Anju, May 14, 2012

CHRISTINE AHN ON HUMAN RIGHTS IN NORTH KOREA: OK, it’s a few months old, but I can’t help myself. Have a wastebasket handy when you click this, preferably not one made of wicker or wire mesh. The fact that Ahn explicitly (if ever so briefly) acknowledges that there are human rights violations in North Korea somehow manages not to make her sound like any less of a tool.

I DON’T KNOW HOW ANY HONEST FEMINIST COULD BE AN APOLOGIST for North Korea, but then, who ever said that Christine Ahn was honest?

The price for a North Korean woman named Kim Eun-sun, her mother, and sister, to escape to China was 2,000 Chinese yuan, slightly more than $300. Like thousands of North Korean women before them, they crossed the Tumen River into China and met a woman who said she would help them escape –only to discover that they’d been sold to a Chinese farmer who wanted a wife. [CSM, Don Kirk]

I have to think plenty of these women know what awaits them, yet choose it over starvation. If it were me, I would.

NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND UPDATE: Fewer North Koreansare arriving in the South, which I suspect is because the North Korean and Chinese regimes have both stepped up their anti-refugee enforcement policies.

MORE OMINOUS SIGNS for the Chinese economy, via The New York Times and Walter Russell Mead. I wonder what Tom Friedman thinks when he reads his own paper these days.

IS IT JUST ME, or has the AP’s Pyongyang Bureau seemed quiet lately?

FORMAT UPDATES: So given all the templates I’ve been experimenting with last weekend, I apologize to anyone who was reading last night after dropping acid. I don’t like any of them as much as the one I was using last week, but unfortunately, that template doesn’t work and play nicely with my plugins. If you have other suggestions, I’d welcome them. I’m looking for a clean, attractive three-column template that’s easy to customize and works with menus and widgets (all of which sounds a little like a personals ad, but isn’t). Is the comment function working OK for everyone?