Re: North Korea appears to have conducted nuclear test
Last year North Korea began to refuse aid shipments of food. At rice planting time they took every office worker and drove them out to the country and for weeks they planted rice. The countryside is so defoliated from people scavenging for wood for heat, that rain created landslides, and despite the maximum planting effort, there was barely enough food.
They have tried market based reforms to get farmers to produce more, but the price of rice skyrocketed, and only the rich got fed.
By far the best piece on North Korea wasdone by Jonathan Watts of the Guardian, his video report from North Korea is absolutely chilling. Play, “Ready for War”, http://www.guardian.co.uk/korea/0,,331519,00.html
Winter is coming, a cold and desperate people choose to explode a bomb, futher isolating starving people from the world. Brilliant.