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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...
...Jong Un is 26 and a chip off the old block, according to Kenji Fujimoto, the Japanese chef who 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...
...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...
...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 Un. "A systematic succession plan is now under way, and has been since early this year," Cheong Seong-chang of the Seoul-based Sejong Institute and one of South Korea's leading experts on North Korean political élites, wrote in a report, parts of which are classified, prepared...
...seen many of its able-bodied men leave to work in the more prosperous cities of Russia and oil-rich Kazakhstan - at least a tenth of the Tajik population of 7 million is migrant labor. Remittances sent home comprise some 40% of the country's total GDP, according to UN figures, and account for only slightly less in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Now, with the collapse of the Russian economy and the drying up of its construction boom, tens of thousands are returning to rugged homelands that offer few opportunities and to families that depended on their labor abroad. Observers...