Korea

Charles Robert Jenkins, a U.S. Army deserter, has teamed with Jim Frederick to write a memoir of his forty years in North Korea.

Sgt. Jenkins's punishment is in his face -- a withered, jug-eared mug that looks about two decades older than its sixty-odd years. In January 1965, Jenkins deserted his unit in the Korean DMZ and slinked into North Korean territory, where he intended to turn himself in and go home after a prisoner-swap. The scheme failed badly. Instead of going home, he ended up confined with a handful of other American deserters, beaten bloody by one, malnourished from the start, and forced every day to do nothing but read and memorize the works of Kim Il Sung. It is a measure of the unpleasantness of the ensuing four decades that one low point was the ripping of a U.S. Army tattoo off his arm without anesthetic, and a high point was watching a bootleg video of Michael Jackson's (admittedly sublime) "Thriller," with the volume turned to nearly inaudible levels, lest someone hear it, turn him in, and possibly have him shot. MORE

On February 29, a leading South Korean research university announced it had suspended the author of two headline-generating papers for fabricating his data.

Tae Kook Kim's research, which appeared in Nature Chemical Biology and Science in 2005 and 2006, offered alluring possibilities for breakthroughs in fighting cancer and slowing (or even reversing) aging. His suspension for dishonesty follows several embarrassing retractions in other hyped research areas -- the most notable involving another South Korean scientist, Woo Suk Hwang, who falsely claimed to have created human stem-cells via cloning. (Ironically, newspapers reporting on Kim's ostensible accomplishments quoted Kim as saying he aspired to be "another Hwang Woo Suk.") MORE

The new president of the Republic of Korea, Lee Myung-bak, is best known as an environmentalist and a pro-U.S. hawk. But he is also a champion of the English language.

As a late bloomer, South Korea is keen to be at the cutting edge of modernity. So as Koreans have joined the rich, bourgeois, post-industrial world, they've acquired all of the familiar accoutrements: a large and growing welfare state, rising social liberalism, universal broadband, Ph.D.'s galore. But must this taste for what is new and what is best extend to the jettisoning of that which is most distinctive about Korean culture? Do Korean children really need English-only instruction in math, science, and Korean history, a proposal Lee floated several months back? Well, yes, actually. Lee, being a coward, abandoned his plans at the last minute, fearing a nationalist backlash. But by embracing English, Korea could dramatically expand its cultural influence and become the first truly globalized society. How's that for cutting edge?