All Things News

South Korean Navy patrol boats

Straight from Yahoo News: “SEOUL, South Korea – A badly damaged North Korean patrol ship retreated in flames Tuesday after a skirmish with a South Korean naval vessel along their disputed western coast, South Korean officials said.

The first naval clash between the two sides in seven years broke out just a week before President Barack Obama is due to visit Seoul, raising suspicions the North’s communist regime is trying to rachet up tensions to gain a negotiating advantage.

There were no South Korean casualties, the country’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a statement. South Korea’s YTN television reported that one North Korean officer was killed and three other sailors were wounded, citing an unidentified government source. The JCS said it could not confirm the YTN report.

Each side blamed the other for violating the sea border.

The exchange of fire occurred as U.S. officials said Obama has decided to send a special envoy to Pyongyang for rare direct talks on the communist country’s nuclear weapons program. No date has been set, but the talks would be the first one-on-one negotiations since Obama took office in January.

“It was an intentional provocation by North Korea to draw attention ahead of Obama’s trip,” said Shin Yul, a political science professor at Seoul’s Myongji University.

He also said the North was sending a message to Obama that it wants to replace the armistice agreement that ended the Korean War in 1953 with a permanent peace treaty while keeping its nuclear weapons.

Washington has consistently said that Pyongyang must abandon its nuclear arsenal for any peace treaty to be concluded. North Korea has conducted two underground nuclear tests since 2006 and is believed to have enough weaponized plutonium for half a dozen atomic weapons.

“We are sternly protesting to North Korea and urging it to prevent the recurrence of similar incidents,” South Korean Rear Adm. Lee Ki-sik told reporters in Seoul.

North Korea’s military issued a statement blaming South Korea for the “grave armed provocation,” saying its ships had crossed into North Korean territory.

The North claimed that a group of South Korean warships opened fire but fled after the North Korean patrol boat dealt “a prompt retaliatory blow.” The statement, carried on the official Korean Central News Agency, said the South should apologize.

South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, who convened an emergency security meeting, ordered the South’s defense minister to strengthen military readiness.

South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a statement that a North Korean patrol boat crossed the disputed western sea border about 11:27 a.m. (0227 GMT), drawing warning shots from a South Korean navy vessel. The North Korean boat then opened fire and the South’s ship returned fire before the North’s vessel sailed back toward its waters, the statement said.

The clash occurred near the South Korean-held island of Daecheong, about 120 nautical miles (220 kilometers) off the port city of Incheon, west of Seoul, the statement said.

The North Korean ship was seriously damaged in the skirmish, a Joint Chiefs of Staff officer said on condition of anonymity, citing department policy. Prime Minister Chung Un-chan told lawmakers the ship was on fire when it fled north.

Lee, the rear admiral, said the shooting lasted for about two minutes, during which the North Korean ship fired about 50 rounds at the South Korean vessel, about two miles (3.2 kilometers) away. He said the South Korean ship was lightly damaged.

He said several Chinese fishing boats were operating in the area at the time of clash, but they were undamaged. Chung, the prime minister, described the clash as “accidental,” telling lawmakers that two North Korean ships had crossed into South Korean waters in an attempt to clamp down on Chinese fishing.

Lee, however, said the South Korean military was investigating if the North’s alleged violation was deliberate.

The Koreas regularly accuse each other of straying into their respective territories. South Korea’s military said that North Korean ships have already violated the sea border 22 times this year.

The two sides fought deadly skirmishes along the western sea border in 1999 and 2002.

No South Koreans were killed in 1999, but six South Korean sailors died in 2002, according to the South Korean navy. It said exact North Korean causalities remain unclear.

Baek Seung-joo, a North Korea expert at Seoul’s state-run Korea Institute for Defense Analyses, said Tuesday’s clash would not have a big impact on inter-Korean relations.

He said the Koreas held a landmark summit in 2000 and the North sent a cheering squad to the South for the Asian Games in 2002. Both events took place after the separate clashes in 1999 and 2002.

Baek, like fellow analyst Shin, said that North Korea caused the incident but that Pyongyang appears to want to create tensions and use them for domestic political consumption.

The two Koreas have yet to agree on their sea border more than 50 years after the end of their 1950-53 Korean War, which ended in an armistice and not a peace treaty. Instead, they rely on a line that the then-commander of U.N. forces, which fought for the South, drew unilaterally at the end of the conflict.

North Korea last month accused South Korean warships of broaching its territory in waters off the west coast and warned of a clash in the zone, which is a rich crab fishing area.

The latest conflict comes after North Korea has reached out to Seoul and Washington following months of tension over its nuclear and missile programs.

North Korea launched a long-range rocket in April and carried out its second underground nuclear test in May. But it subsequently released South Korean and U.S. detainees, agreed to resume joint projects with South Korea and offered direct talks with Washington.

Two administration officials said Monday in Washington that Obama has decided, after months of deliberation, to send a special envoy to Pyongyang for direct talks on nuclear issues.

Obama will send envoy Stephen Bosworth, although no date for his trip has been set, the officials said. The officials discussed the matter on condition of anonymity because the decision has not been publicly announced.

Hundreds of thousands of combat-ready troops on both sides face across the 155-mile-long (248-kilometers-long) land border that is also strewn with land mines and tank traps and laced with barbed wire. About 28,500 U.S. troops are stationed in South Korea to deter a potential North Korean aggression.”

