North Korea Declares 1953 War Truce Nullified
New York Times

North Korea declared the 1953 Korean War armistice nullified on Monday, following through on a longstanding threat that it renewed last week amid rising tensions with South Korea.

The move comes as the United States and South Korea are in the midst of two months of joint military drills, which started on March 1, and on Monday they began another planned joint military exercise that involved bringing 2,500 troops from the United States. Stirring up a sense of crisis among its impoverished people, North Korea was also staging an unusually vigorous military drill of its own, South Korean officials said.

S. Korea braces for North’s unexpected provocations
Yonhap News

South Korea’s military is preparing against unexpected military provocations by North Korea, a Seoul official said, as the communist country ratcheted up threats of a nuclear war ahead of a joint South Korea-U.S military drill.

“North Korea may possibly provoke at a time in a place we can never expect,” like guerrilla attacks in cyberspace, at the sea border or even at the military demarcation line, the military official said.

The provocations could be in violation of the Armistice Agreement, the official said, referring to the North’s recent threats to cancel the truce pact that ended the 1950-53 Korean War.

Is China Cracking Down on North Korea Trade?
Wall Street Journal

Rice prices are reportedly soaring in Pyongyang as Chinese customs and border control impose more stringent inspections on shipments crossing the border.

South Korea’s Yonhap News reported on Friday that Chinese authorities were visibly strengthening customs inspections of shipments bound for North Korea from the northeastern cities of Dandong and Dalian and also tightening border controls elsewhere, which it says has drastically cut the volume of rice smuggled in.

Discrimination Against Asians In College Admissions
WBUR (NPR Boston)

In just days now, spring college admissions letters will start to flow. Here’s a wrinkle you may not have thought of. A lot of Asian-Americans, with high scores and high grades, feel they’re not getting an even break. Feel that top colleges are tapping the brakes on Asian-American admissions to hold down Asian-American enrollment.

Meaning an Asian-American kid, they say, has to clear an unfairly high bar to get in. In the age of Tiger Mom talk and affirmative action angst, that’s a volatile charge.

Asian Americans say they faced voting problems
Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Asian American voters in Georgia had a range of problems during the 2012 presidential election, including being improperly asked to show proof of citizenship at the polls, not having access to translators or interpreters when reviewing ballots, and having their names misspelled on voter rolls.

That’s according to poll data released last week by the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, a nonprofit organization that surveyed more than 9,000 Asians at polling locations in 14 states — including Georgia, where 361 voters were interviewed in Suwanee, Norcross, Duluth and Doraville.

Documenting the problems is especially significant right now because the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments last week related to a challenge to the pre-clearance section of the Voting Rights Act. That section requires that some states and counties, mostly in the South, have changes in their voting law approved by the U.S. Department of Justice before they are implemented.

Monument set up in New Jersey dedicated to ‘comfort women’
Yonhap News

The Bergen County government of New Jersey dedicated a new monument to commemorate Korean women forced by imperial Japan into sexual slavery during World War II, officials said Friday.

The bronze plaque that sits outside the Bergen County Courthouse was sponsored by the Comfort Women Memorial Committee. It aims to pay tribute to the hundreds of thousands of former sex slaves, who were euphemistically called “comfort women,” mostly Koreans.

Lee Byung Hun Says He was Happy to Act as Storm Shadow Unmasked
CJ E&M enewsWorld

Lee Byung Hun got talking about his second piece of work with Hollywood′s G.I. Joe series.

The actor attended the press conference for G.I. Joe 2 held on March 11, and opened up on how he had been happy to act without a mask in the sequel to the original G.I. Joe.

Choo keeps up scorching spring with new team
MLB.com

Shin-Soo Choo went 4-for-4 in the Reds’ 7-3 win over the White Sox on Sunday. In addition to raising his Spring Training batting average to .421, Choo has now hit safely in five of the eight games he has played.

Choo, who was acquired by the Reds in an offseason trade, has not taken a long time to acclimate or make a strong impression on manager Dusty Baker.

“Choo can play,” Baker said. “He’s not doing anything that surprises me. That’s why we traded for Choo.”

Kim Yu-na Readies for World Championships
Chosun Ilbo

Olympic figure skating champion Kim Yu-na left for Ontario, Canada, on Sunday to compete at the 2013 World Championships starting Friday. This time around, she will aim for first place at the event, where she came in second back in 2011 before taking a leave from competition.

