"His banquets often started at midnight and lasted until morning. Live lobsters were delivered in advance to stations.Ī Japanese cook later claimed he was Kim's personal sushi chef for a decade, writing that Kim had a wine cellar stocked with 10,000 bottles, and that, in addition to sushi, Kim ate shark's fin soup - a rare delicacy - weekly. Pulikovsky, who accompanied the North Korean leader, said Kim's 16-car private train was stocked with crates of French wine. One account of Kim's lavish lifestyle came from Konstantin Pulikovsky, a former Russian presidential envoy who wrote the book "The Orient Express" about Kim's train trip through Russia in July and August 2001. Kim rarely traveled abroad and then only by train because of an alleged fear of flying, once heading all the way by luxury rail car to Moscow, indulging in his taste for fine food along the way.
Bbc news north korea today movie#
He reportedly produced several North Korean films as well, mostly historical epics with an ideological tinge.Ī South Korean film director claimed Kim even kidnapped him and his movie star wife in the late 1970s, spiriting them back to North Korea to make movies for him for a decade before they managed to escape from their North Korean agents during a trip to Austria.
Bbc news north korea today professional#
Kim was said to have cultivated wide interests, including professional basketball, cars and foreign films. His trademark attire of jumpsuits and sunglasses was mocked in such films as "Team America: World Police," a movie populated by puppets that was released in 2004. In 1987, the bombing of a Korean Air Flight killed all 115 people on board a North Korean agent who confessed to planting the device said Kim ordered the downing of the plane himself. South Korea has accused Kim of masterminding a 1983 bombing that killed 17 South Korean officials visiting Burma, now known as Myanmar. Kim Jong Il, a graduate of Pyongyang's Kim Il Sung University, was 33 when his father anointed him his eventual successor.Įven before he took over as leader, there were signs the younger Kim would maintain - and perhaps exceed - his father's hard-line stance. Their portraits hang in every building in North Korea and on the lapels of every dutiful North Korean. In the North, Kim Il Sung meshed Stalinist ideology with a cult of personality that encompassed him and his son. The Korean peninsula remains technically in a state of war more than 50 years after the Cold War-era armed conflict ended in a cease-fire. The North invaded the South in 1950, sparking a war that would last three years, kill millions of civilians and leave the peninsula divided by a Demilitarized Zone that today remains one of the world's most heavily fortified. With the peninsula divided between the Soviet-administered north and the U.S.-administered south, Kim rose to power as North Korea's first leader in 1948 while Syngman Rhee became South Korea's first president. Kim Il Sung, who for years fought for independence from Korea's colonial ruler, Japan, from a base in Russia, emerged as a communist leader after returning to Korea in 1945 after Japan was defeated in World War II. Soviet records, however, indicate he was born in Siberia, in 1941.
North Korean legend has it that Kim was born on Mount Paektu, one of Korea's most cherished sites, in 1942, a birth heralded in the heavens by a pair of rainbows and a brilliant new star. officials were in contact with allies in South Korea and Japan.Įven with a successor, there had been some fear among North Korean observers of a behind-the-scenes power struggle or nuclear instability upon the elder Kim's death.įew firm facts are available when it comes to North Korea, one of the most isolated countries in the world, and not much is clear about the man known as the "Dear Leader." President Barack Obama was monitoring reports of the death of the North Korean leader, the White House said Sunday night, adding that U.S. Video from Chinese state television showed residents of Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, weeping while KCNA reported people were "writhing in pain" from the loss. Kim Jong Un, Kim's youngest son, was named by North Korea's official news agency KCNA as the "great successor" to his father, which lauded him as "the outstanding leader of our party, army and people." President Lee Myung-bak also convened a national security council meeting after the news of Kim's death. Mindful of North Korea's nuclear weapons programs and 1.2 million-strong armed forces, South Korea put its military on alert.
She said the nation must "change our sadness to strength and overcome our difficulties." and it is our people and nation's biggest sadness," an anchorwoman clad in black Korean traditional dress said in a voice choked with tears.
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