Last Tuesday, British American Tobacco, the world’s second-largest tobacco company, along with its Singaporean subsidiary, pled guilty to bank fraud and conspiracy charges and agreed to pay a combined $635 million in criminal and civil fines, penalties, and forfeitures to the Treasury and Justice Departments. The charges arise from an secret joint venture, going all the way back to 2001, in which BAT sold the North Korean government tobacco, other materials, machinery, and technical help to manufacture ciga
In 1997, a Washington Post reporter was allowed into the city of Hamheung, in the mountains that ring North Korea’s east coast, to investigate reports of a famine in the isolated country. There, he interviewed the director of a local orphanage, who told him that some parents who could no longer feed their children had begun to abandon them “to nature.” Some of these children died where their parents left them. In other cases, people would bring them to the...
The editors of 38 North are smart, well-informed people, and so I’m puzzled by their decision to publish this submission by Heeje Lee and Samuel S. Han, a dentist and a research assistant, declaring Kim Jong-un’s victory over COVID. Unlike the usual suspects, Lee and Han don’t avoid all criticism of the North Korean system, its leaders, or its policies. They acknowledge “the weak state of the country’s health care system,” concede its widespread malnutrition, and lack of a COVID...