SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the if-they-use-dst-it'd-be-an-act-of-war dept.
North Korea has switched from the UTC+08:30 offset, which it has used since 2015, back to UTC+09:00 (Korea Standard Time), matching South Korea in a "first practical step" towards reunification:
North Korea has changed [its] time zone to match the South after last week's inter-Korean summit, according to state media. At 23:30 local time (15:00 GMT) on Friday the country's clocks moved forward 30 minutes to midnight. The reset is "the first practical step" to speed up Korean unification, the official KCNA news agency said.
Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump says he has a date for his meeting with the North's leader, Kim Jong-Un. "We now have a date and we have a location, we'll be announcing it soon," Mr Trump told US journalists outside the White House on Friday, adding that he was expecting "very, very good things" to come out it. Mr Trump will host South Korea's president Moon Jae-in at the White House on 22 May to discuss the upcoming meeting.
Related: Massachusetts Commission Considering a Potential Move to the Atlantic Time Zone
President Trump Tweets about Nuclear Talks with North Korea
U.S. and North Korean Representatives Holding Secret Talks to Plan for Summit
Kim Jong-un Crosses Into South Korea for Summit
South Korea to Remove Loudspeakers at Border
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Arik on Saturday May 05 2018, @10:40PM
They paint Kim as a tin-hat dictator who inherited the country, well there's some truth to that. But he's also someone that spent much of his youth attending exclusive private schools in Switzerland where he was described as well behaved, perhaps shy; and he was not always the heir apparent, his brother Jong-nam was the anointed heir until 2001 or later.
Furthermore these moves are not so surprising, in fact they're somewhat expected. He's signaled well ahead of time that he's going to try to improve the economy and move away from the military-first doctrine that keeps it strangled. But to do that he needs to end the war. If he were seen as weakening their defenses without first doing something about the constant threat of attack he would become an ex-dictator quite quickly. He doesn't want to be an ex-dictator. What he wants probably looks a bit more like Deng Xiaoping - a market reformer yes, but still a dictator.
Moon, also, has his own reasons to want to end the war, though I suspect the south may have a slightly different picture of how this is supposed to go down.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?