Stop missile tests or we will end food aid, Obama tells N.Korea

[xomputer]

U.S. President Obama has stopped the plan of supplying food aid to North Korea in exchange for their ceasing missile testing. According to diplomatic reports in the Tokyo news source Shimun, the launch is imminent.

Korea has moved the rocket to a launch pad in Tongchang-ri in the northwest and has begun injecting it with liquid fuel in anticipation of an April 12 or 13 launch.
The report came after North Korea insisted on Tuesday it would go ahead with what it says is a satellite launch, disregarding a call from President Barack ObamaBarack Obama to drop the plan and accusing him of a "confrontational mindset."

The US has suspended plans to send food aid to North Korea, saying it has broken a promise to halt missile launches and cannot be trusted to give the help to those who need it, a Pentagon official said yesterday.

The launch is viewed by the West and Asian neighbors like Japan as a preliminary to testing ballistic missile technology.
South Korea is reporting on the issue as well, as President Obama met with the South Korean President. “North Korea will put itself into deeper isolation, make promised American food aid unlikely and face possible international sanctions if it goes ahead with a long-range rocket launch.”

The threatened liftoff, if pressed ahead, will "only deepen North Korea's isolation, damage further relations with its neighbors and seriously undermine prospects of future negotiations," Obama said during a joint news conference after summit talks with South Korean President Lee Myung-bak.

"I'll simply say North Korea will achieve nothing by threats or by provocations," President Obama said, according to Yonhap news agency.


I support what obama said, North Korea is totally wrong. No country believes that it is a satellite. I heard that North Korea took the same technology to make missiles into it. North Korea just wants to test ICBM not a satellite. As far as i know, North Korea had tested fake satellite several times and those were turn out to be missiles. North Korea should stop talking lies and try to make positive changes.

 

[waltky]

Mebbe Obama needs to threaten to stop foreign aid to India an' Pakistan too...

Billions face starvation due to nuclear weapons
April 25, 2012 - MORE than a billion people worldwide could starve if India and Pakistan unleash nuclear weapons because even a "limited" nuclear war would cause major climate disruptions, a study says.

In addition to clouds of radiation which could contaminate farmland far from the centre of the blasts, the study found soot released into the atmosphere would devastate crop yields by cooling global temperatures and reducing rainfall worldwide. The study provides hard data to back up dire warnings of the global - and unintended - consequences of nuclear weapons, said author Dr Ira Helfand of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. "It is not just the arsenals of the US and Russia that pose a threat to the whole world,'' Helfand told AFP. "Even these smaller arsenal pose an existential threat to our civilisation, if not to our species. It would certainly end modern society as we know it.''

The study, set to be published in the peer-reviewed journal Climate Change, was released at the World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates in Chicago. It found that corn production in the United States would decline by an average of 10 per cent for an entire decade and soybean production would drop by about 10 per cent with the most severe decline occurring five years after the nuclear war. It also determined that rice production in China would drop by an average of 21 per cent of the first four years and 10 per cent next six years. Significant losses would also likely occur with other crops and in other countries, Helfand said in an interview on the sidelines of the summit.

And the actual crop losses could be much worse than predicted since the conservative model did not account for increases in UV light and the likelihood that global cooling would also result in sudden, crop-killing frosts. "Even with what we are able to show, the consequences for human nutrition and human life are really profound,'' Helfand said. The resulting increase in food prices and agricultural shortfalls would almost certainly lead to panic and hoarding on an international scale, further reducing access to food. Given that some 925 million people worldwide already suffer from malnutrition according to the latest UN study, the study found that mass famine deaths would likely be unavoidable.

That would further deepen social unrest and could lead to armed conflicts both within and between nations. Mass famine is also often by major epidemics of infectious diseases like cholera and dysentery, which could further raise the death toll. Those consequences would pale in comparison to the Nuclear Winter which would devastate the globe should the United States or Russia unleash even a small portion of their arsenal, Helfand said. "The US and Russia are not likely to start a war with each other, but we know of at least five times when the US or Russia prepared to launch a nuclear attack because it believed it was under attack,'' Helfand said.

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