Yonhap News Summary

The following is the second summary of major stories moved by Yonhap News Agency on Friday.

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(News Focus) N. Korea revives Cold War tensions with renewed border threats
SEOUL -- With threats Friday to scrap the most fundamental safeguard accord
against inter-Korean military clashes, North Korea revived Cold War era tensions
and sent an ultimatum to Seoul's government: withdraw hardline policy or face a
possible clash.
Whether Pyongyang will immediately attempt a military provocation is uncertain,
but analysts cautioned Seoul to be on full alert along a volatile inter-Korean
sea border where bloody skirmishes occurred in 1999 and 2002.
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N. Korea's undoing of detente measures signals return to propaganda era
SEOUL -- North Korea's unilateral nullification on Friday of all political and
military accords with South Korea heralds the return to a Cold War era marked by
hostile megaphone propaganda broadcasts along the inter-Korean border, experts
said.
The abrupt move also puts in jeopardy a series of hard-won tension-reducing
measures, they said.
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Koreas locked in volatile stalemate over sea boundary set by U.N.
SEOUL -- The renewed contention over the border in the Yellow Sea between South
and North Korea can be traced back to 1953, when the three-year Korean War ended
in a fragile truce.
Commander Mark Clark of the U.S.-led United Nations forces unilaterally set the
border at the end of the conflict, hoping the Northern Limit Line (NLL) would
help prevent clashes between the two Koreas.
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Japan seeks S. Korea's help in confirming fate of woman abducted by Pyongyang
SEOUL -- South Korea and Japan are in consultations to arrange a meeting between
a former North Korean agent and the family of a Japanese woman abducted by North
Korea decades ago, an informed source said Friday.
Akitaka Saiki, the head of the Japanese Foreign Ministry's Asian and Oceanian
Affairs Bureau, asked Seoul to help the family members of Yaeko Taguchi, who was
abducted by North Korean agents at the age of 22, interview Kim Hyeon-hee, a
former death-row inmate involved in the bombing of a Korean Air passenger plane
while in flight in 1987.
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Japan forcibly mobilized 120,000 Koreans as laborers: panel
SEOUL -- Nearly 120,000 Koreans were forcibly mobilized as laborers under Japan's
colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula in the early 1900s, a state investigative
committee said Friday.
Historical records have shown that Japan drafted hundreds of thousands of Koreans
to work at coal mines and military facilities or serve as sex slaves in and
outside of Japan in the later years of its 1910-45 colonial occupation of the
peninsula.
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(LEAD) S. Korea's industrial output plunges 18.6 pct in Dec.
SEOUL -- South Korea's industrial output shrank at the fastest pace ever in
December due to faltering domestic demand and exports, stoking concerns the
nation's economy is rapidly heading into a recession, a government report showed
Friday.
According to the report by the National Statistical Office (NSO), production in
the mining and manufacturing sectors shrank 18.6 percent last month from a year
earlier, compared with a 14 percent on-year decline in November.
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(Yonhap Feature) Corporate executives join cost-cutting drive
SEOUL -- In the face of the worst economic downturn in a decade, executives at
South Korea's major companies are voluntarily giving up slices of their bonuses
and salaries as part of desperate corporate efforts to weather the crisis.
Buffeted by tumbling exports and stubbornly anemic domestic demand, the economy
is headed for its first recession since the 1998 Asian financial crisis, forcing
companies to tighten their belts.
(END)