In addition, Kim Jong-il will turn 70 in February and the “Dear Leader” hopes to be able to transfer his power and an economically stronger nation to his son and heir-apparent, Kim Jong-Un.

Reports in South Korea indicated that the government in Pyongyang on Monday ordered all universities to cancel classes until April of next year. The only exemptions are for students who will be graduating in the next few months and foreign students.

North Korea's "Dear Leader" Kim Jong-il

The reports suggested that the students will be put to work on construction projects in major cities while there are also indications that repair work may be needed in agricultural regions that were affected by a major typhoon recently.

Analysts in Japan claim there may be other reasons behind the decision to disperse the students across the country.

“One reason is that there is a possibility of demonstrations at university campuses,” said Toshimitsu Shigemura, a professor at Tokyo’s Waseda University and author of a number of books on the North Korean leadership.

“The leadership has seen the ‘Jasmine Revolution’ in Africa and it is very frightened that the same thing could happen in North Korea,” he said. “They fear it could start in the universities.”

Professor Shigemura also said that North Korea has purchased anti-riot equipment from China in recent months, including tear gas and batons, while there has been an increased police presence at key points in Pyongyang in recent months.

Telegraph

KCNA said the North was also expelling all South Korean workers from a jointly-run factory north of the border.

The move comes after an international report blamed North Korea for sinking a South Korean warship.

Pyongyang denies it torpedoed the Cheonan near the inter-Korean maritime border on 26 March, killing 46 sailors.

South Korea says it plans to refer North Korea to the UN Security Council, and is seeking a unified international response to the incident.

Seoul announced on Sunday it was ending trade relations with the North in response to the sinking.

It has also resumed propaganda broadcasts to the North, playing radio programs that will soon to be broadcast via border loudspeakers.

BBC News

In fact, they said, it gives a clear warning to other state actors that the U.S. will not ignore any growing threats.

“This is putting everybody on notice,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told CBS News chief Washington correspondent Bob Schieffer in an interview conducted Friday at the Pentagon. “We don’t want more countries to go down the path that North Korea and Iran are.”

The revised nuclear policy says that the United States will not use nuclear weapons to respond to a chemical or biological attack from a non-nuclear country. The policy, however, leaves significant contingencies, said Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.

Countries which are non-signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (such as North Korea) or have been found to be non-compliant (such as Iran) are not exempt from nuclear retaliation under the Obama policy.

“We were concerned about the biological weapons,” Gates said, “and that’s why the president was very clear … if we see states developing biological weapons that we begin to think endanger us or create serious concerns, that he reserves the right to revise this policy.”

Clinton added, “If we can prove that a biological attack originated in a country that attacked us, then all bets are off.”

Gates also pointed out that the policy dictates that any country that uses chemical or biological weapons against the U.S. will “suffer a devastating conventional retaliation.”

The United States is also bolstering missile defense systems, in spite of concerns from Russia about the program that weighed down negotiations over the recently-signed New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. Clinton said the U.S. has reached out to Russia for cooperation in its missile defense program.

“We would like to see a joint effort on missile defense because we don’t see the principle threat in nuclear terms coming from Russia, we see it coming from state actors like Iran or nonstate actors like a terrorist organization like al Qaeda getting ahold of nuclear materials,” she said. CBS

State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said the North Koreans, in a bare-bones message through their representative at U.N. headquarters in New York, provided no identifying information about the detainee, including the name or gender, or details of the alleged offense.
This is the second case of a detained American in North Korea to surface in the past month
Washington Post

Inspectors from the United Arab Emirates quickly swarmed the ship and uncovered a truck-size container packed with small arms made in North Korea. Concealed deeper in the ship was the real find: hundreds of crates containing military hardware and a grayish, foul-smelling powder, explosive components for thousands of short-range rockets.

The nature of the cargo, seized in July and described for the first time in interviews with officials and analysts in the UAE and Washington, has raised fears that Iran is ramping up efforts to arm itself and anti-Israel militias in the Middle East. Israeli officials have warned that they may use force to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

The freighter seized in this port enclave was one of five vessels caught this year carrying large, secret caches of weapons apparently intended for the Lebanese group Hezbollah, the Palestinian organization Hamas or the Quds Force, a wing of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps that supports insurgents in Iraq, according to U.S. and U.N. officials and intelligence analysts. In three cases, the contraband included North Korean- or Chinese-made components for rockets such as the 122mm Grad, which has a range of up to 25 miles and which Hamas and Hezbollah have fired into Israel.

