Former U.S. basketball superstar Dennis Rodman has traveled to North Korea to help film a television show and engage in an unlikely cultural exchange in the Stalinist country.
Rodman and several members of the Harlem Globetrotters basketball team also plan to hold a series of basketball camps for North Korean children during the weeklong visit.
After landing in Pyongyang on Tuesday, the eccentric Rodman said he was just looking forward to "having some fun" in the notoriously closed state.
"It's my first time [to visit North Korea]. I think it's most of these guys' first time. So hopefully everything will be okay, and I hope the kids have a good time for the game," Rodman told reporters.
The U.S.-based Vice media group, which is leading the group, billed the trip as a "basketball diplomacy" mission. It said in a press release the visit will include activities aimed at encouraging "openness and better relations with the outside world."
Vice said the mission may also include a "top-level scrimmage" to be attended by Kim Jong Un, the young North Korean leader who took power following the death of his father in 2011. The event could not be confirmed.
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A White House official made two secret visits to North Korea last year in an unsuccessful effort to improve relations after new ruler Kim Jong Un assumed power, according to former U.S. officials familiar with the trips.Frankly, I think part of the problem right there is that this kind of thing will work only if it involves stroking the new North Korean leader's ego. You'd have to send at least a former President like Bill Clinton or Secretary of State, or possibly former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, in order to get them to consider any kind of significant change in stance (and even then you can't trust much of what they promise).
The brief visits in April and August were aimed at encouraging the new leadership to moderate its foreign policy after the death of Kim's father, longtime autocrat Kim Jong Il, in December 2011.
The ruling elite apparently spurned the outreach effort, however. This month, after a surge of fierce anti-U.S. rhetoric, the government in Pyongyang defied international warnings and conducted its third and most powerful underground nuclear test.
The former U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the back-channel trips have not been formally disclosed, said the first visit was an unsuccessful attempt to persuade Pyongyang not to launch a long-range rocket.
North Korea carried out the launch April 12. The missile flew only a few minutes before it exploded and crashed into the sea. A subsequent test of another long-range rocket in December was successful.
The April trip was led by Joseph DeTrani, a North Korea expert who then headed the National Counter Proliferation Center in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which coordinates U.S. intelligence agencies, the former U.S. officials said. It was unclear who led the August trip.
They said Sydney Seiler, who is in charge of Korea policy at the National Security Council, went on both trips. Seiler, a veteran CIA analyst, speaks fluent Korean. He could not be reached for comment.
The White House, State Department and CIA have refused to confirm or deny the 2012 trips, which occurred during the U.S. presidential election season.
The woman’s death is part of one of South Korea’s grimmest statistics: the number of people 65 and older committing suicide, which has nearly quadrupled in recent years, making the country’s rate of such deaths among the highest in the developed world. The epidemic is the counterpoint to the nation’s runaway economic success, which has worn away at the Confucian social contract that formed the bedrock of Korean culture for centuries.As I've written many times before, the most egregious characteristic of suicide in South Korea is how it is widely acceptable as a noble exit, and is rapidly becoming "normative" and even seen as an act of bravery. It's already true among many of South Korea's overwhelmed students, and it may become the same among the elderly at the top of South Korea's inverted population pyramid.
That contract was built on the premise that parents would do almost anything to care for their children — in recent times, depleting their life savings to pay for a good education — and then would end their lives in their children’s care. No Social Security system was needed. Nursing homes were rare.
But as South Korea’s hard-charging younger generations joined an exodus from farms to cities in recent decades, or simply found themselves working harder in the hypercompetitive environment that helped drive the nation’s economic miracle, their parents were often left behind. Many elderly people now live out their final years poor, in rural areas with the melancholy feel of ghost towns.
Such social shifts are not uncommon in the industrialized world. But the sudden change has proved especially wrenching in South Korea, where parents view their sacrifices as the equivalent of a pension plan and where those who are suffering are falling victim to changes they themselves helped unleash as they rebuilt the economy from the devastation of the Korean War.
“The family was always an extended self,” said Park Ji-young, a professor of social welfare at Sangji University in Wonju. “Children were everything they had for their future — for health care, financial support and a comfortable life in old age. Their children’s success was their success.”
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At home and abroad, China has long been regarded as North Korea’s best friend, but at home that sense of fraternity appears to be souring as ordinary people express anxiety about possible fallout from the test last Tuesday. The fact that North Korea detonated the device on a special Chinese holiday did not sit well, either.But will this translate into anything? I'd like to remind everyone that Chinese people don't actually vote for their leaders, who can still do pretty much whatever they want. The question is when will those leaders themselves start to see the danger of North Korea's brinkmanship?
Among Chinese officials, the mood toward the young North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, has also darkened. The Chinese government is reported by analysts to be wrestling with what to do about a man who, in power for a little more than a year, thumbed his nose at China by ignoring its appeals not to conduct the country’s third nuclear test, and who shows no gratitude for China’s largess as the main supplier of oil and food.
“The public does not want China to be the only friend of an evil regime, and we’re not even recognized by North Korea as a friend,” said Jin Qiangyi, director of the Center for North and South Korea Studies at Yanbian University in Yanji City. “For the first time the Chinese government has felt the pressure of public opinion not to be too friendly with North Korea.”
