Word: hermit
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...North Korea HIGH WATER, RISING TENSIONS North Korea marked its 61st anniversary Sept. 9 by vowing to "mercilessly annihilate the U.S. imperialists" in response to any aggression, just days after Pyongyang announced its continued pursuit of a uranium-enrichment program. The hermit state also opened a dam on the Imjin River without warning on Sept. 6, sending 40 million tons of water across the border into South Korea, where six people were swept away. Seoul has demanded an apology, calling the North's excuses for releasing the water "not acceptable...
...vaunted reputation as the world's "Hermit Kingdom" - the ostensibly inscrutable nation that leaves the outside world guessing about what goes on inside its borders - North Korea can also be predictable. Since at least the early 1990s, Pyongyang's relations and level of engagement with its neighbors and with Washington have swung wildly from outright hostility toward rapprochement and back again. No matter how tense things get, Kim Jong Il (like his father Kim Il Sung before him) always steps back from the ledge and tries to re-engage...
...hard labor all over the world, including in Palestine (for collaborating with Israel) and Gambia (for criticizing the President). When President Bill Clinton recently negotiated a pardon for two Current TV journalists who crossed the border into North Korea, he spared them an ordeal many don't survive. The Hermit Kingdom's prison camps, which experts say contain up to 200,000 inhabitants, are considered among the world's worst, replete with grueling physical labor, paltry rations and a lack of medical attention. Analysts estimate half of all prisoners do not survive the first year...
...despite its backward image, the so-called Hermit Kingdom could have pulled it off. Though Pyongyang may have few resources, it spends a lot of them on technology: computer studies are an important part of school and university curriculums. Stratfor's Baker points out that North Korea has become a major player in the computer-animation industry, which means it has banks of highly sophisticated computers, and people who know how to use them. North Korean hackers have in the past, for instance, launched more sophisticated attacks that actually penetrated South Korean sites. (See the 50 best websites...
...That may not seem all that surprising for such a closed society as North Korea's, now locked in a heated standoff with the West over both its nuclear-weapons program and its jailing of two U.S. reporters. But even amid those tensions, the Hermit Kingdom is trying to stimulate its dire economic fortunes by slowly opening its economy to foreign business - and the lack of convenient cell-phone service has emerged as a major irritant, especially for the hundreds of Chinese firms active there, which make up the largest group of foreign investors. Those investors now actually have...