Obama wants you to be healthy!

Straight from Fox News: “The health care reform bill awaiting debate in the House assumes millions of workers and employers would rather pay $167 billion in fines than purchase or provide adequate coverage, according to a recent analysis, raising questions about whether the plan does enough to make insurance affordable.

Though the bill is estimated to expand coverage from the current 83 percent to 96 percent of legal U.S. residents, the windfall of projected penalty payments also exposes a potential contradiction in reform. A significant part of the plan to expand coverage relies financially on fines from the uninsured.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated in its study last week that the House bill would bring in $167 billion over 10 years — $33 billion from fines paid by individuals who decline to buy insurance, and the rest from employers who don’t offer insurance to workers or contribute enough toward premiums.

Ernest Istook, a former Republican congressman from Oklahoma who is now a fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, calculated that anywhere between 8 million and 14 million people would end up paying the fines.

This raises a few problems, he said. First, if those millions somehow get covered and don’t pay the fine, then the health program is faced with a budget hole.

Second, he said, it speaks to a flaw with the insurance packages that are being offered. “If you say people would rather pay $167 billion in penalties rather than buy insurance under your new plan, what’s wrong with your new plan?” he asked.

The answer, Istook said: “It’s expensive.”

The House plan would create a government-run insurance program intended to help extend coverage. But the plan would allow the government to negotiate rates with providers rather than set artificially low Medicare-style rates — as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other liberal Democrats were hoping to do.

While the negotiated rate structure somewhat assuages the concerns of moderate Democrats and others who projected that a system based on Medicare rates would create an irresistibly cheap public plan that would draw millions away from private coverage and hurt doctors, it also does much less to address cost concerns.

In fact, the CBO report said such a public plan “would typically have premiums that are somewhat higher than the average premiums” for private plans in the newly created insurance marketplace. This is partly because the public plan would likely attract less healthy, and more expensive, enrollees.

In addition, many analysts and lawmakers have warned that private premiums will go up as well as a result of new requirements.

Though the government is offering a bevy of subsidies to make coverage more affordable under the plan, it apparently would not be enough to lure everyone into the system.

Suggestions for reducing the number of people who are insurance-averse are wide-ranging.

Some don’t want any fines, emphasizing incentives over penalties. But political momentum in Washington has long since shifted in favor of a requirement to get coverage. President Obama, who opposed such a mandate during the presidential campaign, reversed and supported it during his September address on health care reform to Congress.

Others, especially the health insurance industry, want the fines to be increased.

“If you don’t get everybody in, the market reforms don’t work and premiums skyrocket for everybody,” said Robert Zirkelbach, spokesman with America’s Health Insurance Plans, which opposes the House Democratic plan.

Zirkelbach warned that those who choose to pay the penalty will just wait until they get sick to get covered, driving up premiums across the board. “More needs to be done to make coverage affordable.”

Zirkelbach dismissed the claim that less penalty revenue would leave the federal government with a budget hole. He said getting more people covered would help bring down health care costs overall and balance out in the end for the government’s books.

He doubted, though, that the government plan would have higher premiums. He said the so called public-option would ultimately negotiate rates down to Medicare levels.

Third Way, a think tank that describes itself as part of the “moderate wing of the progressive movement,” also released a study saying the mandate cannot be weakened. But it said several changes can be made to expand coverage. The group suggested, among other things, allowing young people to pay lower premiums and allowing people to meet the coverage requirement with even leaner insurance plans.

Democrats are standing by the mandate provisions, though, arguing that some relatively small group of uninsured people is inevitable.

“There’s just going to be some people who choose rather to pay (the fine) than to pay for health care,” said Stephanie Lundberg, spokeswoman for House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md. “There’s going to be some people that just philosophically don’t want to buy health care.”

She said individual responsibility has to be a part of the plan, but that 96 percent coverage is still pretty admirable.

“It expands coverage substantially,” Lundberg said.”

Iranian sword stabs Star of David and US flag

Straight from Fox News: “The U.N. nuclear watchdog has asked Tehran to explain evidence suggesting that Iranian scientists have experimented with an advanced secret nuclear warhead design, according to a report published Friday.

Citing what it calls “previously unpublished documentation” from an International Atomic Energy Agency compiled report, Britain’s The Guardian newspaper said Iranian scientists may have tested high-explosive components of a “two-point implosion” device.

The report said that even the existence of two-point implosion nuclear warhead technology is officially secret in both the U.S. and Britain. The technology allows for the production of smaller and simpler warheads, making it easier to put a warhead on a missile, the newspaper said.

The IAEA said in September it has no proof Iran has or once had a covert atomic bomb program.

The U.N. watchdog’s statements followed reports from the Associated Press quoting what it called a classified IAEA document saying agency experts agreed Iran now had the means to build atomic bombs and was heading towards developing a missile system able to carry a nuclear warhead.

Extracts of the report have been published before, but it was not known the document included information on such a sophisticated warhead, the newspaper said.

A nuclear site, which Iran revealed in September three years after diplomats said Western spies first discovered it, added to fears of secret Iranian efforts to develop nuclear bombs. Iran claims it is enriching uranium only for peaceful electricity use.

The Vienna-based IAEA, Iran’s Foreign Ministry and the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran were unavailable for comment when contacted by Reuters.”