Search Results for: kaesong

More union corruption exposed: The Korean Federation of Trade Unions has suspended its president Lee Soo-ho in a bid to combat corruption in its ranks. The decision came in an executive committee meeting on Saturday after former vice president Kang Seung-kyu was arrested on charges of taking W81 million (US$81,000) in kickbacks from the Association of the Taxi Industry in Korea. I wonder what it cost the North Koreans to keep them quiet about low wages and unsafe working conditions...

The Curse of Kaesong lives on. This time, a South Korean man has fallen to his death. Which labor union will demand a review of worker safety conditions this time?

I started compiling a list of all the pundits, who, unlike me, are paid to write for expensive newspapers, and who, unlike me, had actually drawn lessons from the North Korean nuclear “breakthrough” that proved erroneous somewhere between the time of writing and time of publication. Inexplicably, none of the examples listed here had the decency to simply acknowledge that the foundation facts were so obliterated as to require pulling the flawed analyses out of simple decency to the readers....

Updated 9/14: The Chosun Ilbo reports that anti-Unification Minister Chung Dong-Young intervened with Hyun, possibly in an attempt to have Kim Yoon-Kyu reinstated, but that his differences with Hyun were “wide.” Chun is not denying that he’s trying to cobble the NK-Hyundai partnership back together, according to this Joongang Ilbo piece: “The government has responsibilities,” pool press reports from Pyongyang quoted him as saying. “In principle, this is a business relationship between a private company and North Korea, but the...

UPDATED; scroll down. You haven’t heard the last of this. Call it a prediction. The U.S. media was watching, but (thus far) doesn’t much seem to care. The U.S. government is watching and does. Update on that later. For now, here’s what happened, beginning with pictures from OhMyNews: Much, much more here. Here’s part of : The demonstration started off peacefully with singing, dancing and a speech by Democratic Labor Party central committee member Lee Jeong-mi, but turned violent after...

Norbert has given me permission to print his e-mail in full: Dear Joshua, Thank you for your message! I am in Seoul ~ it worked again like in January after the tsunami when I returned from Indonesia with a Korean medical aid team. This time I came back from the Philippines with another Korean aid team and I got a “final notice” but was allowed to enter the country even when I refused to sign any document. I do not...

NK Bars Chosun Ilbo Reporter: There’s no clear explanation, but one strong possibility is that they didn’t care for the coverage of this concert and the audience’s reaction to it, something that doesn’t surprise me in the least. The other possibility suggested is that it’s for trying to break the hermetic seal around Kaesong during a recent visit. So much for “window to the world.”

Kaesong Update: North Korea’s latest shakedown is aimed at the investors . . . which is at least an improvement over shaking down the workers. They have the chutzpah to call it “insurance.” I would complain with extreme caution if I were you, gentlemen.

China and North Korea have a new treaty on the processing of refugees . . . as something other than refugees. Thanks to Chinese concepts of open government, opaque writing from the Chosun Ilbo, and a generous ladle-full of South Korean government doublespeak, I have almost no idea what the agreement would actually do, which probably means, “nothing good.” _____________________ A new poll finds that 67% of people are either dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with President Roh Moo Hyun, who...

Kaesong Update: The Commerce Department is mulling over a South Korean request to move high-tech communications gear into North Korea. Given North Korea’s awful record on proliferation and dual use misuse, its lack of transparency, and its intransigence in disarmament talks, this would seem to be an easy decision.

Three Hundred Bucks for a Bus Tour of Kaesong? Someone should tell the Donga-A Ilbo that “capitalism” and “profit-crushing greed” are not synonyms.

There may be dozens of reasons why Koreans and Americans view North Korea so differently, but if you leave the “root causes” argument to another day, the more immediate cause is how the South Korean press covers the issue. Having had a disillusioning view of how the media boloed their coverage of the ADVANCE Democracy Act, I didn’t have terribly high expectations for how the South Korean media would approach a press conference with Natan Sharansky. To some in the...

We have Panmunjom, the inter-Korean talks, the (abandoned) six-nation talks, the New York channel, Curt Weldon, and Selig Harrison. We have Kaesong and Kumgang and several more planned industrial parks that never got off the ground. You wouldn’t think that the missing piece in our diplomacy with self-isolated North Korea is yet another attempt to “engage” them, if “engage” means “pay,” as it usually does, and “North Korea” still just means the North Koreans on the reviewing stand. The Boston...

We have Panmunjom, the inter-Korean talks, the (abandoned) six-nation talks, the New York channel, Curt Weldon, and Selig Harrison. We have Kaesong and Kumgang and several more planned industrial parks that never got off the ground. You wouldn’t think that the missing piece in our diplomacy with self-isolated North Korea is yet another attempt to “engage” them, if “engage” means “pay,” as it usually does, and “North Korea” still just means the North Koreans on the reviewing stand. The Boston...

From the Joongang Ilbo: The head of a group that advocates rights for North Korean abductees said yesterday that the identity of 12 South Koreans being held captive in the North has been ascertained. . . . The list includes former special agents trained to infiltrate the North, former South Korean soldiers and kidnapped South Korean fishermen. Also included was a South Korean spy who had been sent North to bomb a radio station in Kaesong. How times have changed....

From the Joongang Ilbo: The head of a group that advocates rights for North Korean abductees said yesterday that the identity of 12 South Koreans being held captive in the North has been ascertained. . . . The list includes former special agents trained to infiltrate the North, former South Korean soldiers and kidnapped South Korean fishermen. Also included was a South Korean spy who had been sent North to bomb a radio station in Kaesong. How times have changed....

I don’t have much to offer on the various theories about whether the North Koreans are really about to test a nuke, for two excellent reasons. The first of these is that the mother of my two children (also my wife, in case you were going to ask) had the temerity to expect me to pry myself away from the computer over Mother’s Day weekend. We ended up spending most of the weekend eating out, taking long drives in the...

I don’t have much to offer on the various theories about whether the North Koreans are really about to test a nuke, for two excellent reasons. The first of these is that the mother of my two children (also my wife, in case you were going to ask) had the temerity to expect me to pry myself away from the computer over Mother’s Day weekend. We ended up spending most of the weekend eating out, taking long drives in the...