Summary: North Korea’s motives in launching seven ballistic missiles on U.S. Independence Day, July 4, 2009. Includes link to North Korea threat assessment and psychological profile of Kim Jong-Il.

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Summary: Why North Korea could become one of President Obama’s most vexing foreign-policy challenges: For the moment, the Obama White House has bigger priorities than North Korea. Still, the new U.S. president would do well to keep in mind that Pyongyang is continuing to tweak its nuclear-weapons program. It already has an arsenal of ballistic missiles capable of hitting all of Japan and potentially parts of the United States. For all its paranoia, North Korea insists it’s still under the threat of “American and Japanese imperialists,” and says that it has every right to possess a “nuclear deterrent” to defend itself. Appeasing them with money and oil won’t be enough.

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Summary: More than 2 million Iraqis have fled the kidnappings, car bombings, and killings that have racked their homeland since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. The United States has admitted more than 16,000 Iraqi refugees in the past two years and expects to more than double that number by the end of 2009. A coalition of advocates, including Refugees International, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, and the Baltimore-based Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, is calling on the United States to nearly triple the money it spends on the displaced Iraqis while allowing the entry of as many as 105,000 in 2009 — a sevenfold increase over current admissions.

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Summary: In a New York Times op-ed column, New York University journalism professor Charles Seife offers an interesting resolution to the tight U.S. Senate contest in Minnesota between incumbent Republican Sen. Norm Coleman and Democratic challenger Al Franken: cast a lot to determine the winner by chance. … Iraq’s third-largest city, Mosul, faces economic and political problems that could unravel even if the military campaign succeeds.

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