Burglary, murder and other crimes have increased in North Korea in the wake of the failed currency revaluation last November, an online news outlet run by North Korean refugees told The Korea Times on Wednesday.

The report came out after Won Sei-hun, director of the National Intelligence Service (NIS), said last week that despite the internal trouble following the currency reform, the Communist country is still under control. He ruled out the possibility of a coup in the North.

The North Korea Intellectuals Solidarity (NKIS) reported that a North Korean was shot dead in a fight after he, along with several other hungry residents, attempted to loot food items by jumping on a train in North Hamgyeong Province.

The train shipping imported foods from China was passing through the region. The province shares a border with the northeastern part of China.

“A man, who was identified only as Jung, died during a physical fight with security forces,” the report said.

The NKIS Web site provides stories about what’s happening in the isolated state based on reports from secret stringers living in large North Korean cities.

The North Korean freelance reporters send their stories to the organization’s staff based in Seoul by cell phone on a regular basis, an activist of the organization told The Korea Times, asking not to be named.

She declined to give details on the secret reporters, such as the number of stringers and what cities they are based in.

The NKIS said residents in North Hamgyeong Province have been living in horror as several burglary and murder cases have been reported since last month.

Crime has risen in the North after the failed currency reform led ordinary people to face an even worsened economic reality. After the revaluation, prices soared, and it was harder for people to make ends meet.

Evgeni Plushenko, one of Russia's underperforming athletes, took silver in men's figure skating.

Perhaps it’s surprising that Russia managed to walk away with even three gold medals after giving its worst-ever performance at a Winter Olympics, writes The Moscow Times.

Its luge team, for one, has to build its own sleds for lack of money and only got a track to practice on at home in 2008 — and even then it doesn’t freeze properly.

“We make the equipment ourselves and almost from scratch,” Valery Silakov, president of the Russian luge federation, told The Moscow Times.

Silakov explained that it is hard to find people to produce luges within the country and even the Khrunichev space center cannot guarantee that its luges, which cost more than $100,000 each, will reach the needed speeds of about 130 kilometers per hour.

The Russian luge team left the Vancouver Games medal-less after veteran Albert Demchenko, 38, placed fourth. 
 
Demchenko complained in Vancouver about the lack of financing for his sport, saying he has to repair his luge out of his own pocket.

He and his fellow athletes only got a chance to train in Russia when a luge and bobsleigh stadium opened in Paramonovo, outside Moscow, in March 2008. The stadium, however, routinely faces problems with its freezing equipment, Silakov said. The stadium originally built for Soviet athletes is located in now-independent Latvia.

Despite the difficulties, Demchenk said he would like to try his luck at the Sochi Games in 2014, when he will be 42.

Russia might need him. With many athletes deserting during the turbulent 1990s, the younger generation who has replaced them remains amateurish. “Many of them entered sports schools after the [training] system had already been destroyed,” Silakov said.

With only two events left Sunday, Russia looked set to place a dismal 11th in the gold medals table, well behind leader Canada (13) and even countries like South Korea (6) and China (5). Russia also won five silvers and seven bronzes for a total of 15 medals.

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China’s operational high-speed railways have exceeded 3,300 kilometers, leading the world in both length and technologies, the Ministry of Railways said on its official website Thursday.

Last year China finished two high-speed railways between Wuhan-Guangzhou and Zhengzhou-Xi’an, with an operating speed of 350 km/h. Before that, China had built high-speed railways between some of its major cities, including Beijing-Tianjin, Shijiazhuang-Taiyuan, Qingdao-Jinan, Hefei-Wuhan and Hefei-Nanjing.

A number of new high-speed railways are being built and will be finished in the coming few years, of which the Beijing-Shanghai line has a length of 1,318 km and a designed travel speed of 350 km/h. Construction of the line started in April 2008 and would finish in around five years. It would cut travel times between the two cities to only five hours from about 12 hours.

China’s railway links had expanded to 86,000 kilometers by the end of 2009, the world’s second longest only after the United States.

Railway passengers topped a record 1.53 billion last year. Cargo transportation hit 3.32 billion tonnes, according to the ministry.

Railway investment surged 80 percent to 600 billion yuan in 2009 boosted by the 4-trillion yuan stimulus package. The government has planned a record 823.5 billion yuan for 2010 to extend the network to 90,000 kilometers by the end of this year.

