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Earlier, we posted on the IAEA’s dance with the press over its Syria work. Well, it seems to be the season of purloined and leaked documents. The Institute for Science and International Security has posted a copy of the restricted-circulation IAEA report on Syria on its website, embedded in a very useful parsing of the [...]
Welcome home, Jun Young Su aka Eddie Jun. The Korean-American businessman and pastor reportedly confessed to spreading Christianity, a crime in North Korea. Major kudos to Ambassador Bob King, with KCNA crediting evangelist Franklin Graham, whose mother Ruth Bell Graham grew up in Pyongyang, and whose father, the legendary Billy Graham, was a confidant of [...]
Our former colleague Jen Lee flagged this important report now circulating in the Chinese media: North Korea’s own “happiness index.” Astonishingly, North Korea is not number one: 1. China. 2. North Korea. 3. Cuba. 4. Iran. 5. Venezuela. … 152. South Korea. … 203. The United States.
We have been blogging on the leaked UN Panel of Experts report at some length, both because of the interesting international politics it has generated and because it provides a great introduction to the political economy of illicit activities. One of the more interesting sections of the report in this regard deals with foreign direct [...]
In the previous post, we began to parse the leaked Panel of Experts report; here, we continue that discussion, focusing on North Korean methods for circumventing the sanctions. One way of circumventing the sanctions is to play around with product categorizations, which are necessarily imprecise. For example, in a report that had not our knowledge previously [...]
We have finally gotten around to reading the leaked UN Panel of Experts report that has been getting so much attention recently. It provides a surprisingly useful and blunt introduction to how the North Koreans—with the complicity of unnamed “third parties”—has sought to circumvent the sanctions. But it goes farther by putting the country’s weapons programs [...]
On May 20, as Ambassador Robert King and USAID’s Jon Brause were leaving for Pyongyang, Senators Lieberman, McCain, Webb, and Kyl sent a letter to Secretary Clinton requesting that the Obama Administration “rigorously evaluate” North Korea’s request for humanitarian assistance. They further requested that the Administration “closely coordinate” any response with South Korea and Japan, [...]
Two stories of North Korean illicit activities hit the headlines this month through they illustrate different dimensions of the issue. North Korean diplomats have long been engaged in smuggling and other illicit activities, motivated at least in part by their need to generate revenue that is kicked back to Pyongyang. (Not all of these money-making schemes [...]
We have reported on North Korea’s stated interest in attracting foreign direct investment. But an equally important question is what responsibilities investors have given the abysmal human and labor rights record of the country. Our reflection on this question was triggered by running into John Ruggie at a recent conference at Wharton. Ruggie, a Professor [...]
When I tease Professor Haggard about his obsession with foot-and-mouth disease, he responds that I am equally or more obsessed with cyber warfare. One of the odder emails I received this week was a request from the chief information officer of a prestigious Washington think-tank for the contact information of a law enforcement official with [...]
