North Korea Recalls Workers, Suspends Operations At Factory Complex Jointly Run With South

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea said Monday it will suspend operations at a factory complex it has jointly run with South Korea, pulling out more than 53,000 North Korean workers and moving closer to severing its last economic link with its rival as tensions escalate.

The Kaesong industrial complex just north of the Demilitarized Zone is the biggest employer in North Korea's third-largest city. Shutting it down, even temporarily, would show that the destitute country is willing to hurt its own economy to display its anger with South Korea and the United States.

North Korea Reportedly Moves Missiles, Full-Scale Conflict Remains Unlikely

LONDON/SEOUL, April 5 (Reuters) - North Korea has asked embassies in Pyongyang that might wish to get staff out if there is a war to submit plans to it by April 10, Britain said on Friday, as it upped the pressure as part of a war of words that has set the Korean peninsula on edge.

Initial reports by Russia's Foreign Ministry and China's Xinhua news agency suggested that North Korea had suggested that embassies should consider closing because of the risk of conflict.

North Korea's threats of war make Chinese neighbours nervous

Every time North Korea threatens a nuclear strike, Ge Weihan receives a frantic call from his mother. Although the 34-year-old filmmaker moved to Beijing years ago, his parents still live in a small Chinese village less than 25 miles (40km) from the insular nation.

"If a war ever actually breaks out, I'm very nervous about what it would do to my hometown," Ge said. "It's hard living right next to a country that seems willing to do anything."

Are Korea Trade Pact Boosters Selling "Snake Oil"

In 1961, Allen Rosenstein used a $500 loan from his father to found Pioneer Magnetics, an electronics company that grew from a small NASA contractor in Southern California to a major manufacturer of computer components. By 2000, he employed 500 workers and grossed $27 million a year. But that was before competition from low-cost Asian manufacturers inspired much of the American high-tech industry to relocate overseas. "They have persuaded my biggest competitors to move over there," says Rosenstein, who's had to lay off 80 percent of his US workforce to stay competitive. "The net effect is it beggars this country, and we don't seem to be able to recognize it."

On Monday, the Obama administration sent Congress its latest version of the Korea-US Free Trade Agreement (KORUS FTA)—a bilateral pact that would be the largest of its kind since the North American Free Trade Agreement. (The package included free trade deals with Panama and Colombia, but those are small potatoes compared with Korea, the world's 15th-largest economy—and a tech and manufacturing powerhouse.) The US Chamber of Commerce, which launched a national pro-ratification campaign in January, was juiced. "America is finally getting back in the game," Thomas J. Donohue, the group's president, declared in a statement. "The chamber will pull out all of the stops to get the votes in Congress, where the agreements already enjoy bipartisan support."