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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...
...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 the middle son, Kim Jong Chul, is "too feminine" for the job, according to Fujimoto. Hence the mantle of leadership will apparently someday be handed to Kim Jong...
...this have to do with Pyongyang's recent belligerence? According to diplomats and intelligence sources in Washington and East Asia, plenty. The North Koreans have chosen what could have been a period of weakness - with an ailing leader trying to arrange the eventual transfer of power to an untested son - to state that it does not intend to give up its nuclear weapons program. "It's 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...
Before he survived the crash, Ollestad had to survive his childhood. His father was a dashing adventurer who pushed his son to feats of preadolescent derring-do as a surfer and skier that are unimaginable by today's nurturing parental standards. It may have been his familiarity with physical danger, and his calmness in the face of it, that saved Ollestad on Ontario Peak. It helped him manage the psychic aftermath too, to put a frame around it. To the Ollestads, life was "raw and wild and wonderfully unpredictable." To be paralyzed by fear of it, by the inevitability...
Someone jokes that "Today Hashemi carries us to victory!" referring to the fact that the the metro system, an enormously profitable cash cow, is run by the son of former president Hashemi Rafsanjani, who also happens to be one of the chief backers of Mir-Hossein Mousavi. (See pictures of the turbulent aftermath of Iran's presidential election...