The Pressure of North Korea !

Author: bbc.co.uk (By: Paul Reynolds)

Job Indonesia - Military action is out - it carries with it the risk that the North would retaliate and might even launch action of its own. - Lowongan Kerja
North Korea has a million-strong army, 18,000 artillery pieces and possibly useable nuclear weapons. -  Job Vacancy
Sanctions have limited impact on the North. It is already ignoring UN sanctions restricting trade in military equipment and luxury goods.
It manages to keep going with Chinese help and that is unlikely to be withdrawn.
It might be that the South is left to make a lot of diplomatic noise, with American echoes.
In the end it might have to accept that the lesser of two evils is to make its factual case, protest, gain international support, limit its own dealings with North Korea and then continue to build up its forces for the future.
The China dimension The sinking of the Cheonan is not the first incident along the line of the disputed maritime boundary off the west coast.

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NORTH KOREAN ATTACKS

• Jan 1967 - attacks South Korean warship near border, killing 39 sailors
• Jan 1968 - commandos storm presidential palace in Seoul in a failed attempt to kill President Park Chung-hee
• Jan 1968 - captures USS Pueblo - one crew member dies and 82 held hostage for 11 months
• Dec 1969 - hijacks South Korean airliner taking dozens of passengers hostage
• Oct 1983 - bombs hotel in Rangoon, Burma in failed attempt to kill South Korean President Chun Doo-hwan - 21 people die
• Nov 1987 - bombs South Korean airliner, killing 115
• Sept 1996 - sub carrying 26 troops disabled off South - some land in South sparking deadly manhunt
• Mar 2010 - torpedoes Cheonan warship, 46 sailors killed

• How the ship was sunk

None has led to outright war and there is therefore reason to think that this time as well, the South will have to live with the loss, unless it wants to risk a major conflict.

The investigation's findings have thrown the issue into the lap of US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who happens to be arriving in Beijing this weekend with a huge American delegation to discuss the wider relationship between the US and China.
It is possible that the US, pressed by South Korea, will favour a Security Council meeting and, if such a meeting is to have any traction, China's support will be needed.
And beyond that, if new sanctions are to be imposed, China will have to support them as well, being a veto-holding member of the Council.
Yet China usually prefers to deal with North Korea on a more discreet basis (it recently welcomed North Korea's leader Kim Jong-il to Beijing) and was slow even to express sympathy for the loss of South Korean sailors.
It only comes out against the North if Pyongyang does something with wide international ramifications, notably its nuclear testing.
Suspended talks The US might, at this moment, be more concerned to keep Chinese support for sanctions against Iran - agreed by the major Security Council powers this week - than to use its diplomatic credit up in seeking further sanctions on North Korea.

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Co-head of investigation team, Yoon Duk-yong: "Both sections at the failure point were bent upward"

The prospects for settling the disputed maritime border are about as distant as the prospects for getting North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons capability. Talks about the latter are currently in suspension.
North and South Korea did nearly come to a maritime modus vivendi in 2007 in talks involving the then South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun. 

The idea was to concentrate on fishing - and fishing is a major North Korean concern in the disputed waters as its fishermen seek the south-migrating blue-crab from June to September.

But it came to nothing and the North clearly remains ready and willing to defend its interests there, with the South determined to uphold its position as well.
Some international experts think that what is known as the Northern Limit Line, drawn by the UN after the Korean war, should be moved in North Korea's favour, since the old international three-mile maritime limit has made way for 12.
But given the overall state of relations between North and South, there are no realistic hopes of an agreement.
There may well be further incidents ahead.

South Korea Names New Defence Minister !

Author: bbc.co.uk

Lowongan Kerja - Earlier reports said a security aide would succeed Mr Kim, who resigned after North Korea surprised Seoul by shelling a Southern island. Tuesday's barrage killed four people and sent regional tensions soaring.
The office of South Korean President Lee Myung-bak said several candidates were undergoing rigorous checks, denying local reports of a decision. - Job Vacancy
Job Indonesia - On Friday, Pyongyang said joint US-South Korean naval exercises planned for next week would take the region "to the brink of war".
The North's state news agency, KCNA, said the exercises were "reckless" and the "trigger-happy" allies were deliberately targeting the North.
The North Korean artillery shelling - which killed two South Korean civilians and two marines - was one of the worst incidents between the two Koreas since the end of the Korean war in 1953, which concluded without a peace treaty.
'Reckless provocation' President Lee Myung-Bak accepted Mr Kim's resignation "to improve the atmosphere in the military and to handle the series of incidents," a presidential official said.
Earlier on Friday local news agencies reported that Lee Hee-Won, 61, had been named as new defence minister. Mr Lee is a former four-star general who became deputy chief of the US-South Korea Joint Forces Command in 2005.
He retired from the military in 2006 and was made a presidential security advisor in May following the sinking of the Cheonan, a South Korean warship.
In response to Tuesday's incident South Korea has increased troop numbers on the island, Yeonpyeong, and has said it is changing its rules of engagement to allow it to respond more forcefully to similar incidents. The old rules have been criticised as too passive.

