Update: SAIS just cancelled Friday’s presentation. Sorry. It is not the nature of famines to make heroes of men, but if a hero emerged from North Korea’s last Great Famine, it is the Buddhist monk the Venerable Pomnyun. I first heard of this man’s humanitarian work in Andrew Natsios’s “The Great North Korean Famine,” a book that, sadly, is must-reading once again. The Ven. Pomnyun, who leads the charity Good Friends, was one of the few South Koreans to speak...

The Daily NK continues to be our single best source of information from inside the North, despite the obvious limitations in confirmation, not to mention translation.  One pseudonymous interviewee, probably a trader, reports that food is still available in most of the cities  from Pyongyang  to Sinuiju, but for an exorbitant price (the most at-risk areas are along North Korea’s other coast).  It’s thinly sourced but interesting nonetheless.  So far, the interviewee says that food continues to be available for...

Those are the grim words of a North Korean interviewed in Good Friends’s latest newsletter, which reports that North Koreans — not just the usual concentration camp inmates and street orphans, but farmers  — are now dying of starvation because of the current food crisis: In the farming areas of the township of Yangduk, Yangduk County and the vicinity in South Pyongan Province , instances of people dying by starvation due to a shortage of food rations are appearing. Currently,...