North Korea

They were just a jumble of conversations overhead on a train. But for South Korean radio station founder Young Howard, they represented breaking news from a hostile, inaccessible land. When North Korea recently defied international calls for restraint and launched a rocket, purportedly to put a satellite in orbit, it wasn't long before a covert correspondent there was on her cellphone to editors in Seoul. People were celebrating a colossal success, she whispered.

More than a week after North Korea launched a rocket over northern Japan, the U.N. Security Council made it clear Monday that the action was an unacceptable violation of international law and agreed to toughen sanctions against the nation. The council condemned the April 5 launch and said that by the end of the month it would expand sanctions established in 2006 in a resolution aimed at stopping North Korea from developing ballistic missiles and other weapons.

On Monday, the U.N. Security Council voted to condemn North Korea's recent missile launch and ordered the Sanctions Committee to enforce financial sanctions and an arms embargo against Pyongyang. It remains to be seen how far countries such as China and Russia will actually go in tightening sanctions. But the U.S. should ensure that the condemnation has meaning by taking decisive action with or without the Security Council.

North Korea on Tuesday ordered international nuclear inspectors out of the country and said it would "never again" take part in denuclearization talks, dealing a harsh, early setback to the Obama administration's hopes of disarming the defiant regime. In a strident reaction to a United Nations rebuke over its recent rocket launch, the government in Pyongyang took several provocative actions, including announcing that it would resume building nuclear weapons.

He is an enigma from the world's most secretive state, a behind-the-scenes political operative known mostly as a trusted brother-in-law to North Korean strongman Kim Jong Il. But Jang Song Taek has recently emerged as a decisive player in the drama of who might succeed the ailing 67-year-old Kim in a country that remains defiant in the face of international pressure to dismantle its nuclear arsenal.

The two Koreas were all set to hold a face-to-face sit-down Tuesday, their first since conservative South Korean President Lee Myung-bak took office in February 2008. Delegates from both sides were on hand, but the talks stalled early on when no one could agree on a venue for their discussion. Finally, nearly 12 hours after they were scheduled to begin, the two sides met late Tuesday for just 22 minutes, with the North refusing to even discuss the release of a detained South Korean worker.

North Korea said Saturday that it had begun harvesting plutonium from spent fuel rods at its main nuclear plant to build up its atomic arsenal. The move, in defiance of tightening U.N. sanctions, threatened to further damage efforts to dismantle the communist nation's nuclear program.

North Korea warned Wednesday that it will fire an intercontinental ballistic missile -- or even carry out another nuclear test -- unless the U.N. apologizes for condemning the regime's April 5 rocket launch. By flaunting its rogue nuclear and missile programs, Pyongyang raised the stakes in the escalating diplomatic tit for tat with the outside world.

Meet Inspector O, a detective with North Korea's Ministry of People's Security. He is a man who loves his country but harbors a knowing skepticism about its leadership. He rolls his eyes at the communist propaganda and balks at wearing the red lapel pin of founder Kim Il Sung that is de rigueur for North Koreans. He struggles to keep his humanity in an authoritarian and increasingly corrupt society. But Inspector O isn't real.

U.S. intelligence agencies were still collecting data Monday following North Korea's announcement that it had carried out a nuclear test, but analysts expressed little doubt that the regime had exploded such a device. "There is strong reason to believe that North Korea did in fact conduct a nuclear test," said a U.S. counter-proliferation official who requested anonymity. "We're still reviewing the data to see how large it was, but there's no reason to doubt the North Korean announcement."