Moon Jae-in gave up hunting dogs claiming government refused to cover food and veterinary bills
A pair of dogs gifted four years ago by the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, have ended up at a zoo in South Korea after a dispute over who should pay for the animals’ care.
Kim had given the two white Pungsan hunting dogs – a breed indigenous to North Korea – to the then South Korean president, Moon Jae-in, as a gift after their summit talks in Pyongyang in 2018.
Continue reading...Analysis: Kim Jong-un’s pressure on Joe Biden has so far elicited only fresh sanctions. Pyongyang has now signalled it may resume nuclear and ICBM tests
North Korea has already conducted four test launches of ballistic missiles this year, but they could be a mere precursor to more serious provocations, as Kim Jong-un’s regime attempts to break the nuclear stalemate with the US.
Superficially, the recent tests were a reminder of the North’s ability to manufacture more sophisticated weapons – perhaps including those capable of evading missile defences – despite years of international sanctions.
Continue reading...Video from Pyongyang shows North Korea's leader Kim Jong-un looking very dour as he attends the memorial service to mark the 10th anniversary of his father's death. As part of the national memorial, North Koreans have been banned from showing any sign of happiness. The restrictions include an explicit ban on laughter and alcohol during the 11-day period of mourning. On the exact anniversary of Kim Jong-il’s death, 17 December, North Koreans were even banned from going grocery shopping
Some observers said he would survive a few months as the head of a nuclear-armed state but, a decade later, the North Korean leader has proved them wrong
It was not, perhaps, the image Kim Jong-un would have wanted to project in his first public appearance as the latest authoritarian leader of North Korea in 2011. As wailing citizens exhibited their grief along the snowbound streets of Pyongyang, Kim, then only in his late 20s, cut a forlorn figure.
Dressed in a long black coat, Kim walked with grim purpose alongside the hearse carrying his father, Kim Jong-il, one hand resting on the bonnet of the 1970s Lincoln Continental, the other executing an awkward salute. He was later seen crying and drying his eyes at the burial service, in footage broadcast on state television.
Continue reading...Mitsuko left Japan in 1960 for a new life in North Korea. Once there, she realised she – and hundreds of others like her – could never go back
It has been six decades since Mitsuko Minakawa boarded a ferry on the Sea of Japan coast, bound for a new life in North Korea. But the anguish of that sunny day in the spring of 1960 has never left her.
Two months earlier, Minakawa had married a Korean man, Choe Hwa-jae, a contemporary at Hokkaido University, where she was the only woman in a class of 100 students. Minakawa, then 21, and Choe were part of the mass repatriation of ethnic Korean residents of Japan – many of them the offspring of people who had been brought from the Korean peninsula by their Japanese colonisers to work in mines and factories.
Continue reading...Tens of thousands of North Koreans have turned out to pay tribute to their leaders. The most important day in the country’s ritual calendar, 15 April is called the Day of the Sun, the anniversary of the 1912 birth of the country’s founder, Kim Il-sung
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