Word: ling
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Enter the Hostages But Washington's desire to isolate the North has been complicated by Pyongyang's June 8 sentencing of two Americans to 12 years of hard labor. Euna Lee, 36, and Laura Ling, 32, were filming a report for Current TV, a San Francisco - based network co-founded by former Vice President Al Gore, on North Korean refugees in China. They were working near the border city of Dandong in northeastern China when they were arrested on March 17. The two were convicted of illegal entry into North Korea - accounts differ as to whether the women inadvertently crossed...
...Laura Ling and Euna Lee, the American journalists who were each handed 12 years in prison yesterday by a North Korean court for committing "hostile acts" by allegedly overstepping the border in March, have received a harsh sentence by Western standards of justice. The news is grim, to be sure. But former prisoners in Pyongyang's horrific penal system speculate that the pair may not have to endure the grimmest conditions, which very few have emerged to talk about...
...Some say the same whims that informed their long sentence could work in the favor of Ling and Lee, who were reporting for Al Gore's Current TV when they were detained. North Korean activists like Seoul-based Kim Sang Hun, who has interviewed nearly two dozen former prisoners, says the journalists "won't see the real conditions" in the North's prison system because even Pyongyang knows the situation in the country's penal system is something to be ashamed of - a humiliating condition that the Americans would only bear witness to once they were released. Kim thinks...
...These stories come from North Korean survivors who did not have the potential advantage of the world's attention as they served out their long and difficult sentences. Lee and Ling have the Obama Administration moving on their behalf; the White House has already urged North Korea to release them "on humanitarian grounds." Sources knowledgeable about North Korean politics and prisons say Pyongyang will not allow the high-profile prisoners to starve to death, die of disease or endure torture. Small comfort. In any case, since their detention in March, the journalists have been visited by representatives of Sweden...
...nightmare that began on March 17 for the two American journalists kidnapped by the North Koreans along the Chinese border got worse on Monday: Euna Lee, 36 and the mother of a 4-year-old, and Laura Ling, 32, were each sentenced to 12 years in prison by North Korea's highest court. Their crime: illegal entry into the country and "hostile acts." The sentence - "reform through labor" - raises the prospect that the two could be sent into North Korea's notorious system for political prisoners - the so-called kwan li so, which are infamous for their mistreatment of prisoners...