Anju, May 9, 2012

OH KIL NAM’S WIFE, Shin Suk Ja, has died after reportedly being imprisoned in Camp 15 with her daughter. It was Oh’s idea to defect to North Korea, and it’s a grievous moral (and Darwinian) injustice that Shin, who opposed the idea from the start, died for Oh’s stupidity.

DELECTABLE IRONY OF THE YEAR: A Japanese human rights activist searches his country’s archives and finds evidence that one of Kim Jong-Un’s grandparents was a collaborator.

HUMAN RIGHTS WITHOUT FRONTIERS publishes this brief report on North Korea’s rental of laborers to work in exploitative conditions in other countries. (Hat tip.)

NORTH KOREA THREATENS defector for practicing journalism. North Korea was removed from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008. Discuss among yourselves.

I’M NO EXPERT, but this story just has to be bulls**t. This is just too horrible to be true, even in a place like China.

THE ELECTION IS OVER, so I’ll say it: I’m glad Senator Dick Lugar was not reelected. I’ve met Lugar, and it’s true what everyone says about him — he’s nice, but having Lugar as the Senate GOP’s foreign policy dean was tantamount to harmonious one-party rule. That may be why so many Democrats had so much affection for him. But our political system is an adversarial one, which sometimes means that good ideas go to Washington to die, and hopefully, that plenty of terrible ideas also die here. Under Lugar’s leadership, the GOP failed to play its adversarial role on North Korea policy, including those times when it ought to have opposed President Bush. It offered no effective opposition to the agreed frameworks, State’s failure to implement the North Korean Human Rights Act, or the confirmation of Chris Hill. Nor could it advance its own agenda, such as the North Korean Freedom Act and the confirmation of John Bolton.