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South Korea’s National Human Rights Commission found that 20 percent of women in refugee camps bribes North Korean guards with either sex or money in order to defect from the country.

Source:  AFP, “N.Korea women refugees suffer abuse: watchdog,” Google News, February 22, 2010.

North Korea is estimated to earn up to $1 Billion a year from illegal arms trafficking.

Source:  Simon Tisdall, “North Korean plane carrying smuggled arms seized in Thailand,” Guardian, December 13, 2009.

In some regions of China, between 2 to 4 percent of US $100 bills in circulation are fake.  These counterfeit dollars are produced in North Korea and enter China through black market currency brokers.

Source:  David Samuels, “Counterfeiting: Notes on a scandal,” Independent, August 24, 2009.

North Korea earns an estimated $720 Million dollars a year from the production and selling of counterfeit cigarettes.

Source:  David Rose, “North Korea’s Dollar Store,” Vanity Fair, August 5, 2009.

Newsweek reported that North Korea earns around $100 million a year selling missiles to countries such as Iran, Syria, and Pakistan.

Source:  “How Kim Affords His Nukes,” Newsweek, May 30, 3009.

Israel accused North Korea of trafficking nuclear technology and arms to various countries in the Middle East. 

From the AP (via Google News):

Israel accused North Korea on Saturday of covertly supplying at least half a dozen Mideast countries with nuclear technology or conventional arms.

The allegation was made at an International Atomic Energy Agency meeting in Vienna where world powers urged the North to stop reactivating its nuclear weapons program.

“The Middle East remans on the receiving end of the DPRK’s reckless activities,” Israeli delegate David Danieli told the meeting, referring to North Korea by its acronym.

“At least half a dozen countries in the region … have become eager recipients” of the North’s black market supplies of conventional arms or nuclear technology, he said — mostly “through black market and covert network channels.”

While he did not name any of the suspected countries, he appeared to be referring in part to Iran and Syria, which are both under IAEA investigation, and Libya, which scrapped its rudimentary weapons program after revealing it in 2003.

North Korea has told the United States that it no longer wishes to be removed from its terrorism list.

From the New York Times:

North Korea said Friday that it no longer wished to be removed from the United States’ terrorism blacklist, signaling that it is hardening its stance amid reports that its leader, Kim Jong-il, may be seriously ill.

The North Korean Foreign Ministry also confirmed what the United States and South Korea have said already: it has begun to reassemble a nuclear complex that can produce weapons-grade plutonium.

“We neither wish nor expect to be delisted as a ‘state sponsor of terrorism,’ ” the North’s state-run news agency, KCNA, quoted a ministry spokesman as saying. “We can go our own way.”

Bravado is North Korea’s common negotiating tactic. Still, the statement bodes ill for Washington’s efforts to keep the nuclear complex, Yongbyon, north of the capital, Pyongyang, disabled.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-il is believed to be seriously ill after he failed to attend a parade for North Korea’s 60th anniversary. 

From the New York Times:

 The North Korean leader Kim Jong-il is seriously ill and might have suffered a stroke weeks ago, an American intelligence official in Washington said Tuesday, after Mr. Kim failed to attend an unexpectedly small-scale celebration of his country’s 60th anniversary.

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the exact status of the North Korean’s health was unclear, but that it did not seem Mr. Kim was on the verge of death.

Mr. Kim’s health is the focus of intense attention among governments and security experts. He leads one of the world’s most isolated and unpredictable regimes, one with a nuclear weapons program that is the focus of international concern.

Mr. Kim, 66, has not missed any of the 10 previous military or militia parades staged for major party, military and state anniversaries, in which columns of armored vehicles and rocket launchers rumbled through the capital Pyongyang’s main plaza as legions of goose-stepping soldiers saluted him.

In 2005, available estimates of the North Korean drug trade placed opium production at 44 tons a year.

Source: Matthew Quirk, “The world in numbers: The New Opium War,” The Atlantic Monthly, March 2005, pg. 52-53.