hankyoreh

South Korea’s imports of U.S. beef nearly doubled in 2010 from a year earlier, the agriculture ministry said Tuesday.
According to the ministry, the country imported 125,681 tons of beef from the U.S. last year, a 97 percent increase from 63,817 tons in 2009, due largely to dwindling concerns over its safety such as wide spread foot-and-mouth disease. It reaches around 63 percent of the biggest amounts, 199,409 tons imported by South Korea in 2003 before the U.S. beef import ban went into effect in late 2003 after the first case of mad cow disease was reported in the U.S.
　
Raid in Libya wounds two South Koreans
About 500 Libyans, some of them armed with knives and guns, raided on Monday (local time) Korean construction site 30km west of Tripoli, Libya, leaving three Koreans and more than a dozen Bangladeshi workers wounded, the Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade said. Two Bangladeshi workers were stabbed and were in critical condition, the ministry added.
Local Libyans broke into the site twice from midnight and confronted with the workers at the site, including around 40 Koreans trying to block their entry for almost seven hours. “The ongoing anti-government protests in the country might also have sparked the raid,” said an official.
The incident followed looting at a Korean construction site in Libya’s eastern port city of Benghazi on Sunday.

S.Korea and U.S. concerned about N.Korea nuclear issue in 1970s 　　
South Korea and the U.S. were concerned about North Korea’s capability to produce nuclear weapons and planned to mobilize nuclear test detection equipment near the border with the North in the early 1970s, a declassified South Korean diplomatic document revealed Monday.
According to the document, under the project, named “Clear Sky,” the two sides started installing an acoustic detector and an electromagnetic pulse detector at Camp Long, a former U.S. military base in Wonju, Gangwon Province.
“This intelligence-collection project will significantly enhance our knowledge of the technical competence in the nuclear field of potential adversaries and will materially assist in our joint efforts to improve the mutual defense,” Lt. Gen. Robert N. Smith of the U.S. Air Force said in a letter sent to Koo Choong-whay of Seoul’s Foreign Ministry in 1971. At the time, Smith and Koo were heading a joint committee handling issues regarding U.S. troops in South Korea.
　　　
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