Elderly people forced to crawl on their hands and knees to look for weeds to eat, this is the black hole of the world…
Via NY Post:
In so many ways, Dennis Rodman seems the diplomat North Korea deserves: defiant, unpredictable, irrational, unhinged.
Yet the comic aspects of his so-called “basketball diplomacy” — the drunken defense of dictator Kim Jong-un on CNN; serenading Kim with “Happy Birthday”; gifting him with several bottles of his own liquor, Bad Ass Vodka; allowing his “Dream Team” of motley ex-and wannabe NBA players to lose to the North Koreans — has turned the most brutal regime in the world into a punchline for late-night comics.
Lost among the jokes is the suffering of the average North Korean — the 24.7 million who live in abject poverty in the world’s most isolated nation.
North Korea’s human-rights record has been condemned by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the United Nations. Aside from saber-rattling, the government maintains little communication with the outside world.
The nation has so little electricity that, in the ultimate metaphor, nighttime satellite imagery shows North Korea gone dark, the only country in the world not illuminated. Travelers are only allowed to move within a circumscribed part of Pyongyang and are chaperoned and surveilled by government officials.
So: What do we really know about life inside the Hermit Kingdom?