Read the full story here.

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China’s Internet is open and welcomes international companies, a Foreign Ministry spokesperson said Thursday, just two days after Google issued a statement saying it might quit China.

Spokeswoman Jiang Yu told a regular news briefing that China encouraged development of the Internet.

“China’s Internet is open,” said Jiang. “China has tried creating a favorable environment for Internet,” said Jiang while responding to a question on Google’s possible retreat.

“China welcomes international Internet companies to conduct business within the country according to law,” she said. “China’s law prohibits cyber crimes including hacker attacks.”

Google’s corporate development and chief legal officer, David Drummond, posted a statement on the company’s official blog on Tuesday, indicating the possibility that Google may “shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.”

Read more here.

Low birth rates of women in China may be to blame for some 24 million men failing to find a spouse in 2020, according to a report of the Chinese Academy of Social Science (CASS), cited by china.com.cn.

More inter-generational marriages with wives being older than their husbands’ families will emerge due to a large proportion of men born since the 1980s.

“People’s minds have changed a lot during recent twenty years. Young couples don’t want to have a second child, or just live a DINK life,” said Yan Hua, sociology PHD of CASS.

Some people’s preference of wanting a boy to continue the family line also leads to the abortion of girls in rural China, the report said.

Despite the sluggish demand from overseas, China will probably surpass Germany as the world’s largest exporter in 2009, said the Ministry of Commerce.

The MOFCOM also predicted the exports in 2009 will drop by 16.5 percent from a year earlier, which means that the nation is expected to export goods worth $1.19 trillion in 2009 and that December is expected to witness the first year-on-year growth of as high as 10 percent since last November.

“The year 2009 was the hardest in the Chinese trade history, but the nation has made positive achievements,” said Zhong Shan, vice-minister of commerce, during the China Economic Forum held in Beijing.

“It’s very likely that China will take over Germany this year as the world’s biggest exporter and that the share of China’s exports in world exports will rise to nine percent this year from 8.86 percent last year,” he predicted.
Buoyed up by the turnaround of the world economies, declines in exports have begun to ease off since the second half of this year, but China’s exports fell by 18.8 percent during the first 11 months to $1.07 trillion, according to the Customs.

Although the figure for December is yet to be disclosed, Zhong predicted China’s exports for the whole year in 2009 will drop by “16.5 percent year-on-year” to $1.19 trillion, and imports “down 15 percent” to $963 billion.

That means that China’s exports for December are expected to grow by 9.6 percent year-on-year to $121.86 billion, which will be the first year-on-year growth for Chinese exports since last November.

According to the World Trade Organization, during the first half of 2009, China had, for the first time in the past seven years, edged narrowly ahead of Germany in exports. China and Germany exported goods worth $521.7 and $521.6 billion respectively during the January to June period.

Economists predicted such momentum will be sustained during the second half of 2009 and the years ahead.

Read more here.

In 1992, I immigrated to the United States along with one thousand other Tibetan refugees under a special United States government sponsored resettlement program. Prior to my departure, I sought an audience with our family spiritual teacher who we call a Lama. After some initial small talks, He told me, with much confidence that compassion for others is both good in itself, and also in one’s own self-interest. I had of course heard these sentiments before, but somehow His confidence and warmth added much to this meaning. However, soon after I landed in the United States, it was making money that was the forefront of my attention. With the assistance of my Aunt, I quickly got a job as a dishwasher (like many before me) to begin my American dream. It has now been almost 18 years living in this great country.

America has given me much: enabled me to provide some monetary and other support to my family/relatives/community, self finance my higher education, find the love of my life, own our own home, travel extensively throughout the world, find my dream job and be involved in founding one of the largest Tibet related grass root human rights organizations.  However, the greatest gift this country has given me is it has allowed me to see the wisdom of my culture.

Since Tibet’s occupation in 1959, it has been roughly estimated by the Tibetan exile administration that over 1.2 million Tibetans (out of 6 million) were killed and over 6,000 monasteries were destroyed.  Many of my own relatives suffered terribly.

