The World
Plutonium Won't Fill Empty Stomachs
The United Nations World Food Program says that North Korea is facing its worst food crisis since a deadly famine a decade ago. Millions of people are going hungry following a poor harvest, restrictions on aid workers, and a big drop in foreign food aid that coincided with the North's belligerent missile and nuclear tests. The WFP, which fed as many as 6.5 million people in past years, currently is reaching only about 700,000, raising fears about further chronic child malnutrition.
Having now promised to give up its nuclear weapons programs, Pyongyang is admitting that it needs more foreign food help. Getting that aid may depend in part on the North's imminent actions. South Korea, which cut aid after Pyongyang's July missile tests, resumed shipping fertilizer for the North's spring planting season, but it is delaying major rice shipments a few more weeks awaiting the North's moves on shutting down its main nuclear reactor.
The Multibillion-Dollar Human Trade
To get an inkling of the problem, just Google the words human trafficking. On any given day, there are a few news stories from around the world about this modern form of slavery in which criminals sell poor women and girls into prostitution and poor boys and men off to toil in fields and dangerous factories. These reports barely scratch the surface: Experts say that at any given time, some 2.5 million people are being trafficked and enslaved.
Last week, coinciding with the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the United Nations launched a "global initiative" to raise public awareness of the problem—including among potential victims—and to press governments to do more to stop traffickers. A major international conference is planned for November in Vienna.
A recent report identifies Thailand, China, Nigeria, Albania, Bulgaria, Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine among the countries that are the greatest sources of trafficked persons. The most common destinations: Thailand, Japan, Israel, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Turkey, and the United States.
With Thomas K. Grose in Britain and Associated Press
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