Mr Kim quit after being criticised for his handling of an artillery attack by North Korea

Whoever is appointed will now have the opportunity to overhaul the country's security apparatus, says the BBC's Chris Hogg in the South Korean capital, Seoul.
The cabinet had decided that under the old rules of engagement there was too much emphasis on preventing a military incident escalating into something worse, our correspondent adds.
In future, the South would implement different levels of response depending on whether the North attacked military or civilian targets, a presidential spokesman said.
The US aircraft carrier group led by the USS George Washington is meanwhile on its way to participate in exercises with the South Korean navy - a move arranged before the incident with the North.
North Korea has warned it will "wage second and even third rounds of attacks without any hesitation if warmongers in South Korea make reckless military provocations again".

The Secret of Donald Trump Success !!!

By Charles Miller Producer, Donald Trump: All-American Billionaire 

Job Indonesia - Donald Trump was in Scotland recently, collecting an honorary doctorate from a university in Aberdeen. In the press conference afterwards, he said he was thinking about running for President in 2012. -  Job Vacancy
'Trump considers White House bid' produced more coverage than his honorary doctorate. Whether or not he runs, Trump knew the media would take the bait. They always do. - Lowongan Kerja
In 1999, he said the same thing and generated the same kind of attention. And that was just a rerun of 1987, when rumours were also flying about Trump running for President. The following year, George Bush senior was elected - without Trump on the ticket.
Through the many ups and downs of a long business career, one of Trump's key assets has been his relationship with a media that never tires of his name.
The Big Apple

A man and his town: Donald Trump in Manhattan

He has had two bites at the Big Apple. In the first, he was a blonde, twenty-something tycoon from Brooklyn who developed huge, shiny buildings like Trump Tower on New York's Fifth Avenue. He and his wife Ivana became fixtures on the New York celebrity circuit.
But as the eighties drew to a close, Trump was battling for his business life, at what can now be seen as the end of the first part of his glittering career. Recession hit Trump's many projects and forced him into a spectacular near-bankruptcy. Around the same time, his marriage ended in divorce.
But Trump survived - to breathe life back into his business, and find domestic happiness again too.
The Trump franchise Today, he is a celebrity with global, rather than national, recognition. But in some ways, not much has changed.
He still lives in his Trump Tower triplex, he's still got a model wife - his third, Melania Knauss -, and he insists he's still got his own hair, whose curious architecture is now a key part of the image.
He's back at the top of his game, but this time round, it's a bigger game than in the eighties.

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Trump: 'I like Alan very much'

There are 21 Trump buildings in New York, and more around the country and the world. There are 10 Trump golf courses, and another one in Scotland under construction - against some publicity-generating opposition, which he freely admits has helped raise its profile.
He has his very own beauty pageant business, Miss Universe. And he co-owns a huge global TV franchise, and stars in the original US-version of The Apprentice. (Lord Alan Sugar is Britain's version of Trump.)
Trumpeting Trump The key to Trump's business and media longevity, in both phases of his career, has been his ability to monetise his name.

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“Start Quote

Trump's career was never just about money... fame was the real goal.”

End Quote Ned Eichler former business partner

Putting "Trump" in large gold letters on Trump Tower may have started as an ego-trip, but it quickly turned into a smart business move. Today he estimates the brand centred on his name as being worth $3bn - about half the $6bn he says he's worth.

