May you all have a safe & happy New Years Eve, and a great start for the coming year. 새해 복 많이 받으십시오.

Chosun Ilbo: U.S. Envoy for North Korea Leaves for Pastures New
Fox News: U.S. Amb. to South Korea Won’t Be Reassigned
The Star: South Korea launches largest phone link with North
Korea Times: NK Leader’s Bank Accounts Moved to Luxembourg
Relief Web: US halts food aid to North Korea
VOA: SK Parliament Extends Military Deployment in Iraq, But Reduces [...]

GI Korea has an excellent post on driving in South Korea:
Koreans prescribe to what I call a Darwinian approach to driving. There is a food chain on the Korean roads. The buses and “Terminator” trucks rule the roads…
Read the rest here.

There is no doubt that the reunification of the Korean Peninsula will be an extravagantly expensive affair, but this will soften the blow for those in the South (this is something the West Germans did not have to look forward to):
North Korea is one of the world’s most impoverished states but its value of minerals [...]

Japan’s ambassador to Norway and Iceland, Fumiko Saiga, has been appointed as the countries first Human Rights Ambassador. She has met with U.S. special envoy on human rights Jay Lefkowitz, and will be focusing on North Korea:
“Abduction is an unpardonable act that infringes on all kinds of human rights, such as freedom of expression, thought, [...]

This recent article points out that for the first time ever there are move females than males in South Korea:
This is the first time since 1970 for the number of women to exceed, or even come close to, the number of men in Korea. The reversed sex proportion comes as a surprise in Korea, as [...]

WaPo has been doing pretty good reporting on the issue of increasing confrontations between rural villagers and the corrupt Chinese rural government bureaucracy.
I blogged about one of its stories previously. Now there is a follow-up. Some choice bits:
Two weeks after a protest that culminated in gunfire and bloodshed, the rebellious farmers and fishermen of Dongzhou [...]

I am always fascinated by the origin of family names, including that of my own. DPRK Studies has an entry about Korean surnames and inspired me to dust out some Na clan lore I found on the Net a while back.
Behold the power of the Internet!
First, the Na entry in ancestry.com shows that there were [...]

North Korea’s political counselor at the DPRK embassy in Malaysia, Paek Hyon Chol, hypothesizes that Charles Jenkins fabricated claims of abducted Malaysians in North Korea as a capitalist vice: “He may have run out of money and used the opportunity to gain financial reward from the media by criticising and slandering our country.” Lots of [...]

The NYT has a brief take on the efforts of South Korean missionaries to convert North Koreans and Chinese.
This being The NYT, the tone of the piece is mostly negative. The piece emphasizes some of the frictions and miscommunication between missionaries and defectors, and ignores the big elephant in the story — that just as [...]