N Korea lines up missiles as US-South drill begins

YEONPYEONG (S Korea): China on Sunday pressed the emergency button for talks to resolve the crisis on the Korean peninsula, as North Korea moved its surface-to-surface missiles on launchpads in the Yellow Sea and the United States and South Korea began a massive naval drill on its troubled waters.

China urged six-party talks (including the US, Japan and Russia) at the earliest possible in December but Seoul and Tokyo only said they would "study" the proposal. At an unscheduled meeting earlier in the day, South Korean president Lee Myung-bak told a visiting Chinese delegation that Beijing must "do more" to help.

China's move to bring the two Koreas to the negotiating table comes after global pressure on Beijing to take a more responsible role in the standoff and try to rein in ally Pyongyang. It has, however, made clear that the talks would not amount to a resumption of six-party disarmament discussions which North Korea walked out of two years ago and declared dead.

Yonhap news agency in Seoul said North Korea, whose ailing leader, Kim Jong-il , is preparing to hand over power to his youngest son, had moved surface-toair and surface-to-surface missiles to frontline areas, days after it shelled Yeonpyeong island, killing four people. The North's official KCNA news agency warned of retaliatory action if its territory was violated.

China directing global cyber sabotage
Here are just some of the startling revelations that have emerged from the new WikiLeaks release:

American and South Korean officials discussed the prospects for a unified Korea , should the North's economic troubles and political transition lead the state to implode. South Korea was even willing to offer economic incentives to China.

Chinas Politburo directed the intrusion into Google's computer systems in the country, as part of a coordinated campaign of computer sabotage carried out by government operatives, private security experts and Internet outlaws recruited by the Chinese government.

The Yemeni government has sought to cover up US role in missile strikes against the local branch of Qaida. At a January meeting, Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh tells Gen David Petraeus: "We'll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours".

When Afghanistan's vice president visited the UAE last year, local authorities working with the Drug Enforcement Administration discovered that he was carrying $52 million in cash. With wry understatement, a cable from the American Embassy in Kabul called the money "a significant amount" that the official, Ahmed Zia Massoud, "was ultimately allowed to keep without revealing the money's origin or destination" (Massoud denies taking any money out of Afghanistan).

American diplomats in Rome reported in 2009 on what their Italian contacts described as an extraordinarily close relationship between Vladimir Putin and Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian PM, including "lavish gifts", lucrative energy contracts and a "shadowy" Russian-speaking Italian go-between. They wrote that Berlusconi "appears increasingly to be the mouthpiece of Putin" in Europe.

The 251,287 cables, first acquired by WikiLeaks, were provided to NYT by an intermediary. Many are unclassified, and none are marked "top secret," the government's most secure communications status. But some 11,000 are classified "secret," 9,000 are labelled "noforn," too delicate to be shared with any foreign government.

Read more: N Korea lines up missiles as US-South drill begins - The Times of India