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For Laura Ling and Euna Lee, the two journalists held in North Korea
since March, the nightmare is apparently over: The Hermit Kingdom’s
state-run news agency has announced that the two have been pardoned and will be released.
Now that they’re free, I hope that Ling and Lee will talk frankly
about their experiences in North Korea. To save face in the
international community, Kim Jong-Il’s kingdom almost assuredly housed
the imprisoned pair in far better conditions than most “free” North
Koreans experience, and they would have been allowed to come in contact
with only the most ideologically pure guards and representatives of the
government. But Ling and Lee can surely at least give us some
information about what the people they came in contact with were like,
what sort of knowledge they had about America and the world at large,
whether anyone demonstrated any warmth toward them. Some reports have
indicated that North Koreans are beginning to understand more about the
world thanks to pirated South Korean soap operas and other smuggled
goods—did they see any indication of this? ... (Read more in Double X.)
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A post from Double X writer Garance Franke-Ruta:
From the department of small comforts: The sentencing Monday of journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee to 12 years in prison by North Korean authorities is likely to shine a bright light on the situation facing North Korean women who seek refuge in China... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com.)