North Korea’s leader boosts younger sister
Compiled from news services
TOKYO –– Kim Jong Un has taken another key step to consolidate his family’s control over North Korea, elevating his younger sister to the powerful political bureau of the ruling Workers’ Party and moving her closer to the center of the leadership.
Mr. Kim announced that his 30-year-old sister, Kim Yo Jong, had been promoted during a weekend of festivities celebrating the Kim family’s grip on the totalitarian state and amid expectations of a new salvo of missiles.
The North Korean regime will on Tuesday celebrate the 72nd anniversary of the founding of the Workers’ Party, through which the Kim family controls the country.
Analysts saw the sister’s elevation as the latest sign that Mr. Kim is trying to boost Ms. Kim’s standing in the regime. The Kim family claims its legitimacy through the “Paektu bloodline” –– the idea that their family has been destined, by a sacred Korean mountain, to lead the country.
Mr. Kim, 33, has played up the bloodline angle as he has sought to cement his claim to be his father’s rightful successor. But it is not clear who would succeed Mr. Kim if he were to die suddenly.
Michael Madden, an expert on the Kim family who runs the North Korea Leadership Watch blog, thinks that Mr. Kim might be positioning his sister as the next heir to the family dynasty.
U.K. cabinet shake-up?
U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May could soon be planning an overhaul of her team of top ministers in a bid to reassert her authority and end the government infighting that’s put Brexit talks in jeopardy.
Senior officials in Ms. May’s Conservative party, speaking on condition of anonymity, want her to deal with Boris Johnson, who has angered colleagues by forging his own path on Brexit in the run-up to what proved a disastrous party conference for May this week in Manchester.
In an interview with the Sunday Times, Ms. May sent a strong signal about her intentions when asked specifically what she planned to do about her rebellious foreign secretary, the former London mayor who’s in the past been touted as a potential successor.
“It has never been my style to hide from a challenge and I’m not going to start now,” she told the newspaper. “I’m the PM, and part of my job is to make sure I always have the best people in my Cabinet.”
Trump’s Scottish clubs
President Donald Trump’s two name-branded golf courses in Scotland lost more than $24 million in 2016 –– more than twice what they’d lost the year before –– as revenue from golfers and overnight guests dropped, according to documents filed with the British government.
Mr. Trump is not a beloved figure in the United Kingdom: Over the summer, a Pew Research Center poll found that only 22 percent of Britons had confidence that he would do the right thing.
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