Body
Earlier I wrote a piece on the rising costs of unification. According to Yonhap, the South Korean government continues to putter away on its “unification tax” proposal. Maybe we should import some National Assembly members to serve in the House of Representatives…
It never ends: South Korea’s Maeil Business news is reporting that 35 million people had their personal information compromised by Chinese-based hackers. As we have been reporting, in the murky world of cyber-crime it is hard to tell to what extent, if any, the perpetrators are affiliated with the Chinese and/or North Korean governments. In some cases it appears that state-connected agents with political missions have used their connections and skills to branch out into purely criminal activity.
Earlier this month EU parliamentarians held a conference on North Korean human rights. According to a press report passed along by Willy Fautre, Ho-Young Ahn, the South Korean ambassador to the EU, urged Europe to involve itself with the nuclear issue and the humanitarian crisis unfolding in North Korea. MEP Anna Rosbach, who hosted the event, argued that China has a key role to play in bringing the North in from the cold, saying, “China is the only country that can really bring about change.”
My colleague Steph Haggard recently wrote a piece on critics of the Obama policy of “strategic patience.” But in his survey of the dovish landscape he overlooked the redoubtable John Bolton who is no fan of the Obama policy either. Sort of reminds of me of a joke a former colleague used to tell about working on the NSC under President Nixon. He said that they would always present Nixon with three options: (1) nuclear war, (2) surrender, and (3)….
Agreed Framework, RIP: finally, from AP: “Nuclear plant components that were once destined for North Korea have been quietly disassembled in New Hampshire's Pease International Tradeport…Spokesman Scott Shaw of the Nuclear Power Plants division at Westinghouse Electric Co. the reactor components were once meant for a North Korean nuclear power initiative called the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization, under an agreement between the United States and North Korea aimed at deterring nuclear arms production. But the agreement fell apart and the components were scrapped.”
