The North Koreans who stormed past guards in Beijing and made it into the Spanish Embassy have been granted permission to travel to South Korea. While I'm glad to hear they'll get to escape their repressive homeland, I had to wonder at these paragraphs from the article:
The group of 25 North Koreans had threatened suicide if they were sent back to the Stalinist state, which has suffered years of drought, floods and fierce winters.
. . . . .
Beijing has quietly given North Korea food to help stave off famine that has stalked the country since the mid-1990s.
It's amazing how CNN makes it sound like all of North Korea's troubles are from external forces of nature. Doesn't anyone over there realize that "hard-line" "Stalinist" government is destroying the country from the inside out? It doesn't take a brain surgeon to realize that South Korea is on the same peninsula, yet is surviving quite well.
