In his inaugural address, rules out U.S. military options against N. Korea: President Roh Moo Hyun declared Thursday that under no circumstances would South Korea allow the United States to resort to a military attack against North Korea. Roh made the comment while blaming the nuclear deadlock on the uncompromising attitudes of both North Korea, which he called “the most stubborn country in the world,” and the United States, which he described as the “most opinionated country in the world.”...

From the Joongang Ilbo: Citing interviews with North Korean defectors, a Seoul-based research institute said yesterday that the regime in Pyongyang is continuing an aggressive campaign to suppress underground churches in the country. The 2005 North Korea Human Rights White Paper published by the Korea Institute of National Unification reported a number of executions of religious figures operating underground Protestant churches in the North. In 2001, five people found guilty of conducting missionary work were executed by firing squad in...

Probably the most exciting new source of information about North Korea today is DailyNK, for which I’m honored to be a Correspondent in Washington (I take no credit for making up that title, and of course, it’s unpaid, like all of my activities on North Korea). Information from defectors, of course, comes with special cautions about biases as well as special insight. For all of its occasionally clumsy English (including my own), Daily NK is breaking new ground–by putting North...

Daily NK had one last fascinating report today, about North Korea’s worsening inflation and the burgeoning black market in dollars that has resulted. The dealers are increasingly sophisticated and brazen, plying their trade in front of major hotels and getting exchange rate updates by cell phone: High inflation is continuing in North Korea. Price of dollar in the blackmarkets in Pyongyang was â–² 950 Won/1$ in Nov. 2003 â–² 1,245 Won in May 2004, â–² 2,200Won in Feb 2005 and...

Update on Our Missing Special Forces Team: Two dead, one rescued, one missing.

From the NY Times: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will visit four Asian countries from Friday through the following Wednesday, July 13, to discuss North Korea’s nuclear program and other issues, the State Department announced today. Ms. Rice will travel to China, South Korea, Japan and Thailand, said a department spokesman, Sean McCormack.

The U.N. is investigating racial discrimination against foreigners and ethnic minorities in Japan.

From the Joongang Ilbo: Citing an unidentified source with a group that supports North Korean defectors, Yonhap News Agency reported yesterday that 10 North Koreans entered a Korean international school in Qingdao, China, and requested asylum in South Korea. The source was quoted as saying that two men and eight women, all from Hamgyong province, entered the school through the front gate while students were leaving. This is a risky move. It’s doubtful that a school will have protected diplomatic...

Count Roh Moo-Hyun among those being swept back out to sea in the post-9/11 wave of anti-American passive-aggressiveness. Chirac is battered, Schroeder is finished, and now Roh may be forced into a potentially fractious coalition with the far-far-left Democratic Labor Party or the center-left Millenium Democratic Party, from which he broke in 2002 shortly after his election. In Korean politics, such coalitions have a history of extreme instability. It remains to be seen whether these parties can unite sufficiently to...

Senators Hillary Clinton and Carl Levin have an op-ed about North Korea’s nuclear program in today’s Washington Post. It is an unremarkable document in its failure to offer any new or novel suggestions for solving the seemingly insoluble problems that confront us now. As an attack on the Bush administration’s (lack of a) North Korean policy, it sets itself up for easy success. As a defense of Clinton-era policies that helped to make matters infinitely worse, it is remarkable for...

From the Chosun Ilbo: Civic groups are demanding that Korea take over prosecution of the U.S. military driver whose truck killed a 51-year-old yogurt delivery woman in Dongducheon last month. An “emergency committee” including the Dongducheon Civil Association and the National Campaign for Eradication of Crime by U.S. Troops in Korea held a press conference in front of the government complex in Gwacheon on Monday to urge the Justice Ministry to wrest the investigation from U.S. military authorities. It will...

Disturbing reports of a dramatically worsening famine continue to filter out of North Korea, notwithstanding the regime’s Maoist mobilization of schoolchildren and office workers to the countryside. It’s not working, according to South Korean agricultural expert Kang Jong-Man, via the L.A. Times: The rice paddies are thin and uneven. Potato plants are pale and stunted. The fields are not properly graded. Barley still on the stalks should have been harvested weeks ago so that the same fields could be used...

Chinese Communist Party=Evil Cult: More evidence that trade is not working its moderating magic.

We have a team missing in the Konar Valley, in eastern Afghanistan. Pray that the search for them is successful, and that they’re found alive and well.

I no longer know which is more assinine: the administration’s insistence that it won’t talk bilaterally with North Korea, or its critics’ insistence that it should. More from the NYT.

The rest of them are now posted here, including Nicholas Eberstadt, Ambassador Lilley, and my conversation with Ambassador Lilley last Wednesday, foreshadowing an angry reaction from the South Korean government.

Chinese Communist Party=Evil Cult: More evidence that trade is not working its moderating magic.

We have a team missing in the Konar Valley, in eastern Afghanistan. Pray that the search for them is successful, and that they’re found alive and well.