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Well, thank you, Reuters Asia Correspondent Paul Eckert.  That was a very nice story, and I’m glad to see that the Times picked it up.

This story needs to be told, and unfortunately, right now, only a few of us are telling it.  My hope is that one day, reporters will work directly with defectors and professional imagery analysts to tell it instead, and I can find a new hobby.

Update: Overnight, the Reuters story was picked up by news sites all over the United States, Britain, and India, and translated into Spanish, Finnish, Russian, Czech, and Japanese. The servers seems barely capable of keeping up with the traffic, so please be patient. Things should be back to normal in a day or two. It’s more than worth it to get this issue into the news.

For those who are wondering what you can do to help, I’d recommend two particularly effective non-partisan, non-sectarian, international groups: the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, which does scholarly research, and LiNK, which helps North Korean refugees. You could even set up Wikipedia pages (see this and this) in your native language.

Update, Jan. 11, 2012:  So as of today, this has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Ukrainian, Czech, Slovak, Romanian, Italian, Finnish, and Japanese, and also ran in newspapers in India, the U.K., the Philippines, New Zealand, South Africa, and Ireland. The Chosun Ilbo also got hold of it eventually, and appears to think my name is Joshuya, that I’m a human rights lawyer (not quite), and that I lived in Korea in the 90s (actually, until 2002). Also, no link? Really? But at least someone in South Korea is talking about this topic.