North Korea faces anger over sinking of South's warship

North Korea is facing international condemnation after investigators blamed it for the sinking of a South Korean warship in March. 

Pyongyang rejected the claim as a "fabrication" and threatened war if sanctions were imposed.
The international report found a North Korean submarine's torpedo sank the South Korean navy ship, causing the deaths of 46 sailors.


China urged restraint and did not criticise the North.

The US administration described the sinking as an "act of aggression" that challenged peace.
Britain, Australia and Japan also expressed anger at North Korea. South Korean President Lee Myung-bak pledged to take "stern action".

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said the report was "deeply troubling".
Britain's Foreign Secretary William Hague said North Korea's actions would deepen the international community's mistrust.
'UN resolution'
 
The investigation team, which included experts from America, Australia, Britain and Sweden, said it had discovered part of the torpedo on the sea floor and it carried lettering that matched a North Korean design.

Pyongyang said it would send its own inspection team to the South, to "verify material evidence" behind the accusation.

A North Korean defence spokesman said the country would "respond to reckless counter-measure with an all-out war of justice", the state KCNA news agency reported.

Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said Beijing had "noted" the report and would make its own assessment, but called on both sides to exercise restraint.


The Cheonan went down near the disputed inter-Korean maritime border, raising tension between the two nations, which technically remain at war.

The shattered wreck of the 1,200-tonne gunboat was later winched to the surface, in two pieces, for examination.


Investigators examined eyewitness accounts, damage to the vessel, evidence collected from the seabed and the injuries sustained by survivors and those who died.

There had earlier been a number of explanations suggested for the sinking, including an accidental collision with an unexploded sea mine left over from the Korean War.

Mr Lee's presidential office said he had told Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd his government would be taking firm measures against the North, and through international co-operation would make the North admit wrongdoing.

Japan's Prime Minister said in a statement that North Korea's action was "unforgivable".
Yukio Hatoyama said Japan would support South Korea if it sought a UN Security Council resolution against North Korea.

Climate change 'makes birds shrink' in North America

 Songbirds in the US are getting smaller, and climate change is suspected as the cause.

A study of almost half a million birds, belonging to over 100 species, shows that many are gradually becoming lighter and growing shorter wings.
This shrinkage has occurred within just half a century, with the birds thought to be evolving into a smaller size in response to warmer temperatures.
However, there is little evidence that the change is harmful to the birds.
Details of the discovery are published in the journal Oikos.

 In biology, there is a general rule of thumb that animals tend to become smaller in warmer climates: an idea known as Bergman's Rule.
Usually this trend can be seen among animal species that live over a range of latitude or altitude, with individuals living at more northern latitudes or higher up cooler mountains being slightly larger than those below, for example.
Quite why this happens is not clear, but it prompted one group of scientists to ask the question: would animals respond in the same way to climate change?
To find out, Dr Josh Van Buskirk of the University of Zurich, Switzerland and colleagues Mr Robert Mulvihill and Mr Robert Leberman of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Rector, Pennsylvania, US decided to evaluate the sizes of hundreds of thousands of birds that pass through the Carnegie Museum's Powdermill ringing station, also in Pennsylvania.


They examined the records of 486,000 individual birds that had been caught and measured at the ringing station from 1961 to 2007.
These birds belonged to 102 species, arriving over different seasons. Each was weighed. It also had the length of its wings measured, recorded as wing cord length, or the distance between the bird's wrist to the tip of the longest primary feather.
Their sample included local resident bird species, overwintering species, and even long distance migrants arriving from the Neotropics.
What they found was striking.
Of 83 species caught during spring migration, 60 have become smaller over the 46 year study period, weighing less and having shorter wings.
Of the 75 species migrating in autumn, 66 have become smaller.

In summer, 51 of 65 breeding species have similarly reduced in size, as have 20 out of 26 wintering species.
The differences in size are not big.
"On average, the decline in mass of spring migrants over the 46 year study was just 1.3%," says Dr Buskirk.
"For a 10g warbler that's a loss of just 130mg."
But some species are losing more weight.
For example, the rose-breasted grosbeak has declined in mass by about 4%, while the Kentucky warbler has dropped 3.3% in weight and the scarlet tanager 2.3%.
The trend is particularly noticeable among those birds that winter in the New World tropics of the Caribbean, Central America and South America.
"The headline finding is that the body sizes of many species of North American birds, mostly songbirds, are gradually becoming smaller," says Dr Buskirk.
However, their populations are not dwindling.

"So many of these species are apparently doing just fine, but the individual birds are becoming gradually smaller nonetheless," says Dr Buskirk.
That suggests that bird species in North America are obeying Berman's rule, by evolving into a smaller size as temperatures increase.
Though this change appears quick, it has taken place over at least 20 generations of birds.
"There are plenty examples of rapid contemporary evolution over much shorter time periods," says Dr Buskirk.
Whether the trend will cause the birds any long-term consequences is unclear.
"In one obvious sense, the consequences are positive," says Dr Buskirk.
"That is, as temperatures become warmer, the optimal body size is becoming smaller."
However, even though the species appear to be adapting to the new climatic conditions, it could still be that their average "fitness" in evolutionary terms, is going down.

