(Source: Kyodo News)

Kim Jong-un, the heir to the North Korean regime, has reportedly undergone plastic surgery so that he more closely resembles his grandfather, the deeply respected Kim Il-sung.

(Source: The Telegraph)

The founder of Pakistan's nuclear bomb program asserts that the government of North Korea bribed top military officials in Islamabad to obtain access to sensitive nuclear technology in the late 1990s.

Abdul Qadeer Khan has made available documents that he says support his claim that he personally transferred more than $3 million in payments by North Korea to senior officers in the Pakistani military, which he says subsequently approved his sharing of technical know-how and equipment with North Korean scientists.

Khan also has released what he says is a copy of a North Korean official's 1998 letter to him, written in English, that spells out details of the clandestine deal.

The trademark suit sported by North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il is now in fashion worldwide thanks to his greatness, Pyongyang's official website said Wednesday.

Uriminzokkiri, quoting an article in communist party newspaper Rodong Sinmun, said the modest-looking suits have gripped people's imagination and become a global vogue.

"The reason is that the august image of the Great General, who is always wearing the modest suit while working, leaves a deep impression on people's mind in the world," it said.

"To sum it up, that is because his image as a great man is so outstanding."

North Korean fashionplate, Kim Jong-Il.

North Korea has executed a senior official blamed for currency reforms that damaged the already ailing economy and potentially affected the succession, a news agency in South Korea reported today.

Pak Nam-gi was killed by firing squad last week, said Yonhap, citing multiple sources. The Workers party chief for planning and the economy had not been seen in public since January.

The 77-year-old was put to death as "a son of a bourgeois conspiring to infiltrate the ranks of revolutionaries to destroy the national economy", the agency said.
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November's abrupt redenomination of the won led to public discontent and was having a negative impact on plans for the succession, another source said.
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Pak was last mentioned by the north's official Korean Central News Agency in January when he accompanied Kim on an inspection trip.

He was allegedly denounced as a traitor at a party meeting in the same month and arrested on the spot.

North Korea announced Tuesday that it had pardoned two detained American journalists, hours after former president Bill Clinton met in Pyongyang with reclusive dictator Kim Jong Il as part of an unannounced and highly unusual diplomatic mission to win their freedom.

Trust North Korea, even as relations appear to be getting a little better with the outside world, suddenly to spit in your eye. On Friday May 25th Japanese television and other regional news sources reported that the hermit kingdom had launched several short-range missiles into the Sea of Japan. South Korea’s spy agency confirmed the “drill”, suggesting the weapons were surface-to-ship types. It appears that they were launched from both the east and west coasts of North Korea.

The action, at the least, was extremely tactless, but it could have been worse. Although surprising it was reportedly part of an annual exercise. And testing long-range missiles that could reach Japan, as has been done before, would have been more provocative. Last July North Korea launched both long- and short-range missiles. As with previous stunts orchestrated by North Korea's isolated leadership—including the big one of testing a nuclear device last year—the desire may have been designed, in large part, to get attention from the outside world. Another theory is that Pyongyang was annoyed after South Korea launched a new destroyer.

The first deadline for North Korea to shut down and seal its main facility for manufacturing nuclear weapons fuel expired Saturday with no apparent action by the North to fulfill its commitments, while China asked angry officials in the Bush administration to show patience.

The inaction leaves President George W. Bush vulnerable to attacks from hawks in his own party, who have argued that it was a mistake to return $25 million in frozen funds to the North Koreans — much of it believed to be from illicit sales of counterfeit currency and missiles — and who doubt that the North Koreans will stop producing bomb fuel as well as give up all of their existing weapons.

The White House was silent about the missed deadline, but the chief American negotiator dealing with the North, Christopher Hill, told reporters in Beijing: "We don't have a lot of momentum right now. That is for sure."

The U.S. envoy to talks on North Korea's nuclear program said Tuesday that a tentative agreement had been reached on initial moves for the communist nation's disarmament. "I'm encouraged by this that we were able to take a step forward on the denuclearization issue," Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill said.

He declined to give details of the draft, but said it outlined specific commitments for Pyongyang and would set up working groups to implement those goals to begin meeting in about a month.

Hill said the draft still needed to be reviewed by the home governments of the six countries at the talks, but he was positive about its contents.

Has North Korean leader Kim Jong Il subverted the United Nations Development Program, the $4 billion agency that is the U.N.’s main development arm, and possibly stolen tens of millions of dollars of hard currency in the process?

According to a top official of the U.S. State Department — using findings made by the U.N.’s own auditors — the answer appears to be a disturbing yes, so far as UNDP programs in North Korea itself are concerned.

