Word: jong
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Last year, when oil was fetching more than $75 a barrel and Congress was thinking of slapping the industry with a windfall tax, the prospect of falling energy prices seemed as remote as Kim Jong Il winning the Nobel peace prize. China and India, with their booming economies, were supposed to consume every last drop of oil the world could produce, guaranteeing shortages for the rest of us. And with instability mounting in the Middle East as well as in major oil-producing countries like Nigeria and Venezuela, it was only logical to predict many years of tight supplies...
...story of contemporary North Korea is almost universally told as the tale of one man: Kim Jong Il, the all-powerful dictator whose idiosyncrasies and erratic behavior overshadow the more mundane lives of his 23 million subjects. So it's a bit of a surprise to realize that Kim's name isn't mentioned at all in the 280 pages of James Church's impressive North Korean thriller, A Corpse in the Koryo. The dictator and his father, North Korea's founder Kim Il Sung, are in passing alluded to as "our great Leaders", but to Inspector O, a gruff...
...align--when China's perception of its own national interest matches what the U.S. and other international powers seek--that help can be significant. Exhibit A is North Korea, long a Chinese ally, with whom China once fought a war against the U.S. As North Korea's leader Kim Jong Il developed a nuclear-weapons program in the 1990s, China had to choose between irking the U.S.--which would have implied doing little to rein in Pyongyang--or stiffing its former prot...
...after all, Pyongyang did return to the negotiating table this week after boycotting the talks or nearly a year. But after the resumed six-party talks aimed at bringing the North's nuclear program to an end concluded in Beijing, Friday, it was depressingly clear that Dear Leader Kim Jong-il is in no hurry to end his newly-minted membership in the nuclear club. Pyongyang's delegates refused to even discuss the nuclear program, instead insisting that the talks first solve the issue of some $24 million in North Korean funds that are frozen in a Macau bank account...
...limits on Russian influence were made clear in July 2000 when Kim Jong-il pulled a fast one on Russia's then-rookie President Vladimir Putin. Back then, Kim told Putin - who visited Pyongyang en route to his debut G8 summit in Okinawa - that North Korea would scrap its missile programs if other countries agreed to blast its satellites into orbit for the purposes of "peaceful space exploration." Putin tried to play Kim's statement as a trump card in his case against Washington's plans to develop a national missile defense system. But, the following month, the North Korean...