Officials in North Korea have warned that they are on the brink of war with the South, as the United States and South Korea prepare to conduct a joint training exercise in the Yellow Sea. Tensions have been high since the North shelled the South Korean island of Yeonpyeong on Tuesday, taking relations between the two Koreas to one of its lowest points since the Korean War. And ahead of the US-South Korean drills scheduled to begin on Sunday, the North continued to rattle its saber, saying it was “ready to annihilate the South’s stronghold” if it violated the North’s sovereignty. North Korea also conducted artillery test fires audible on Yeonpyeong. The rounds fired on Friday were the first heard since the attack earlier this week, and South Korea’s Ministry of Defense spokesman, Kwon Ki-hyeon, told The New York Times that all of the rounds fired appeared to stay within North Korea and were thus likely part of a drill or a show of force designed to keep South Korean forces on edge. South Korea appears to be preparing for the possibility of more acts of aggression, with government officials announcing that they would change their rules of engagement. Previously, those had been designed to stop a conflict from escalating, but they are being altered to make it easier for South Korean forces to respond to any further “provocations,” reports The Chosunilbo. Although many South Koreans doubt that the recent attack will lead to a larger conflict, there has been mounting criticism that Seoul’s response was not strong enough. On Thursday, the country’s Defense minister resigned, and was replaced by a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Kim Kwan-jin. Hundreds of South Koreans also demonstrated in the border town of Paju, saying that their government was “being too weak,” reports the Guardian. President Lee had vowed a strong response to any attack after an investigation found that the North was responsible for the sinking of the South Korean Navy vessel the Cheonan in March. The United States has reemphasized its commitment to South Korea's defense following the artillery attack. Gen. Walter Sharp, the top commander of US forces in Korea, toured artillery-damaged areas on Yeonpyeong just hours before the North conducted its apparent training fire exercise. Although the coming joint military exercises will take place far from the disputed Yellow Sea border, The Korea Herald reports that the North may use them as cause for another act of aggression. The exercises were planned before the attacks happened.
II. UPI - British said to pay fake Taliban leader
Britain did not respond Friday to Afghan charges its agents introduced an impostor posing as a Taliban leader into President Hamid Karzai's palace. Earlier this week, a New York Times investigation revealed that a man calling himself Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour had held three meetings with NATO and Afghan officials and met Karzai. Karzai's chief of staff, Mohammad Umer Daudzai, said unidentified British officials brought the man to meet Karzai in July or August, the Washington Post reported Friday. Afghan intelligence later established he was really a shopkeeper from Quetta, Pakistan. Britain's MI6 paid the impostor at least $100,000 over a year, The Daily Telegraph reported Friday, citing unnamed intelligence sources. When an Afghan who knew the real Mansour revealed the error, the man was allowed to return to Pakistan, according to reports. MI6 is thought to have made contact with the false Mansour in Quetta, where the Taliban leadership is based. It is not clear who was responsible for trying to verify his identity.
III. JPOST - Saudi Arabia arrests 149 al-Qaida militants
Interior ministry announces in past 8 months terrorists who were planning attacks on state, security official, journalists detained; 124 are Saudis while the rest belong to other nationalities, report says. The Saudi Arabian Interior Ministry announced on Friday that in the past eight months it has arrested 149 al-Qaida militants who were planning attacks on state and security officials and journalists, AFP reported. Out of the 149, 124 are Saudis while the rest belong to other nationalities, according to a statement carried by state-owned Al-Ekhbareya television. Saudi authorities have also dismantled 19 Al-Qaida cells, the report suggested. In October Saudi intelligence services warned of a new terror threat from al-Qaida against Europe, particularly in France. European officials were informed that al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula was doubtless active or envisioned being active on the European continent.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has warned that talks to end Cyprus' 36-year division would suffer a major setback unless progress is reached early next year. The United Nations chief said in a report released on the island Thursday that peace talks "could founder fatally" without a "substantive agreement" being reached before elections in Cyprus and Turkey are held in mid-2011. The Mediterranean island was split into a breakaway Turkish Cypriot north and an internationally recognized Greek Cyprus joined the European Union in 2004, but the breakaway north, where Turkey maintains 35,000 troops, has been effectively left out. The ongoing dispute is hurting EU-NATO co-operation and Turkey's troubled EU membership bid. In his report, Ban described progress in the UN-backed talks as "frustratingly slow," pointing to a stalemate over the key issue of settling property claims by Greek Cypriots displaced from the north in 1974. Ban invited rival Cypriot leaders to U.N. headquarters last week in an effort to revive the process. He will meet with them again in Geneva in late January to gauge the chances for a successful outcome — and he has urged the two side to be "fully prepared with a practical plan." Under the terms of the negotiations, a reunification deal would require approval in separate referendums. Cypriot government spokesman Stefanos Stefanou, responding to the report, said his government remains committed to work "intensively and constructively" for a breakthrough before the Geneva meeting. Cypriot south in 1974 when Turkey invaded.