And just as disturbingly, the U.N. aid agency bureaucracy has kept the scamming a secret since at least 1999 — while the North Korean dictator and his regime were ramping up their illegal nuclear weapons program and making highly publicized tests of intermediate range ballistic missiles.

North Korea agreed Tuesday to rejoin six-nation nuclear disarmament talks in a surprise diplomatic breakthrough three weeks after the communist regime conducted its first known atomic test. A U.S. envoy said the talks could resume as early as November.

Chinese, U.S. and North Korean envoys to the negotiations held a day of unpublicized talks in Beijing during which North Korea agreed to return to the larger six-nation talks on its nuclear programs, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said.

"The three parties agreed to resume the six-party talks at the earliest convenient time," the Chinese statement said.

North Korea on Tuesday denounced U.N. sanctions over its nuclear test as a declaration of war and the United States and others suspected it may try a second bomb test despite international condemnation.

Defiant in the face of sanctions backed by even its closest ally, China, Pyongyang said it had withstood international pressure before and so was hardly likely to yield now that it had become "a nuclear weapons state."

The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously on Saturday to impose punishing sanctions on North Korea for its claimed nuclear test, declaring that its action posed "a clear threat to international peace and security."

North Korea immediately rejected the resolution, and its U.N. ambassador walked out of the council chamber after accusing its members of a "gangster-like" action which neglects the nuclear threat posed by the United States. Ambassador Pak Gil Yon said North Korea wants talks but warned that it will consider increased U.S. pressure a declaration of war.

The vote came after the United States, Britain and France overcame last-minute differences with Russia and China during what Russia's U.N. Ambassador Vitaly Churkin called "tense negotiations."

So you could be forgiven for thinking that the hoo-hah this week over North Korea’s joyful announcement that it had become the tenth family member might have been overdone. Won’t we just get used to dealing with Kim Jong Il as well? The optimistic view — if it can be called that — is enhanced by the suspicion that what they did in the mountains near Kimchaek last weekend may have been unsettling for the people of Kimchaek but shouldn’t make the rest of us lose much sleep.
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Stripped of the grandiose claims by Kim’s minions, the objective scientific evidence for a nuclear explosion is sketchy. The explosive yield, according to military analysts, was something less than a kiloton. A plutonium device such as that first used by the US in 1945 produces a yield in the range of 20 kilotons. Some warheads in the US nuclear arsenal now can deliver an impact about 1,000 times that of Hiroshima. ... So why worry? Here’s why. Unlike all previous nuclear nativities, North Korea’s efforts this week have truly propelled the world into a new and much more dangerous age. There’s no good strategic reason for Pyongyang even to claim to have a nuclear weapon, as China, Israel, Pakistan and India had.
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The problem with North Korea has not been an insufficiency of multilateralist diplomacy in the past ten years but an overabundance. Beginning in 1994, the Clinton Administration started the US down a course of an engagement with Pyongyang that was all carrots and no sticks. Every time the North Koreans thumbed their noses at the US and its allies, they were punished with — what? Sharp intakes of breath and shakes of the head.

Not only was the US unwilling to make good on its threats, but effective multilateral action also required serious efforts by other countries with real leverage over North Korea to do something. But for the past six years China has been playing a dangerous double game. It never wanted North Korea to become a nuclear power but it was quite happy that its ally kept the US, Japan and South Korea off balance with its burgeoning ambitions.

The same story of hand-wringing futility has been played out with Iran. Russia and China have both placed short-term diplomatic and commercial gain over long-term stability. The Europeans were, well, European.

As for Iraq, I don’t recall the Russians, Chinese or Europeans urging the US to divert its regime-changing attentions to North Korea. They wanted the US to perform the same foot-dragging, futile, pointless dance with Baghdad that they were pursuing over Pyongyang. Would that have been any better? Now, belatedly, the talk is of tough UN sanctions against Iran and North Korea. But it is too late. Out of a combination of fear, opportunism and cynicism, the world’s so-called powers have ridden a tiger for the past decade. Now the tiger has turned on them. Blaming America may make them feel better about it. It won’t change the bleak and terrifying new reality.

One of many tests conducted since North Korea's claimed nuclear test found a radioactive gas consistent with an atomic explosion, but the U.S. government has made no definitive conclusions about the blast, a senior Bush administration official said Friday.

"The betting is that this was an attempt at a nuclear test that failed," the official said. "We don't think they were trying to fake a nuclear test, but it may have been a nuclear fizzle." The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the information.

The test found a type of radioactive gas that would be present after a nuclear detonation, the official said. It is one of a number of analyses conducted this week, which have not provided clarity about what North Korea detonated on Monday.