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Scarcity does odd things to people. Back when the FTC restricted beer markets geographically, such was the allure of Coors beer beyond Colorado that I remember people driving back to Texas with cases of the yellow water in the trucks of their cars. For two generations of Americans it’s been Cuban cigars. And cigarettes have [...]
Any resumption of the Six Party Talks is going to have to address a host of new issues that have gained importance over the last couple of years, including renewed concerns about the North Korean missile threat. Joel S. Wit, Andrew Hood, Jeffrey Lewis, Scott Pace and Leon Sigal have published a new report for [...]
Having recovered from our annual tryptophan binge, some updates on stories that we have been following: Spies. Back in September, we commented on the arrest of a North Korean agent allegedly sent to assassinate outspoken North Korean defector Park Sang-hak with a poison-tipped needle. The Diplomat has since run a story on North Korea’s clumsy [...]
We started off Thanksgiving weekend with Steph’s piece on the status of North Korean refugees here in the United States. We’ll close it with a story from one of those people. Many of our readers probably know Kim Kwang-jin, either personally or by reputation. He defected with his family while working in Singapore for the [...]
In honor of Thanksgiving, we thought that we should hold our first annual turkey shoot. As you know we have been following the travails of the steroid-addled industrial-strength musk deer gland secretion mainlining North Korean women’s soccer team. With the ladies getting suspended by FIFA, North Korean soccer fans have had little to cheer about. [...]
Growing up in Texas, occasionally the legislators would get so cranked up over some issue confronting the state that they would, as we used to say, “go to fist city.” But as far as I know, brawls in the Texas State Legislature were mere slugfests. This week in Seoul, National Assembly member Kim Sun-Dong, a [...]
On Thanksgiving, it seems appropriate to remind ourselves of our good fortune and of those deserving our support. We have recently been involved in some court cases in Southern California dealing with the legal status of North Korean refugees who managed to enter the United States. The law in this area is a tangled mess; [...]
In the previous post, we noted the emergence of South Korea as a donor, a component of its wider international standing (including membership in the G20). Here, we burrow into the North Korean piece and the ongoing difficulty in sorting out how much aid the South actually provides to the North. We showed last time [...]
We have often argued that South Korea might gain from channeling at least some portion of its official assistance to the DPRK through multilateral routes. Bilateral assistance to the North will always be a component of the South’s policy. But there are economies to be reaped by working through the multilaterals as well as advantages [...]
In South Korea, the antics of the DP opposition in the National Assembly have finally backfired; the GNP appears poised to use its majority to bring the KORUS to a floor vote on November 24. We consulted with one of our students who has served in government, Yongha Son, and he provided some insight into [...]
