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Hold Off on that North Korean Vacation: Two U.S. Reporters Detained at Border

While other notoriously closed societies have cracked open their doors a bit to tourism, North Korea still remains highly suspicious of foreigners. Two American reporters from scrappy San Francisco-based Current TV are being held in North Korea, having been nabbed by guards as they filmed the country from the Chinese/North Korean border. The reporters, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, were working on a story about North Korean refugees when they were taken into custody for "illegally intruding" into the Stalinist dictatorship on Tuesday.

While it's not clear whether they actually did cross the border or remained on the Chinese side, the incident has provoked a minor crisis, with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton doing a whole bunch of diplomacy on the matter.

It would be difficult to make relations between North Korea and the rest of the world any more strained. Kim Jong Il's hermit kingdom only allows a trickle of foreign tourists to visit, and they're required to surrender their cell phones upon entry and travel only to approved sites with a government minder. I'm game for traveling almost anywhere, but North Korea seems like one of the bleaker destinations in the world, if Guy Delisle's excellent comic Pyongyang is to be believed.

Here's hoping the reporters are released unharmed, and that North Korea begins to engage the rest of the world a bit more. I know that the latter is a long shot, but today is the first full day of spring and I can't help but feel optimistic.

[Photo: AP/Boston.com]

Related Stories:
· Detained Reporters Drawn to NKorea Refugee Story [Associated Press]
· US Awaiting NKorean Reply on Detained Reporters [AP/mercurynews.com]
· Pyongyang by Guy Delisle [Official Site]
· Current TV [Official Site]
· North Korean Travel [Jaunted]