Via Austin Bay, the Washington Post reports that the State Department’s personnel system has gotten the memo that the Cold War is over, and that a new war has started: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said yesterday that she will shift hundreds of Foreign Service positions from Europe and Washington to difficult assignments in the Middle East, Asia and elsewhere as part of a broad restructuring of the diplomatic corps that she has dubbed “transformational diplomacy.” The State Department’s culture...

The first of two detailed reports in the New York Times. First, the macro view: BEIJING, Jan. 19 – Chinese took to the streets to protest land seizures, corruption, pollution and unpaid wages in record numbers in 2005, the national police said Thursday, with mass incidents that involved violent confrontations or attacks on government property surging at the fastest rate. The number of “public order disturbances” rose 6.6 percent last year, to 87,000. Mass protests that involved “disturbing social order”...

I make no specific comment on Google’s refusal to let the U.S. government access the content of customers’ searches. Read carefully, and buried in the middle of the article is the tidbit that it seems to be aimed at catching child molesters (not Commie witches, as the lede would suggest) although you can’t really figure out what the big, bad government is looking for, or why, or based on what authority, at least not from this schlocky reporting. So they’re...

You’ve previously seen me mention the extreme displeasure of some activists in Washington and elsewhere that U.S. embassies are turning away North Korean refugees, most likely due to political “sensitivities” regarding the governments of South or North Korea, or China. I have blogged that letting these refugees in is a specific statutory requirement under the North Korean Human Rights Act, section 303, now codified at 22 U.S.C. sec. 7843. It also flirts with violating the U.N. Refugee Convention, something I’ve...

Remember, kids, distorted history texts are bad! Now that we’ve settled that, listen to what a Korean professor is saying about history texts in South Korea, before a GNP-hosted forum at which likely presidential candidate Park Geun-Hye also appeared: A Seoul National University professor said yesterday at a political seminar that many textbooks used in primary and secondary schools here contain serious distortions and are disparaging of South Korea’s modern history. Park Hyo-chong, a professor of social studies at the...

I certainly hope these boys are getting tatooed and in-processed in Hell tonight: Two senior trainers with Al Qaeda and the son-in-law of Al Qaeda’s No. 2 leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, were among those killed in the American airstrikes in remote northeastern Pakistan last week, two Pakistani officials said here on Wednesday. . . . . If any or all were indeed killed, it would be a stinging blow to Al Qaeda’s operations, said the American officials, who were granted anonymity...

I’d like to have some of this guy’s friends, and let’s not forget the South Korean officials who conveniently lost him for all these months: Mr. Park “is a guaranteed risk of flight,” an assistant United States attorney, Stephen Miller, told Magistrate Judge Theodore H. Katz in Federal District Court in Manhattan. Mr. Miller said Mr. Park had “fled back to South Korea” after he was served in December 2004 with a grand jury subpoena at the Watergate hotel in...

Kim Jong Il is back in North Korea, after hastily arranged talks between Chris Hill and Kim Kye-Gwan. The meeting reportedly focused on the North’s alleged counterfeiting activities, which have emerged as a stumbling block to the talks because of financial sanctions Washington has taken as a result. No report of progress, and more importantly, no reports of rail mishaps so far.

A long an interesting article in the LA Times this week (free registration required) on the decline of the U.S.-Korean alliance. The article was written by several reporters, including OFK favorite Barbara Demick, and suffers from the contradictory biases of several of them as a result. It begins by accusing the United States of neglecting the alliance, only later getting around to the point that the current Korean government has profited from popular hostility to the United States. Fallout from...

The disintegration continues: According to their faction the candidates have different approaches to the party’s problems leading to predictable confrontation. One point of dispute is the reason for the drastic fall in the party’s support. Kim Geun-tae said this was the fault of Mr. Chung. Another candidate, Kim Du-kwan, a pro-Roh faction member and former presidential secretary agreed with him. Mr. Chung said such comments only brings about party disunity. Amid the rivalry of the former ministers, another pro-Roh faction...

The Joongang Ilbo has more coverage of Ambassador Vershbow’s chatroom diplomacy: The U.S. ambassador to Korea, Alexander Vershbow, warned South Koreans yesterday that ignoring the oppressive nature of the North Korean regime would not hasten the unification of Korea. He also said people in the South should be concerned about the North’s counterfeiting and other illicit activities. Mr. Vershbow was responding to a question posted on the Embassy’s Web site section called “Cafe USA,” a Korean-language message board aimed at...

Kim Jong Il is back in North Korea, after hastily arranged talks between Chris Hill and Kim Kye-Gwan. The meeting reportedly focused on the North’s alleged counterfeiting activities, which have emerged as a stumbling block to the talks because of financial sanctions Washington has taken as a result. No report of progress, and more importantly, no reports of rail mishaps so far.

Via Richardson at DPRK studies, there are fresh reports that the North Koreans are hanging up pictures of second son Kim Jong-Chol. Richardson has another picture that’s not so flattering, either. It’s interesting that the story is emerging as Kim Jong Il is traveling in China; however, the information has a not-so-fresh smell: The newspaper, Chosun Ilbo, said the North Korean senior official, who defected to South Korea, had said many communist party officials were hanging the picture of Kim’s...

Remember when Chung told elderly voters to stay home on Election Day? Someone in his party seems determined to make their votes count. The police raided the Seoul city chapter office of the governing Uri Party yesterday, an action that was a first in this country and would have been unthinkable under Korea’s strongman presidents. The police were following up on complaints that the party may have enrolled about 100 elderly people “• and collected party dues from them “•...

An explosion ripped through a superstore in the bustling business district of downtown Shenzhen just one day after a reported visit by North Korean leader Kim Jong-il to the city. Accounts of the incident that surfaced in Hong Kong papers on Tuesday said the explosives were left in a storage locker at the Carrefour superstore detonated at around 1 p.m. injuring three workers. Prior to the attack, five superstores including Carrefour, Shenzhen Xinyijia Supermarket and the Shenzhen Baijia Supermarket reportedly...

Apparently, the South Koreans don’t approve of counterfeiting, either. Incidentally, they’re at least five years overdue for a W50,000 bill. Mature economies don’t force citizens to carry their money in wheelbarrows.

Thuggish tactics may have prevented him from talking to far-left Voice of the People last week, but our man in Korea is determined to leave no stronghold of the radical, pro-North Korean left untouched. Now, he’s now on the Internet: “I think all South Koreans should be worried about a regime that treats its own people so badly,” Vershbow said in a message posted at Café USA, the embassy PR website set up by his predecessor Christopher Hill. He claimed...

Thank God for those moments when candor at least appears to leak through the diplomatic sieve: Kim’s lengthy tour of China’s boom cities of Guangzhou and Shenzhen suggests that soliciting Chinese support for North Korean economic reform was also high on his agenda. A staff member of a Chinese think tank says on previous occasions when Kim visited developed areas in China, he presented relevant economic reform policies after returning home. However, a source in Beijing said the tour of...