Kim Hyun-hee, one of the infamous bombers of Korean Air (KAL) 858 in 1987 which killed 115 (see book review, The Tears of My Soul), claims that South Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS), during the first year of Roh Moo-hyun’s administration, pressured her to recant that the bombing was directed by North Korea. When she [...]

Today North Korea condemned the U.S. for allegedly conducting a raid into Syria that the Syrian government claims killed eight people, including a family with four children. The North described this as, “an unpardonable inhuman criminal act” and “terrorism.” Anonymous U.S. officials – aren’t they always, in cases like this – described the operation [...]

From Reuters: “Washington [will] not remove North Korea from a U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism on the initial deadline of Monday. . . The [U.S.] had made clear it did not expect a deal with Pyongyang by Monday for presenting a verification plan for its nuclear programs. . .” The admin gets one [...]

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 [...]

What Israel hit in Syria, and more importantly the silence from both Israel and Syria, has caused rampant speculation on what the target was. Aside from the prospect of North Korea aiding a nascent Syrian nuclear program – with initial reports indicating Israeli commandos seized nuclear material – some reports indicate the target was a [...]

Update: Via the Nomad, an interesting theory on Syria’s relatively mild protests to Israels attack:
Notice how far away Dayr az-Zawr is from Israel. An F15/16 attack there is not a tiptoe across the border, but a deep, deep penetration of Syrian airspace. And guess what happened with the Russian super-hyper-sophisticated cutting edge antiaircraft [...]

From Japan Today, “U.S. ready to take N Korea off terrorism list by year-end.”
Wow, sounds like a done deal. Let’s read a bit of the report:
The United States has decided to remove North Korea from a list of states that sponsor terrorism as early as by the end of the year, if progress is made [...]

Daily Chosun says:
Taliban killed another Korean hostage in Afghanistan after the latest deadline for negotiations expired on Monday. Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, a purported spokesman for the Taliban, told the Chosun Ilbo, AFP and AP by phone, “’Finally tonight at 8:30, we killed one of the Koreans named Sung Sim with AK-47 gunshots.” He claimed the [...]

[Update: July 26, 2007] This is what I mean by “metro-elite propaganda” (h/t my former boss). The article begins well enough, but then sneaks in the following:
Some devout Christians are calling the abductees martyrs, evoking the self-glorification of extreme Islamist jihadists.
This is the kind of anti-Christian moral equivalence that bugs me. On the one hand, [...]

The 2006 Country Report on Terrorism by the State Department is now available. This is the entire section on North Korea:
North Korea
The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) was not known to have sponsored any terrorist acts since the bombing of a Korean Airlines flight in 1987. The DPRK continued to harbor four Japanese [...]