Korea Tour Talks with North Korean refugees: Chanyang (2022-07-06)

Freedom Speakers International (FSI) met with several tourists visiting from the USA.

The featured speaker was North Korean refugee Chanyang Ju (standing between FSI co-founders Casey Lartigue and Eunkoo Lee). Chanyang first joined Freedom Speakers International in 2013 shortly after we began our activities. At that time she was at the ABC level. It is amazing seeing her engage with people in English.

She is engaged in many activities. It seems that she is always on the go! She is a speaker who enjoys engaging with audiences. And that's a good thing because this particular group of tourists was quite lively. When I did a brief introduction they asked several questions.

Shortly after Chanyang started speaking they had several questions.

She handled it well, welcoming their questions.

I introduced a bit about the two books that FSI has published this year.

Greenlight to Freedom

My Father's North Korea Story

2019-12-19 Interview with Japanese reporter

"The interview is the honeymoon, publication is the divorce." --Shinae Chun I had a GREAT and FUN interview today with a reporter from Japan. Let's hope publication will also be great! www.lovetnkr.og

Chosun Monthly magazine [Korean language]

Chosun Monthly Magazine has made an announcement (in Korean) about the Seoul Honorary Citizenship award that I received on December 9, 2022. Our Korean staffers say that the magazine is a big deal in South Korea. Here's the overall roundup of media about the award. In the next two months, I have extended interviews coming up in two different magazines, one in the USA and one in South Korea. Both articles will be in respected publications so they should raise awareness of FSI's work that your support makes possible. * * * Support FSI via Stripe or PayPal . https://donate.stripe.com/3cs28F5IAcc85IAaEF or PayPal .

North Korean defector seeks justice (Korea Times)

It was international news when 12 North Korean waitresses and a male manager who worked at a restaurant operated by the North Korean regime in China arrived in South Korea in 2016. The waitresses have mostly maintained a low profile. There have been numerous accusations and assertions, with some saying the waitresses didn't want to escape, some accused the Park Geun-hye administration of playing politics by releasing details of the case, etc., etc., etc. My blog at the Korea Times today features an exclusive interview with one of the former North Korean waitresses who filed a criminal case against the former manager. You can read about it here on the Korea Times website. https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/opinion/2023/02/728_345165.html Keep in mind that there are many more facts to the case and that it is much deeper than this brief excerpt of her comments. She also shared legal documents that I shared with the Korea Times well in advance to give them time to review t...

Michael Vick ain't got nuthin on me!!!

After football player Michael Vick admitted that he had been running a dog-fighting business I wrote that he was an idiot. If he was going to engage in such activity he should have gone to Indonesia or somewhere else. He certainly had the money to do so at that time. If he knew then what he knows now then he would have spent $10 million to run his dogfighting ring in Manila. Today I did something that probably not even Michael Vick ever did: I ate dog meat. I never expected that I would do so. It is a bit scandalous because Koreans don't just kill the dogs and eat them. Rather, they will beat them to death while they are still alive. That allegedly is to get the adrenaline flowing which allegedly makes the meat more tender which allegedly improves a man's stamina. I had told a friend that I wanted to give it a try. But as we sat down to eat I said: "I want to try this but don't give me any details until after we are finished eating." It just looked like regular me...

Back in America, 4 days and counting

I got back a few days ago, I'm still unpacking... Some of the highlights so far: * Friday morning I was in the audience for a CNN/The Root discussion about being Young and Black in America . As a veteran of so many of these Washington talking events I am less than enthusiastic about them these days. Still, I bumped into a few friends, some of whom are neither young nor black. The discussion seemed so 1980s, with the panelists trying to figure out how to politically empower young black people. I guess it was appropriate then that the head of the NAACP was there. His most irrelevant concern was about hate talk radio...or I guess Rush Limbaugh being on the air all these years explains the high level of black-on-black crime. 20 years later, how is the Stop the Violence movement working out? The highlight of this particular panel was running into old friend David Plotz, who is now editor of Salon Magazine. I don't think I've seen him since college but he recognized me. I forgot...

The Casey Lartigue Show!

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