Hello, stranger: South Koreans recount awkward reunions with families in North | Reuters

Instead, she says, she just wanted to return home.

“It was like I met someone I don’t know at all,” said Jung, who was among 89 South Korean families who joined in reunions last week of relatives separated by the Korean War, fought from 1950 to 1953.

“I wish my nephew resembled my brother, but he did not. They were like strangers,” she told Reuters, days after the event held in North Korea’s tourist resort of Mount Kumgang.

“I don’t want to meet them again. I don’t know how other separated families felt, or maybe I am just cold-hearted.”

While many wept and embraced loved ones they were meeting for the first time in more than six decades, others, such as Jung, couldn’t connect at all with their Northern relatives.

The disconnect shows how far apart the neighbours have grown in the decades since they ended hostilities in a truce rather than a peace treaty, leaving them technically in a state of war.

 

Source: Hello, stranger: South Koreans recount awkward reunions with families in North | Reuters

May’s new Brexit plan. There is an alternative – from within the Government itself. | Conservative Home

The Cabinet was reportedly presented with a Treasury assessment of the impact of four outcomes to the Brexit talks: no deal, a Canadian-type deal, the EEA…and the Government’s own new scheme.  This itself should give pause for thought to the suggestion that, other than the EEA and no deal, there is no alternative to the plan agreed at Chequers.  It is a statement of the obvious that there will be as many of the last as there are people willing to propose them.

Far more to the point, however, there was one from within the Government itself – a proposal for it to seek “Canada Plus Plus Plus”, as David Davis once referred to it.  It is well known that DexEU was working on a draft of the White Paper that would outline this idea during the run-up to the Chequers meeting.  We are told that it went through some nine iterations.  The last ones were largely cuts for length.  None of them have been made public.  Until now.

Today, ConservativeHome publishes key extracts from a full draft of this White Paper.  They are not from one of the briefer final versions, but they set before our readers the main pillars of DexEU’s approach, which we are told were unchanged in any of those nine drafts.  As we write, we don’t have the advantage of also having seen the Government’s own White Paper, apparently to be published later, and thus the capacity to make comparisons between its text and that we publish today.

However, there will clearly be substantial overlap between the two – but, on the basis of the Government document published in the aftermath of Chequers, some key differences too.  A central one is the proposed regulatory treatment of manufactured goods.  In her Mansion House speech earlier this year, the Prime Minister referred in this context to “a comprehensive system of mutual recognition”.  She also set out in her Florence speech last year a three-basket approach to regulation.

“There will be areas which do affect our economic relations where we and our European friends may have different goals; or where we share the same goals but want to achieve them through different means.  And there will be areas where we want to achieve the same goals in the same ways, because it makes sense for our economies,” she said.  This was the approach agreed at the Chequers mee

 

Source: May’s new Brexit plan. There is an alternative – from within the Government itself. | Conservative Home

Trump really has achieved a historic breakthrough – for the Kim dynasty | Jonathan Freedland | Opinion | The Guardian

A useful way to test the deal Donald Trump has reached with Kim Jong-un is to imagine what Trump himself would have said had it been Barack Obama rather than him who shook hands with the North Korean dictator. Trump and his echo chamber on Fox News and elsewhere would have poured buckets of derision on Obama for the piece of paper he signed with Kim, for the fawning praise he lavished on a brutal tyrant, and for the paltry non-concessions he got in return. He would have branded the agreement a “horrible deal” and condemned Obama as a sucker for signing it.

Look first at what Kim got from the encounter. Once ostracised as a pariah, Kim was treated as a world statesman on a par with the president of the United States, the two meeting on equal terms, right down to the equal numbers of flags behind them as they shook hands. The tyrant now has a showreel of images – including his walkabout in Singapore, where he was mobbed by what the BBC called “fans” seeking selfies – which will feature in propaganda videos for months, if not years.

 

Source: Trump really has achieved a historic breakthrough – for the Kim dynasty | Jonathan Freedland | Opinion | The Guardian

Moon Jae-in Declares Victory in South Korea Presidential Election – The New York Times

Striking North Korea Could Harm Key U.S. Ally, Analysts Warn | The Huffington Post

“There are no good options. They do not exist.”

Source: Striking North Korea Could Harm Key U.S. Ally, Analysts Warn | The Huffington Post

One minute we’re back of the queue (or back of the line as Obama meant to say), next minute we’re at the front. Why don’t they make up their minds.