“We had hoped this action would not be necessary,” states a letter dated Sept. 16 from Moraine City Manager David Hicks, “but in light of your continued incarceration in North Korea resulting from your (a) unilateral decision to travel to North Korea against the advice of your family and acquaintances; and (b) running afoul of North Korean restrictions on ‘anti-government’ activities, and as stated, the exhaustion of your accrued vacation time, we have to act in the best interests of...

James Pearson and Ju-Min Park of Reuters have unearthed the fact that Miller lived in South Korea for several months, pretending to be a British person named “Preston Somerset,” and working on his magnum opus — an “Alice In Wonderland” anime project. I guess “Sir Trevor Biggleswade-Duxbury, CBE” was already taken by a comic store clerk from Rancho Cucamonga. Since then, Suspected British Person James Pearson and Confirmed British Person Chad O’Carroll of NK News have published some of Miller’s pictures. Your reaction to those pictures...

here: “A lot of people don’t know they can even come here, and then when they get here they say it’s not what they were expecting,” said Rowan Beard, 27, an Australian who runs Young Pioneers. “They think it’s going to be all doom and gloom and death and sad faces.” That’s funny. I’m no Madonna expert, but if I ever met her, I’d expect to see cosmetics troweled over layers of cosmetic alterations and a vacuous personality, not running sores, lesions, or...

http://tinyurl.com/lk9hm5c #MadonnaSyndrome

at the Wall Street Journal. Despite all the references to “risk,” “tension,” and “testing the … limits,” the slide show shows us the same stations in the same old state-sanctioned tour that hundreds of people have been hyping for a decade and a half. It is all so very dull now. You could find more arresting images of almost any other city on Earth without attracting the interest of a single newspaper, yet no image of Pyongyang is too trite to be at least...

One of the core arguments of the Sunshine Policy and its “engagement”-based derivative theories is that more people-to-people contact between Americans and North Koreas will reduce tensions, stimulate economic and political reforms, and eventually, improve inter-governmental relations.* The last two decades have been unkind to this theory, but today, North Korea made an announcement suggesting that its opposite may be closer to the truth. SEOUL—North Korea said Monday it will charge two Americans in its custody with unspecified crimes, a move that may signal...

By now, you know that it has happened again, and the unethical North Korea tourism industry has flung a third sacrifice into the bubbling, sulfurous maw of the North Korean penal system. The North Koreans identify the latest victim as Jeffrey Edward Fowle, who joins erstwhile tour guide Ken Bae,* and tourist and possible defector Matthew Todd Miller. (This obviously doesn’t include Merrill Newman, who was released not long after his arrest.) Despite State Department warnings and my own humanitarian pleas, some people still haven’t...