Kim Jong Il's 62nd birthday was on the weekend. In reading the North Korean press accounts of the celebrations, I learned a lot about this leader.

CNN has the best summary. In addition to throwing his country into a "precipitous economic decline coupled with deadly food shortages" leaving millions of his citizens starving, apparently he is also "...a renaissance man who has flown fighter aircraft, written operas and shot 11 holes-in-one in his first try at golf. "

Amazing that one man's capabilities could be so diverse. Kim Jong Il is one complex dude.

"Has the BBC got it wrong again, in another part of the axis of evil? Weeks after its two top bosses resigned over a discredited report on Iraq, the British broadcaster is facing scrutiny over a documentary about North Korea. The programme grabbed headlines around the world this month with its claim that the communist state was testing chemical weapons on prisoners in secret gas chambers. However, debate rages in Seoul about the authenticity of the BBC's evidence."

The oil we eat "...if all of the world ate the way the United States eats, humanity would exhaust all known global fossil-fuel reserves in just over seven years."

U.S. "...if anything, the North Korean HEU program is of longer duration and more advanced than we had assessed..."

North Korea "...the United States has stepped up its preparations for a war against the DPRK behind the curtain of the six-way talks."

North Korea's founding leader, Kim Il Sung, had pledged to build a "people's paradise" in which "all the people lead happy lives in tile-roofed houses with sufficient with steamy rice and meat soup." However, the North Korean climate and soil are not particularly fit for rice growing and crops were meager, leading to mass starvation since the mid-1990s. With arable fields accounting for less than 17 percent of its territory, the North can hardly produce enough grain to feed is 22 million citizens. Of this farmland, only 30 percent is rice paddies. Farming has also been frequently affected by inclement weather. Still worse, under the name of "juche farming," North Koreans cut down trees on hills to make rice paddies in the 1960s and 1970s. Due to this, however, the mountain slopes were no longer able to hold water required for farming, especially during rains North Korean agricultural experts, however, were forced to press forward "juche farming" because it was introduced by "Great Leader" Kim. Three consecutive years of floods from 1995-97 buried those hill paddies while mud from the treeless hills buried most of the richer rice paddies in the valleys and plains. North Korean defectors say it took four years to get rid of the mud from the fields. Since the "worst-ever" flood in 1995, up to 2 million people have reportedly died in the country. The acute food shortages have forced the state, led by Kim Jong Il since the 1994 death of his father, to swallow its pride of juche and seek outside food aid. Relief workers said this week North Koreans were facing new food shortages that could be as bad as 1996 and 1997, the peak of the near-famine conditions of the past 10 years. About 6.5 million North Koreans will not receive food rations in February and March, the World Food Program warned, calling for urgent international assistance to help feed the country's hungriest people.

Within Prison Walls: "The above person is transferred from Camp 22 for the purpose of human experimentation with liquid gas for chemical weapons." - via Doc Searls Weblog

I haven't felt sick like this in a long time.

The letter of transfer was dated February 2002 which raises two questions in my mind;

A) What is being done to pressure, coerce or otherwise influence North Korea to stop their campaign of human rights abuses?

B) Why am I just reading about this now?

It makes me sad and angry at the same time knowing that this has been going on for so long, yet there has been so little attention (outside of Bush' rhetoric and the occasional "They've got nukes" newstory...) paid to this.

(Does finding out about this now make me incredibly naive or just completely uninformed?)

This needs more attention, and it needs to stop.