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Former Blue House spokesman Yoon Chang-jung, as is probably known to most readers of this blog, allegedly celebrated President Park’s up-until-that-moment successful visit to Washington by getting drunk and sexually assaulting a 21 year old Korean-American female who had been hired to work on summit-related tasks. Reportedly when the woman returned to her hotel room [...]
When we last checked in, Dennis Rodman was chillaxing with his friend “Kim,” doing Sunday morning talk shows, carrying diplomatic messages, and appealing to Kim to “do him a solid” and release Kenneth Bae. It seems that Worm is now losing his patience, indicating that “Obama can’t do sh#t” but promising to make another pitch [...]
Considerable attention focused last week on the visit to Pyongyang by Isao Iijima, special assistant to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. As I observed in a post last week, the Japanese public places marginally greater concern on abductees than on the North Korean nuclear program and the abductee issue has been a focal point of [...]
A constantly recurring question is how decades of chronic food insecurity interspersed with food emergencies and even outright famine may affect the long-term physical and mental health of the North Korean people. Since we cannot do direct scientific study of the North Korean population, thinking on this issue is by its very nature speculative. One way [...]
I do not know what motivated the North Koreans to repeatedly threaten the US over the last couple of months, but I do know what the effect has been: the threats greatly narrow the Obama Administration’s options going forward, especially with respect to any action that would require Congressional approval. It is particularly difficult for [...]
When it comes to North Korea, it’s a dirty little Washington secret that the “humanitarian community” sometimes looks askance at the “human rights community” out of fear that the latter will mess up the former’s gig. Some of this concern may reflect genuine differences in priorities, though grubby financial and bureaucratic self-interest may play a [...]
As a country, the US does food aid badly. We require that the aid be requisitioned here in the US and that it travel to the disaster zone on US-flagged vessels. These requirements create significant time delays and raise costs (as former USAID Administrator Andrew Natsios put it, “food aid often gets there after everyone [...]
“Honey, what do want to see on vacation this year? The Parthenon, Machu Picchu, or the Kim Il-sung mausoleum?” You just can’t make this stuff up: according to Yonhap North Korea is “is trying to lure more foreign tourists” while at the same time telling their diplomatic representatives to flee due to imminent conflict. Huh? [...]
The old joke about North Korea is that if it weren’t a country we’d indict it under RICO. New sanctions legislation introduced by Rep. Ed Royce (R-Ca), chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, and seven co-sponsors in the House, the “North Korea Sanctions Enforcement Act of 2013,”comes pretty close. Frequently overlooked in sanctions analysis are [...]
OK, this one is not about North Korea per se, much less its economy, but it is cool. Check it out:
