Orphaned and homeless: Surviving the streets of North Korea

One day, her mother told her she had somewhere to go. “She never came back,” Yoon Hee said.

Yoon Hee had no choice but to live alone in North Korea. So she did what many abandoned North Korean children do — living on the streets, nearly freezing to death in the winters, begging for mercy, plucking grass for food and crying so hard at night only the pain in her face could stifle her tears.

Yoon Hee stayed in the same neighborhood as her mother in the city of Hyesan, hoping they could live together again.

“I sometimes ran into her on the streets,” Yoon Hee said, “but I couldn’t ever get a warm feeling from her.”

One time when they met, Yoon Hee said, “she told me she was already having a hard time living by herself, so she couldn’t live with me.”

But Yoon Hee was undeterred.

“I had a hope.”

Clandestine Video Shows Work in N.Korean Arms Factory

The rare footage was obtained by evangelical group Caleb Mission, which supports North Korean defectors. “The factory was built to look like an ordinary structure on satellite photos,” said Kim Sung-eun, a pastor who heads the mission. “The production lines are underground.”

In the video, workers can be seen at the assembly lines operating machine tools, apparently milling parts for hovercrafts. “North Korea produces its own parts due to a shortage of dollars,” whereas South Korea imports them, Kim said. 

He said the footage was taken by North Koreans who smuggled it across the border and tried to make money selling it to Chinese or South Koreans.

N.K. refutes views of eased inter-Korean tensions

SEOUL, May 14 (Yonhap) — North Korea Tuesday refuted assessments that tensions have eased on the Korean Peninsula, saying the ongoing South Korea-U.S. military exercise is fueling uncertainties.

SEOUL, May 14 (Yonhap) — North Korea Tuesday refuted assessments that tensions have eased on the Korean Peninsula, saying the ongoing South Korea-U.S. military exercise is fueling uncertainties.

The Rodong Sinmun, an organ of the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK), said in an article monitored in Seoul that conditions remain precarious because of the naval exercise taking place in the East Sea.

Four student dissidents acquitted decades after being imprisoned | YONHAP NEWS

SEOUL, May 13 (Yonhap) — Four former student activists were acquitted in a retrial on Monday 39 years after they were imprisoned for campaigning against the military regime led by then President Park Chung-hee.

In 1974, the four were sentenced to prison terms ranging from seven to 10 years for leading a protest against the revision of the Yushin Constitution that the former president introduced to prolong his stay in power, in violation of a now-defunct emergency decree.

Park apologizes for scandal

President Park Geun-hye on Monday apologized to the public over the groping scandal involving her former spokesman Yoon Chang-jung, as the controversy continued to spill over to her office and undermine political momentum that she had hoped to pick up upon her first overseas tour.

“I regret that an unsavory incident involving a public servant occurred toward the end of the U.S. visit, thereby causing great disappointment to the people,” Park said during a weekly meeting with senior secretaries.

It was Park’s first mention of the incident involving Yoon, who allegedly groped an intern hired to help the Korean delegation accompanying Park in her visit to Washington last week. 

N. Korean escapees to S. Korea to fall 20 pct this year: official | YONHAP NEWS

SEOUL, May 13 (Yonhap) — The number of North Korean escapees reaching South Korea will likely decrease by about 20 percent in 2013 from a year earlier, mainly due to improvements in the communist country’s food supply, an official said Monday.

The official at the Settlement Support Center for North Korean Refugees under the Ministry of Unification told reporters that as of early May, 556 North Korean nationals have safely arrived in South Korea.

Schmidt’s Washington speech on North Korea, Internet and dictatorships

Google has posted video of Eric Schmidt’s remarks at the recent “Big Tent” event in Washington, D.C.

The Google-organized events act as idea summits and have been running for about three years and the D.C. event took place on April 26.

During his speech, the chairman of Google talked about North Korea and the impact that the connected world, and the Internet in particular, would have on authoritarian countries.

“In North Korea we visited with the government, of course that’s all there is in North Korea, and we went to the Korea Computer Center and they asked us all about future versions of Android,” he said in the speech. “Obviously they have access, at least in the government, to what we are doing, as if I was going to tell the future roadmap of Android to the North Koreans. I obviously didn’t.”

N Korea installs new defence chief

North Korea has replaced its hard-line armed forces minister with a relatively unknown general, according to state-run news agency KCNA.

Little is known about Jang Jong-nam, who replaces General Kim Kyok-sik.

Officials in Seoul say his political stance is not known, but he appears to be younger than his predecessor.

Meanwhile, Pyongyang has denounced new joint US-South Korea naval drills that involve a US nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.

RFA: Former Defectors Work for Change in North Korea

For a long time, Jo Jin Hye led two lives. Most people knew her as a home health-care manager living outside Washington D.C., or as a night student at a high school for adults.

But she had also become one of the United States’ leading activists for human rights in North Korea, her native country. She is called night and day by North Koreans half a world away in desperate need of advice, contacts,  or money.

“Sometimes,” she says, “I am on the phone from 1:00 a.m. to 5:00 a.m., when defectors are attempting an escape.”

These defectors are beginning a journey that Jo Jin Hye, now 25, began at age 10 with her mother Han Song Hwa and younger sister Jo Eun Hye, also called Grace Jo, in 1998 amid a famine in North Korea’s Hamgyeong Province, on the Chinese border.

UN names Australian, Serbian, Indonesian to human rights probe in North Korea

GENEVA — The U.N.’s top human rights body has appointed three experts from Australia, Serbia and Indonesia to carry out an inquiry into North Korea for possible crimes against humanity.

The 47-nation U.N. Human Rights Council said Tuesday it has appointed Australian retired judge Michael Donald Kirby and Sonja Biserko, founder and president of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia, to join Indonesian lawyer Marzuki Darusman on the three-member commission.