Monthly Archive: March, 2009

WHEREVER THEY ARE NOW, LAURA LING AND EUNA LEE are having a rough day, and that’s about all we know for certain. Although it’s not much more than speculation, the L.A. Times’s Barbara Demick suggests that Ling and Lee might have strayed into North Korean territory. Underground railroad hero Chun Ki Won doesn’t think the North Koreans would have crossed into China: “They must have gone in too close, where it was dangerous. I don’t think the North Koreans would...

THE WEEKLY STANDARD BLOG is reporting that Senator Brownback is publicly threatening to hold Chris Hill’s nomination, which would doom it. TWS points out that Brownback isn’t running again and has little to lose by raising the ire of Sen. Richard Lugar. Lugar, who represents the State Department in the Senate, is also Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. IT WAS LUGAR, you will recall, who quietly torpedoed the nomination of John Bolton as U.N. Ambassador, despite the fact that...

INTOLERABLE SUFFERING, STARVATION, torture, almost universal suffering, yada yada: Thai jurist Vitit Muntarbhorn told the world body’s Human Rights Council that the situation in the communist-ruled country was “dire and desperate” with the population living in fear and pressed to inform on each other. “The country is under one-party rule. At the pinnacle there is an oppressive regime, bent on personal survival, under which the ordinary people of the land undergo intolerable and interminable sufferings,” he said. Diplomats said his...

JAPAN WILL GO TO THE SECURITY COUNCIL if North Korea tests a missile. If they’re shivering in Pyongyang, it’s probably just cold there. ARBEIT NICHT FREI: If the prospects for the Kaesong Slave Labor Park were bleak enough already, briefly imprisoning its South Korean business managers there can’t have helped matters. UH OH: The new U.S. Trade Representative calls the U.S.-ROK FTA “unfair” as negotiated. Pretty much as I’d predicted — South Korea let the issue become toxic in the...