Update: It’s even worse than I thought. If I saw this guy near the Metro station, I’d offer him my uneaten sandwich. ————– If you live in North Korea, you’d damn well better take it. SEOUL, South Korea – North Korea’s communist government is urging women in the country to wear traditional Korean clothes instead of pants, according to a North Korean monthly magazine. “Keeping alive our dress style is a very important political issue to adhere to specific national...

Suzanne Scholte forwarded this to me yesterday, regarding a North Korean diplomat who went postal in a hallway on Capitol Hill last week: An unexpected face-to-face encounter — in the hallowed halls of Congress, no less — turned downright ugly when North Korea’s deputy chief to the United Nations, Ambassador Han Song-ryol, purportedly threatened the life of a North Korean defector, Kim Seung-min, director of Free North Korea Radio. Our story begins last Thursday, when Republican Reps. Christopher H. Smith...

While most of the papers appear to be on the bandwagon as accepting that North Korea’s harvests are up by 10% this year, I strongly question that because of a dubious chain of transmission–one that originates with the North Korean government and has been “laundered” through the highly credulous Richard Ragan of the World Food Program. If you want to see dissenting views, here is one, and here is another from a person I know to be truthful and who...

Take That, Hippie! The South Korean government has barred 988 thugs with criminal convictions for violence activists from entering the country before the APEC summit.

Abductees Update: Japan continues to press for a full accounting of their fate. I see little chance that relations will be normalized unless North Korea delivers.

The EU’s resolution condemning human rights conditions in North Korea has reached the floor of the General Assembly: The resolution calls for an end to North Korea’s egregious and systematic human rights violations including torture, illegal detention, public executions and forced labor. It lashes out at Pyongyang’s brutal treatment of defectors who are caught or repatriated. The General Assembly is expected to vote on the resolution between Nov. 17 and 23. Meanwhile, back in Korea, score one for the GNP....

A “Young Turks” faction is challenging Roh for control over the Uri party: As main players during 1970s and 1980s activism against military regimes, this faction has purposely remained separate from President Roh Moo-hyun and his supporters. After Mr. Roh took office, they were ousted from the party mainstream, as the president’s close aides exerted more influence within the party. Now taking the crushing by-election defeat as a call to arms, they are raising voices against the president and his...

Updated again Nov. 3; thanks to reader usinkorea for the hat tip; thanks to the Marmot for linking and to his readers for stopping by. Once again, anti-Unification Minister Chung Dong Young has opened his mouth, and once again, nothing good came out of it. The latest nominal justification for giving Chung a supply of ink so far out of proportion to his intellect is the 55th anniversary of the Korea Times. Chung’s first sentence, however, makes it apparent that...

Political Correctness Watch: “Jewelry, many men think, is for gangsters and gay boys.” I have no further comment on that whatsoever. Just pointing it out.

I don’t mean “blind” in a perjorative way; I use the term to signify the studied opacity and manipulation that are so evident from visitor accounts to the country. This post, more than anything else, is about the difficulty of measuring economic and political trends in the North, and how the biases of the writer and those he speaks with can quickly lead from three small and different datasets to three wildly different conclusions. The course of North Korean society,...

Next is Time’s Donald Macintyre of Time Asia, who writes perhaps the best piece to emerge from North Korea’s propaganda disaster known as Arirang. I still don’t have time to give this piece the justice it deserves, but will give you the best grafs and urge you to read the rest on your own. His impressions of the cross-border trade couldn’t be more different when approached from the direction of Pyongyang: Our group, Western journalists granted a rare visit to...

Of the three correspondents, Andrei Lankov, writing in the Korea Times, has the greatest depth of experience. Lankov focuses on the aspect of North Korea’s reforms–unstoppable if you believe Brooke and abortive if you believe Macintyre–that interests me most, the psychological impact on the North Korean people. Lankov finds that materially, things have changed not at all or gone backwards, but that psychologically, North Koreans are much more open than in the past. He begins near his alma mater, Kim...

How many kids could you feed for one of these? SEOUL, Oct. 29 (Yonhap) — Luxury Swiss watches have recently gone on sale at a new store in North Korea, a pro-Pyongyang newspaper in Japan said Saturday. “Pyongje Co., a dealer for Swiss watch brands Longines and Tissot established in April, is selling their watches at a store in downtown Pyongyang,” Choson Sinbo said in its Internet edition. North Korea had previously purchased watches in Switzerland for use as special...

You’d think most people “open-minded” enough to fork money over to North Korea would be the idea target audience for the regime’s propaganda, but the bad press keeps flowing in, most recently from the superb Yi Sun Shin blog: Now, as for the Mass Games themselves, they were equally impressive and bizarre, spectacular and disturbing. As I watched with rapt attention at the near perfection of movement by hundreds if not thousands of performers on the field and their living...

Welcome to the new, independent South Korea–the one that bravely sets its own policy direction without regard for how Yankee imperialists may view it: The Foreign Ministry is hiring an American PR firm to put a positive spin on its U.S. policies in a nation that has been reading them as increasingly hostile. The Foreign Ministry recently wrote to the parliamentary Unification, Foreign Affairs and Trade Committee asking for an extra budget of W1.2 billion (about US$1.2 million) next year...

The conservative main opposition party on Monday submitted a statement to the National Assembly urging the government not to abstain from voting on a resolution against North Korean human rights violations at the UN General Assembly. South Korea did not vote on three resolutions condemning abuses in the Stalinist country in the UN Human Rights Commission since 2003. Grand National Party deputy floor leader Na Kyong-won told reporters the party’s lawmakers adopted the draft at a general meeting on Monday...

Link. Photo cred: Chosun Ilbo.

First, I read this: BERLIN (Reuters) – Iran is permitting around 25 high-ranking al Qaeda members to roam free in the country’s capital, including three sons of Osama bin Laden, a German monthly magazine reported on Wednesday. Citing information from unnamed Western intelligence sources, the magazine Cicero said in a preview of an article appearing in its November edition that the individuals in question are from Egypt, Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia and Europe. They are living in houses belonging to Iran’s...