Word: pyongyang
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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After two years of waiting, South Korean cellist Bong-Ihn Koh ’08 will finally get to play alongside a North Korean orchestra in Pyongyang today...
...shortages have again made North Korea a ward of the international community. At the request of Pyongyang, the World Food Program (WFP) has stepped up its relief effort in recent months. The agency plans to provide food in the coming weeks for more than 6 million North Koreans - about a quarter of the population. In certain parts of the country, particularly the northeast, the situation is "reaching a level of humanitarian emergency," says Jean-Pierre de Margerie, the WFP's country director for North Korea in Pyongyang...
...fertilizer for years, but Seoul has given no aid at all this year. Relations between the two Koreas turned icy after the inauguration earlier this year of South Korean President Lee Myung Bak, who reversed a decade of conciliatory police and linked further economic cooperation to the dismantlement of Pyongyang's nuclear program. Lee has said Seoul would continue to provide humanitarian aid, though Seoul's Ministry of Unification says Pyongyang...
...confusing time. Last month, reports emerged that North Korea's paramount leader, Kim Jong Il, may have suffered a stroke, and he vanished from sight for several weeks. (In early October, North Korean media reported that Kim attended a university soccer match, his first public appearance since August.) Then Pyongyang abruptly backtracked on its agreement with the U.S. and four other countries to dismantle its nuclear program. U.S. negotiator Christopher Hill flew to Pyongyang in an attempt to get the agreement back on track, but his talks with the North Koreans didn't produce a breakthrough. By alienating its neighbors...
...agriculture sector; by this year, the country's shortfall of grain was the worst since 2001. The regime's leadership "would rather have a proportion of their population starve to death" than pursue reform, says Nicholas Eberstadt, a North Korea expert at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. Pyongyang believes market reform "would risk ideological and cultural infiltration, which is how they see the Soviet system going down...