Category: North Korea

Via One Free Korea comes news of just how stupid former North Korea detainee Jeffrey Fowle is:

An American who is back home after being detained in North Korea says he left a Bible in a nightclub hoping it would get into the hands of the underground Christian church.

Jeffrey Fowle said Friday that he left the Bible under a trash bin at a nightclub in the northern port city of Chongjinin in an effort “to spread the Gospel out to the remote corners.”

Fowle arrived in North Korea on April 29. He was detained after North Korean officials found the Bible.

Fowle said he had left his name in the Bible and hoped a Christian would find it.

Fowle was detained for nearly six months. He returned to his home in Ohio last week after negotiations involving retired diplomat and former Ohio Congressman Tony Hall. [Associated Press]

You can read more at the link and according to this interview he did he is not sorry for his action as at all.

I think One Free Korea sums up quite well at his site Fowle’s stupidity.

It is probably not a good business model for an open ski resort to have more employees than guests, but then again this is North Korea where such logic does not apply:

When a photographer took a trip to one of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s pet projects – built to bring in thousands of foreign tourists to the country – he discovered a sparkling clean ski resort… with barely another person or drop of snow in sight.

The communist enclave’s one and only ski destination, on top of Taehwa Peak, boasts a hotel with wood cabin style rooms, complimentary toiletries, and spa facilities and 110 kilometres (70 miles) of multi-level slopes.

However, photographer Aram Pan, from Singapore, who took the photos while on his fourth trip to North Korea from 16-20 October, did not find any other tourists to mingle with.

‘I saw one western tourist on a “private tour” at the Ski resort. I’m not sure who he was. I didn’t ask,’ Mr Pan told Daily Mail Australia.  [Daily Mail]

#DPRK foreign ministry warns #EU not to adopt an anti-N. Korean human rights resolution or it will face "unpredictable consequences."

— Steve Herman (@W7VOA) October 30, 2014

The fact that watching South Korean dramas was added to the charges of these officials likely had nothing to do with their purge, it was just something throw in as a point of emphasis to everyone else not to watch these dramas that the Kim regime views as subversive media:

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is seeking to erase the remaining influence of his dead uncle, executing about 10 senior Workers’ Party officials on charges from graft to watching South Korean soap operas, according to an aide to a South Korean lawmaker.

The deaths by shooting are part of Kim’s latest round of purges, said Lim Dae Sung, a secretary to ruling Saenuri Party lawmaker Lee Cheol Woo who attended a briefing at the National Intelligence Service yesterday in Seoul. Kim had Jang Song Thaek, his uncle and de facto deputy, killed in December last year. Lee didn’t say when the executions took place, or who the officials were. [Bloomberg]

You can read more at the link.

The South Korean intelligence is probably pretty accurate on this:

South Korea’s spy agency said Tuesday it has solved the mystery of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s 6-week public absence, which set off a frenzy of wild speculation around the world.

The National Intelligence Service told legislators that a foreign doctor operated on Kim in September or October to remove a cyst from his right ankle, according to Park Byeong-seok, an aide for opposition lawmaker Shin Kyung-min. The aide said the spy agency also told lawmakers in a closed-door briefing that the cyst could recur because of Kim’s obesity, smoking and heavy public schedule.  [Associated Press]

So I wonder if we will see a number of retractions from all the people claiming a coup happened or other theories that were floated around with no evidence to support them?

Now, after several painful weeks with no Kim Jong Un photos at all (the young despot was incommunicado, thought to be recovering from either gout or an ankle injury), the hard-working men and women of the Korean Central News Agency have gifted us with one of the finest specimens in months. Behold, via the Washington Post’s Adam Taylor, Kim Jong Un and stern North Korean officials visit the Pyongyang Baby Home and Orphanage:  [VOX.com]

This picture is just begging for a caption contest. What is Kim Jong-un looking at?

Some farmers are upset with the activists sending the balloons into North Korea:

Lee Jae Wook raised the scoop of his mud-spattered tractor as he braced for a scuffle with activists trying to fly balloons carrying leaflets calling for a revolt against Kim Jong Un across the border to North Korea.