The Worlds will offer an important snapshot of athlete standings before the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, after which Kim said she will retire for good.

In her first international competition since her comeback, Kim won the NRW Trophy in Dortmund, Germany, in December last year with 201.61 points and then the Korean nationals in early January with 210.77 points. She missed her graduation ceremony at Korea University to concentrate on rigorous training for the World Championships.

Giancarlo Stanton’s batting practice home run shatters Arizona Diamondbacks employee’s car windshield
New York Daily News

Memo to fans: your car is not safe when Giancarlo Stanton is in the batter’s box.

Alex Kim learned that lesson first-hand last week when he went to the parking lot following a Team USA workout to see the windshield of his car shattered. The culprit was a batting practice homer hit by Stanton.

“I was a little upset,” Kim told MLB.com. “My first reaction was I have to pay for a windshield that I didn’t break.”

Andrew Zimmern Slams Roy Choi’s Spam Endorsement On Go Fork Yourself
TheBraiser.com

On this week’s edition of Andrew Zimmern’s podcast Go Fork Yourself, he and Molly Mogren tackled the vast and complex pizza-verse, but first, they obliged to tackle the week’s biggest food news. In this case: Roy Choi’s Spam endorsement, just a year after he announced he’d be going veg, because the animals spoke to him, or something.

How Jin Soon Choi Kicked Off Her Career
Styleite.com

It can be tough to imagine many of the fixtures of the fashion world as having particularly humble beginnings. But nail guru Jin Soon Choi is one exception, having kicked off her career as an accounting assistant at a wholesale beverage company in her native South Korean village, as she wrote for WWD this week.
Since calculators weren’t available, she had to use — get this — an abacus, worked twelve hour days, and walked a full hour to get to her gig. But she credits her early days of roughing it in the professional world for her current success: “I was exposed to the importance of record keeping and monitoring cash flow in shaping and organizing one’s business,” she says. “I also learned how to work with other people in a business setting.”

Exciting news, everyone!

Filling a long-overlooked hole in the freeze-dried vegetable market is Trader Joe’s recent release of Dried Kimchi. Whaaaaaaattttt??!

The specialty grocery store debuted the new item late last month and we haven’t been this excited for an Asian product made by a mainstream American company since Lay’s started selling Sriracha potato chips. Continue Reading »

North Korea vows to end nonaggression pacts with South Korea
Los Angeles Times

North Korea has vowed to nullify nonaggression pacts with South Korea in response to the U.N. Security Council’s new tough sanctions and planned joint South Korea-U.S. military drills.

In addition to voiding the peace agreement, the Committee for Peaceful Reunification of Korea, the North’s agency in charge of dealing with cross-border affairs with the South, announced in a statement broadcast on state media Friday that it will sever a North-South hotline.

The state-run agency said North Korea “abrogates all agreements on nonaggression reached between the North and the South … [and] also notifies the South side that it will immediately cut off the North-South hotline.”

After Sanctions Vote, 2 Koreas Ratchet Up Attack Threats
New York Times

Angrily responding to the United Nations Security Council’s unanimous decision to impose tightened sanctions, North Korea said on Friday that it was nullifying all nonaggression agreements with South Korea, with one of its top generals claiming that his country had nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles ready to blast off.

Matching the harsh warning with a toughened stance, South Korea said Friday that if Pyongyang attacked the South with a nuclear weapon, the government of the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un would be “erased from the earth.”

Tensions on the Korean peninsula: Kim blows up again
The Economist

RUMOURS of fatherhood, and the thrill of having Dennis Rodman, a 51-year-old American basketball has-been, as a new best friend, have done little to mellow Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s young leader. Once again relations between his family’s regime and the outside world have returned to the dangerous script of nuclear provocation, sanctions and threats of war.

On March 6th Kyodo, a Japanese news agency, reported that camouflage netting was being thrown over buses and trains in Pyongyang in readiness for conflict. A day earlier the regime reheated old threats, as America proposed a resolution to the UN Security Council, stiffening sanctions against North Korea for its third nuclear test on February 12th. It said it would scrap the 1953 armistice agreement with America that ended the Korean war (did it forget that it had already scrapped it, in 2009?). It cut off a hotline with American troops in South Korea. And it once again threatened nuclear attack.

