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Breaking: U.S.: North Korea launches rocket

4:32 pm - 04/12/2012


Pyongyang, North Korea (CNN) -- Defying warnings from the international community, North Korea launched a long-range rocket on Friday, but it appears to have broken apart shortly afterward, U.S. officials said.
Tokyo, which had threatened to shoot down the rocket if it appeared to be threatening its territory, had called for restraint. But Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda said Thursday, "We are fully prepared to deal with any contingency," according to the news agency Kyodo.
Countries that include the United States and South Korea see the launch as a cover for a ballistic missile test. International leaders had urged North Korea to cancel the launch, but Pyongyang refused to back down, insisting the operation is for peaceful purposes.

Updates:

According to ABC news, the rocket seems to have failed.


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tabaqui 13th-Apr-2012 12:31 am (UTC)
Didn't their last rocket launch fail horribly, too? I wish the citizens would just have enough of the bullshite and rise up and revolt.
ms_maree 13th-Apr-2012 12:39 am (UTC)
I'm sure they have, and then they got shot...hard to uprise against an army with no resources and on the starvation line.
tabaqui 13th-Apr-2012 01:41 am (UTC)
It is. I just wish the soldiers would think about their families starving and decide to take over or *something*. Though i don't know if they'd be any better.....
ms_maree 13th-Apr-2012 01:43 am (UTC)
Maybe the soldiers know better than anyone how futile it is. But as I said, I've read accounts of uprisings, I've read accounts of soldier trying to defect (some succeeded, some didn't). And for those who failed and didn't manage to escape, it ended badly, for them and their families.
tabaqui 13th-Apr-2012 01:47 am (UTC)
It just...it makes me kind of sick to think about it, how utterly miserable their lives are, how cut off and isolated they are and they don't have any hope.... I saw a documentary once about some people defecting/who had defected, and a woman's sister was visiting her somehow and they were talking about how fat the Dear Leader was and the sister was saying 'no, no, he's just bloated from not eating, he works so hard, he's just like us'.... And in the end she went back to NK....

That's just so damn sad and horrifying.
ms_maree 13th-Apr-2012 01:52 am (UTC)
Here is an article that I read recently about a woman who was forced to leave her son behind while she and her daughters managed to get out.

Umm, it doesn't end happily.

http://edition.cnn.com/2012/03/24/us/north-korean-refugees/index.html
tabaqui 13th-Apr-2012 01:55 am (UTC)
Ah, damn. Uh. I'll bookmark this. There's so much ugly stuff going on right now, not sure if want to go there. Thanks, though.
ms_maree 13th-Apr-2012 01:57 am (UTC)
Yeah, it's not a happy article. I cried a lot when I read it. But I'm glad I did read it (if that makes sense) because I felt I needed to know what was happening.
angelofdeath275 13th-Apr-2012 01:23 am (UTC)
im pretty sure revolting there is a matter of life or death.
tabaqui 13th-Apr-2012 01:41 am (UTC)
Yeah. There are just *so many people*. Seems like they could eventually overwhelm everyone but...it would be horrible.
theguindo 13th-Apr-2012 02:32 am (UTC)
It's hard when those people are barely getting enough food to survive. They don't even have the energy to live, much less the energy to get angry enough to organize a revolt.
angelofdeath275 13th-Apr-2012 02:39 am (UTC)
and some probably have families in a prison camp or something, so if they did anything their families would end up dead.
nesmith 13th-Apr-2012 03:06 am (UTC)
The other problem is that there's no way for people to mobilize or gather; there really is an Orwellian level of surveillance and people are encouraged to turn in family members for daring to criticize the government. By the time a group manages to get together the army is there to put them down.

It really is fucked every which way.
tabaqui 13th-Apr-2012 03:18 am (UTC)
It is. One of the saddest situations out there, i think, because there's simply no way to help or *do* anything.
illusivevenstar 13th-Apr-2012 02:10 pm (UTC)
it's easy to say that from where you are sitting. it's a way different thing when you live there.
mskye 13th-Apr-2012 01:25 am (UTC)
The North Korean government is incompetent on many levels, but they really know how to crush the souls of their citizens. It's like they read 1984 and thought to themselves "Hey, look! A handbook on how to run a country!".

I sincerely hope that the NK government is overthrown soon, though. At the rate it's going it might just collapse.
tabaqui 13th-Apr-2012 01:40 am (UTC)
Yes. I keep hoping it will collapse, too, but fuck - it will be so ugly and so horrible.
homasse 13th-Apr-2012 02:14 am (UTC)
It crashed into the sea, yes.

And according to twitter (I follow a reporter in S. Korea who was monitoring N. Korean broadcasts on it)...there was absolutely NO mention of it on N. Korean TV. So I daresay the vast majority of N. Koreans have no idea it happened, and if they do find out, they'll be told, same as with the last failed launch, that it was a success and their satellite is working, beaming out songs praising Kim.
tabaqui 13th-Apr-2012 03:17 am (UTC)
Yeah. It's horrifying how cut off and manipulated the citizens are.
zizzo_no_ai 13th-Apr-2012 07:45 am (UTC)
Surprisingly, it looks like North Korea's acknowledged the launch failed.
homasse 13th-Apr-2012 07:49 am (UTC)
Yeah, I saw that - that really is surprising, even though they're spinning it.

Combine that with them letting foreign reporters take pictures when the buses driving them somewhere took a wrong turn, instead of telling them not to or slamming the curtains shut, and it seems like something is definitely going on in N. Korea behind the scenes that we don't know about.
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