Tag: North Korea

You would think she should just be happy she has refuge in the United States after being part of the Kim regime’s inner circle and would want to keep a low profile:

The US-based aunt of North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un filed a defamation suit in South Korea on Wednesday against three defectors from her reclusive homeland.

Ko Yong-Suk, who looked after Kim for years when he was at school in Switzerland, said the three defectors, who escaped the North and settled in South Korea in the 1990s, were guilty of repeatedly “spreading false information” about her and her family.

Ko took asylum in the United States in 1998 with her husband, and the suit was filed on her behalf by her Seoul-based lawyer, Kang Yong-Seok.

The younger sister of Kim’s mother, who died in France in 2004, Ko is seeking a total of 60 million won ($51,900) for remarks the defectors made on South Korean TV talk shows between 2013 and 2014.

Kang said the defamation allegations covered claims that Ko once managed a secret fund for Kim’s late father, Kim Jong-Il, that her father collaborated during Japan’s 1910-45 colonial rule over the Korean peninsula and that she had plastic surgery after defecting to the US.

“The defectors made groundless remarks without really knowing about her life,” the lawyer told AFP.  [AFP via reader tip]

You can read the rest at the link.

https://twitter.com/freekorea_us/status/671150640698155008

Can you imagine a whole country of people with Kim Jong-un haircuts?  Well that is reportedly what the Kim regime is trying to do:

North Korean officials are ordering young men to keep their hair short and are enforcing their tonsorial diktat if they find anyone who fails to comply.

A source in Pyongyang last week said authorities have issued an order requiring men to keep their hair no longer than 2 cm, while women are required to keep their hair bobbed. “University student monitors are walking around with scissors and cutting off the hair of offenders,” the source said.

Young men have been told to model their hairstyle on North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, whose eccentric hairdo is known in the North as the “ambitious” style, where the sides and back of the head are almost clean shaven and only the top is left. [Chosun Ilbo]

You can read the rest at the link.

This really should not come as much of a surprise since the vast majority of North Korean defectors are women and when they arrive in the South they have few job skills to make a living with.  Turning towards prostitution to make ends meet is something that women with financial issues have done for centuries.  Additionally many of these North Korean women had to turn to prostitution while refugees in China in order to make money to get to South Korea in the first place:

A considerable number of female defectors from North Korea have become sex workers here after experiencing difficulties adjusting to life in the South, according to media reports.

KBS, a state-run broadcaster, aired a program on Sunday night about the plight of some 40 to 50 female defectors who work at “ticket dabangs,” coffee shops that illegally sell sex, in Hwaseong, Gyeonggi Province. Some of these places are owned by North Korean defectors.

The women are usually in their late 30s to mid 40s. The clients, mostly in their 50s to 70s, are not only residents of Hwaseong, but travel to the town from other regions.

The women spend time with clients in karaoke and go to motel rooms with them as well as delivering coffee, which is the ostensible business activity.

A female defector told the program that each client pays 25,000 won ($22) per hour for singing together in karaoke rooms. Another woman asked for a more than 100,000 won to provide sexual services when a member of the production crew disguised as a client contacted her.

It was already known that ticket dabangs recruiting female North Korean defectors are also prevalent in Yongin, Gyeonggi Province.

The women said that they used to work at normal companies or work as waitresses in restaurants after they defected, but their monthly salaries of some 1.3 to 1.7 million won was not enough to maintain their livelihood and support their family members left behind in the North. [Korea Times]

You can read more at the link.

https://twitter.com/freekorea_us/status/671022731182362625

North Korea fails to launch ballistic missile from submarine: official https://t.co/SiJaZKcabj @korea_observer 님이 공유

— The Korea Observer (@koreaobserver) November 28, 2015

Sour note lifted in kimchi war as North Korea gets taste of victory at UN: https://t.co/DcBFL5aXcr via @GuardianNK

— NK NEWS (@nknewsorg) November 24, 2015

It has already been 5 years since North Korea’s deadly artillery shelling of Yeonpyeong Island which the Kim regime has never taken responsibility for:

South Korea’s Marine Corps held a live-fire drill in the Yellow Sea on Monday, as the country marked the fifth anniversary of North Korea’s shelling of Yeonpyeong Island.

The live-fire exercise, which mobilized K-9 self-propelled artillery launchers, was held despite warnings from North Korea on Sunday that it would react “mercilessly” if the South pushed ahead with the scheduled drill near the tense maritime border.

Monday marked the fifth anniversary of the Yeonpyeong Island shelling, which was North Korea’s first attack on South Korean soil since the 1950-53 Korean War. The bombardment of shells left two Marines and two civilians dead and further froze inter-Korean relations under the Lee Myung-bak government, which had accused the North of torpedoing the Cheonan warship in the Yellow Sea eight months earlier. The North denies responsibility for the sinking, which killed 46 sailors.  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read the rest at the link.

https://twitter.com/freekorea_us/status/667497111953481728

Long-read about the Ohio man held in North Korea for planting a bible. @atavistmag https://t.co/hE3GwOow8n

— Alastair Gale (@AlastairGale) November 18, 2015