From The Guardian's account of this week's railway disaster at Ryongchong, North Korea comes this telling passage:
North Korean officials said about 350 injured people were hospitalized in Sinuiju, a bigger city on the Chinese border, according to [Dr. Eigil Sorensen, World Health Organization representative].
Aid workers didn't go there Saturday because Sinuiju is a special economic zone and North Korean officials hadn't prepared the required entry permits, Sorensen said. But he said they were promised access within the next two to three days.
We'll never know what actually happened there, but it's nice to see how efficiently the Communist bureaucracy responds to human needs.
If this damned thing had happened just a little further from the Chinese border, we'd never have heard about it.