Among the weapons components discovered aboard the ANL Australia were 2,030 detonators for 122mm rockets, as well as electric circuitry and a large quantity of solid-fuel propellant, according to an account given by UAE and U.N. Security Council officials. The materials were bought from North Korea and shipped halfway around the globe in sealed containers, labeled as oil-drilling supplies, that passed through a succession of freighters and ports.

An Israeli raid last month on a ship in the eastern Mediterranean reportedly netted hundreds more 122mm rockets. Israeli officials said the freighter was bound for Syria and was carrying 500 tons of armaments intended for Hezbollah. Similar caches were discovered this year at a port in Cyprus and aboard Russian and German cargo ships searched by U.S. Navy teams.

A U.S. intelligence official familiar with the UAE episode acknowledged that U.S. spies “played a key role” in tracking the shipment, but he declined to elaborate.

The surge in smuggling is a direct challenge to the Security Council, which is convening a special panel this month to review Iranian violations of U.N. resolutions banning such weapons shipments. U.N. and U.S. officials say sanctions adopted by the world body against Iran appear to be having little effect, and Iranian leaders continue to defend their right to aid groups they call “fighters in the path of God.”

“We are proud to defend Hamas and Hezbollah,” Ali Larijani, Iran’s parliament speaker, said at a news conference in May. “We are not trying to hide it

High-seas shell game

The route chosen by North Korea to deliver the rocket components eventually seized by the UAE was hard to track. According to shipping records, the 10 large cargo containers left the North Korean port of Nampo on May 30 on a North Korean vessel, and two days later they were transferred to a Chinese ship in the port city of Dalian, in northern China.

From there, the containers were ferried to Shanghai, where on June 13 they were moved to a third ship, the ANL Australia, a Bahamian-flagged freighter owned by a French consortium. Spokesmen for the freighter’s owner and operator say they received sealed cargo containers along with manifests that listed the contents as oil-well equipment.

By mid-June, the cargo had left Shanghai on the ANL Australia, which followed a meandering course through East and Southeast Asia, pausing in mid-July in Dubai, one of the world’s largest seaports. Then it left on the final leg of its journey, to Shahid Rajai, on the shores of Iran’s Strait of Hormuz.

Because of international sanctions, Iran and North Korea have been forced to buy and sell military-related technology through clandestine means. Iran, in particular, has favored a strategy of redundant purchases from multiple vendors, assuming that some shipments will be discovered and stopped, said David Albright, a former U.N. nuclear inspector who is president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a nonprofit research group in Washington. Using such schemes, and employing a network of front companies, Iran has managed to obtain key technology and equipment for advanced missiles as well as a sophisticated nuclear program.

“These networks have spread like the Internet, and as they get bigger, they get even harder to destroy,” Albright said. “They use fronts to obtain all kinds of technology from major suppliers, including Europe, Russia, China and the United States.”

Gulf states crack down

For years, Dubai served as a convenient hub for Iran’s illicit procurement network. But two years ago, the UAE began what U.S. officials acknowledge is a serious crackdown on Iranian trafficking in military technology. Its government has enacted tough export controls, restricted the number of business visas to Iranians and closed numerous suspected front companies, according to UAE officials as well as Western intelligence officers and independent analysts.

But government officials and analysts acknowledged that the UAE’s capacity to shut down trafficking is still being developed, and much of the illegal trade in the region consists of cash-and-carry transactions that are harder to detect and control.

The crackdown also is not without costs. The UAE, which conducts nearly $15 billion in annual trade with Iran, has received numerous complaints over what Tehran calls unwarranted interference by UAE regulators.

Yet, UAE officials insist that they are acting in their own interest, and not in response to pressure from the United States or anyone else.

“No one can tell us that we can’t have legitimate trade,” one UAE official said. “But we were coming into a crunch, where we had to make a choice for the sake of national security: We either have to do a better job of stopping this trafficking or prepare to live with a nuclear Iran.”

UAE officials faced that dilemma July 22 when alerted to possible contraband in the ship bound for Iran, the official said.

After the containers holding the arms and rocket materials were removed, the ANL Australia was released to continue its journey. The propellant was left on UAE soil, where it remained as recently as this week. The U.N. sanctions committee has filed a formal query with North Korea, but there has been no response.

UAE officials say they are awaiting the arrival of U.N. witnesses to begin the process of destroying the fuel.

Source: Washington Post