Daily Kor for March 28, 2010

The aftermath of the sinking of the ROK naval ship in the Yellow Sea waters off Paengnyŏngdo Island still dominates the news today; it's basically the only new story up on this Sunday in Korea, which is typically a slow news day anyway. Mostly we have updates of stories that basically ran yesterday: we don't know what happened and we're still looking for survivors.

Tentatively North Korea has been ruled out as having directly sunk the boat, at least publicly. But I note that the KCNA website so far does not have any mention of the incident, not even a message of condolence which would not be farfetched if this were purely an accident.

1. ROK government states North Korean not likely to have sunk Chonan, though reasons are unclear (Reuters, Xinhua, WSJ, Bloomberg)
• Search continues, but hope is fading for missing forty-six sailors (BBC, Bloomberg, CNN, UPI, AP via USA Today, Yonhap, Joongang Daily)
• Survivor denies internal explosion caused sinking, suggests outside attack on ship (Korea Herald)
• KRW drops against the dollar following naval incident (CNBC)
2. Tokyo hands over list of 175K forced laborers during World War II, which includes records of $3 million in unpaid wages that may be used in determining compensation (Yonhap)
3. Kim Yuna, reeling from seventh-place showing earlier in competition, wins only silver as Japan's Mao Asada takes gold in Figure Skating World Championship in Torino, Italy (Korea Times)

4. After losing ground in the Happy Holidays battle, Baptist extremists move ahead with plans to "take back Easter" (AP via WaPo)