Why should we care at all if North Korea keeps shooting off missiles and blowing up its nuclear arsenal deep in its own tunnels? We should be applauding this, because it means that they are using up all of their weapons in a bid to get our attention.... and mockery:
North Korea's preparing for a third nuclear test, supposedly. And I say let 'em! Then taunt them that we thought that was just a bunch of TNT detonated in a mine shaft, so they'll detonate another one to prove us wrong. Lather, rinse, repeat, and eventually all their nukes will be gone. I should be president.The nukes are also a bid to get our attention as well as our food aid (and this is what we should do with tyrant temper tantrums aimed at getting our attention).
What we don't know is the size of the device. We don't know the material from which the devise was made. In fact, we don't even know definitively that this was larger than the previous two tests. It probably was. But it would take some time for the seismologists to estimate the yield accurately. ...If North Korea really can miniaturize a nuke, it might be time to recycle this old post about what would happen if a nuke were detonated in central Seoul, i.e., my house.
I think the test today marks a quantitative change. And it demonstrates that Pyongyang is moving along its arc of developing nuclear weapons that can threaten the United States. It already has ballistic missiles that can threaten the region. And if it can fit a nuclear warhead onto those, then it can directly threaten some of its neighbors. But it doesn't mark a fundamentally new departure. North Korea has already tested two nuclear weapons. It's tested plenty of missiles. Today marks an intensification of the threat, rather than a fundamental change in the nature of the threat.
The Department of Homeland Security’s civil rights watchdog has concluded that travelers along the nation’s borders may have their electronics seized and the contents of those devices examined for any reason whatsoever — all in the name of national security.Got that? Denying their ability to search without reasonable suspicion harms their operations without providing any real benefit to our own civil rights or civil liberties. (Says who?!)
The DHS, which secures the nation’s border, in 2009 announced that it would conduct a “Civil Liberties Impact Assessment” of its suspicionless search-and-seizure policy pertaining to electronic devices “within 120 days.” More than three years later, the DHS office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties published a two-page executive summary of its findings.
“We also conclude that imposing a requirement that officers have reasonable suspicion in order to conduct a border search of an electronic device would be operationally harmful without concomitant civil rights/civil liberties benefits,” the executive summary said. [bold-faced emphasis mine]
The memo highlights the friction between today’s reality that electronic devices have become virtual extensions of ourselves housing everything from e-mail to instant-message chats to photos and our papers and effects — juxtaposed against the government’s stated quest for national security.
The President George W. Bush administration first announced the suspicionless, electronics search rules in 2008. The President Barack Obama administration followed up with virtually the same rules a year later. Between 2008 and 2010, 6,500 persons had their electronic devices searched along the U.S. border, according to DHS data.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.That a person's iPhone, camera, computer, etc., is part of their "papers and effects" is far clearer than what a "well-regulated militia" is.
But even more upsetting are the shots taken in Namibia, in which a black man is a prop. A black model was also shot in the African country, but when the magazine used the man as a prop, they used a white model, for contrast. Photographing Emily DiDonato against the country's stunning sands wasn't enough. A half-naked native makes the shot seem more exotic — even though Namibia is a country with a capital city where there are shopping malls and people, you know, who wear Western clothes. Also: People are not props.Not that that excuses anything on the Korean side (just so we're clear). You've been warned.
Africa has long been portrayed as a place of uncivilized, primitive people, despite the fact that it is a very diverse continent with an epic diaspora and considered the birthplace of civilization. From Morocco to Côte d'Ivoire to Ethiopia to Egypt and Nigeria, no one African country is like another. But these shots tap into the West's past obsession/fetishization with so-called savages, jungle comics and the like. Again: In a visit to seven continents, this image is what Sports Illustrated is using to represent the continent of Africa. A model holding a fucking spear.
Questions: Who is this man? Was he cast? Was he paid? Does he know his ass is in glossy print, all over the United States right now?
Last week, we picked Napa cabbage in the garden. Now, we're using it to make kimchi in the kitchen. Make it at home: pic.twitter.com/Y0L7dASZThe attached picture even includes a simple recipe:
Apple alone claimed 70% of the cellphone industry's total worldwide profit of $16 billion, while Samsung had 25%, according to a report released late Thursday night by Counterpoint Technology Market Research.Given that Samsung is a major components supplier for Apple's smartphones, that arguably makes the South Korean tech behemoth the predominant player. Sure, Apple's still the
In third place was Nokia with 2%. That left the remaining 3% to be split by about 300 companies.
"Apple has essentially created the smartphone sector as we see it today and its combination of beautiful, easy-to-use products coupled with a rich content and application environment has enabled it to attract outsize profits," Couterpoint Research said in its report. "Only Samsung has come close to replicating this success."
The two leaders' shares of the profit pool are up from sharply from 2011, when Apple had 51% of industry earnings, followed by Samsung with 15% and Nokia with 12%, Counterpoint said.
In 2010, Apple had 43% while Nokia had 20% and Samsung had 16%.
