Conscience in Unlikely Places

The Myanmar junta released 19 North Korean defectors into Thailand on Wednesday following their arrest in December, a diplomat said Thursday. The 19 North Koreans, including 15 women and a 7-year-old boy, were arrested at the Myanmar-Thai border town of Tarchilek on Dec. 2 while trying to cross into Thailand en route to South Korea, the same source said. [Kyodo News]

It’s hard to understand why that regime, with its bizarre reliance on numerology, does anything. I suspect this doesn’t mean the end of the regime machine-gunning dissident monks. But even the Nazis had the Abwehr. Maybe conscience can persist — for a few — in even the most inhospitable places.