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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
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(Score: 5, Insightful) by SparkyGSX on Saturday May 05 2018, @09:11PM (16 children)
This all seems to good to be true. A few months ago, Kim Jong-Un and Trump were boasting about nuclear buttons, and now, suddenly, North Korea promises to play nice, not to make nuclear weapons, and want to reunite with South Korea? I sincerely hope it's all true, but I find it very hard to believe.
I'd never though I'd say this, but with all the childish crap coming from Trump, Kim Jong-Un seems to be the mature and responsible one here.
If you do what you did, you'll get what you got
(Score: 2) by mendax on Saturday May 05 2018, @09:25PM (1 child)
I agree. Trust the North Koreans and die, perhaps literally.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 06 2018, @05:28PM
What did North Koreans do to you? Did they pee in your tea? Seriously, have you even met one? Do you believe every lie your government tells you?
(Score: 4, Informative) by fishybell on Saturday May 05 2018, @09:26PM
I'm not an optimist on these sorts of things but things definitely seem to be improving. I'll take more world peace -- even if it comes in purely symbolic increments -- over less world peace any day of the week.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 05 2018, @09:51PM (1 child)
I wholeheartedly agree. It's common knowledge that Trump can be swayed by flattery. I think Kim Jong-Un is playing Trump in order to get a face-to-face meeting - the first between a North Korean dictator and an American President. Once legitimized by this meeting Kim Jong-Un can consolidate his power base in North Korea and demand international respect.
Even if a deal is struck it could turn out like all the other deals: North Korea lies about compliance long enough to get enough resources inside their borders to last until the next American President thinks he is smarter than his predecessors.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 06 2018, @06:01AM
> Once legitimized by this meeting Kim Jong-Un can consolidate his power base in North Korea and demand international respect.
I don't think it's gonna be that easy, it's not like Trump has much international respect either.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by tftp on Saturday May 05 2018, @10:08PM (5 children)
Kim has only a narrow window of opportunity here. He is not clearly related to anything heinous - say, torpedoing a ship like his father. Only a respectable leader can participate in summits. If he waits long enough, something bad will happen and will be attributed to him, and the doors will close.
On the other side, unification is needed because Kim, a sufficiently young person, probably does not want to rule a concentration camp. His country was poor to begin with, and decades of juche only made things worse. His country may not even survive without changes.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 05 2018, @10:26PM (1 child)
Think he can blame his half-bro's assassination on the CIA?
Anyway Obama and other US presidents have been linked to more heinous stuff than torpedoing a ship. Similar for other leaders. Never stopped them from participating in summits.
(Score: 1) by tftp on Saturday May 05 2018, @10:47PM
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday May 06 2018, @12:13AM (2 children)
Guessing his motives is not a great idea. He did what he needed to do and killed who he needed to kill to consolidate power before this point. Was all that just to silence any potential opposition to a peaceful reunification? Or does he want to remain a dictator and is using the same stalling tactics as his father before him?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 06 2018, @06:08AM
I don't know about most of his motivations, but I'm 100% sure that one of them is trying to stay alive. A despot has to kill all potential rivals, to stave off his own demise. As seen by assassinations of his family members in other countries, it's not like he could avoid the conflict by running away. It's literally kill or be killed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 07 2018, @02:55PM
Just imagine if one day you woke up as him and you still wanted to live your "great dictator lifestyle". Which probably isn't that bad. You'd probably do about the same things he is doing in order to survive and maintain that lifestyle. Try to get nuclear weapons. Then if it fails, try plan B which is what he's probably doing now.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by zocalo on Saturday May 05 2018, @10:08PM
That said, with the literal collapse of their nuclear test facility and even the DPRK's "allies" doing more to enforce the UN's sanctions, I am hopeful that perhaps they actually are up against a financial wall this time and have realised that they *really* need to come to the table and rethink their Juche approach, at least a little. For all Trump's rhetoric and hawks like Bolton in his inner circle, I doubt that the DPRK would really think that the US would initiate a war on the peninsula if they were to just tone it down a little, so unless Pompeo made some pretty significant promises during his Easter visit, I can't really see any other reason they'd suddenly start playing nice. Even if it all goes well, I doubt there's going to a reunification any time soon though; the issue of what happens to Kim and the burden it would place on South Korea making German reunification look cheap, not to mention finding an approach that the Chinese and US will be both happy with, seem like they'll scupper that.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(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?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 05 2018, @11:11PM
Being "diplomatic" isn't the beginning and end of diplomacy. Try that 100% of the time, and you get walked all over.
Sometimes you have to seem a bit crazy. Sometimes you have to do things that "refined" and "proper" "educated" people see as being "childish crap". Tweeting out a vague threat to nuke a country is not automatically the wrong thing to do; in some cases it can deliver results. The same goes for calling an opponent "Rocketman" or "short and fat".
The world does not work as many are taught to believe. This is true in business, in dating, in politics, in war... and certainly in diplomacy.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Sunday May 06 2018, @03:26PM (1 child)
I read a news piece attributing the sudden change of face to North Korea's last nuke test blowing a hole through the side of the mountain they were testing under, and caused substantial collapse. If true, that would mean that in one swoop they destroyed their testing facility, inflicted an unknown degree of radioactive contamination on their country, and possibly killed, injured, and/or radiation-poisoned a substantial portion of their nuclear research team. That could indeed be good motive to start making nice.
An alternative is that Jong Un and his cabinet/puppet-masters realized that adopting his father's "crazy military despot" act wasn't going to work in the face of a US president who demonstrates a far broader and apparently genuine disconnection from reality. Not to mention China apparently starting to tire of constantly covering their asses.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Monday May 07 2018, @12:41AM
They had foreign visitors recently to dispel the rumor. It's false. The site was still operational very recently. It was shut down voluntarily.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?