Search Results for: qatar

April 20, 2015

RFA: North Korea tells overseas workers to attack journalists

Ever since the U.N. Commission of Inquiry issued its report last year, North Korea has been particularly sensitive to accusations of human rights violations. It shouldn’t surprise us that this sensitivity is especially keen when the scrutiny threatens to cut off a growing source of hard currency — its export of what amounts to slave labor to places like Russia, Malaysia, and Qatar. Press reports on the working conditions of these workers, and the regime’s spotty history of paying their (paltry) wages, have embarrassed the regime, embarrassed companies...

Categories Human Trafficking/Terrorism (NK)
February 23, 2015

Under NKSEA, transactions in N. Korean slave labor would be punishable by prison time

Yet again, a news story is reporting that North Korea is sending workers abroad to toil in conditions tantamount to slavery: When the North Korean carpenter was offered a job in Kuwait in 1996, he leapt at the chance. He was promised $120 a month, an unimaginable wage for most workers in his famine-stricken country, where most people are not allowed to travel abroad. But for Rim Il, the deal soured from the start: Under a moonlit night, the bus carrying him and...

Categories Human Trafficking
December 27, 2014

Hard times for North Korean mines, and miners

Please pardon me for taking a few days of rest with my family during the holidays. I’ll have much to say about The Interview, Nate Thayer’s intrepid reporting on the AP, and other exigent matters after we’re all played out on Legos and board games. Meanwhile, I have a few posts that I’d written last weekend and had planned to publish when North Korea hit the front pages. Here is the first of them. ~   ~   ~ A series of possibly...

Categories Human Trafficking/NK Economics
September 13, 2014

On Think Tanks, Propaganda, the Foreign Agents’ Registration Act, and Korea

Washington is a marvelous city for someone like me. Where else could a foreigner, an outsider like myself, do the things I was able to do? – Tongsun Park, to the House Ethics Committee, April 1978 A detailed story in The New York Times, examining grants and gifts by foreign governments to U.S. think tanks — and how those gifts influence scholars (and through them), voters, policymakers, and Congress — has caused much controversy and discussion in Washington this week....

Categories U.S. & Korea/U.S. Law/Washington Views
September 8, 2014

N. Koreans are bootlegging liquor in Muslim countries

Last week, NK News published a detailed report on a black market in alcohol run by North Korean diplomats in Pakistan. Almost simultaneously, The Daily NK also reported that two North Korean “chauffeurs,” dispatched by the regime to Qatar, and nominally working for private companies there, had been arrested for bootlegging. Two North Korean men are being detained in Qatar under suspicions of the distribution of illegal liquor; Voice of America [VOA] reported on September 4th, citing the Gulf Times, Qatar’s English language newspaper. The...

Categories Drugs & N Korea/Money Laundering
October 22, 2012

Syria, the next Afghanistan?

The Flock isn’t moving that way now, but I still defend the Obama Administration’s military and diplomatic approach to the Libyan civil war.  Qaddafi was mentally unstable, mentally unstable people are dangerous, and his regime was an ideal breeding ground for extremism.  If things hadn’t changed, they’d only have continued to get worse. Better for us to have supported the more moderate elements than to have allowed the extremists to make Libya their own, as would have eventually happened (and...

Categories Geopolitics
May 10, 2004

Back to the Blogosphere

Excuse the long absence and the long rant. I meant to announce my absence in advance, before my move last week, but our Internet service was cut before I expected. I just bought my first house, and since then have been single-handedly helping Home Depot and Lowe’s meet their quarterly sales estimates. Last week was full of heavy lifting, moving, painting, cutting, chiseling, sanding, drywalling, prying, painting, and of course, shopping. Like many of you, I’ve been in a deep...

Categories Uncategorized
May 10, 2004

Back to the Blogosphere

Excuse the long absence and the long rant. I meant to announce my absence in advance, before my move last week, but our Internet service was cut before I expected. I just bought my first house, and since then have been single-handedly helping Home Depot and Lowe’s meet their quarterly sales estimates. Last week was full of heavy lifting, moving, painting, cutting, chiseling, sanding, drywalling, prying, painting, and of course, shopping. Like many of you, I’ve been in a deep...

Categories Uncategorized