Category: Miscellaneous

~ 1 ~ THAT’LL SHOW ‘EM: The State Department is sending the International Civil Aviation Organization a strongly worded complaint about North Korea’s rocket launches. Oh, and the U.N. Security Council issued a press release of disapproval: [You can change the puppets, but the strings still move the same way.] Somewhere in Pyongyang, Kim Jong Un is asking his generals how many divisions the ICAO has, and Park Geun-Hye is asking her Foreign Minister whether she should send him to...

New Focus International is reporting that North Korea has distributed cell phones to its secret police, and that the secret police are using them to hunt down potential refugees: The distributions of cell-phones are being made as part of efforts to aid agents of the Ministry of State Security and Ministry of People’s Security in preventing people escaping the country. As part of the process of organising an escape, North Koreans intending to flee the country often make contact through...

~   1   ~ NORTH KOREA FIRED A MASSIVE BARRAGE OF ROCKETS over the weekend, this time in the Sea of Japan,* near the disputed inter-Korean maritime border. “North Korea fired off about 100 artillery shells in a northeast direction into the East Sea for about 30 minutes from 11:43 a.m. from a place hundreds of meters away from the demilitarized zone (DMZ) in Goseong, Gangwon Province,” JCS spokesman Um Hyo-sik said. “They landed in the sea, some 1 to 8...

~   1   ~ I SUSPECT THAT SOMEONE LIKE KURT CAMPBELL would have been a better man for the job, but I wish John Kerry the best of luck in his discussions with the Chinese: “China shares the same strategic goal, and we discussed the importance of enforcing U.N. Security Council resolutions that impose sanctions on North Korea’s weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile program,” Kerry said. However, Kerry said China needs to do more in reining in its...

~   1   ~ NORTH KOREA LAUNCHES MORE SCUDS into the Sea of Japan. I reckon that somewhere in Washington, someone who worked at the State Department in the 1990s is thinking that by launching missiles on July 2nd and July 9th (but not the 4th), North Korea was really being conciliatory. ~   2   ~ PARK GEUN HYE CALLS for the “international community,” which is an oxymoron, to pay more attention to the rights of North Korean...

~   1   ~ AP’S JEAN LEE WANTS YOU TO BELIEVE that she became a target for lifting the curtain on North Korea, but Jean Lee really became a target for trying to tell us that the curtain was North Korea. Also, I can’t believe she keeps saying things like this: “People often assume that our work is censored, but the North Koreans know that that’s a red line, that the AP would never tolerate censorship. So none of our material is...

~   1   ~ A REMARKABLE COINCIDENCE: Say, do you suppose there could possibly be any link between the decision of the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Fatou Bensouda of the Gambia, to close her investigations of the Cheonan and Yeonpyong incidents four years ago, and the visit by North Korea’s Foreign Minister to Gambia earlier this month, at which time the two governments discussed “boosting the bilateral relations of friendship and cooperation and on matters of...

~   1   ~ NORTH KOREA, WHICH PRESIDENT BUSH REMOVED from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008, has threatened to “resolutely punish” Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop for “dar[ing]” to “slander the dignity of its supreme leadership.” Discuss among yourselves. Also, I think that should be “punish resolutely.” ~   2   ~ HMMM: Shops are springing up in Chinese cities bordering North Korea which specialize in cheap cell phones that operate on the...

~   1   ~ SUZANNE SCHOLTE’S CAMPAIGN ON SOCIAL MEDIA: If you feel strongly about human rights in North Korea, don’t you want there to be at least one member of Congress who feels as strongly about it as you do? If so, please support Suzanne Scholte by liking her on Facebook and following her on Twitter. ~   2   ~ AMBASSADOR-NOMINEE MARK LIPPERT gives some hints about his policy views at his confirmation hearing: “The first is...

Were it not for an obscure provision of the Dodd-Frank Act, we would not have learned last week that some of America’s largest corporations have been indirectly subsidizing North Korea by buying gold supplied by its Central Bank. Dozens of companies disclosed over the last week that their suppliers use gold refined by North Korea’s central bank. These companies include Hewlett-Packard Co., Ralph Lauren Corp., International Business Machines Corp., Rockwell Automation Corp. and Williams-Sonoma Inc. IBM, for example, disclosed that...

~   1   ~ Congressional Hearing, June 18th: “Human Rights Abuses and Crimes Against Humanity in North Korea.” The briefer will be Ambassador Lee Jung-Hoon, South Korea’s Ambassador for Human Rights. I’m rather interested in Lee’s answers, because I see no evidence that either the U.S. or South Korea intends to offer a credible policy response to the Commission of Inquiry’s report. If you wonder just how much the South Korean government is embracing and acting on the COI’s...

~ 1 ~ Victor Cha has co-written a piece in Foreign Policy about the importance of keeping human rights on the negotiating agenda with North Korea, and points to this infographic on the gulags, co-sponsored by the George W. Bush Center. The Bush Center will also host an invitation-only event on human rights in North Korea again next week. Leave aside the mootness of arguing about the negotiating agenda with North Korea. One may as well argue about Eric Cantor’s...

~   1   ~ MUST-READ: NK NEWS has obtained and analyzed recent satellite images of the site of that apartment collapse in Pyongyang. It’s too bad that there aren’t any images of the site from early May, so that they could draw some firmer conclusions, but it’s clear that either the regime (a) covered up the collapse for days (if not weeks) to protect it from unfavorable comparisons to the Sewol Ferry disaster, (b) hauled the debris away with no consideration of...

~ 1 ~ ANOTHER APARTMENT BUILDING in Pyongyang is near collapse, according to the Chosun Ilbo. The report claims that the building’s foundation is settling into the ground, its walls are cracking, and residents are selling their apartments to other families and moving out (which tells you a lot about the state of civic ethics in Pyongyang). I think just about every news service except the AP has now reported something newsworthy about this story. (hat tip: GI Korea) ~...

The House Foreign Affairs Committee unanimously approved H.R. 1771 today. Only two amendments were offered at the markup, by Congressman Connolly (D., Va.) and Congressman Castro (D., Tex.). Both were good amendments that made H.R. 1771 a better and tougher piece of legislation. You can read the current version, san amendments, here. I was struck by the bipartisan unanimity of the mark-up, compared to others I’ve seen. Several members called for Kim Jong Un’s overthrow, and some of the most strident rhetoric...

~   1   ~ SO, TO SUMMARIZE yesterday’s NLL excitement, North Korea fired artillery “near” a South Korean patrol boat off Yeonpyeong Island (which North Korea shelled in 2010), South Korea (borrowing from the North Korean lexicon) threatened a “merciless counterattack” if provoked, North Korea said it never fired but South Korea did, and South Korea called that “a blatant lie.” Now tell me which Korea was more transformed by the Sunshine Policy. ~   2   ~ WHY BUILDINGS...