Philharmonic Agrees to Play in North Korea

They just can’t bring their instruments… :). Think those teeny cameras found in the cymbals, did it.

Seriously though…

Adding a cultural wrinkle to the diplomatic engagement between the United States and North Korea, the New York Philharmonic plans to visit Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, in February, taking the legacy of Beethoven, Bach and Bernstein to one of the world’s most isolated nations.

The trip, at the invitation of North Korea, will be the first significant cultural visit by Americans to that country, and it comes as the United States is offering the possibility of warmer ties with a country that President Bush once consigned to the “axis of evil.”

“We haven’t even had Ping-Pong diplomacy with these people,” said Ambassador Christopher R. Hill, the Bush administration’s main diplomat for negotiations with North Korea and the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs.

NYT

Gosh, hope they can come back.

U.S. and British policies like apartheid-era government: Tutu

OH, PUHLEEZE !

By Wendell Roelf

CAPE TOWN (Reuters) – Archbishop Desmond Tutu accused the United States and Britain on Monday of pursuing policies like those of South Africa’s apartheid-era government by detaining terrorism suspects without trial.

At an event to commemorate the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UNDR), the Nobel laureate said the detention of suspected al Qaeda and Taliban members at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was a “huge blot on a democracy”.

“Whoever imagined that you would hear from the United States and from Britain the same arguments for detention without trial that were used by the apartheid government,” Tutu told a news conference in Cape Town.

Do read on….IF you feel you must.

Reuters via Breitbart