Word: koreas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When he was a boy, the apparent dictator-in-waiting used to be an enthusiastic basketball player - not to mention a sort of coach on the floor. Kim Jong Un, the youngest son of the man known as the Dear Leader, North Korea's Kim Jong Il, would play hoops with his friends and his brother and afterward, according to a memoir written by his family's former chef, would gather his teammates and offer constructive criticism: "You should have passed here instead of shooting. We should have double-teamed this guy." (No one, mind you, ever told the Dear...
...used to cook for the Kim clan. He is short, a bit overweight and "aggressive," Fujimoto has said, "just like his father." And Kim Jong Un is now, many analysts believe, officially in line to succeed Kim Jong Il as the leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea - which helps explain Pyongyang's recent explosively belligerent behavior. (Read "Time to Face Facts on Our North Korea Ignorance...
...Just over four months into Barack Obama's presidency, North Korea has become his first foreign policy crisis. To force itself to the top of Obama's agenda, the North has resorted to just about every nasty tactic short of war - testing both a long-range rocket and a nuclear bomb, arresting two American journalists and sentencing them to harsh prison terms. With such provocations, North Korea seems intent on establishing that it is more dangerous than ever. Kim Jong Un is at least part of the reason...
...Family Matters Late last summer, his father, 68, suffered a stroke, and that brush with mortality apparently concentrated his mind. North Korea was founded by Kim Jong Il's father, the so-called Great Leader, Kim Il Sung, who has become, in the decades since, the focus of a dynastic cult of personality like no other. (Dead for 15 years, Kim Il Sung is still North Korea's "President for life.") Kim Jong Il has three sons from two wives. The eldest embarrassed his father in 2001 by trying to sneak into Japan on a fake passport. His father thinks...
...pretty clear they have made the strategic choice to be a nuclear power, period, and will no longer hold out the weapons program as a thing to be bargained away in talks with the U.S. and its neighbors," says Bruce Klingner, a former deputy chief of the Korea desk at the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence and now a senior fellow at Washington's Heritage Foundation. "They've decided that now is the time to raise, not lower, the walls against foreign interference." (Read "Jailed U.S. Reporters: Business as Usual for North Korea...