“I won’t let them provoke Kim Jong Un into firing shells at my town,” the 68-year-old South Korean farmer said Oct. 25 at the Imjingak tourist park, near the demilitarized zone that separates the nations. “I can’t afford to lose the peace I need in this busy harvest season.”

The tussles over the weekend pitched a handful of leafleting activists against border residents like Lee and hundreds of others who support a policy of engagement with North Korea. Dozens of police officers were deployed to keep them apart. One leaflet shows Saddam Hussein with a noose around his neck and the corpse of Muammar Qaddafi and urges North Koreans to “topple evil Kim Jong Un and shoot him to death!”

A series of shooting exchanges this month has escalated concerns among residents that North Korea may fire at civilian areas in South Korea should the flying of leaflets continue to be permitted.  [Bloomberg]

I guess we are supposed to feel bad for these farmers.  However, it isn’t until the end of the article that we find out who these people really are:

“These balloons will only come back to us in the form of bombs,” An So Hee, a United Progressive Party member of Paju City Council, said at Imjingak. “It’s the border residents who’ll have to bear the consequences of these leaflets.”

Long time ROK Heads may remember that the UPP is the South Korean political party filled with North Korean sympathizers and spies.  These North Korean sympathizers have done these protests before on behalf of their North Korean handlers by assaulting the balloon activists. This time they are trying to conduct an information operation by making their protesters appear to be concerned farmers to try to create public pressure to stop the balloon launches. The efforts by the North Korean stooges to stop the balloon launches only convinces me even further how effective these balloon launches are that the Kim regime would put this much effort into stopping them.

I doubt the travel ban is actually for ebola, but that is what the North Koreans are claiming:

When word spreads in Max Brooks’s 2006 dystopian novel World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War that zombies are infesting the world, North Korea acts decisively, sealing its borders and hustling its people into mysterious bunkers. “No country was better prepared to repel the infestation than North Korea,” says Hyungchol Choi, the fictional deputy director of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency. “Rivers to the north, oceans to the east and west, and to the south … the most heavily fortified border on Earth.”

Now, as a far less apocalyptic virus completely unrelated to zombies spreads, North Korea is closing its borders. On Thursday, Oct. 23, North Korea notified foreign tour operators that visitors are now banned. “The reason given was Ebola, and I can’t think of any other reason, as they don’t arbitrarily close the border,” Simon Cockerell, managing director of the tour operator Koryo Tours, told USA Today.  [Foreign Policy]

You can read the rest at the link.

Via One Free Korea comes the latest example of North Korea’s racist attitudes and lack of regard for human rights:

North Korean officials making a rare appearance at a United Nations human rights event on Wednesday laughed among themselves at the testimony of former labor camp detainees and referred to the ambassador of Botswana with derogatory racial language, according to Korean-speaking sources who overheard their conversations and spoke with VICE News.

The special session featured an awkward and testy exchange between Kim Ju Song, advisor for political affairs at the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s mission to the UN, and Michael Kirby, the retired Australian judge who headed a recent UN commission of inquiry into North Korean human rights abuses. The commission released a report in March that cited forced labor, starvation, persecution of religious believers, and a massive network of political prisons holding up to 120,000 people among various violations and crimes against humanity committed by North Korea’s government.

Speaking along with Kirby were the ambassadors of Australia, Panama and Botswana — whose delegations co-sponsored the hearing — as well as two former North Korean detainees whose experiences were featured in the commission’s report.

At one point, members of the North Korean delegation were heard referring to Botswana’s UN Ambassador Charles Ntwaagae in Korean as “that black bastard,” sources who were nearby told VICE News. They also chuckled at the testimony of Kirby and the two prison escapees, Jung Gwang-il and Kim Hye Sook. Those in the room with the North Korean delegation who later spoke with VICE News insisted on anonymity due to fear of reprisal.  [VICE News]

You can read more at the link, but people shouldn’t be surprised by the racist attitudes if they have read B.R. Myers book the Cleanest Race.

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— NK NEWS (@nknewsorg) October 25, 2014