Search Results for: scarlet

November 15, 2006

Scarlet Fever Outbreak Spreads in N. Korea

South Korea’s official Yonhap news agency is now picking up the story that the Daily NK first reported, and the news isn’t good. Scarlet fever has been spreading fast in North Korea for nearly a month and is showing signs of becoming a full-blown pandemic despite efforts by North Korean authorities to contain the disease, a source close to the North said Wednesday. The disease first broke out in the communist state’s northern Yanggang Province last month, but is quickly...

Categories Human Rights/Inside NK
October 13, 2015

The more North Korea trades, the more it reforms, right? Wrong.

Yesterday, I questioned the premises of economic engagement with Pyongyang — that Pyongyang is socialist, that trade is capitalism, that capitalism inexorably erodes socialism, and that capitalism (least of all, state capitalism) is inherently liberal and peaceful. I argued that Pyongyang adopted state capitalism decades ago, and that it has grown steadily more menacing and repressive ever since. It feigns socialism to feed our false hopes of reform and arguments against sanctions, to tempt investors, to recruit apologists who embrace its socialist pretenses, and to justify the...

Categories Border Control/Capitalism/Censorship/Class Warfare/Engagement
September 28, 2015

A guerrilla health care system for North Korea’s poor

Gullible leftists and U.N. nincompoops who take North Korea’s claims of socialist equality at face value love to bleat about the wonders of its free universal health care, but those bleats have little basis in reality. A 2010 study by Amnesty International found that Pyongyang provides less for the care of its non-elite citizens per capita than almost any other nation on earth: The North Korean government has failed to adequately address the country’s ongoing food shortages since the 1990s....

Categories Health & Disease
October 3, 2013

Sanctions are working in Iran. They’ll work better against North Korea, and here’s why.

Drag a modest grant check through DuPont Circle and you’ll accumulate at least ten pundits, several dozen grad students, and a multitude of assorted kooks who would willingly write you an academic paper entitled, “Why Sanctions Never Worked.” And that’s true, except for South Africa, Yugoslavia, Burma, Nauru, Al Qaeda, Iran, and North Korea, and only if you limit the argument to trade sanctions and exclude other tools of economic pressure, like coordinated divestment, third-party financial sanctions like those in Section...

Categories Axis of Evil/Iran/Money Laundering/Sanctions
October 1, 2013

I can’t wait to read this one: “Treasury’s War,” by Juan Zarate

I wonder if Amazon can deliver this while I still have an unexpected windfall of leisure time: Zarate, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, plays the role of the bureaucrat. He joined the Treasury Department just weeks before the 2001 attacks to aid the agency’s enforcement wing. [….] Treasury launched its most ambitious assault with this new weapon on a tiny bank in Macau. That bank, Banco Delta Asia (BDA), caught the department’s attention in...

Categories Books & Films/Money Laundering/Sanctions
May 1, 2010

The Head of the World Health Organization Bears May Day Greetings from Pyongyang! (Update: No Signs of Obesity There!)

It could have been worse, I suppose, had I awakened this morning to the clatter of panzerkampfwagens rolling through the D.C. suburbs blaring the Horst Wessel Lied from loudspeakers. But if the prospect of the U.N. as Government of Earth horrifies you any less, get a load of what Margaret Chan, the head of the World Health Organization, holds up as the very model of a peachy health care system: UN health agency chief Margaret Chan said on Friday after...

Categories "United" Nations/Fiskings/Useful Idiocy
January 26, 2008

Jane’s: N. Korean Regime Near Collapse

[Update: Digg it here] [Update 2: A reader points out that Reuben F. Johnson is the source of both the Weekly Standard and Jane’s stories. I admit that I’m not familiar with Johnson’s work, but when a story comes with specifics, it’s more persuasive than when it comes without.] Kim Jong-Il’s regime could collapse within six months, bringing chaos to North Korea, observers and intelligence sources in Asia have told Jane’s. [. . . .] I know, I know: saying...

Categories Uncategorized
December 10, 2007

Drug-Resistant TB Hits N. Korea

I’ve previously explained my conflicted feelings about the Eugene Bell Foundation, but I would rate their reporting about the spread of disease inside North Korea as fairly reliable. A friend (thank you) passed along an e-mail message/ press release meant to recruit support for an EBF trip to North Korea. It contained this alarming news: [C]ountermeasures are urgently needed for the recent increase of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) patients in North Korea. After years of visiting and providing TB medicines...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Inside NK
September 18, 2007

Chaos Conquers North Korea

I had really wanted to publish  a Q&A with Professor Andrei Lankov this morning, but since Yahoo’s e-mail service has gone from bad to worse, it’s simply not possible for me to even open up my e-mail to pull up his responses.  So spread the word:  Yahoo! mail stinks.  Meanwhile, there’s a wave of fresh evidence, most of it via the Daily NK, to support Lankov’s thesis that North Korea can’t control the spread of chaos  or the erosion of...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Inside NK/NK Economics
March 24, 2007

Anju Links for 3/24: Another Stolen Life, More Measles in N. Korea, Cowardly Capital, and the Diplomacy of Blame

*   Doina Bumbea, artist, 1950-1997.    From this photo, it’s  almost as if she could foresee the tragedy of her own  life. The circumstantial proof seems strong, though  not conclusive, that the  North Koreans lured  Doina from  Bucharest  to Japan and kidnapped her for the use of U.S. Army deserter James Dresnok,  who by all accounts is an utterly comtemptible person.  But  Doina’s family, which didn’t know what happened to her for all these years, seems convinced.  And there’s...

Categories Abductions/Diplomacy/Famine & Food Aid/Money Laundering/Six-Party Talks/WMD
January 16, 2007

Pandemic Strikes Chongjin, North Korea’s Fourth-Largest City

Previous posts on the spreading pandemic here, beginning last October.  Yonhap, quoting unnamed sources and the NGO Good Friends, tells us that things have gotten worse, and that the largest city in North Korea’s northeast faces outbreaks of several deadly diseases: Four infectious diseases have stricken a North Korean city on the east coast, affecting up to 4,000 people, a source claimed Monday. “Chongjin is overrun by scarlet fever, typhoid, typhus and paratyphoid. About 3,000 to 4,000 are suffering from...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Inside NK
October 30, 2006

Epidemic in North Korea?

Several days ago, a well-informed contact asked me whether I had heard rumors of a new disease spreading rapidly in northeastern North Korea, in the vicinity of Camp 22.  I hadn’t.  The rumor — I emphasize it was unverified and described to me as such — was that this was a made-in-the-lab germ  that had spread from one of the concentration camps in the vicinity to the  population on the outside.  It all sounded a bit conspiratorial to me, until...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Inside NK