Others dispute the figures: the authoritative Forbes Rich List, with which he regularly disagrees, has him down for 'only' $2bn to $3bn.
Whatever the number, nobody disputes that the name Donald J. Trump, on a residential building, a hotel, or even a silk tie, gives it a value it wouldn't have if it was branded Donald J. Bloggs.
Ned Eichler, a businessman who dealt with Trump in the early days, recognised Trump's priorities right from his first project. Trump's career, recalls Eichler, was never just about money: "money was just part of the fame, but fame was the real goal."
Too big to fail

Donald and Ivana Trump, here with Bob Hope, were part of New York High Society

Trump turned fame into money by writing an early autobiography and self-help book, The Art of the Deal, a couple of years before his financial crisis. He plugged it relentlessly, even turning up on the Wogan show with his wife Ivana. The book was a huge best-seller, adding to the name-recognition he had already created.
In his late eighties crisis, when a slew of Trump businesses were struggling to keep up interest payments on massive loans, his creditors had to decide whether to pull the plug on his empire. That they decided not to, says his biographer Gwenda Blair, was thanks to his name recognition:
"He was one of the first to get, that getting his name on things, getting his name associated with luxury, and making himself the central character, would make him the irreplaceable piece."
He was, in a phrase the recent global financial crisis has made familiar again, "too big to fail".
New caution Trump has his own account of how he scraped through that crisis, saying "it turned out that the banks liked me a lot". But he admits he 'took his eye off the ball' in the late eighties, over-expanding and believing his own hype.

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Mark Burnett: 'Donald is not the kind of enemy you would want'

Who wouldn't when, as he remembers, his own father told him that "everything you touch turns to gold?"
Twenty years on, he's more cautious, saying he calculates what might go wrong before committing himself to a deal.
One sign of this new caution is what he calls the "branding deals" he negotiates with the developers of some of the latest Trump buildings.
They use his name on the building, along with his contacts and marketing expertise, and give him a share of the upside. If the project goes wrong, Trump's financial exposure is limited.
Family business At the same time, with the help of three of his children, Don Jnr, Ivanka and Eric, who now work as Trump executives, he's taken his business in new directions to exploit the brand he's created.
So alongside new luxury apartment blocks like New York's Trump World Tower, the tallest residential building in the city, there are the golf clubs and overseas resorts, such as those in Hawaii and (to come) Panama.

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Eric Trump: 'We're Trumps. We're type A personalities'

And there are Trump managed hotels, like the huge gold building in Las Vegas, where the Trump brand, once the preserve of the super-rich, is open to anyone who wants to stay a night in a reasonably priced room.
The familiar business journey from upmarket to profitable mass market works for Trump as well as for other brands.
At 64, Donald Trump is still firing on all cylinders. In years to come, it will be up to his children to maintain the right kind of media profile, so that the company can keep charging a premium for the name Mr Trump has worked so hard to associate with success.

Iranian Man Charged in Nigeria Over Arms Shipment !!!

Author: bbc.co.uk

Azim Aghajani appeared in court in Abuja, but did not enter a plea.
Court documents reportedly identified him as a Tehran businessman, and also a member of Iran's Revolutionary Guards.
Three Nigerians have also been charged in connection with the shipment, which included rockets and grenades hidden between building materials.
The court said Mr Aghajani had been charged with attempting to import prohibited arms into Nigeria and conspiring to send the illegal shipment to Gambia.
The Iranian said he needed his embassy to represent him before he could present his plea.
Two of the three Nigerian defendants were only charged with conspiring to re-export the shipment to Gambia.

“Start Quote

This is a matter of great national importance, and if I may add, it has international implications”

End Quote Matthew Idakwo Prosecutor

All four men are reported to be in custody in the Nigerian capital.

"This is a matter of great national importance, and if I may add, it has international implications," said prosecutor Matthew Idakwo. "These arms were imported from Iran to our country. It is of great interest to the world."
The BBC's Fidelis Mbah in Port Harcourt, who has been following the case, says Mr Aghajani's court appearance came as a surprise.
People were not aware that Mr Aghajani was going to be charged in court, as the Iranian government had been reaching out to their Nigerian counterparts to find ways of resolving this issue, our correspondent says.
The arms were discovered at Apapa seaport in Lagos in October. They were hidden in 13 containers shipped from Iran, which were labelled as building supplies.
Mr Aghajani is believed to be the man who was questioned inside the Iranian embassy in Nigeria several weeks ago in relation to the shipment.

The arms cache included rockets, rocket launchers, grenades and ammunition

There were reports that the Nigerian authorities wanted to question a second Iranian national, but that he had since left the country.
Iran has said the weapons were the subject of a "misunderstanding" that has now been cleared up.
Nigeria reported the seizure of the shipment to the UN Security Council for an apparent breach of the sanctions against Iran.
Another illegal shipment of weapons was discovered in Lagos on Wednesday, increasing fears among some Nigerians of possible violence ahead of next year's elections.