Prime Minister George Papandreou reiterated, from Parliament's podium on Friday, that there is no issue of co-exploitation in the Aegean Sea with neighbouring Turkey. The premier noted that no such a discussion can be held with Turkey under the still existent threat of war (casus belli) issued in the 1990s by Turkey's assembly, "because our territorial rights are being disputed via incessant violations and infringements, and of course, because Turkey has not recognised the International Law of the Sea." He also cited the fact that the issue of the Aegean's continental shelf has not been resolved based on international law and the International Court of The Hague.
VI. RT - ISS crew safely back to Earth
The latest crew to return to Earth from the International Space Station has landed safe and sound. The Soyuz capsule delivered the Russian cosmonaut and two American astronauts to Kazakhstan. The undocking took place as scheduled and the journey back to Earth lasted about three hours. Russian veteran cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin has spent a year in space and his colleagues from NASA, Shannon Walker and Douglas H. Wheelock – about six months each. Their mission included a number of space walks and 120 scientific experiments, including biotechnology, physics and chemistry tests. On Thursday evening, the crew had a Thanksgiving farewell meal with their colleagues staying at the ISS. Three more cosmonauts remain there and they are waiting to welcome three others in the mid-December.
VII. PRAVMIR - The Spirit of Thankfulness
It is natural for us to ask help from God in times of trouble or sorrow. It is also natural to plead on behalf of our loved ones. These two forms of prayer - petition and intercession - are vital. But the prayer of thanksgiving, mentioned so often in Scripture and made so eloquently in many Psalms, must also be an essential part of our lives as Christians. Are we truly thankful to God for His innumerable blessings and mercies toward us? Do we really feel we even have anything to be thankful for? Perhaps, amid our daily duties and struggles, an occasion for gratitude seems hard to find. We may have pressing financial needs, urgent family problems, deep personal sorrows or concerns. We may be only too well aware of the evils of our time, or the sins of our heart. We may simply feel empty, weary, isolated. The evening news, or the events in our neighborhood, may make us feel that talk of thanking God is at best simple-minded and at worst hypocritical. In reality, the practice of prayerful thanksgiving is essential to acquiring inner peace. Far from being simple-minded, it requires - and develops - a living faith and humility in the soul. One of the reasons God often seems far from us is simply because we do not - even will not - see Him where He is, in the daily circumstances of life He sends us. Giving thanks to God for everything in our "ordinary" lives can help us to see at last that nothing in our lives is really ordinary. Life is never "ordinary". It is rather a passage from time into eternity. The circumstances that rise before us, the problems we encounter, the relationships we form, the choices we make, all ultimately concern our eternal union with or separation from God. If we as Christians truly believe that our lives are lived under the sign of the Cross and in the light of eternity, then we must believe that God is with us in all the changing fortunes of our days. And we must also believe that despite natural disasters and human ills, evil is not finally triumphant and death is not victorious. In our lives there are no chance events, no irrational twists of empty fate, but rather the ever-present workings of a provident God, Who uses all means to lead us into the harbor of Christ. When we begin to feel, however faintly, the truth of this, we shall find much to be grateful for. The spirit of thankfulness is a necessary part of the spiritual discipline of living in the present moment - with God - and not in the past or the future. We cannot know what will happen tomorrow, or even tonight; we cannot change what is already past. But we can be grateful today for the blessings of today - the blessing of life itself, the blessing of communion with God through prayer and the Holy Eucharist, the blessing of repentance, the healing of forgiveness. Even the small, seemingly trivial, moments in our day - the sight of a bird in the sky, the greening of a tree, the laugh of a child, the voice of a friend - speak to us of God if only we wish to hear, for everything of beauty, of light, of love, comes to us from Him. In such small moments, as much as in the dramatic crises of our lives, the headlong rush of time opens upon eternity. If we learn to live quietly, attentively, faithfully, in the "now" which alone truly exists for us, we shall be prepared by degrees for the "everlasting now" which awaits us after death. If we do not find and follow Christ in the present moment, we shall not recognize Him at the end of time. Let us ask of God a grateful heart, and let us resolve to give thanks each day for the day itself and the presence of Christ in it, sustaining our life by His hand and giving courage to our struggles, zeal to our repentance, contrition to our prayer, and stability to our labors. If only we will make an effort, we will find that giving thanks to God - even in adversity - opens our hearts to see blessings we had not thought to find.