Yuzno.com

MTS announced that it has signed a memorandum of understanding with VimpelCom, MegaFon and Rostelecom jointly to lay and operate an submarine fibre-optic cable joining the Russian Far East with Sakhalin Island.

Lee Su-jin must now abandon any hope he had managed to cling to, as the end of the 18th National Assembly on Tuesday took with his chances of reuniting his family. The session ended without the passing of a bill that would have provided settlement aid to ethnic Koreans on Russia's Sakhalin Island.

A heavy snowstorm hit Sakhalin on Wednesday, paralyzing traffic on the Russian Far Eastern island, the Itar-Tass news agency reported.

More than 600 anglers stranded on an ice floe in the Russian far east have been rescued. The operation to airlift them off the ice involved 48 people, two helicopters and 11 ships, the emergencies ministry said.

In 1945, the Soviet Union took over the southern half of the large island of Sakhalin, hitherto a possession of Imperial Japan. Some 310,000 people lived in the south at the time. When the Soviets came, they immediately expelled all ethnic Japanese residents (some 280,000), but forbade ethnic Koreans from leaving.

About 16-hundred graves of Koreans forced into labor by Japan during their colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula have been discovered in Sakhalin, Russia. The Commission on Verification and Support for the Victims of Forced Mobilization under Japanese Colonialism in Korea says it conducted a field survey on a Sakhalin cemetery through July and August [...]