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N. Korean Delegation Visits Google, Stanford

A dozen North Koreans spent an hour and forty minutes touring Google’s Mountain View headquarters Friday morning. The delegation then moved on to the campus of nearby Stanford University.

The U.S. bans visits to the country by high-level North Korean officials like Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye-gwan and Ri Gun, director-general of the U.S. affairs bureau at the North’s Foreign Ministry. However, private U.S. groups may invite mid-level N. Korean officials for economic, cultural and educational purposes.

The N. Korean delegation appears to have been invited by the Asia Foundation which is likely to have arranged the Google tour. Visiting N. Korean officials are sometimes given corporate tours as a way to introduce them to U.S. capitalism.

The delegation has visited New York, San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco since March 21. They left the U.S. Sunday. Their corporate tours have included Qualcomm, Bloomberg News, Bloomingdale’s department store and Citigroup. While at Stanford, the group attended a lunch seminar attended by employees from various Silicon Valley firms.

Also this weekend Choe Tae-bok, chairman of N. Korea’s Supreme People’s Assembly was making a 4-day visit to the United Kingdom beginning March 28 to seek food aid. A British parliamentarian is reported to have given Choe a DVD containing the South Korean documentary I Give You Peace about a South Korean doctor-turned-Catholic missionary who devoted his life to helping people in Sudan until dying of cancer last year.

“They probably gave it to him without realizing that it’s illegal in North Korea to possess South Korean DVDs,” said a S. Korean Foreign Ministry official.

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