Jess, you asked if it’s ever okay to criticize a female public official’s sartorial choices. Check out what North Korean officials recently said about Hillary Clinton: “Sometimes she looks like a primary schoolgirl and sometimes a pensioner going shopping.” This was after calling her a “funny lady” and “vulgar” and “by no means intelligent.” She, of course, started it, by saying the North Koreans were behaving like “small children” and “unruly teenagers.” It’s possible that she was just playing bad cop to pave the way for her husband to rescue the two arrested American journalists. Still, these twin images of Hillary locked in a nasty spat while her husband gets to play the white knight bring back bad memories.

Photograph of Hillary Clinton by Romeo Gacad/AFP/Getty Images.

Tags: bill clinton, Hillary Clinton, kim jong-il, women in politics

For Laura Ling and Euna Lee, the two journalists held in North Korea since March, the nightmare is apparently over: The Hermit Kingdom’s state-run news agency has announced that the two have been pardoned and will be released.

Now that they’re free, I hope that Ling and Lee will talk frankly about their experiences in North Korea. To save face in the international community, Kim Jong-Il’s kingdom almost assuredly housed the imprisoned pair in far better conditions than most “free” North Koreans experience, and they would have been allowed to come in contact with only the most ideologically pure guards and representatives of the government. But Ling and Lee can surely at least give us some information about what the people they came in contact with were like, what sort of knowledge they had about America and the world at large, whether anyone demonstrated any warmth toward them. Some reports have indicated that North Koreans are beginning to understand more about the world thanks to pirated South Korean soap operas and other smuggled goods—did they see any indication of this?

And perhaps they will be able to answer the question that has been on my mind since they were arrested: Was their treatment in any way affected by the National Geographic documentary Inside North Korea? In 2007, Ling’s sister, Lisa, and members of a camera crew entered the country with a humanitarian group conducting cataract surgery in Pyongyang and secretly filmed what they saw. They saw a government-sanitized version of North Korea, with approved handlers and translators and only limited interactions with “real” North Koreans, but it was chilling nevertheless, particularly in its portrayal of those whose vision had been restored by the group Ling accompanied: When the bandages were removed, each headed straight for the portraits of Kim Jong-Il and Kim Il-Sung, bowed, and led the rest of the gathering in thanking their leaders.

In North Korea, people are regularly and cruelly punished for the sins of their relatives: In the memoir The Aquariums of Pyongyang, author Kang Chol-Hwan recalls spending 10 years in a labor camp, beginning as a 9-year-old, because of his grandfather; Shin Dong-hyuk was born in such a camp and lived there until he escaped in his early 20s. And if Kim Jong-Il’s embarrassment about Inside North Korea—his regime regularly monitors such negative coverage and would surely have learned about Lisa Ling’s undercover work—made Ling and Lee’s ordeal that much worse, I shudder to think what must have happened to Lisa Ling’s handlers, those ordered to keep her and her group in line, after it was revealed that their charges carried out such a mission.

Photograph of a sign supporting the release of formerly jailed journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee by Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Images.

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

Wow, that might be the fastest Bill Clinton has ever picked up two women...

In all seriousness, it’s fabulous news that North Korea is releasing journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee. But Torie, I don’t know how much light will be shed on this. According to this CNN story, North Korea’s infamous state-run media is claiming that Clinton “expressed words of sincere apology to Kim Jong-il for the hostile acts committed by the two American journalists.” I don’t buy that for a second, but given the delicate negotiations that apparently preceded this trip—the United States dropped a request for a straight-up release and instead agreed to amnesty, which implies wrongdoing—I also don’t think the the former president will waste his breath countering such obviously ridiculous claims.

Besides, Clinton probably has bigger things on his mind. Fred Kaplan writes today in Slate that it’s unlikely that someone of the former president’s stature would be sent to a hostile country merely for the purpose of getting some prisoners released. Could Clinton be trying to re-open a dialogue with the rogue nation that in May tested a nuclear device? Perhaps.

Photograph of Bill Clinton being greeted at a North Korean airport by KNS/AFP/Getty Images.

Tags: bill clinton, euna lee, laura ling

Did anyone who watched Laura Ling and Euna Lee’s arrival in Burbank this morning not cry? Though the reunion of Lee and her daughter, Hannah, was the bigtime tearjerker, for all the obvious, poignant, mommy-daughter-love-runs-deep reasons, there was another quieter moment that had me dripping tears into my cheerios.

After Laura Ling finished embracing her immediate family—husband, sister, mother, father— she walked over to hug Lee’s husband. Her mother, standing behind her, quickly reached over Laura’s shoulder to tuck a wayward strand of hair behind her daughter’s ear. It was such a sweet, impulsive gesture: after all these months, she just can’t keep her hands to herself, so happy to be able to touch her baby whenever she wants. Even more, after all these months, she finally gets to be a mom in the most normal of ways, keeping her daughter’s hair out of her eyes.

Photograph of Laura Ling's and her mother is a still from a video of Ling and Euna Lee's arrival in Los Angeles.

Tags: euna lee, laura ling