Despite the atrocities, our elders and teachers (led by His Holiness the Dalai Lama) to this day have always preached that revenge is not the answer.  They remind us that China also suffered terribly under their leaders’ bad policies.  They teach us that the real cause of suffering is due to destructive emotions such as hatred, jealousy, pride and the lack of understanding that we are all interdependent which disturbs the natural clarity of our own minds.  To impress on young Tibetans this point and the danger of not having control over one’s own mind our elders occasionally share this funny story:

A certain Tibetan Buddhist monk was told that he would have to choose from among three things: to have sex with a woman; to kill a goat; or to drink alcohol.  After due consideration, the monk decided that having sex would break his vow of celibacy, and that killing a goat would be taking a life, but drinking alcohol, although it involved breaking a monastic rule, didn’t seem quite as bad.  So he drank, got drunk, then killed the goat and had sex with the woman.

There is no doubt that Tibet has much to learn from the outside world in politics and economics.   However, I feel confident that the ancient Tibetan culture can be an important part of the solution to the world’s many problems.  The world currently struggles through so many issues such as climate change, terrorism, war and financial crises.  The answers we try to find appear 100% focused on treating the symptoms.  Perhaps we are making the same mistake as the Tibetan Buddhist monk.  Maybe we need to be more aware of the dangers of the intoxicants of our own destructive emotions in order for us to make smarter judgments. If not, our technology and intellect will only create new problems and amplify existing ones.

The author is an MBA graduate from the Thunderbird School of Global Management and a BA from Dickinson College.  He currently works in the banking field with a focus on the energy sector. Tsewang is one of the Founding Board of Directors of Students for a Free Tibet, first Tibetan to officially enlist in the United States Military and served as the Executive Director of the Tibetan Community Center Project (NY) from 2007-2008. He can be reached at densang123@yahoo.com.

Wealthy nations at the UN climate talks in Copenhagen appear to be coalescing around the number 100 billion as their final offer to the developing world including China – although whether a dollar, pound or euro sign comes in front of the figure despite the variance in currency valuations is another story.

On Thursday, in attempt to push forward stalled talks in the Danish capital, US secretary of state Hillary Clinton said Washington was ready to embrace the idea of $100 billion (€70 billion) in funds to developing countries to help them tackle climate change.

“The US is prepared to work with other countries to jointly mobilise $100 billion a year by 2020,” Ms Clinton told reporters.

The number, if not the actual sum, echoes the EU’s offer of €100 billion for the third world on the table since the autumn and Britain’s suggestion dating back to July of £100 billion (€112 billion).

But where the EU figure has been offered without conditions, the American number requires a quid pro quo from other powers, notably China and other emerging countries such as India and Brazil.

“In the absence of an operational agreement that meets the requirement that I outlined there will not be the final commitment that I outlined – at least from the United States,” warned Ms Clinton.

The US wants at least the more advanced developing countries to commit to promises of steeper reductions in greenhouse gas emissions growth and in particular to a process that verifies the cuts have actually been made.

The developing world says they are happy to move to a low-carbon development path, but they say that those responsible for the crisis must pay for this transition and that only those actions taken that are funded by the west should have to be reviewed in this way and that any supplementary measures taken should not.

China has promised reductions of between 40 and 45 percent in their “carbon intensity” in relation to their GDP growth, but what this actually means remains unclear.

The EU wants more transparency from China in this regard in terms of which greenhouse gases they mean, which industrial sectors this will apply to and what sort of GDP metrics.

The issue of climate finance has been one of the biggest – although by far not the only – stumbling block in negotiations.

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U.S. President Barack Obama announced Thursday he would send U.S. envoy Stephen Bosworth to North Korea for direct talks on December 8, naming a date for the mission for the first time, says The Korea Times.

“We will be sending Ambassador Bosworth to North Korea on December 8 to engage in direct talks with the North Koreans,” he was quoted as telling reporters after talks with South Korean President Lee Myung-bak.

Bosworth’s mission is to bring the North back to the six-party nuclear disarmament talks which it quit in April, a month before staging a second atomic weapons test.
The North’s nuclear ambitions were the key topic during Obama’s visit to Seoul, the fourth and last stop on his debut Asian tour.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-il said last month his country is ready to return to the six-nation talks but only if the bilateral discussions with the United States are satisfactory.

The six-nation talks group the two Koreas, the United States, China, Russia and Japan and began more than six years ago.

Obama condemned what he called a pattern in which the North behaves provocatively for a while, returns to talks and then walks out again when it fails to secure further concessions.

“The door is open to resolving these issues peacefully, for North Korea to see over time the reduction of sanctions and its increasing integration into the international community,” Obama said.