More concerns that DPRK will push Japan to nukes

At the same time that the US is considering putting North Korea back on the terrorist list, and placing more financial restrictions on the country, and the UN Security Council seems to be getting a little more serious about tougher sanctions, North Korea has sentenced two US journalists to 12 years in prison:

North Korea on Monday sentenced two American journalists to 12 years of hard labor in a case widely seen as a test of how far the isolated Communist state was willing to take its confrontational stance toward the United States. NYT article

Obama appears to have gotten fed up with DPRK's repeated games and won't offer any new incentives for it to dismantle the nuclear facility, and fears that Kim Jong-il and crowd will start a nuclear arms race in northeast Asia:

...Mrs. Clinton said the United States feared that if the test and other recent actions by North Korea did not lead to “strong action,” there was a risk of “an arms race in Northeast Asia” — an oblique reference to the concern that Japan would reverse its long-held ban against developing nuclear weapons. NYT US Weighs Interecpting North Korean Shipments.

North Korea has threatened war if the UN imposes sanctions or if the US/UN interferes with its vessels. Of course they've threatened war many times since the last war they fought in which they would utterly defeated until China felt threatened enough to intercede. But who really knows what Kim will do?