Good Friends serves up the irony — that, or disinformation — in its penultimate update:

This past June 1st, the Pyongsung City police succeeded in arresting 7 people involved in a professional counterfeiting operation. 4 out of 7 were women. Working out of a hidden location within the city, they were counterfeiting travel documents, Pyongyang residency proofs, Renminbi, dollars, and the new North Korean currency. Among those arrested included an employee of the Pyongsung currency printing press. After searching through their location, the authorities found about 5.8 million Won’s worth of counterfeit bills of new NK currency, dollar, and Renminbi, along with about 10 printing presses, 3 computer printers, and other tools.

Pyongsong is where the North Korean government prints supernotes. The truth may be that these are employees who are moonlighting, that they took home a little extra product, or that the North Koreans would like Good Friends’s readers to think that counterfeiting in North Korea is a strictly private affair. There’s a more recent Good Friends update here.

Ileana Ros Lehtinen, the Ranking Member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, calls for closer relations and an FTA with China’s one and only elected and legitimate government. I found this part very scary:

Recent press reports of an alleged freeze on arms sales to Taiwan, so as not to cause consternation in Beijing, is a cause of concern for all friends of Taiwan in the US. Former US president Ronald Reagan’s Six Assurances in 1982 expressly forbade any prior consultation with the Chinese Communist Party regime on such arms sales. The clearest means for the current administration in Washington to demonstrate that it is not ­kowtowing to Beijing on Taiwan’s security needs would be to make available to Taiwan’s Air Force the next generation of F-16 fighters, an action which I have long advocated.

While Taiwanese need to maintain vigilance to ensure they are not taken in by any wolf-in-sheep’s clothing, Washington can also ill afford to neglect the security of the Western Pacific. Recent crises, both domestic and foreign, have caused many in the US to avert their eyes from the continued political and economic developments taking place across the Pacific. [Taipei Times]

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Barbara Demick has written a must-read article on the Great Confiscation (ht to Curtis). There’s also a podcast here.

Radio Free Asia gives more information about that propaganda poster of a red-handed North Korean sinking a Cheonan-like ship.

A number of interesting reports lately talk about the end of China’s cheap-labor era and the growing disgruntlement of Chinese workers. Here is just one of those reports. It’s a fairly predictable consequence of industrialization, urbanization, and rising affluence in a society, because not all people become affluent at the same rate, and because envy, not poverty, is the primary cause of social unrest.