Some believe that the kind of interaction that Ford had with the country can only be positive, as information from the outside world slowly drips in to the hermetically sealed country.
(See "After No-Show, Questions Mount About Kim Jong Il") "There are no problems," Kim Yong Nam, North Korea's second-ranking leader and ceremonial head of state, said Wednesday to Japan's Kyodo News, one of the few foreign news agencies to have an office in the hermetically sealed country.
North Korea, one of the world's most tightly sealed countries, has surprised and puzzled South Koreans by broadcasting nightly reports of the World Cup soccer games in South Korea and Japan.
Early after the attacks, North Korea, one of the most tightly sealed countries in the world, seemed to go out of its way to express sympathy, even showing signs of understanding for American military reprisals.
Venezuela's populist president, Hugo Chávez, sealed his country's membership in the group alongside the founding four: Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay.
The military government has sealed the country off from the outside world for decades, and the barriers and the mistrust have grown even higher in recent years with the imposition of economic embargos.
What's more, he argues, economic isolation, even if it could be achieved, would not really bother Myanmar's generals; after all, they themselves sealed the country off from the world for 30 years up to 1988.The proponents of boycotts and sanctions, who include Aung San Suu Kyi and her political party, claim that the regime does worry about its image.
The group's founder, John Tanton, said in a 1997 interview that unless the borders were sealed, the country would be overrun by people "defecating and creating garbage and looking for jobs".
But events began moving very quickly after the Soviet-sponsored government in Hungary decided in early May 1989, as part of its own Gorbachev-style restructuring, to turn off the electrified fence that sealed the country's western border.
AP launched its North Korea bureau in January of 2012 as the first all-format news office in Pyongyang with the goal of giving its audience a glimpse into the notoriously sealed off country.
Many, but not all of them are Sunnis, nominally allied with President Hadi, who is being supported by the Saudis, leading a coalition that is attempting to bomb the Houthis into submission while sealing the country's land and sea borders.