Is Kim Jong Un more dangerous than his father?
CNN.com

North Korea’s threat to launch a preemptive nuclear strike against the United States has puzzled American officials, who see the regime ramping up its threats and rhetoric.

It’s leading to the belief that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is more unpredictable, more dangerous and harder to read than his late father, Kim Jong Il.

“The new leader is acting in ways a bit more extreme than his father, who was colder and more calculated,” a senior administration official said. “Kim Jong Il was more aware of the off-ramps to end these escalations.

O.C.’s Korean Americans react to North Korea threat
Orange County Register (Calif.)

They’ve heard North Korea’s threats before. Some local Korean Americans are concerned. Many others, however, see it more as political theater.

Orange County’s Korean American community offered mixed reactions to North Korea’s threat to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the United States and South Korea. Many said threats by North Korea are so common that it’s hard to take them seriously.

“They talk tough so many times. Nobody takes it literally,” said J.J. Kim, president of the Korean American Chamber of Commerce of Orange County.

U.S. ambassador hails ‘truly historic’ inauguration of President Park
Yonhap News

The inauguration of President Park Geun-hye last week was “truly historic” for South Korea, the U.S. ambassador to Seoul said Friday, renewing his commitment to closely working with the new government.

“Last week was truly historic for Korea. President Park Geun-hye was inaugurated as South Korea’s first female president,” U.S. Ambassador Sung Kim said of his attendance at the inauguration ceremony in a blog post on the embassy’s Web site.

“President Park has long been a strong supporter of the alliance, and we very much look forward to working with her administration,” Kim said.

Is This the First Digital Image of a North Korean In-Flight Meal?
Jaunted.com

This is an airline meal. It’s not just any airline meal, however; it’s a piece of digital imaging and travel history and it was only created this morning.

David Guttenfelder, Chief Photographer in Asia for the AP, is currently in North Korea on assignment and taking advantage of the newly un-banned 3G network to share some Instagrams from daily life, like this seemingly banal image of his in-flight meal on North Korea’s state airline, Air Koryo.

Kakao chats punishable for defamatory comments
The Korea Times

Spreading unfounded rumors through free mobile chat service KakaoTalk is subject to punishment on the grounds of defamation a court ruled Thursday.

The Seoul court fined a woman 700,000-won for spreading defamatory comments through KakaoTalk.

According to records, the woman made groundless accusations and shared them through Kakao with 13 others.

In another case, a man was given a six-month suspended jail term for insulting his girlfriend. The man had claimed on Kakao that she had a miscarriage after having sex with another man.

Top Chef’s Beverly Kim returns to Kendall College to cook and teach at her alma mater
Chicago Tribune

Around this time last year, Beverly Kim was something of a minor television celebrity on “Top Chef.” Several Saturdays ago, we found Kim calling out dinner orders from a cavernous and modern West Town kitchen, a space that would be the envy of every chef in town. This kitchen even has a 180-degree view of the Chicago skyline.

Kim wore a neckerchief and a tall chef’s hat, attire not seen since French restaurants in the ’80s, and hollered lingo only line cooks understood: “Pick up three amuse!”

Since January and until mid-June, this kitchen is where Kim spends her Tuesday through Saturday nights. The menu is hers; the restaurant isn’t. It’s CUL-249 at Kendall College’s School of Culinary Arts, a course titled fine dining restaurant. It’s an unplanned but welcome surprise, Kim said, as she never thought she’d teach undergraduates at a cooking school in 2013, especially for a chef who was supposed to springboard from a TV show to operating her own restaurant (see: Izard, Stephanie).

PSY to Debut “Gangnam Style” Follow-Up Next Month
TIME.com

Stop making ‘Harlem Shake’ videos, and listen up: South Korean rapper PSY announced today that he is releasing a follow-up to his worldwide hit “Gangnam Style.”

The single is due out Apr. 13, and Psy will perform a concert dubbed “Happening” at the Seoul World Cup Stadium later that night, which will be streamed live on YouTube. PSY, whose real name is Park Jae-sang, delivered the news in Korean, English, Chinese, Thai, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Indonesian subtitles — a sign of how popular “Gangnam Style” has become worldwide.

Hank Conger’s throwing issues could be a concern for Angels
Los Angeles Times

Catcher Hank Conger has sailed two throws to third base into left field this spring. He bounced a late throw to second on Wednesday and nearly hit pitcher Jered Weaver in the head with a throw to second after the Angels pitcher finished his warm-up tosses before an inning.

