North Korea's Kim Jong Un Shows Off New Wife Ri Sol Ju. SEOUL, South Korea -- The nation's young leader tours a new amusement park with his beautiful bride on his arm, smiling and waving to adoring crowds. An everyday image of domestic bliss in high places? In North Korea, it was a carefully choreographed appearance aimed at showing Kim Jong Un as a friendly, modern leader, no different from the heads of other countries. It also provided a sharp contrast to the intensely private face his father Kim Jong Il had portrayed during his 17 years in power.
Kim Jong Un's marital status was confirmed almost as an afterthought by state TV in an understated report on Wednesday about the opening of the amusement park: "As a welcoming song resonated, dear respected Marshal Kim Jong Un, supreme commander of our party and people, appeared at the inauguration ceremony together with his wife, comrade Ri Sol Ju.
" It also helps ordinary North Koreans feel that their new ruler is an average guy, not an eccentric, said Ahn Chan-il, another political analyst. 경애하는 김정은동지를 모시고 진행한 모란봉악단 시범공연. North Korean Film On American Propaganda. Venerable Pomnyun’s Earthly Mission Is to Aid North Korea. Woohae Cho for The International Herald Tribune South Korean Buddhist monk Venerable Pomnyun in his office at Peace Foundation in Seoul, South Korea on April 4. IN August 1996, the Venerable Pomnyun, a Buddhist monk from South Korea, was cruising down the Yalu River between China and when he saw a boy squatting alone at the North Korean edge of the water. The boy was in rags, his gaunt face covered in dirt. Pomnyun shouted to him, but the boy did not respond. Pomnyun’s Chinese companion explained that North Korean children were instructed never to beg from foreigners.
And when Pomnyun asked if the boat could be steered closer to the child to bring help, he was reminded that they could not enter North Korean territory. “Never before had I realized the meaning of a border so painfully until that day,” said Pomnyun, 59. The encounter led him to establish one of the first relief campaigns for North Korean refugees and to take on an unlikely role for a Buddhist monk. North Korea’s Failed Fireworks. In early February, Iran launched its third successful commercial satellite in three years. The Barack Obama administration, the United Nations, and the news media barely acknowledged the accomplishment.
North Korea, on the other hand, has created a furor each of the three times its satellites failed to reach orbit. Its latest effort, on Apr. 13, broke up within two minutes of launch. Pyongyang acknowledged the failure and went on with its celebrations of the 100th anniversary of the birth of the country’s founder, Kim Il Sung. The Obama administration immediately condemned the North Korean launch. It followed through on its threat to suspend its participation in the Feb. 29 agreement that would have sent 240,000 metric tonnes of food assistance to North Korea. “We want to make clear to them&that each step that they take in terms of provocations will only lead to a deeper isolation, increase consequences,” stated Ben Rhodes, deputy national security advisor for strategic communications. North Korean carrier rocket explodes 80 seconds after launch. North Korea confirmed the failure of its rocket (or missile, depending on your interpretation) which launched at 7:39 this morning, local time.
The United States, South Korea and Japan all reported that the rocket broke up shortly after launch. According to the North American Aerospace Defense Command, a North Korean Taepodong-2 missile launched at 18:39 EDT before following a trajectory over the Yellow Sea. NORAD reports that the missile's first stage landed in the sea 165 km (about 100 miles) west of the South Korean capital, Seoul.
The rocket's other stages are all thought to have landed off shore, and no stage was the missile or its debris deemed a threat, NORAD said. In South Korea's assessment the rocket was reported to have disintegrated into 20 pieces. Pyongyang has maintained that the rocket launch was for the purposes of putting a satellite into orbit, while the interpretation of the US and its allies is that this was a poorly-disguised missile test.
North Korea Prison Camps: 150,000 Languish In Secret Gulags, Human Rights Group Says. Claire Lambrecht: Escape from a “Necrocracy” In North Korea, the hunger games have been raging for quite some time. Image from Flickr via Tequila Partners By Claire Lambrecht What lies 25 miles north of Seoul is something of a mystery. Since the 1950s, the region has fallen out of favor, bringing otherwise-electric conversation to a screeching, brownout halt. Few people, it seems, know exactly where North Korea is, though they know it belongs somewhere near the top-right corner of the map—so far north Sarah Palin could probably see it from her house. It’s easier, of course, to imagine the country as an army of Team America bobble-head dolls: to call it, as the late Christopher Hitchens did in a 2001 Vanity Fair article, a “necrocracy.”
Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West (Viking, April 2) is one such story. North Korean labor camps… have lasted twice as long as the Soviet gulag and nearly twelve times longer than Nazi concentration camps. “It is unthinkable,” wrote Aleksandr I. South Korea's Unification Plan: 'No One Wants to Just Swallow Up the North' - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International.
Kim Jong II and Hans Blix. Il looking at things. Escape Artist - An FP Slide Show. Beloved Leader, acrylic on hanji, 3.28 x 2.13, 2009 If the Kim regime falls, what would you like to see done with the thousands of works of propaganda art, like the ones you used to create? The passage of time is inevitable and change is inevitable. The people believe that change is coming to North Korea. When the time comes that the regime is no more, the North Korean people will be the ultimate judge. They will be the arbiters of what kind of monuments, icons, or propaganda material to get rid of or preserve.
I would like to preserve some of the monuments as a reminder of the past, a reminder of how North Koreans lived without basic freedoms, how countless North Koreans have had to bow down in front of huge statues of Kim Il Sung, as a reminder of how North Koreans lived. Interview by Joshua E. Courtesy of www.songbyeok.com. North Korea's nuclear weapons: A horse worth the price.
How one man escaped from a North Korean prison camp | Books. North Korea: Long-Range Rocket To Launch To Mark Founder's Birth. By Jack Kim and Jeremy Laurence SEOUL, March 16 (Reuters) - North Korea said on Friday it will launch a "working" satellite to mark the centenary of founder Kim Il-sung's birth next month, prompting immediate fears from Japan it would in fact be another long-range missile launch in breach of a U.N. resolution. In April 2009, a long-range missile test failed when its first stage fell into the Sea of Japan without orbiting a satellite, provoking outrage in Tokyo, which had threatened to shoot down any debris or rocket that threatened its territory. Another test failed in similar circumstances in 1998. Experts said the latest launch was clearly another long-range missile test, designed to pressure Washington into advancing stalled nuclear disarmament negotiations. The North, which said recently it would suspend long-range missile testing as part of talks with the United States, said on Friday it had already launched two experimental satellites.
The U.N.