SEOUL, South Korea

Seoul holds military drills despite N. Korean threats

South Korea today conducted live-fire military drills from five islands near its disputed sea boundary with North Korea, despite Pyongyang’s threat to attack.

South Korea reported no immediate action by North Korea following the drills, which ended after about two hours. They took place in an area of the Yellow Sea that was the target of a North Korean artillery attack in 2010 that killed four South Koreans.

The heightened tension comes two months after the death of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. His young son Kim Jong Un has taken the helm of the nation of 24 million.

South Korean military officials said they were ready to repel any attack. Residents on the front-line islands were asked to go to underground shelters before the drills started, according to South Korea’s Defense Ministry and Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Before the drills began, North Korea said it would launch a “thousands-fold more severe” punishment than the 2010 shelling if South Korea conducted the drills.

North Korea is fully prepared for a “total war,” and the drills will lead to a “complete collapse” of ties between the Koreas, the North’s Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea said in a statement carried today by the official Korean Central News Agency.

BEIRUT

Syrian judicial officials slain in guerrilla-style ambush

Gunmen in Syria staged a guerrilla-style ambush that killed a senior state prosecutor and a judge Sunday in an attack that suggested armed factions are growing bolder and more coordinated in their uprising against President Bashar Assad’s regime.

The roadway slayings — reported in an opposition-dominated northern region by the Syrian state news agency — came a day after a deadly hit-and-run attack on a political figure in the heart of the pro-Assad city of Aleppo.

The targeted killings have not reached Assad’s inner circle, but they indicate a growing shift toward violent tactics by the opposition as it brings aboard more military defectors and seeks to tighten control over the small pieces of territory in its hands.

The fears of a looming civil war have neighboring Jordan racing to finish a refugee camp near the Syrian border to handle a possible exodus of people fleeing for safety.

 

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