 "Evidence from other studies is that some species will benefit and others will be harmed, and it's not always the species we like that will be harmed," says Dr Buskirk.
The jury is still out as to why any species responds to warmer temperatures by becoming smaller.
Originally, biologists proposed that having a larger body surface to volume might help in warmer climates.
But more recent ideas suggest that animals might actually be responding instead to something else that correlates with temperature, such as the availability of food, or metabolic rate.
"It looks like it might take a while before we know," says Dr Buskirk.
His team says much more data is now needed to confirm this trend and to see if it is happening in animals other than birds.
For example, it took an avalanche of data before people became convinced that climate change is already altering when birds start migrating.

Meeting North Korea's 'Generation next'

The people sitting before Chris Lawrence will one day be running North Korea.

It was a freezing cold February morning and Chris's new classroom at the elite Kim Il-sung University in the capital Pyongyang wasn't much warmer than the streets outside.

These days even the children of the party faithful can't escape some of the hardships of everyday life in North Korea.

"The main problem is a lack of heating," he said.

"Most of us in here are wearing our outdoor clothes as we work."

Chris is one of a small team of English teachers forming a joint project between the British Council and the Government in Pyongyang.

In a sign that it may one day open up to the Western world, North Korea has gradually shifted a lot of its language training away from Chinese and Russian and towards English.

This is Chris's first day in the job but his new class has already made an impact.

"I'm quite impressed by the level of English in this particular group" he told me.

"I expect the students will go on to occupy some quite important positions within Korean society."

I asked one student what he hoped to do with his English.

"I hope to achieve speaking English so that I can go abroad and do some business because I want to be a businessman," he said.

Another said he was going to be a diplomat.

They seemed, at the moment anyway, quite willing to engage with the outside world.

I asked one student who his favorite English authors were.

He hesitated and then said "Shakespeare... and Dickens".

I asked him if he had read anyone more recent. There was a long embarrassed pause and then he replied: "Um… Jane Eyre... or Hamlet…"

The government wasn't only keeping a close eye on their reading list.

Everything the students said to me was being listened to by government officials who were there the entire time I was in the country, traveling on a journalist's visa.

But despite their presence, none of the students felt the need to include in their answers to me the usual rhetoric of "studying for the glory of the party and the dear and great leaders."

They were quite happy to talk about what they wanted to achieve in life as individuals.

It was in marked contrast to their faculty head who went into a long monologue about the virtues of the "dear leader" President Kim Jong-il as soon as I switched on my microphone.

Heated debate

Across town at the nearby Pyongyang University for Foreign Studies, the staff were much more progressive.

They told me they were very pleased to have someone from the BBC because "we record the BBC News everyday to help the students improve their language skills".

They played me some of their archive including news bulletins from the World Service that were almost a year old, so I knew they hadn't been recorded just for my benefit.

I found the final year class next door having a heated debate in very good English about whether it was fair to keep animals in zoos.

The students were sophisticated, knowledgeable and engaging.

They quizzed me about the on-going Iraq inquiry in Britain and then 21-year-old Ri Ji-hye asked me if she could be frank.

"It's so good that we can listen to [the] BBC," she said.

"It helps us a lot learning English. I so much want my country to be one of those leading in the economy."

"We're already a leading nation in politics and other stuff. Well, it's no offense but I want to learn English so that the other people get to learn [about] Korea."

She smiled and said "Look at our faces - are we depressed, are we unhappy, are we hungry? No."

That was certainly true of Ji-hye and her classmates.

But one of the challenges for her generation will not just be opening up to the rest of the world but opening their eyes to the world just beyond their city limits.

The British Ambassador to Pyongyang, Peter Hughes, is one of those who believes the country will have to wait for another generation before there's any prospect of real change.

And he says few of people in the capital have any idea what life is like for the majority of North Koreans living beyond Pyongyang.

"I think it's important to remember that Pyongyang is totally different from anything that's outside of the city."

"Only certain people can live here and one of the punishments for doing something wrong is actually to be banished outside of the city."

"If you go out to the regional centers there is very little out there. The cities are in a bad state of repair. There are a large factories that are standing empty."

Proud and patriotic

Back in the classroom at the Foreign Studies institute, another British Council teacher was showing North Korea's "Generation next" how to run a brand campaign for Harley-Davidson, while on the streets outside people often stood more than a 100-strong waiting for a bus.

Pyongyang may be the country's showcase city but even here it's pretty obvious that the economy isn't working.

Like their parents, the young North Koreans I met are proud and patriotic.

They have high hopes for their country even if they don't yet understand just how far they've fallen behind their neighbor China.

But at least they may now be starting to learn enough about the real world to make sure they don't repeat the same disastrous mistakes.