A North Korean refugee recently gave a radio interview to PRI.org which focused on why North Koreans like South Korean clothes and beauty products as well as the importance of black markets in the country:
Would you wear skinny jeans if they were illegal? As it turns out, the answer is yes, at least for one young North Korean woman.
Danbi and I are browsing through a South Korean market, when she stops to admire a pair of slim fitting pants. “Girls just love these back home!” she declares. By home, she means a city in far-off North Korea.
She flips her hair dramatically, and laughs heartily, as she tries on a sparkly hair clip. She recalls, “We all wanted to be able to run our fingers through our hair like this. Like we saw in a South Korean TV show. But we couldn’t. Because we didn’t have enough shampoo in North Korea, so your fingers would just get stuck!”
Danbi is a 24-year-old North Korean refugee, who paints a picture of the totalitarian regime that’s quite different from the one we’re used to seeing, but an account supported by other defectors and those working with North Koreans. Yes, the country is rife with human rights abuses and grinding poverty. But Danbi, who took on her new name after fleeing, is from a city near the Chinese border — which has become surprisingly porous, and so she’s grown up in this presumably closed nation with a window to the outside world.
She says she shopped in black markets with smuggled foreign goods and watched American and South Korean TV shows, via smuggled USB sticks, since she was a kid. So by the time she entered junior high, Danbi says what she learned in school — that Americans can’t be trusted and South Koreans are poor — she doubted its truth. [Global Voices]
Another month and more dead Koreans found in the Philippines:
Another Korean couple was shot to death in the Philippines, confirmed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Seoul on Friday, again in the coastal province of Cavite, 21 kilometers (13 miles) south of Manila. A middle-aged man was shot by an unidentified assailant on the road right outside the couple’s residence early Friday morning, according to the Korean Foreign Ministry. His wife was shot inside the house, where she was discovered dead.
The man, reported to be a 54-year-old surnamed Lee, held Korean nationality. However, his wife, a 47-year-old surnamed Park, was an ethnic Korean with Chinese nationality.
Park called the local police at around 1:30 a.m., which is likely around the time the shooting began. Philippine police are still investigating the fatal shootings to confirm details. Cavite is the same province in which a 64-year-old Korean man surnamed Na and his 60-year-old wife Kim were shot to death in their retirement home by an unidentified gunman on Aug. 19.
Police have yet to find a lead on that case, which was suspected to be an armed robbery. This brings the number of Koreans killed in the Philippines this year to 10, including Korean-Chinese Park, raising questions about how to bolster security for Koreans residing in or traveling to the Southeast Asian country. [Joong Ang Ilbo]
Analysts at 38North have a good posting up about why the Unha-3 rocket that North Korea has threatened to launch again is likely intended for space launch purposes:
But if the Unha-3 is intended for use as an ICBM, it’s not a very good one. The second- and third-stage engines don’t have enough thrust to efficiently deliver heavy warheads; a militarized Unha might deliver 800 kilograms of payload to Washington, DC. The North Koreans can probably make a nuclear warhead that small, but it would be a tight fit. With bigger upper-stage engines, which we know the North Koreans have, they could deliver substantially larger payloads. This would allow bigger and more powerful warheads, more decoys to counter US missile defenses, and a generally tougher and more robust system.
The Unha is also too heavy and cumbersome to be survivable in wartime. Too big for any mobile transporter, it can only be launched from fixed sites. Its highly corrosive liquid propellants require hours of pre-launch preparations. That’s a bad combination for North Korea; their fixed launch sites are going to be watched very closely, and particularly in a crisis, any indication that an ICBM is being prepared for launch could trigger a pre-emptive strike.
The same could be said of the old Soviet R-7. As an ICBM, it was pretty much a dud—the USSR never deployed more than 10, and retired them after less than a decade. As a space launch vehicle, its descendants are still in service today.
The North Koreans could press the Unha-3 into limited service as an ICBM, just as the USSR did with the R-7—a temporary measure, until something better is available. They can almost certainly build something better, and they appear to be trying. The KN-08 missile mock-ups, twice paraded through Pyongyang, are exactly the sort of thing a nation like North Korea would build if it wanted to use its eclectic mix of early 1960s rocket technologies to build an ICBM. It is small enough to be mobile and therefore survivable but with the performance (barely) to reach the enemy’s homeland. The Unha-3, by comparison, looks like it was designed to launch satellites rather than warheads. [38North]
A police officer stands outside the entrance of an indoor shooting range in the southern port city of Busan on Oct. 3, 2015, after a man stabbed the owner and fled with a .45-caliber handgun and around 30 to 40 bullets. (Yonhap)
I have no sympathy for idiots like this guy who cross into North Korea for their own selfish reasons and then when the going gets tough they willingly make themselves propaganda tools of the Kim regime and want South Korea and the US to get them out:
Joo Won-moon, a South Korean student at New York University, is escorted by a South Korean official into the South Monday at the border village of Panmunjom. Joo’s return ended a five-month detainment in Pyongyang after he illegally entered North Korea by crossing the Yalu River from China in April. Provided by the Ministry of Unification
North Korea Monday repatriated a South Korean student who had been detained for five months, an unexpected conciliatory gesture toward South Korea.
