Tag: North Korea

Otto Warmbier got arrested in North Korea, sentenced to hard labor, and was eventually sent back to the U.S. — comatose. As with many things North Korean, the why and how is speculative at best.

Physicians in South Korea are working to understand the health issues North Korean defectors face, in preparation for eventual reunification.

Our fear of nuclear conflict has more to do with Iron Man and Godzilla than it does Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un.

Interviews with defectors also suggest that North Koreans are not serious consumers of marijuana. The drug of choice is, in fact, something much more pernicious: crystal meth. Meth, known colloquially as eoreum or bingdu (both mean “ice”, a name by which the drug is also known in the US) is a drug unfortunately suited to […]

Margaret Ely is a web producer and reporter for The Washington Post. Maybe I was hungry and saw the word “sushi” in the headline, but I was hooked the moment I started reading Adam Johnson’s bizarre, outlandish story about a Japanese chef who served North Korea’s supreme, “dear leader” Kim Jong-il. While it’s known that […]

Shin In Geun was born into Camp 14, a prison for political enemies of North Korea. His first memories were of executions, and he had come to hate the parents that gave birth to him knowing that their son would also remain a prisoner: The guards taught the children they were prisoners because of the […]

“We all knew there was no hope for anything to get better in North Korea,’’ she told me. “Sometimes we’d say, ‘Hey, if we crossed the river we’d be in China, but there are too many soldiers.’ ’’ Song-hee also knew that, if she crossed the border, she could be picked up by the Chinese […]