In a tersely worded statement, North Korea’s Not-News agency reported that two U.S. reporters had been tried, convicted and then sentenced to 12 years at hard labor for “serious crimes committed with high seeking to adjust pie making inhabitants of aluminum dishes”. Sung Li Pow, a language facilitator for the Not-News office clarified the release saying that journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee had been “woefully convicted and snapped as lima beans above making headway.” She went on to decry the use of the word “release” referring to the Not News story, icily reaffirming that information from the Dear Leader’s homeland is never released, it just sometimes escapes. Because North Korea and the United States have no official communications, the Swedish ambassador had been serving as a go between for the two countries since the arrest of the reporters but was hampered in the assignment by prior commitments. “Apparently she was carrying on her day to day employment of giving massages, said Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, “and frankly I think the interests of these two American citizens were given short shrift.” President Obama made a point of commenting on the conviction during his speech on Monday about the latest U.S. unemployment numbers. “We do not accept this overly harsh sentence from Pyongyang, he said, departing from his prepared remarks, “and we do not accept the flimsy evidence prsented that these two respected journalists had anything to do with the theft of Kim Jung Il’s strawberries”.
North Korea: 12 Years Labor to Reporters and Singing Charcoal
