Word: pyongyang
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...month ago, American diplomats, journalists and sundry high-ranking North Korean officials sat together in a concert hall in Pyongyang, listening to the New York Philharmonic orchestra perform for the first time in the communist capital. Television audiences around the globe caught snippets of the televised event and saw a friendlier side to the least understood nation in the world...
...Music Therapy? It was remarkable that there was so much hoopla over whether the New York Philharmonic's performance in Pyongyang could somehow have a lasting effect on relations between North Korea and the civilized world [March 10]. Not quite four decades ago, the U.S. table-tennis team ping-ponged to Peking, enabling Nixon to play the China card against the Soviets, but that only led to nearly two decades of détente. The only effective way to bring about the end of totalitarian regimes is direct confrontation. The U.S.S.R. fell because Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Pope John...
...remarkable that there was so much hoopla over whether the New York Philharmonic's performance in Pyongyang could somehow have a lasting effect on relations between North Korea and the civilized world [March 10]. The Bard declared that what's past is prologue. Not quite four decades ago, the U.S. table-tennis team ping-ponged to Peking, enabling Nixon to play the China card against the Soviets, but that only led to nearly two decades of détente. The only effective way to bring about the end of totalitarian regimes is direct confrontation. The U.S.S.R. fell because Ronald Reagan, Margaret...
...concerns prior to Beijing 2008. The manufacturing economy in China's northeast, home to many state-owned companies, has slowed. "The Chinese already have plenty of surplus labor in that part of the country; they don't need or want any more, and that message has been conveyed to Pyongyang," the diplomat says. Publicly, Beijing insists that all North Korean refugees are "economic migrants" who have no right under international law to enter China illegally. International human rights groups disagree, and say Beijing, as a signatory to the United Nation's protocol on refugees, is obliged to give them safe...
...North Korean government in the past has executed captured refugees, but it does so inconsistently. Pyongyang sends some for extended stays in the country's horrific prisons. Aid groups and people active in the so-called underground railroad, which tries to move refugees into China and eventually to safety in Seoul, say the executions this week were probably meant to deter those fleeing because food is scarce. To North Koreans, the period just before the spring barley harvest is known as "barley hill." In the past, failure to get over the "hill" has meant death by starvation, particularly during...