Free Republic

Insight: Obama's North Korean leap of faith turns to ashes 2:39am EDT By Andrew Quinn WASHINGTON (Reuters) - When U.S. diplomats filed into North Korea's grim embassy in Beijing last month they found an unlikely surprise: Starbucks. Their hosts, led by North Korean's chief nuclear negotiator Kim Kye-gwan, had ordered U.S.-style coffee for talks both sides hoped would lead to new negotiations on Pyongyang's nuclear program and to resumed U.S. food shipments to one of the most feared and secretive countries in the world. There were more surprises to come. Five days later, the United States and North Korea simultaneously...

North Korea has dismissed a demand from President Barack Obama that it scrap plans to launch a satellite marking the centenary of the birth of Kim Il-sung as world leaders sounded a global alert over the threat of nuclear terrorism. "We will never give up the right to launch a peaceful satellite, a legitimate right of a sovereign state and an essential step for economic development," a foreign ministry spokesman told the official KCNA news agency. Replying to the US leader's challenge during a visit to South Korea for a nuclear security summit, the Pyongyang regime said it would press...

After squinting through binoculars into a nation frozen in time, US President Barack Obama reeled off a contempt-laden and startlingly frank indictment of North Korea. The Stalinist remnant of the Cold War was, in Obama's eyes, nothing but a nation which cannot make "anything of any use", "doesn't work", and even its vaunted weapons exports were hardly state of the art. "It is like you are in a time warp," Obama said Sunday, after he toured a rocky border post in the demilitarised buffer zone that has split the Korean peninsular for longer than he has been alive. "It is...