First, Joel Trachtman of Tufts’ (great and soon-to-be better) Fletcher School has started up a new international trade blog, called International Economic Law and Policy. If you know anything about international trade law and/or economics, you know Joel Trachtman and thus you know that this will be a must-read. He has been joined at the blog by Columbia Law’s Petros Mavroidis.
Second, check out Security Dilemmas, a blog on international politics and law by my friend Seth Weinberger (international politics, Puget Sound). Insightful, pithy and irreverent — it’s everything you’d want in a blog. Here’s a taste of his recent take-down of Dan Rather’s 60 Minutes report on North Korea:
“There were no tours available at any price to areas where mass starvation has been reported. We were allowed to go into the countryside, but not to the jails that have been called gulags for political prisoners.” There are only reports of starvation? The US Institute of Peace estimates that 2-3 million people died of famine between 1994 and 1998. The average daily food ration during the famine was estimated to be 600 calories, or 1/4 of what is needed. People are often reduced to eating grass and bark. Entire generations of children have had their development stunted. And Rather tells us that there are “reports” of starvation? And that the jails are “called gulags?” No mention of the forced abortions, the testing of biological and chemical agents on prisoners, the 20-25% death rates, the arrest and imprisonment of entire families for the “crimes” of one member, or any other of the barbaric conditions mentioned here in a NBC special report, here in The Aquariums of Pyongyang, here in a report in the San Diego Union-Tribune, on in any other of the innumerable reports on North Korean gulags. No, Rather only mentioned reports of mass starvation and that some people call these prisons gulags.
Check ’em out.
