Anju, April 6, 2012

TEAR DOWN THIS WALL: It’s too bad almost no one reported it at the time he said it:

“The day all Koreans yearn for will not come easily or without great sacrifice, but make no mistake, it will come,” Obama said. “And when it does, when it does, change will unfold that once seemed impossible. And checkpoints will open, and watchtowers will stand empty, and families long separated will finally be reunited, and the Korean people at long last will be whole and free.” [NPR]

NPR’s report doesn’t clarify where President Obama was when he said this, which may be part of why so few reporters found this dramatic enough to be newsworthy. If he’d said it with the DMZ and a bullet-proof shield as a backdrop, it probably would have gotten more attention. But it’s a good start.

AP WATCH: David Guttenfelder has more “exclusive” pictures of propaganda monuments at the Potemkim Village of Samjiyon, near Mount Paektu. The pictures are visually pretty, but they don’t tell us anything that we couldn’t have gleaned from KCNA, Naenara, or any other North Korean propaganda outfit. The AP has consistently represented that Guttenfelder’s pictures reveal what ordinary life is like in North Korea — which they do, for a tiny unrepresentative elite. Now try this experiment on Google Earth: go to 41 degrees, 48 minutes north by 128 degrees, 19 minutes east, and see for yourself if there’s a single town or village within a 50-mile radius that looks even remotely as modern, clean, or prosperous as Samjiyon. Despite its obvious limitations, Google Earth will tell you more about what daily life is really like in North Korea than the AP will.

COINCIDENTALLY, THE SAME COUNTRIES that stall and then violate every sanctions resolution against North Korea are the same ones that gave it its missile technology:

[T]his is where the experts Security Clearance spoke to disagree. Vick said the upper stage of the Taepodong-2 has a very different ancestry. “The third stage is of Chinese origin,” he said. “The third stage is actually a Chinese solid motor surrounded by shrouds.” Whatever the origin, that upper stage has never worked. Referring to the 2009 launch, Wright said, “As far as we can tell, the third stage simply didn’t fire and fell into the ocean with the second stage.”

The two experts agree that the second stage of the Taepodong-2 missile comes from the SSN-6. “The second stage, from the size and the way it operated, was essentially one of these SSN-6 Soviet missiles,” Wright said. “We have some good photos of this launch vehicle that the North Koreans provided; it has the right size and shape. If you do some of the computer modeling that we’ve done, it has some of the performance you would expect of the Soviet missile.” [CNN]

Much more here.

THEY’RE IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS, THEN:

An unnamed source who said he was a school friend of Kim said that Pak Un — as Kim was known there — often did not show up at school until afternoon, preferring instead to play video games or watch basketball on television.

His grades seemed to suffer accordingly. According to the report, he failed science and got minimum pass grades in English and German, the main language used in the Swiss capital of Bern, but did well in music and technical studies. [MSNBC]