Eastern Asia

On April 13, 2016, South Korea held the National Assembly Elections. Three hundred representatives were to be elected in 13,837 election districts, including 253 from single-seat constituencies and 47 from the party lists (on pro rata basis). The Central Election Commission reported that the voter turnout amounted to 58% (a 3.7% increase over the 2012 elections). There were no crude violations registered that could radically change the outcome of the elections.

Hong Kong saw the formation of a new “political party,” headed by 19 year-old student Joshua Wong – a young man with no experience and no explanation as to who is funding him or backing him politically.

This year, from March 31 to April 1 in Washington the forth Nuclear Security Summit took place, which has been held every other year since 2010. The main objective of this political platform according to the plans of Washington was to adopt concrete measures to prevent acts of terrorism by using various kinds of nuclear devices.

The list of American citizens who suffered at the hands of the North Korean regime has just become a bit longer. On March 16, 2016, the Supreme Court of North Korea sentenced a U.S. student to 15 years in a labor camp for “committing an act of hostility against the state’s unity.”

A statement delivered by President of the Republic of Korea (ROK) Park Geun-hye in April, confirming that ROK is getting ready to launch an anti-cyberterrorism program, compels to turn to the topic of “the North Korean hackers” once again. (For the record, “the North Korean hackers” is a mythical phenomenon ROK traditionally resorts to whenever it falls a victim to a cyberattack or whenever there is a trivial safety violation).

Nothing could be more symbolic of the decline of Europe and the rise of Eurasia than the construction of a modern railway from the Ethiopian capitol of Addis Ababa to a port on the Red Sea in Djibouti. The Rail line is being built by Chinese Civil Engineering Construction Corporation and China Railway Group (CREC).

Modern society, despite the achieved technological progress, remains powerless in the fight against natural disasters.

The residents of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea are being warned the country will soon be struck by a famine as severe as the one they experienced in the 1990s. That period in the history of North Korean is known as “the Arduous March,” and according to the North Korean central mass media, the hard times are, basically, around the corner.

A month has passed since the release of the last article devoted to inter-Korean crisis of 2016. This period was marked by both good and bad events. The principle good news is that both South and North refrained from reckless actions amidst the practice of the main part of Operations Plan (OPLAN) 5015. South Koreans practiced a simulated destruction of the leadership of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea as part of their drill, but did not make any provocative moves.