Joo Won-moon, a 21-year-old student at New York University and a green card holder for the U.S., was handed over to South Korean authorities at the border village of Panmunjom at around 5:30 p.m. Monday. Joo’s release followed a surprise announcement earlier in the day by the state-run Korean Central News Agency saying he would be freed. The announcement didn’t elaborate on what led it to the decision.
Joo crossed the Yalu River from China into North Korea in April and was arrested by North Korean guards. In an interview with CNN in May, he said he hoped his journey “could have a good effect in the relationship.”
Joo reappeared before cameras in a Sept. 25 press conference in Pyongyang at which he read what was seen as a carefully drafted statement praising North Korea and denying international accusations that the Pyongyang regime was responsible for gross human rights violations. He also called for a shift in the U.S.’s North Korea policy to engage the country more. [Joong Ang Ilbo]
On August 26, 2015, Korean Central Television (KCTV) aired a program entitled, Let’s Go Forward in Patriotism and Strength in the Forest Restoration Battle. The broadcast criticized several Forest Management Centers, including one in North Hwanghae Province’s Songnim. “They set up sun shades carelessly and then do not even water saplings properly. As a result saplings have become withered and yellow,” the program alleged.
The broadcast went on to a scathing critique of the tree nursery’s poor management: “The spraying equipment also does not properly work […] No more than 30% of the trees are alive […] The soil is overgrown with weeds […] One of the trees still has not sprouted.”
It also condemned the management of the Kangdong County tree nursery. “Because they do not properly conduct fertilizer management and also do not follow water guarantee measures, the saplings turn yellow and wither away. In the vegetable gardens there is so much seaweed that it is difficult to tell whether they are fields of saplings or meadows.”
“The fact that saplings can not grow properly is not due to unfavorable climate conditions but the defeatist and ‘non-owner’ work attitudes of the Forest Management Center workers and tree nursery work groups, who half-heartedly do their work and quit,” the broadcast added. [North Korea Econ Watch]
Why would anyone want the immigration problems that Sweden has?:
A world renowned scholar has called for gender equality improvements in South Korea, saying it lags behind the country’s economic advancement.
In an interview with KBS on Saturday, Swedish medical doctor and statistician Hans Rosling said United Nations’ data proves that South Korea has become an advanced nation comparable to countries like Japan or Sweden.
However, he said that in the area of gender equality, such as birth rate or the percentage of women politicians, South Korea lags behind Sweden by about 50 years.
He said the traditional thinking that women are in charge of childcare and household chores has not caught up with the nation’s economic development.
Rosling also said that accepting immigrants could be a solution to South Korea’s low birth rate and pointed out that more immigrants not only boosts population but also expands social diversity. [KBS World Radio]
Here is what this Swedish scholar wishes to impose on Korea:
Sweden takes in more refugees per capita than any other European country, and immigrants – mainly from the Middle East and Africa – now make up about 16 per cent of the population. The main political parties, as well as the mainstream media, support the status quo. Questioning the consensus is regarded as xenophobic and hateful. Now all of Europe is being urged to be as generous as Sweden.
So how are things working out in the most immigration-friendly country on the planet?
Not so well, says Tino Sanandaji. Mr. Sanandaji is himself an immigrant, a Kurdish-Swedish economist who was born in Iran and moved to Sweden when he was 10. He has a doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago and specializes in immigration issues. This week I spoke with him by Skype.
“There has been a lack of integration among non-European refugees,” he told me. Forty-eight per cent of immigrants of working age don’t work, he said. Even after 15 years in Sweden, their employment rates reach only about 60 per cent. Sweden has the biggest employment gap in Europe between natives and non-natives.
In Sweden, where equality is revered, inequality is now entrenched. Forty-two per cent of the long-term unemployed are immigrants, Mr. Sanandaji said. Fifty-eight per cent of welfare payments go to immigrants. Forty-five per cent of children with low test scores are immigrants. Immigrants on average earn less than 40 per cent of Swedes. The majority of people charged with murder, rape and robbery are either first- or second-generation immigrants. “Since the 1980s, Sweden has had the largest increase in inequality of any country in the OECD,” Mr. Sanandaji said. [Globe and Mail]
Why would anyone in Korea want to sign up for this?
