Hillary Clinton, speaking at a graduation ceremony at Barnard College in New York City, displayed an amazing degree of naiveté:
“We have two young women journalists right now imprisoned in North Korea and you can get busy on the Internet and let the North Koreans know that we find that absolutely unacceptable,” Clinton told the [...]

Via CNN: “An Iranian woman, blinded by a jilted stalker who threw acid in her face, has persuaded a court to sentence him to be blinded with acid himself under Islamic law demanding an eye for an eye… Her attacker… admitted throwing acid in her face in November 2004.”

The UN’s audit of the UNDP – which last June the internal audit was noted as being somewhat of a fiasco – has, surprise, surprise, cleared the UNDP and itself of any wrongdoing in the matter:
The case has in part revolved around accusations that some of the hard currency UNDP spent in North Korea ended [...]

South Korean Defense Ministry officials report that North Korean patrol craft violated the Northern Limit Line (NLL) last Saturday, for a total of three violations this year, resulting in the South Korean Navy being put on alert.
The violations could be deliberate attempts by the North Korean regime to signal displeasure with the new Lee [...]

Instead of pressuring North Korea where we know the regime can be influenced, the Bush administration is setting the stage for removing the DPRK from the list of terrorist sponsoring nations, and insulting our strongest ally in the region, Japan, in the process:
North Korea appears to have met the legal criteria to be taken off [...]

Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kansas), sponsor of the North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004, submitted Resolution 399, which calls for requiring several conditions before North Korea can be removed from the U.S. list of terrorism-sponsoring nations:
The resolution urges the administration not to lift the designation until it can be demonstrated that North Korea is no [...]

The U.S. Navy captain was very… trusting:
North Korean sailors who fought off a hijacking by Somali pirates reportedly disagreed with their U.S. helpers over the treatment of five detained pirates. According to sources, the captain of the North Korean cargo ship Dai Hong Dan wanted to leave them in a rubber dinghy at sea after [...]

Koreans are generally more sensitive than other nationalities to outside (i.e., international) criticism or scrutiny and obsessed with their “place” in world rankings. So these three articles caught my attention; a series on a movement to stop foreign adoption, misleading abortion statistics, and the praises of dog meat, all of which can be seen as [...]

North Korean cult mythology tells us that Kim Il-sung carved at least hundreds of anti-imperialist or anti-Japanese slogans into trees throughout Korea during his time as a freedom fighter before World War II. These trees – “slogan trees” – are now national treasures in North Korea and many are protected with glass enclosures (see pic [...]

Update: Bolton has his say:
Congressmen, human rights activists, and a former ambassador are challenging the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s plan to transfer $25 million in frozen funds to North Korea… “These are tainted funds and it would be bad enough to have a private bank handle them, let alone the Fed,” a former [...]