Word: pyongyang
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...This year was different, though. In the midst of one of its periodic "peace offensives," the New Year's message had the regime in Pyongyang purring like a pussycat. It focused on developing light industry and agriculture to improve the lives of its citizens. And in a passage carefully noted in both Washington and in the South Korean capital, Seoul, the message read: "The fundamental task for ensuring peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula and in the rest of Asia is to put an end to the hostile relationship between [North Korea] and the U.S.A." (See pictures of North...
...None of last year's call for blood was there. And just in case anyone had missed the point, Pyongyang reiterated it on Jan. 11, saying the key to its return to the six-party nuclear talks - which it had declared "dead" last April - was better relations with the U.S., starting with a peace treaty that would formally end the Korean War, which concluded with a truce that has been in place since 1953. The price of such rapprochement, it demanded, was a lifting of international sanctions on North Korea...
...Life in the North wasn't always so rank-and-file. In the early 1900s, Pyongyang was widely known as the "Jerusalem of the East" for its vibrant milieu of Christians. American Protestant missionaries arrived as early as the 1880s (Catholics arrived centuries earlier but the religion didn't catch on as widely), building religious schools and universities across the capital. Later, as Christianity gained popularity, worshippers held group prayers in public every Christmas. But after the Japanese government took control of Korea in 1910, the new administration began suppressing religious gatherings, and by the 1950s, - after the Korean...
...government took a more nuanced - if short-lived - approach to religion in the following decades. In 1988, South Korea expanded economic ties with its neighbor, bringing in more foreigners on business and exchange trips; the following year Pyongyang hosted the World Festival of Youth and Students, a massive socialist festival that attracted 22,000 people from 177 countries. With an influx of foreigners, the government saw a need to build four state-run churches in Pyongyang in the following years, though critics maintain they're facades to show the world that it supports freedom of religion. "[Foreign missionaries] are allowed...
...coordinators of these flights are fly-by-night companies set up to ship goods in violation of U.N. weapons sanctions or embargoes, says Hugh Griffiths, an expert on illegal arms trafficking at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Analysts have said the weapons on board the flight from Pyongyang were probably meant for terrorist groups or rebels in the Middle East or Africa, the usual clients for these types of portable but high-impact arms. But authorities have thus far been unable to establish who arranged the shipment - the paper trails are too winding and the companies involved too murky...