Conger, a 2006 first-round pick who has spent much of the past three years at triple-A, is ready to hit in the big leagues, and his arm strength is adequate. But to nail down the job as Chris Iannetta’s backup, he’ll need to find a consistent-enough exchange and arm stroke to control a running game. He is still searching.

“On the practice field, he’s making a lot of strides, but at some point you need to bring that consistency into the game,” Manager Mike Scioscia said. “We’re very confident he will, but he has to find it.”

Ryu piles up K’s, but Dodgers’ bats stymied
MLB.com

Dodgers lefty Hyun-Jin Ryu — signed to a six-year contract worth $36 million over the offseason — held the Indians to two runs on three hits in three-plus innings. Ryu piled up five strikeouts, including three consecutive called strikeouts to Ryan Rohlinger, Drew Stubbs and Jason Kipnis in a swift third inning.

“Everything kind of worked for me, including control, command of the pitches,” Ryu said through an interpreter. I was able to execute pitches. Not only the fastball, but other pitches as well.”

Why South Korean Gamers Are So Pissed about SimCity
Kotaku

Upset about the rocky SimCity rollout? Take heart. You are not alone. Gamers in South Korea are also not happy campers. But it’s not just due to the inability to play.

Here’s what happened: When South Korean gamers couldn’t connect to servers, the official SimCity Korean Facebook page called out the country for piracy. You know, EA Korea’s paying customers. Talk about adding insult to injury!

Frankie Faison, Hoon Lee on ‘Cons’ of ‘Banshee’
AP via YouTube

Tweets, pics give real-time peek into North Korea
AP via Yahoo News

“Hello world from comms center in (hash)Pyongyang.”

That Twitter missive, sent Monday from Koryolink’s main service center in downtown Pyongyang using my iPhone, marked a milestone for North Korea: It was believed to be the first tweet sent from a cellphone using the country’s new 3G mobile data service.

Later, as we were driving through Pyongyang, I used my iPhone to snap a photo of a new roadside banner referring to North Korea’s controversial Feb. 12 nuclear test while AP’s Chief Asia Photographer David Guttenfelder uploaded an image to Instagram of a tour guide at a mountain temple, geotagged to Pyongyang.

Pretty ordinary stuff in the world of social media, but revolutionary for North Korea, a country with intricate rules to stage manage the flow of images and information both inside and beyond its borders.

Poverty Creeps Up on Elderly in South Korea
Wall Street Journal (subscription req’d)

The economic polarization of South Korean society—a major theme of the election that brought Ms. Park to power—is most extreme between the young and old. Traditionally, older Koreans have relied on the support of their families in retirement. The nation has the lowest savings rate in Asia as Koreans prioritize large immediate costs such as education. But multigenerational family structures have become less common as the country modernized and the elderly increasingly have to fend for themselves.

Yoo Jung-nam, 72 years old and a former soldier, works as a day laborer on construction sites in Seoul in order to get by.

Ex-NBA star Dennis Rodman tells North Korean leader Kim Jong Un: ‘You have a friend for life’
AP via Washington Post

Ex-NBA star Dennis Rodman hung out Thursday with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un on the third day of his improbable journey with VICE to Pyongyang, watching the Harlem Globetrotters with the leader and later dining on sushi and drinking with him at his palace.

“You have a friend for life,” Rodman told Kim before a crowd of thousands at a gymnasium where they sat side by side, chatting as they watched players from North Korea and the U.S. play, Alex Detrick, a spokesman for the New York-based VICE media company, told The Associated Press.

Irvine actor drinks in possibility of stardom
Orange County Register (Calif.)

It’s easy to be drunk. It’s much harder to act drunk.

Dudley Moore did it to perfection in “Arthur,” but countless actors have stumbled when trying to pull it off in movies.

Justin Chon, a 31-year-old Irvine-based actor, gets his shot at the art of playing drunk in the film “21 & Over,” which opens Friday.

Chon has been acting for 11 years, including the recurring role of Eric in the first four “Twilight” movies, but this is his first starring role in a wide-release movie.

Drinking farce ’21 and Over’ is often too much, often funny
Detroit Free Press

Jeff Chang (Justin Chon from “Twilight”) is a catchphrase, a punch line and a punching bag, all in one. As in “Just one beer, Jeff Chang.” And “Jeff Chang is a grown man and he made his own decisions.” And “I think we killed Jeff Chang.”

