Loggers' asylum

South Korea has decided to give asylum to more than 100 North Korean lumberjacks who have defected from logging camps in Siberia, in a move linked to a new get-tough policy with the North, Terry McCarthy writes from Tokyo. Pyongyang has said Seoul's new-found concern for the loggers is 'an act of premeditated treachery', and accused the South of 'insidiously . . . inventing the human rights problem of our loggers'.