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Dennis Halpin, a senior aide to Rep. Henry Hyde, Chairman of the House International Relations Committee, was kind enough to submit a second essay for publication here. Dennis has somewhere around three decades of experience as a diplomat in Asia or as a senior staffer in Congress, where he’s widely regarded as a resident expert. He was also a major force behind the North Korean Human Rights Act. It’s long, thoughtful, and well-researched piece–a must-read for anyone who wants to...

Thanks to a friend from DailyNK for inviting me to last night’s meeting to the Korea Club. The bad news is that everything there, including remarks by the featured speaker, U.S. Special Envoy to the Six-Party Talks, Ambassador Joseph DiTrani, was off-the-record, and I’m going to keep my word and respect that. The good news is that what I learned will still be useful here, because it will open up new sources of information all of us, and more importantly,...

Dennis Halpin, a senior aide to Rep. Henry Hyde, Chairman of the House International Relations Committee, was kind enough to submit a second essay for publication here. Dennis has somewhere around three decades of experience as a diplomat in Asia or as a senior staffer in Congress, where he’s widely regarded as a resident expert. He was also a major force behind the North Korean Human Rights Act. It’s long, thoughtful, and well-researched piece–a must-read for anyone who wants to...

Dennis Halpin, a senior aide to Rep. Henry Hyde, Chairman of the House International Relations Committee, was kind enough to submit a second essay for publication here. Dennis has somewhere around three decades of experience as a diplomat in Asia or as a senior staffer in Congress, where he’s widely regarded as a resident expert. He was also a major force behind the North Korean Human Rights Act. It’s long, thoughtful, and well-researched piece–a must-read for anyone who wants to...

Here’s how I’m commemorating Kwangju this week. I’m going to talk about people we can still save, like these people, just to name a few million: The head of the World Food Programme’s North Korea mission told the BBC that without new contributions famine-like conditions would be likely to reappear. How dare I? For starters, South Korea is already a democracy, and like every case where the good guys won, there’s seldom anywhere to go from there but down. Not...

Lately, I’ve been researching some of the different death toll figures for the North Korean famine–the one that peaked in the 1990’s, continues to this day, and which the WFP now says is threatening to reemerge. Here’s a summary: The most often-cited estimate of the death toll is two million. A 1999 CNN report estimated that by then, the famine had already killed two million people. The North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004 includes a toll of two million...

I know–that’s me, Mister Sensitivity. Spare me. If Korea expects to be treated like a mature nation, it will eventually have to accept some responsibility for the triggers pulled by its own hands rather than perpetually fighting over which group of foreigners should have restrained them. Is today’s fratricide equally destined to be tomorrow’s tortured projection of blame? When a far larger number of preventable deaths is not even on Korea’s moral radar screen, why should anyone accept Korea’s protestations...

This has to be a hoax; it’s just too much like this to be true.

Here’s how I’m commemorating Kwangju this week. I’m going to talk about people we can still save, like these people, just to name a few million: The head of the World Food Programme’s North Korea mission told the BBC that without new contributions famine-like conditions would be likely to reappear. How dare I? For starters, South Korea is already a democracy, and like every case where the good guys won, there’s seldom anywhere to go from there but down. Not...

Here’s how I’m commemorating Kwangju this week. I’m going to talk about people we can still save, like these people, just to name a few million: The head of the World Food Programme’s North Korea mission told the BBC that without new contributions famine-like conditions would be likely to reappear. How dare I? For starters, South Korea is already a democracy, and like every case where the good guys won, there’s seldom anywhere to go from there but down. Not...

Lately, I’ve been researching some of the different death toll figures for the North Korean famine–the one that peaked in the 1990’s, continues to this day, and which the WFP now says is threatening to reemerge. Here’s a summary: The most often-cited estimate of the death toll is two million. A 1999 CNN report estimated that by then, the famine had already killed two million people. The North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004 includes a toll of two million...

I know–that’s me, Mister Sensitivity. Spare me. If Korea expects to be treated like a mature nation, it will eventually have to accept some responsibility for the triggers pulled by its own hands rather than perpetually fighting over which group of foreigners should have restrained them. Is today’s fratricide equally destined to be tomorrow’s tortured projection of blame? When a far larger number of preventable deaths is not even on Korea’s moral radar screen, why should anyone accept Korea’s protestations...

This has to be a hoax; it’s just too much like this to be true.

The New York Channel: Whatever the thinking behind our preference for multilateral talks over bilateral ones, it certainly is looking more like a pretense than ever.

This Just In! Shock in the Chosun Ilbo newsroom as Joseph DiTrani suggests that he may comply with an act of Congress (signed last November, btw). Can you believe it–the effontery of bring up human rights to the North Koreans? Will the madness ever stop?

The New York Channel: Whatever the thinking behind our preference for multilateral talks over bilateral ones, it certainly is looking more like a pretense than ever.

This Just In! Shock in the Chosun Ilbo newsroom as Joseph DiTrani suggests that he may comply with an act of Congress (signed last November, btw). Can you believe it–the effontery of bring up human rights to the North Koreans? Will the madness ever stop?

James Lileks on Berlin. Understand America? You can’t understand the world without understanding the history of New York. It’s not the only city one should study, of course. I mean, there’s Berlin. (“And on this site in 1932, chalk-faced Communists premiered a musical devoted to exposing the horrors of the international rubber trade.) I’ll resist the overpowering temptation to add anything other than the fact that I don’t agree with his major premise about New York. Lileks isn’t God, but...