He’s the Ken Jeong “Hangover” character here, a wild-partying break from Asian stereotypes. All he wants to do is sleep well the night before a big internship interview. But his gonzo pal Miller (Miles Teller of “Project X”) and more responsible friend Casey (Skylar Astin of “Pitch Perfect”) want to get him blind drunk.

K-Pop Stars Do the ‘Harlem Shake’: Miss A’s Min Explains
Billboard.com

As the Hot 100 confirms, the “Harlem Shake” is America’s hottest musical entity. The feverish meme has made its way across the globe, spreading to some of K-pop’s hottest stars.

Min, a member of popular girl group miss A (who last charted with the Top 5 hit “I Don’t Need A Man”) uploaded an all-star K-pop edition to her personal YouTube account. The video includes Amber of girl group f(x) and Jo Kwon of boy band 2AM.

‘Top Chef Seattle’: 10 Questions With Winner Kristen Kish
The Hollywood Reporter

From the very beginning, there was something about Kristen Kish. Yes, the 28-year-old former model was beautiful, but it was her facility in the kitchen — tough, focused, graceful — that set her apart from the rest of the Top Chef Seattle hopefuls.

Her breakout moment came in a challenge in which she was called upon to do nothing more than make French-fried onions and mushrooms, but her technique was so flawless, she walked away with a win. Her momentum grew steadily after that, and it quickly became clear that she was the one to beat.

Stoker director Park Chan-wook: ‘In knowing yourself, you can liberate yourself’
The Guardian (U.K.)

The director of Oldboy has featured vendettas, incest and even amateur dentistry in his movies. So what horrors does his first Hollywood film, the ‘gothic fairytale’ Stoker, have in store?

YouTube Spawns Asian-American Celebrities
Voice of America

From movies and TV shows to songs on the radio, there have been fewer opportunities in traditional media for Asian-American entertainers. But the Internet, especially YouTube, has changed that. Los Angeles has seen an explosion of Asian-American YouTube celebrities.

Clara Chung loves to create music. She does it in her home studio, surrounded by instruments, a microphone and a computer. She says she didn’t think her music would turn into a career until it ended up on the Internet.

“The Internet was probably the foundation for everything in my career and still is,” she said. “It provided a global audience.”

Are There No Great Restaurants in South Korea?
Wall Street Journal

The announcement this week of S. Pellegrino Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants raised some eyebrows in countries that didn’t have any representatives on the list, like Taiwan. And Vietnam. And Malaysia. And the Philippines.

South Korea was one of the big absentees on the list, which has upset some in the restaurant scene in the country.

“There are many good hotel restaurants in Korea. For example Pierre Gagnaire should be in the list”, said Kang Tae-ahn, a restaurant development consultant.

‘Eunsuh Choi: Consciousness’ at Pittsburgh Glass Center has artist seeking growth
Tribune-Review (Pittsburgh, Pa.)

Standing next to her piece “The Limited Barrier III,” Korean glass artist Eunsuh Choi says, “All of my pieces are about aspiration, dreams.”

At more than 3 feet tall, the massive piece, made of clear borosilicate glass rods and filled with blown-glass “clouds,” arranged on a pedestal nearly as tall, seems to tower above the artist. In a way, the relative scale has a metaphoric meaning, even though, as Choi says, “I do not make a piece for specific meaning.”

Choi, 37, created the piece while an artist-in-residence at the Pittsburgh Glass Center in the fall. It’s the centerpiece of her current exhibit there titled “Consciousness,” which contains a dozen pieces made of borosilicate glass rods that the artist has painstakingly bent and fused with a blowtorch in a process called “flameworking.”

Not interested in the standard street stall tteokbokki or bossam topped with ssamjang? If you’re traveling to South Korea and looking for foods off the well-worn (and rewarding) culinary path, then there are a few surprising, and somewhat “extreme” fare for your taste buds.

We’ve all heard about the now infamous sannakji, “live” octopus tentacles that wiggle around your plate, suctioning to your cheeks as you slowly and deliberately chew away or boshintang, known on this side of the Pacific as dog-meat stew. But have you ever considered hongeo, raw fermented skate fish? Or beondegi, boiled silkworm pupae?

Yonhap News recently explored the one-of-a-kind foods found in Seoul, giving readers the low-down on what to expect on their first bite of hongeo or beondaegi: Continue Reading »

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