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Someone wake up Al Gore and tell him Manbearpig has two of his reporters: North Korea said Friday that it had decided to indict two American journalists who have been detained for more than five weeks on charges of illegally entering the country and committing “hostile acts. “Our related agency has completed its investigation of the American journalists,” North Korea’s state-run news agency, KCNA, reported. “It has formally decided to put them on trial based on confirmed criminal data. [….]...

Those North-South Korea talks lasted just 22 minutes, all of them tense, and hopes that they would end with make-up sex were not realized.  It looks like there’s trouble at the DMZ: North Korea accused South Korea of a “serious provocation” by moving a marker on their heavily guarded border, raising tensions after rare talks between the two ended without agreement.”This serious military provocation is a wanton violation of the Armistice Agreement and a deliberate and premeditated action to escalate...

It has now been just over months since President Bush, true to his June announcement, removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism.  To calm skeptics of the move who noted that North Korea had neither renounced terrorism nor performed meaningfully on its Agreed Framework II obligations, Bush said this: The six-party process has shed light on a number of issues of serious concern to the United States and the international community.  To end its isolation, North...

No post until tonight at the earliest, due to other obligations.  Hopefully, I’ll be back then with something longer and more detailed.  Thanks.

For Google Earth geeks, it doesn’t get much better than this: Photo cred: Digital globe, via AFP and the Joongang Ilbo.

CHRIS HILL’S CONFIRMATION HEARING starts tomorrow, and the Weekly Standard has (second only to this blog) owned the story. Stephen Hayes relates the story of Hill’s insubordination to his bosses in talking directly to the North Koreans, which is a prohibition I find it hard to believe the last Administration was really serious about enforcing. Frankly, a writer of Hayes’s caliber could have done far better, and I hope he will yet. Still, Hayes manages to do much better than...

THE HANKYOREH IS PLEASED TO REPORT that North Korea has become marginally less hellish in some ways! But read the fine print: “North Korea’s human rights situation is wholly poor. Economic, social, and cultural rights are growing notably worse, while there have been institutional improvements in civic and political rights. Also, the human rights situation is different by social group and region, with continually deepening disparity. Wait! It gets better, I swear! The document notes that there have been systemic...

CALL UP THE RESERVES! Vigilant South Korean citizens have discovered … a sleeper cell? Another DMZ tunnel? A submarine beached at Incheon? Even worse. COOL. Via. WHY THERE WILL NEVER BE A FUNCTIONING PALESTINE, in microcosm.

Barring a few privileged exceptions, the lives of children are dirt cheap north of the DMZ. Last year, UNICEF and the World Food Program reported that 40% of North Korea’s children are chronically malnourished. The children in this video are mostly orphans; they’re homless kids known as “kotjaebi.” They began to appear on the streets of North Korean cities after the Great Famine killed or displaced many of their parents. They live by begging, stealing, foraging on trash, or getting...

What our negotiations with North Korea have always lacked was structure — starting with spine — but also deadlines, benchmarks, clear expectations, and clear consequences for reneging on agreed terms. As a result, two decades of American nuclear diplomacy have accomplished little except to solidify and reward North Korea’s instincts for stalling, lying, cheating, and moving the goalposts, often in ways that pose grave dangers to our national security. Occasionally, enough Americans notice this pattern that American politicians feel compelled...

Update: Or, Chris Hill might succeed at keeping his job. BBC monitoring, quoting the Japanese Monthly Sentaku, claims that Richard Holbrooke is leaning on Hillary Clinton to keep Hill, and that the Japanese are wary about that possibility. No link, sorry. Hope! Change! If this piece in the Washington Times has it right, it’s going to be Harvard Professor Kurt Campbell, who also advised the Pentagon on Asia-Pacific issues during the Clinton Administration and a number of other government and...

In these times, terrorists, whose training manuals teach them to fabricate claims of torture, can sue law enforcement officers for damages in our courts for having the temerity to interrupt their plans. If we’ve dispensed with the idea of keeping disputes between individuals and states out of the courts, it’s at least just to allow American victims of torture to seek compensation against those — including foreign states — who wronged them. A few years ago, Congress removed an impediment...

Why do I do this every day, you ask? (Again with those straw-man questions I plant in your heads.) I do it because of stories like this. South Korean firms that lost big on the Kaesong bubble are demanding compensation from, or possibly suing, the government. So would the government in the caption — where it says “defendant” — be the government that actually shut down their operations in breach of all of the written understandings and for no legally...