Word: seoul
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...most recent anti-South probe began in September, after authorities caught a group of students in a university computer lab watching a new South Korean disaster film, Haeundae, according to the North Korean Intellectuals Solidarity (NKIS), the Seoul-based defectors' organization that Myung now manages. The group says it learned of the arrests from an antigovernment cell at a North Korean university, which they regularly contact to gather information from inside the hermit state. Inspection teams have also been purging border cities where the movies are smuggled in, and even executing some smugglers in public as a warning, according...
...Myung Chul Jin, 43, a recently defected North Korean living in Seoul, it hasn't been an easy year. The government executed his uncle last year for subversion against the state, the former police commander says, and his constant worry for his family still living in the North sends his gaze to the floor of his office in Seoul. But there were good times in Pyongyang too: evenings with friends when they watched smuggled South Korean soap operas and American films like Superman Returns and Titanic. "North Koreans love foreign dramas," says Myung, using an alias to protect his family...
...relaxed sentences for offenders who only do the latter. Ten years ago, that particular crime carried a sentence of five years in a prison camp; today, enemy-propaganda watchers are usually handed a sentence of three months or less of unpaid labor, according to two refugees in Seoul. The shift may not have been an ideological one: Myung, who served in the North Korean police just last year, says that the regime made the decision because it couldn't afford to send so many people to prison camps. (See rare pictures from inside North Korea...
...officers to escape labor sentences, and sometimes even give officers the bootleg to watch themselves. "I used to believe strongly what the government told us - that foreign films are crazy and violent. We used to be terrified of watching South Korean dramas," says one North Korean university student in Seoul, who remains sympathetic to the regime. "But I've opened my mind." At least one student under investigation has lobbied authorities to legalize foreign films with no political message, according to a newsletter by the defectors' group...
...Global Reach Perhaps only Michael Jackson could command premieres around the world, from the main event in Los Angeles to London to Seoul. All told, there will be 33 premieres, with 16 synched to begin at the same time and eight featuring a satellite feed showing red-carpet arrivals from the gala in Los Angeles. The numbers are staggering even to folks used to marquee-name statistics. Vivian Mayer-Siskind, who worked in the marketing department at Summit Entertainment for the launch of that other worldwide obsession Twilight, says she's impressed. "Michael Jackson is of a level that...