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The GW Hatchet

AN INDEPENDENT STUDENT NEWSPAPER SERVING THE GW COMMUNITY SINCE 1904

The GW Hatchet

Serving the GW Community since 1904

The GW Hatchet

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GW Briefs

CLLC offers housing podcasts

Students can now turn to an unusual source to learn the ins and outs of the housing selection process: their iPods.

The Community Living and Learning Center has created specific audio files that students can access on their portable MP3 devices that provide answers to questions about the ongoing selection process.

“We try to be as innovative as possible … knowing how popular (iPods) have become and the University has a partnership with iTunes, we came up with the idea of using podcasts,” said Seth Weinshel, director of campus housing.

CLLC staff helped create the informative podcasts to assist students. After the 24 podcasts were recorded, the files were converted and uploaded onto the CLLC Web site, http://gwired.gwu.edu/cllc.

Campus Housing has already found students taking advantage of the podcasts. “We’ve already had 400 hits on that Web site since (Feb. 6),” Weinshel said.

-Nadia Sheikh

Scholar discusses North Korean foreign relations

The hermetic, despotic North Korean government is hostile because its allies have historically treated it poorly, an historian said Wednesday in a lecture at the Elliott School of International Affairs building.

In her lecture, Kathryn Weathersby, a senior associate at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, detailed the history of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea specifically during the Korean War period, from 1950 to 1953. She based some of her conclusions on newly released archives from former Soviet states.

New information from ex-Soviet countries provide what Weathersby said was documentation that China and Russia, ostensibly North Korean allies, repeatedly neglected the communist country.

“(North Korea) was in the front line against American imperialism,” Weathersby said, “the poster child of the Communist world.” Yet the DPRK’s status as the baby of Communist Asia did not save it from suffering repeated manipulation at the hands of Russia and China, she told the approximately 20 people in attendance. She explained North Korea’s extreme dependance on Stalinist Russia and Maoist China and how vulnerable it made Korea to betrayal.

North Korea has always been a part of the international community, Weathersby said, but its being maniuplated has made it wary of dealing with other countries. More advanced countries, including China, Russia and the United States, are trying to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons program.

“Roots of North Korean antagonism are very deep,” Weathersby said, adding, “It’s the North Korean national story.”

-Paloma Ellis

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