Word: pyongyang
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...Some South Koreans place at least part of the blame for the deteriorating North-South relationship on their own conservative President. Lee's two predecessors pursued an agenda of engagement with Pyongyang called the "sunshine policy," in which Seoul gave North Korea aid and investment - including the development of an industrial park just north of the border - in the hopes of defusing tensions. The "sunshine policy" produced two North-South summits - in 2000 and 2007 - but Pyongyang offered Seoul no meaningful concessions in return for its help. Upon taking office last year, Lee changed course and linked further economic cooperation...
...years, we've been giving them things and now that they're not getting it, they're acting up," says Youn Bong Sug, 57. "If we give, they should know how to be grateful. The nature of those people is rotten." Some in Seoul have become annoyed that Pyongyang continued to spend money on its weapons programs even as South Korea donated large amounts of fertilizer and food to its much poorer Northern brethren. "What we're unhappy with is the fact that even if we send them aid, they don't use it for their people and instead spend...
...Malnourishment and beatings are common," says Kang Chol Hwan, author of The Aquariums of Pyongyang, his account of the 10 years he spent as a prisoner in the North (Hwan's grandfather and other family members were also arrested by the security police in North Korea for "crimes" never delineated). The American journalists, employed by Current TV, a San Francisco-based TV network founded by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, were filming a report about North Korean refugees in China when they were seized by North Korean agents along the border between the two countries. The U.S. government immediately...
...Though Americans will wake up this morning shocked by the harshness of the verdict, they shouldn't be. This is, sadly, business as usual for the North. The regime in Pyongyang is nothing if not a Mafia state - a family-run dynasty that funds itself in part through a variety of illicit businesses, such as illegal arms sales and counterfeiting U.S. currency. For decades, international kidnapping has been in its playbook. (See pictures of North Korea's secrets and lies at LIFE.com...
...Pyongyang admitted what many in Japan had been saying for years - that it had systematically kidnapped Japanese citizens in the 1970s and '80s, using them to train its spies, who were then filtered back into Japan. Kim Jong Il said at a 2002 summit meeting with then Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi that the North had seized 12 Japanese citizens (though he also said to Koizumi that he himself was unaware of the program), including, most infamously, 13-year-old Megumi Yokota, who was abducted on the way home from school in Niigata, on the northwestern Japanese coast. Kim had hoped...