Kathreb

Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Rumours re South Korean hostage ransom

Much is currently being writting on this at present. I may add a few more of my own opinions shortly. But for now, the Taleban is denying the rumours. Not sure how trustworthy they are though. Perhaps the deal is that they get the ransom as long as they keep it quiet. Or, perhaps, there is no ransom.

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Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Home sweet home

The Taleban has agreed to release the remaining 19 South Korean hostages. Happy news for the families and general public and a huge relief, no doubt, to the South Korean negotiators and Administration. Especially given that South Korea's side of the bargain is to do what they were planning to do anyway, plus prohibit further escapades of South Korean Christian aid workers into hostile nations.

Book review

Crisis in North Korea: The failure of de-stalinization, 1956 by Andrei Lankov was much easier to read than I anticipated. I expected it to be interesting but somewhat dry. Kudos to Mr. Lankov for making an event we know very little about involving people we sometimes know even less about into something both readable and educational. Certainly much remains unknown about this event but the failure of de-stalinization in North Korea was clearly told and nicely placed into the wider picture of events in the Communist world at that time. I particularly liked that features of Communism in the 1950s and reference to events happening in other Communist nations at that time (Eastern Europe) were explained as a reference for how events/circumstances differed or were the same in North Korea.

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Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Ban lifted

I have finished reading the final Harry Potter book. Hooray! In the month since I posted last things have been quite busy. I got the job that I applied for. Hooray! I attended the Festival of History. The highlight of which, for me, was the World War I fly boys and the Jousting tournament. And last weekend I attended a wedding. Crappy Korean weddings aside, I love weddings. Nice clothes, everyone's in a good mood, champagne, good food (huge leg of lamb per person in this case - I love lamb, and a melty, moist piece of chocolate pudding with double cream), dancing - its all good times.

Korean news has been less pleasing of late with the unfortunate kidnapping in Afghanistan. I am informed (and it makes some sense) that because they are mostly women, they stand a slightly better chance of being released. This is partly evident by the fact that the two to have been killed so far were men. Of course, things are still very hairy at the moment and there are several ways things could pan out.

And then there is the upcoming summit meeting between a lame duck and sick man. I haven't given this much thought but it is not immediately evident to me as to why Kim would waste his time meeting with Roh - I can't really see it having much influence on the upcoming election, probably have little impact on aid. It might just be for whatever amount of cash Roh is having to fork out for the meeting.

Finally, with the lifing of the ban I took some time to visit a few Korean blogs and I would like to submit a request to The Marmot or more specifically, to Robert Koehler: This is something that has bothered me for qutie a while. I strongly urge you to put the name of the person posting at the top of the post and not at the bottom. There are some contributers I like and some I am less interested in. This means I have to scroll down for every post to check who wrote it before I decide to read it. This is very bothersome to me and I would guess that I am not the only one who selectively reads posts based on contributer.

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