There is some brewing international trade drama between the E.U. and Inuits about seal meat which is deeply, incredibly fascinating, and I will fill you in later, but the main takeaway is: This fine lady, Governor general Michaelle Jean, who is Queen Elizabeth's representative in the Canadian government, butchered and ate RAW SEAL HEART.

Then she said to the E.U., in laconic superhero fashion: "Take from it what you will." Take that, Kate Connor.

Image of Michaelle Jean by Attila Kisbenedek/AFP/Getty Images

Tags: canadian official eats seal heart

From the department of small comforts:  The sentencing Monday of journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee to 12 years in prison by North Korean authorities is likely to shine a bright light on the situation facing North Korean women who seek refuge in China that was the subject of their documentary project for Current TV.

My colleague Blaine Harden has an excellent and eye-opening piece on the situation in today's Washington Post, detailing how the much-discussed gender imbalance in China has led to a market for North Korean wives among rural Chinese men.

The women want to escape poverty and starvation in North Korea, and the Chinese men desperately want wives. Such complementary population needs don't lead to positive outcomes for the women however, because, as Harden reports, the women—and eight out of 10 recent defectors are women, he writes—are often finding their exits through men who turn out to be traffickers, offering them freedom and then selling them off as brides to strange Chinese men once across the border. Or, once across the border on their own, they fall prey to marriage brokers, because as stateless illegals in China, they risk deportation back to North Korea—where they may be sent to forced labor or reeducation camps—should they seek help from Chinese authorities.

"If I had a chance to meet with President Obama, I would first like to tell him how North Korean women are being sold like livestock in China and, second, to know that North Korean labor camps are hell on earth," one North Korean sold into three different marriages in China before being returned to North Korea told Harden.

The whole disturbing story is worth a read.

Worth pondering, too, in light of the spate of articles about how the gender-imbalance in China is allowing Chinese women to lead more liberated lives and have their pick of suitors.

Tags: china, euna lee, laura ling, north korea

I don’t know that it gives me any special insight into the situation, but I was in Copan, Honduras, the night one head of state was replaced with another. The military had apparently cut the power and water supply, and walking to breakfast, a friend and I saw some armed soldiers jogging in the distance. But waking up in a Central American country and finding that the lights don’t work, the shower won’t turn on, and some armed men are lining up outside isn’t really cause for surprise. I thought nothing of it. Sunday’s La Prensa—the country’s biggest paper—had been printed before the takeover, so it wasn’t much help. Indeed, the paper I read Sunday morning was filled with furious denunciations of the president, his disregard for the constitution, his affinity for unlimited executive power, and his affiliation with Hugo Chavez. And when I boarded a bus bound for Guatemala City the same morning, I still thought it was President Zelaya—not the military—who was transforming the purported democracy of Honduras into something else altogether.

As Brookings’ Kevin Casas-Zamora explains, “There are many villains in this play ... Zelaya pursued his ambition with total disregard of his country’s constitution.” Zelaya’s removal, though carried out by soldiers, was ordered by the Supreme Court and backed by the legislature. Cato’s Tom Palmer drives the point home:

Imagine that George Bush, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan or some other American president had decided to overturn the Constitution so that he could stay in power beyond the constitutionally limited time. To do that, he orders a nationwide referendum that is not constitutionally authorized and blatantly illegal. The Federal Election Commission rules that it is illegal. The Supreme Court rules that it is illegal. The Congress votes to strip the president of his powers and, as members of Congress are not that good at overcoming the president’s personally loyal and handpicked bodyguards, they send police and military to arrest the president. Now, which party is guilty of leading a coup?

I don’t have the answer to that question, and having been so close and known so little, I suspect very few people really understand what is going down in Tegucigalpa.

Photograph of soldiers in Hondras by Yuri Cortez/Getty Images.

Tags: honduras

Jonathan Van Meter’s new profile of Hillary Clinton in Vogue is very fine. The reporting took place over the middle months of the year since Clinton assumed her position as Secretary of State. It’s complete with a juicy account of the near-misses, prolonged waffling, and trickery that preceded her acceptance of Barack Obama’s job offer.

Each time Clinton wavered, Obama would talk her through it again. "At the end of the day," says one of her aides, "it was the president who sold her on it. He didn't delegate it." Says another staffer, "They started talking about it substantively, looking around the globe, and they were basically in the same place. The things they disagreed about in the campaign? We didn't believe he was actually going to have coffee with Ahmadinejad. It was something he shouldn't have said in the campaign, and we pounced on it. The tiny differences in their foreign-policy ideas during the primaries evaporated during the general election."

As usual, the story makes me feel terrible about the campaign season I spent trashing Clinton’s motives, if not her smarts. Of course, her personal ambition—a key source of derision—has been naturally checked by her new position as diplomat, not commander-in-chief. But when she brings the Liberian parliament to tears with her statement of patriotism, ribs Defense Secretary Bob Gates for being too private, or takes a lonely swim in the Atlantic Ocean, it paints a portrait of a woman satisfied—and converting her own "overexposure" into an overseas version of "hope and change."

What’s really interesting, however, from a diplomatic perspective, is this nugget buried in the middle of the story:

One of the refrains I kept hearing from reporters was Condi would never do this. Clinton, a woman from politics, knows how to work a crowd. Sometimes her motorcade would arrive and she would jump out and just plunge right in, getting out ahead of her security team, who often looked a little panicked. She danced her funky little dance at the dinners held in her honor (as seen on YouTube). In Cape Town, she threw a party for the press and drank with the best of us, talking for more than two hours, into the night, with surprising off-the-record candor about everything from her husband to her disdain for certain world leaders. She's fun. She laughs at herself. And she is full of surprisingly sharp, pointy little retorts, barbs, and comebacks. On several occasions she drifted to the back of the plane, allowing zesty debates to flower, often asking, "What's your take?" of different reporters, who hung on her every word. One of them told me his opinion of Hillary had completely turned around: "My parents hated her, and I thought she was a bitch who surrounded herself with horrible people. But she's nice! She's really frank and blunt and funny. One time she said to me, 'We need China.' Condi would never do that. I like her." Condoleezza Rice, I was told, almost never even came out of her cabin.

Never mind the flattering comparison with Rice—I’m both surprised and not to read that Clinton is so loose-lipped about sensitive bilateral relationships. This candor has caused Clinton to be branded as a gaffe-machine by Michael Crowley in the New Republic, among others—quite a departure from the “almost animatronic ability to stay on message” she maintained during the 2008 campaign. Should we care? Yes, her new job description requires more discretion than this paragraph might suggest she possesses. But the remark about China (of ever greater importance to the United States, given financial and environmental debates raging today) is a blatant statement of fact. Likewise her Kissinger-esque comments about overlooking the nation's human rights failings in service of some realpolitik. Further, not only is this truth-telling refreshing, Clinton’s candor, in a way, fits more closely with the spirit of openness and transparency that her opponent advocated during the 2008 campaign. Have we seen Barack Obama be this genuine about his foreign policy beliefs recently? Turnabout, it seems, is fair play.

Photograph of Hillary Clinton by Alex Wong/Getty Images.

Tags: foreign policy, freedom of speech, Hillary Clinton, Hillary Clinton in Vogue