It Makes a Difference to the Sheep

KOREA NEWS ROUNDUP:

REMAINS OF U.S. SERVICEMEN RECOVERED IN NORTH KOREA

The Defense Department’s Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office negotiated terms with the North Koreans in July, which led to the scheduling of two, month-long operations this year. As a matter of policy, these recovery talks deal exclusively with the issue of recovering the remains of missing Americans. POW/MIA accounting is a separate, stand-alone humanitarian matter, not tied to any other issue. The second operation will end on October 28, 2003 when these remains and others will be repatriated.
...

Since 1996, 26 individual joint operations have been conducted in North Korea, during which 182 sets of remains believed to be those of U.S. soldiers have been recovered. Of the 88,000 U.S. servicemembers missing in action from all conflicts, more than 8,100 are from the Korean War.

Nice to see success in the midst of the diplomatic stand-off on nuclear proliferation.

NORTH KOREA TO JAPAN: ABDUCTIONS OF JAPANESE CITIZENS ARE JAPAN'S FAULT

North Korea said Wednesday that it completely rejects Japan's accusations over the abduction issue and that the abductions were the result of Japan's hostile policy over the past century.
....
The North Korean envoy also said the few abductees are nothing compared with the deaths of 8.4 million Koreans under Japan's 40 years of colonization of the Korean Peninsula.

In short, "you were so mean to us in the past we had no choice but to kidnap your citizens." I'm speechless.

U.S. TO ROK: WE'LL MAKE OUR PRESENCE IN YONGSAN EVEN SMALLER

The United States has offered to maintain a smaller presence in the Yongsan Garrison when the U.S. military headquarters relocates south of Seoul in 2006, thus returning to Korea a larger piece of land there than initially envisioned, a report said yesterday.

The U.S. side is expected to return about 700,000 pyeong (2.3 million square meters) of land to Korea, a significant departure from its earlier agreement to return 500,000 pyeong of the total 870,000 pyeong, Yonhap News Agency reported, quoting an unnamed diplomatic source.

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Military experts believe, however, the sudden softening of the U.S. stance is aimed at inducing Korea to make a commitment to send combat troops to Iraq to join the multinational effort led by the United States to maintain security there.

Given that Yongsan was the headquarters of the Japanese Imperial Army during Japanese colonial rule of Korea (1910-1945), I think it might be better, at least for symbolic reasons, for the Americans to vacate "Dragon Hill" altogether.