Tag: Kim Jong-un

I wonder if the North Korean delegation was even able to see this protest?  I am willing to bet the ROK authorities kept the North Koreans out of view of this protest:

Conservative protesters on Monday burned a picture of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and the North’s national flag, in a rally against its participation in next month’s PyeongChang Winter Olympics.

The activists, led by the far-right Korean Patriots Party, held a press conference in front of Seoul Station at around 11 a.m., when a group of North Korean officials arrived at the train station from the eastern city of Gangneung, on the second day of their two-day trip for inspection of performance venues.

“The PyeongChang Winter Olympics is turning into ‘Kim Jong-un’s Pyongyang Olympics’ that effectively recognizes its nuclear armaments and propagates the North Korean regime,” they said. [Korea Times]

The Daily Beast has an article published that looks back on the childhood of Kim Jong-un as he was attending school in Geneva, Switzerland:

“It’s one of the great mysteries why Kim Jong Nam studied in Geneva and learned French and the other kids who came later were sent to Bern where it’s German-speaking,” says Michael Madden, a North Korea expert affiliated with Johns Hopkins who runs North Korea Leadership Watch. “All I can think is that North Korea is always a little bit on the run. They like to change things up.”

The Kim family began building what Madden calls a “necessary network” in Paris in the 1970s and it maintains a home there to this day.

“You can’t send the kids of a dictator abroad without a network, people and institutions in place to help take care of them,” Madden said. “The Kims started all of this in Paris.”

Last year, Kim Jong Un’s aunt, Ko Yong Suk, told The Washington Post, that she and her husband took care of Kim and his two siblings in Switzerland. Kim Jong Chol arrived in 1992; Kim Jong Un came in 1996, when he was 12.

“We lived in a normal house and acted like a normal family. I acted like their mother,” Ko said about her time in Bern. “I encouraged [Kim Jong Un] to bring his friends home, because we wanted them to live a normal life. I made snacks for the kids. They ate cake and played with Legos.”

During school breaks, Ko and her husband took the kids skiing in the Swiss Alps, swimming on the French Riviera, and to Italy.

In Bern, Kim liked playing with machinery in addition to obsessing about basketball and Michael Jordan.

“He wasn’t a troublemaker, but he was short-tempered and had a lack of tolerance,” Ko recalled. “When his mother tried to tell him off for playing with these things too much and not studying enough, he wouldn’t talk back, but he would protest in other ways, like going on a hunger strike.”

He had begun showing signs of a complicated personality, and he reportedly was caught once with a BDSM porn magazine, it’s not clear how significant that is, if it is true at all.

A local education official confirmed to Reuters that a student known only as Pak Un who was registered as the child of a North Korean embassy worker attended the Steinhoelzli school from 1998 until late 2000. “Pak Un attended a class for non-German speaking pupils but then quickly moved to another class,” said Ueli Studer in a 2011 report.  “He was described as well-integrated, diligent and ambitious. His hobby was basketball.”  [The Daily Beast]

You can read more at the link, but it is clear his love for Dennis Rodman and his development of the ski industry in North Korea came at a young age while in school in Switzerland.

There has likely been some back channel communications with the Kim regime, but I would be very surprised if President Trump was in direct contact with Kim Jong-un like he appears to be suggesting:

President Donald Trump suggested in an interview Thursday that he has developed a positive relationship with the North Korean leader, but declined to say whether they have spoken.

No sitting U.S. president is known to have spoken with a North Korean leader. The two nations have remained in a state of war and without diplomatic relations since the Korean War ended in 1953 without a peace treaty.

“I probably have a very good relationship with Kim Jong Un,” Trump told The Wall Street Journal. “I have relationships with people. I think you people are surprised.”

Asked if he had spoken with Kim, Trump was evasive: “I’m not saying I have or haven’t. I just don’t want to comment.”  [Associated Press]

You can read more at the link.

Once again President Trump has the media all worked up by a Tweet:

If you were looking for a two-word slogan to describe Donald Trump’s life, that would be a fitting one. In everything — from the size of his buildings to the size of his genitals to the size of his nuclear arsenal, Trump is totally and completely obsessed with being the biggest and the best.

