On Friday at a hotel in Tunisia (North Africa), a gunman dressed as a tourist opened fire, killing 38 people, including British, German and Belgian visitors. Reports say he had hidden a gun in his umbrella.
A brief look at the headlines shows that 1 German, 3 Irish, and “at least 30” Britons were killed.
AJ+ reports.
According to Radio Free Asia, North Korean authorities have asked South Korean enterprises in the Kaesong Industrial Complex to replace popular “chocolate pie” cookies with rice cakes to serve as snacks for North Korean workers there.
This is to stop the spread of “capitalist culture” and boost the sales of its own snack producers, sources with knowledge of the matter said.
Radio Free Asia states that North Korea recently started to supply “keongdanseolgi,” the isolated country’s rice-cake version of the South’s cookies known as “Choco Pies” to some of its 53,000 workers in the industrial zone. Choco Pies are similar to Moon Pies in the United States, writes Radio Free Asia.
The Kaesong Industrial Region (KIR) is a special administrative industrial region of North Korea (DPRK), writes Wikipedia. It was formed in 2002 from part of the “Kaesong Directly-Governed City.”
Wikipedia states that the most notable feature of the region is the Kaesong industrial park, operated as a collaborative economic development with South Korea (ROK). The park is located about ten kilometers (or six miles) north of the Korean Demilitarized Zone. It is an hour’s drive from Seoul, and has direct road and rail access to South Korea.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/kaesong-industrial-complex/
University of North Texas basketball player Eboniey Jeter committed suicide in her dorm room, according to the Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office report released yesterday, May 8th.
She was a forward on the UNT women’s team.
The Denton Record-Chronicle newspaper states the report by Dr. Nizam Peerwani, chief medical examiner, revealed how Ms. Jeter took her own life.
The Record-Chronicle decided not to include the details of the suicide out of respect to her grieving family.
The newspaper was unable to reach family members Friday afternoon for comment.
(Updated article)
http://www.swishappeal.com/2015/5/8/8574125/north-texas-forward-eboniey-jeters-ruled-a-suicide
According to the Associated Press, it’s the first ever self-driving semi-truck licensed to drive on public roads — in this case Nevada’s highways — not only for testing, but business, too.
“Daimler Trucks North America LLC debuted the self-driving big rig Tuesday night with a drive — and a driver steering — atop the Hoover Dam on the Nevada-Arizona border,” writes the AP.
Taking a line from astronaut Neil Armstrong, Dr. Wolfgang Bernhard of Daimler Trucks and Buses told the crowd bused to the site from Las Vegas for a news conference that they were about to witness “a short drive for man and a long haul for mankind.”
(Updated report)
North Carolina police are hunting for a robber who held up a bank in Pineville, North Carolina, while wearing a Darth Vader costume. The incident happened on Monday, March 16th, states cbsnews.com.
The “Star Wars” character came into the Pineville State Employees Credit Union that Monday, WSOC reported. Police say he demanded cash while he pointed a long gun at a bank teller, according to nydailynews.com.
He left in a gray Chevy Suburban with an undisclosed amount of cash, states cbsnews.com. No one inside the bank was injured.
(Updated article)
On the Korean peninsula, the jittery season is drawing near: joint military exercises conducted by South Korea and the United States each spring will start next week.
The drills, involving thousands of troops and state of the art military hardware, don’t play well with North Korea.
“Each year, Pyongyang complains and demands a stop to these annual exercises, which it claims to be offensive in nature,” said Sung-Yoon Lee, a professor of Korean studies at Tufts University.
The United States and South Korea stress that the exercises, named Foal Eagle and Key Reserve, are supposedly defensive and non-provocative in nature. The North Korean regime,of course, doesn’t see it that way, and its state media has characterized the drills as rehearsals for an attack.
Philip Yun is the executive director of the Ploughshares Fund, a group that advocates nuclear disarmament. “The North Koreans, being paranoid in their own way, have always had this concern: ‘If there is going to be an invasion, this would be the time,'” said Yun.
In March 2013, the North Korean military went as far as claiming that the United States was carrying out the drills with the aim “to mount a preemptive nuclear strike together with its South Korean puppet forces.” Playing up the threat also helps the North Korean leadership’s propaganda efforts to control the population, according to Yun.
As well as providing practice for the forces involved, the exercises send a message that the United States “would defend South Korea in the case of a North Korean invasion,” claimed Tong Kim, a visiting scholar at the U.S.-Korea Institute, part of Johns Hopkins University.
North Korea usually responds to the drills with a lot of angry rhetoric and a series of weapons tests. Near the start of the year, North Korea typically demands the cancellation of the exercises, threats of impending doom are made, and rockets are fired into the sea.
On February 8th, just a day after the North announced it had successfully tested a “cutting-edge” anti-ship missile, North Korea fired five short-range missiles into the East Sea, according to the South Korean Defense Ministry.
