N. Korean overseas
workers forfeit up to 90 pct of pay: report
June 24, 2012
TOKYO, June 24
(Yonhap) -- North Korean overseas workers are being severely exploited at the
hands of the Pyongyang regime, a Japanese newspaper reported Sunday, saying the
North's workers take home merely 10 to 20 percent of what they are paid by
overseas employers.
In a special report, the Asahi Shimbun said
North Korean workers dispatched to a joint-venture sewing factory in the Czech
Republic, for instance, are paid US$150 a month but their actual net income
amounts to only around $30, with the rest seized by the regime in Pyongyang.
Anti-N. Korea leaflets
carry news of defector's parliamentary election June 24, 2012
SEOUL, June 24
(Yonhap) -- A dozen North Korean defectors launched balloons carrying about
50,000 anti-Pyongyang leaflets across the border with North Korea Sunday,
attempting to publicize that a high-profile defector and a unification activist
have become South Korean lawmakers, contrary to widespread belief among North
Koreans that they are imprisoned.
The leaflets contained news of the
parliamentary elections of Cho Myung-chul, who formerly taught economics at the
North's most prestigious Kim Il-sung University, and Lim Su-kyung, a female
pro-unification activist known for making an illegal trip to Pyongyang in the
late 1980s, said the activists.
Russia agrees to write
off 90 pct of N. Korea's Soviet-era debt
June 23
SEOUL, June 23
(Yonhap) --Russia has agreed to write off 90 percent of North Korea's
Soviet-era debt of US$11 billion, the Russian finance ministry said Saturday in
its web site.
According to the web site, a bilateral
agreement, reached during Russian Deputy Finance Minister Sergei Storchak's
reported visit to Pyongyang from May 31-June 2, also calls for investing the
remaining 10 percent of the debt into joint education, medical and energy
projects in North Korea.
Moscow has moved to invite North Korea
to participate in a project to build a gas pipeline linking Russia and South
Korea via the North, as well as in the connection of the Trans-Siberian Railway
and the Trans-Korean Railway.
The Inexorably Rising
RMB Exchange By Chris Green [2012-06-26
11:16 ]
Notably, almost the
only products in the jangmadang that are now traded in local currency are food
and a few other very low-priced items; everything else, from clothing to
electronics, is bought and sold in foreign currency.
Congress needs tough
monitoring for NK food aid: Rep. Royce 2012/06/26
By Lee Chi-dong
WASHINGTON, June 25
(Yonhap) -- The U.S. Senate's move to ban food assistance for North Korea
without a presidential waiver overlooks a more important issue -- securing
measures for fair and transparent distributions of food donations in the communist
nation, a U.S. congressman said Monday.
"My concern is that the compromise
reached in the Senate would not lead to effective monitoring of food aid,
should U.S. food aid ever be resumed," Rep. Ed Royce (R-CA) told
Yonhap News Agency.
The five-year farm bill cuts agriculture
subsidies and includes an amendment that the U.S. will provide Pyongyang with
food aid under the Food for Peace Act only when the president issues
a waiver in consideration of national interest.
Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) initially proposed an
amendment to cut off U.S. food aid to North Korea, but Senate Foreign Relations
Committee chairman John Kerry (D-Mass) and ranking Republican Richard Lugar of
Indiana countered it with their own amendment to leave the door open for the
shipment of food to the North.
The House of Representatives has yet to
reach an agreement on its own version of the farm bill.
In 2011, Royce, the chairman of the House
Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation and Trade, played a
key role in revising agriculture appropriations to prohibit "international
food aid to countries that do not provide adequate monitoring and which divert
food for inappropriate purposes."
The U.S. has provided about $800 million
in food aid to North Korea since 1996, he noted.
The U.S. came close to resuming food aid for
North Korea earlier this year. But it shelved the plan when Pyongyang fired a
long-range rocket in April.
