Kim Jong-il's secret affair with a married actress

In the 1960’s Kim Jong-il began an affair with a married actress that he wanted kept from his father and founder of North Korea's ruling dynasty, Kim Il-sung (which even now is so sensitive it remains air-brushed from the reclusive state's official history).

Kim Jong-il would eventually father a son with the actress, a star of her time called Sung Hye-rim, or Song Hye-rim, who died in exile in Russia in 2002.

Kim Young-soon, a celebrated dancer at the time, moved among North Korea's elite before she was sent to prison for nine years. Her crime? Knowing this secret. She told Reuters in Seoul, "I have lived a life that cannot be told without tears. This is just the frightening way in which North Korea works."

Much of Kim Young-soon’s story has been verified by North Korean defectors, including former high-ranking officials in the secretive state.

Intelligence sources have also verified reports of Kim Jong-il's liaisons with Sung, whom is believed to have been one of his wives and the mother of Kim Jong-nam, who was born in 1971.

Unrest and starvation in North Korea

North Koreans are starving to death and unrest is growing due to the currency revaluation last year that crippled markets and led to the sacking of a senior cadre, reports said on Wednesday. The news comes as the destitute North is under growing pressure to end its boycott of international nuclear disarmament talks, where it can win aid for reducing the security threat it poses in economically vital North Asia.

North Korean Workers' Party finance director Pak Nam-gi, who led the currency revaluation aimed at breaking up market activities in the socialist state, has been removed from his post, the Chosun Ilbo newspaper said quoting diplomatic sources in Beijing.

North Korea last year announced a revaluation of its currency where old notes of its won currency would be changed for new ones at a rate of 100 to one. The move was a further blow to the North's wobbly economy, which has also been hit by U.N. sanctions imposed after its nuclear test last year.

The currency revaluation was aimed at wiping out the cash holdings of a burgeoning merchant class, who traded in hard currency in China for food and items not properly provided by the central government. The North's impoverished citizens have increasingly turned to markets for essentials not provided by the broken distribution system.

Dong-A Ilbo reported ethnic Koreans on the Chinese side of the border as saying there have been reports of starvation in Sinuiju, a North Korean border city that has typically fared well because of trade with China.

There has also been rare civil unrest in the authoritarian state with North Koreans fighting security agents trying to stop people from smuggling or trading food, Daily NK, an online site run by activists, reported sources in North Korea as saying.

North Korea, an ideology of the most unapologetic racism and xenophobia

The Kim Jong-il system is a phenomenon of the very extreme and pathological right. It is based on totalitarian "military first" mobilization, is maintained by slave labor, and instills an ideology of the most unapologetic racism and xenophobia.

The United States and its partners make up in aid for the huge shortfall in North Korea's food production, but there is not a hint of acknowledgement of this by the authorities, who tell their captive subjects that the bags of grain stenciled with the Stars and Stripes are tribute paid by a frightened America to the Dear Leader.

Wall posters and banners depicting all Japanese as barbarians are only equaled by the ways in which Americans are caricatured as hook-nosed monsters.

Many of the slogans employed and displayed by the North Korean state are borrowed directly—this really does count as some kind of irony—from the kamikaze ideology of Japanese imperialism.

Every child is told every day of the wonderful possibility of death by immolation in the service of the motherland and taught not to fear the idea of war, not even a nuclear one.

Excerpt from Slate

UN to send top aide to North Korea this month

UN chief Ban Ki-moon's top political adviser Lynn Pascoe will visit North Korea in February as part of a four-nation tour that will also take him to China, Japan and South Korea, a UN statement said on Sunday.

Mr Ban's press office said Mr Pascoe, the UN under secretary general for political affairs, would visit North Korea from Feb 9 to 12 on the first leg of his east Asian tour to hold wide-ranging talks on all issues of mutual interest with senior North Korean officials.

In September, Ban Ki-moon, a South Korean former foreign minister, conferred with North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Park Gil Yon at UN headquarters on North Korea's nuclear program as well as on humanitarian and human rights issues.

The United Nations wanted to send envoys to Pyongyang early last year but North Korea rejected the offer, Yonhap said. Pyongyang has been under growing international pressure to return to six-nation nuclear disarmament talks that the communist state has boycotted for nine months.

Straits Times