Witness his tweet Tuesday night directed at North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un:

“North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the ‘Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.’ Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”

“Much bigger & more powerful.” “My Button works.”

North Korea’s top leader Kim Jong-un pays respect to his late father at a mausoleum in Pyongyang in this photo published in the Dec. 18, 2017, edition of the North’s ruling party newspaper Rodong Sinmun. The North’s media had been mum on the leader’s whereabouts on Dec. 17, when the entire country mourns the death of Kim Jong-il, raising curiosity among North Korea watchers. The photo on the right shows the basket of flowers Kim placed at the mausoleum. (Yonhap)

North Korea’s top leader Kim Jong-un is seen holding a cigarette in this photo capture from the North’s Korean Central TV on Dec. 13, 2017, as he attended the 8th Conference of Munitions Industry in Pyongyang a day earlier. North Korea launched a nationwide anti-smoking campaign last year, but outside watchers say the smoking rate is actually increasing, partly due to Kim’s smoking habit being frequently shown in public. (Yonhap)

The New York Times has a very good article published that shows who are the various scientists in North Korea that have made Kim Jong-un’s nuclear and ballistic missile ambitions so successful:

“We have never heard of him killing scientists,” said Choi Hyun-kyoo, a senior researcher in South Korea who runs NK Tech, a database of North Korean scientific publications. “He is someone who understands that trial and error are part of doing science.”

Analysts are still trying to explain how North Korea managed to overcome decades of international sanctions and make so much progress so quickly. But it is clear the nation has accumulated a significant scientific foundation despite its backward image.

Its new ICBM is a feat of physics and engineering that has stunned the world, and each of its six nuclear tests has been more powerful than the last, boosting Mr. Kim’s stature at home and his leverage abroad.  [New York Times]

Also if you are wondering how the North Koreans have been so successful so quick with their nuclear and missile programs, this may explain it:

In 1992, a plane carrying 64 rocket scientists from Moscow was stopped before departing for North Korea. It is not clear how many, if any, former Soviet scientists made it to North Korea in the decades since.

Theodore A. Postol, a professor emeritus of science, technology and international security at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the North has “this fantastic record for flying rockets the first time and having them succeed.”

In this undated photo provided on Sunday, Dec. 3, 2017, by the North Korean government, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un inspects a local tire factory in Chagang Province, North Korea. Kim thanked workers at a factory that built the tires for a huge vehicle used to transport a new intercontinental ballistic missile that was test-launched this week. Independent journalists were not given access to cover the event depicted in this image distributed by the North Korean government. The content of this image is as provided and cannot be independently verified. Korean language watermark on image as provided by source reads: “KCNA” which is the abbreviation for Korean Central News Agency.
KOREAN CENTRAL NEWS AGENCY/KOREA NEWS SERVICE VIA AP

The many styles of KJU offices.. pic.twitter.com/5wT8wKnKP7

— Nathan J Hunt (@ISNJH) November 29, 2017

As much as I don’t like Kim Jong-un I don’t think it is fair to blame him for a parasite epidemic when it wasn’t too long ago when South Koreans were doing the same thing and having the same problems:

The hermit nation’s leader issued an instruction to farmers in 2014 telling them to use human faeces with animal waste and organic compost on their fields. With a lack of livestock to provide animal fertilizer, agriculturists poured the human excrement, also known as “night soil”, on their fields.

Kim’s pronouncement further precipitated  the falsehood in North Korea that human waste was the best fertilizer for crops despite the dangerous parasites and worms found within in it, Reuters reported.

The nutrition and widespread health problems that blight North Korea have been highlighted by one North Korean soldier who has recently defected to the south. The army sergeant was found to have dozens of flesh colored parasites in his digestive tract, one of which measured 10.6 inches in length.  [Newsweek]

You can read the rest at the link, but I can remember about 20 years ago I was out near the Imjim River in South Korea during a military training exercise.  From my Bradley Fight Vehicle we could see this old Korean woman in the distance walk into a rice paddy pull her pants down, squat, and take a dump right there in the field.  And no she did not wipe afterwards.  Seeing that made me laugh nearly as hard as when I was flashed by a Korean transvestite while driving in a HMMWV in Dongducheon.