It's part of a pattern at the Post where they're gradually been getting rid of all the people who write interesting copy on China or Hong Kong and toning down the paper. It's basically a process of self-censorship.

[To survive has required tenacity. Koreans are reported even to have murdered children and mixed their flesh with pork to eat. When I have encountered North Korean refugees in Asia, they look barely human - stunted figures with sallow, terrified faces. Some North Koreans have tried to grow their own food, potentially a sign of independent thinking. But for years Kim had them stopped, though he has begun to open the economy slightly in the past three years. Those who protested were sent to an extensive gulag system, which may have resulted in the deaths of one million people. In this internal slave state, Becker suggests, tests of chemical weapons are carried out on prisoners, and pregnant women whose children were tainted with foreign blood have been forced to have abortions. Kim Jong Il has] resisted adopting every policy that could have brought the misery to a quick end, ... the suffering he inflicted on an entire people an unparalleled and monstrous crime.

Instead we were filling the newspaper with bland, harmless stories, and if there was anything sensitive we would run agency copy and sort of try and downplay it.

It's been successfully cheating its way with its nuclear program for something like 20 years, so I think a lot of people will say, 'lets not jump on this and let's not be too hasty'.

[Details of that extravagance are drawn from Kim's former lackeys.] For all the immense privileges enjoyed by ... those who ruled the Soviet Union and China, they did not aspire to a live a life completely alien to their countrymen, ... They did not show signs of a consuming desire to emulate the tastes of a jet-set billionaire.

We need people. We got money. We don't have people.