The U.S. and South Korean militaries announced Tuesday that the exercises will run from March 2nd to April 24th.
Pyongyang also carries out their own drills each winter that analysts view as offensively minded.
Have the U.S. and South Korea ever suspended their drills? Yes, amid nuclear negotiations with Pyongyang in early and mid-1990s, Washington held off on the drills several times.
“There is precedent, we have (suspended the drills) before,” said Yun. But he qualified that “circumstances have changed significantly since that period of time.”
North Korea has determinedly pressed on with its nuclear weapons program, regardless of international outcry. It has carried out a series of underground tests and launching long-range rockets that could be used as intercontinental missiles.
In January, Pyongyang suggested it would halt nuclear tests if the United States canceled the joint drills. The news drew a sharp response from Marie Harf, a U.S. State Department spokeswoman. Harf seemed convinced the drills with South Korea are defensive and not threatening.
“The offer, as I understand it, which we see as an implicit threat, is for the U.S. to stop doing something that is routine, that is transparent, that is defensive in nature, and that is annual … in exchange for the North Koreans not doing something that is prohibited under multiple U.N. Security Council resolutions and that they are not supposed to be doing,” Harf said.
“That’s really a false choice here,” she stated.
Why did tensions increase so much in spring 2013? In 2012, North Korea conducted a long-range rocket test, followed by its third nuclear test two months later.
The United Nations responded with sanctions, and Pyongyang continued to ramp up its threats of nuclear war against South Korea and the United States.
One North Korean government website even uploaded a YouTube video showing an imaginary missile attack on Washington, D.C.
The U.S. decision to fly B-2 stealth bombers – which are capable of carrying nuclear weapons – over the region during the annual military drills only served to further antagonize the North. “That was a really bad escalation of the tensions in the Korean peninsula,” Tong Kim said of the period.
But Pyongyang’s decisions to carry out the rocket launch and nuclear test were most likely carefully timed, according to Yun, who was part of U.S. teams that negotiated with North Korea under former President Bill Clinton. “They game everything out. They don’t do things off the cuff for the most part,” he said of the North Koreans. “If they’re going to do something very provocative, they have an extensive decision tree laying out many options.”
Coal ash, which contains many of the world’s worst carcinogens, is the waste left over when coal is burnt for electricity.
An estimated 113 million tons of coal ash are produced annually in the US, mostly from America’s coal power-plants. Coal Ash is found and stored in almost every state — some of it literally in people’s backyards.
There is very little government oversight and few safeguards in place, so toxic chemicals have been known to leak from these storage sites and into nearby communities, contaminating drinking water and making residents sick.
VICE News visited the areas most affected by this toxic waste.
This Kardashian-West family is no stranger to controversy.
It hasn’t been two weeks since Kanye pretended to crash the stage at the Grammys again. And just days ago Kim’s sister, Khloe, got in a Twitter war with Amber Rose.
This week, Kim posted a photo of daughter North West in a baby bulletproof vest, according to HLN. The attire is part of Kanye’s new fashion line for Adidas.
Kanye told Style.com that one of his influences for the line was the London riots. “I was living in London at that time and saw the way that the kids wanted the clothes and I didn’t have the skill set to do the more inexpensive clothes,” he told the publication.
“North West has been attending shows at New York Fashion Week — including Kanye’s own show — with her parents. According to reports, she has had a few meltdowns during the shows,” according to HLN.
Three Muslims, including a newly-wed couple, were shot dead in their home in a North Carolina neighborhood in the US. All three victims were shot in the head, sources told WRAL News. A motive has not yet been confirmed.
Students Deah Shaddy Barakat, 23, his wife Yusor Mohammad, 21, and her sister, Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, 19, were found dead at their apartment in Chapel Hill near the University of North Carolina (UNC) campus, according to Yahoo News.
Barakat was a second-year dental student at UNC, and Mohammad was due to begin her dental studies. They were married in December.
A 46-year-old man, identified by police as Craig Stephen Hicks, has been charged with three counts of first degree murder.
Police arrived at the building complex following reports of gunshots at 5:11pm on Tuesday. The man reportedly turned himself in later than evening.
“It is with deep sadness that we share with you the news that the victims included Deah Barakat, a second-year student in the School of Dentistry, and his wife, Yusor, who had planned to begin her dental studies here in the fall. Her sister, Razan, a student at N.C. State University, was also killed,” UNC said in a statement.
Here is an interesting documentary about North Korea from 2014. It covers general life in North Korea and what a foreigner could expect to see in North Korea.
Korea was annexed by the Empire of Japan in 1910. In 1945, when Japan was defeated in World War II, Korea was divided into two occupied zones, with the north occupied by the Soviet Union and the south by the United States.
OK, Fine. 