The term's contemporary usage is notably unrelated to the USSR, such as in the expression “ North Korea's Gulag ” for camps operational still today.

The late Kim Il-sung is North Korea's Eternal President of the Republic | Eternal President.

At the same time North Korea's policy of self-reliance and the antagonism of America and its allies made it difficult for them to expand foreign trade or secure credit.

In the 1970s, expansion of North Korea's economy, with the accompanying rise in living standards, came to an end and a few decades later went into reverse.

North Korea's desire to lessen its dependence on aid from China and the Soviet Union prompted the expansion of its military power, which had begun in the second half of the 1960s.

However, soon after making such investments, international prices for many of North Korea's native minerals fell, leaving the country with large debts and an inability to pay them off and still provide a high level of social welfare to its people.

By the mid to late-1970s some parts of the capitalist world, including South Korea, were creating new industries based around computers, electronics, and other advanced technology in contrast to North Korea's Stalinist economy of mining and steel production.

Moreover, his Juche philosophy had effectively replaced Marxism-Leninism as North Korea's official ideology ( as outlined in the 1974 North Korean constitution ).

Without Soviet aid, North Korea's economy went into a free-fall.

After three years of consolidating his power, Kim Jong-il became Chairman of the NDC on October 8, 1997, a position described by the NDC as the nation's " highest administrative authority ," and thus North Korea's de facto head of state.

The inefficiency of North Korea's Stalinist-style agricultural system also contributed to the disaster.

An official at South Korea's seismic monitoring center confirmed a magnitude-3. 6 tremor felt at the time North Korea said it conducted the test was not a natural occurrence.

North Korea's advancements in weapons technology appear to give them leverage in ongoing negotiations with the United Nations and other countries.

* On North Korea's streets, pink and tangerine buses, Christian Science Monitor, June 2, 2005

Some 80 percent of North Korea's land area is composed of mountains and uplands, with all of the peninsula's mountains with elevations of 2000 m or more located in North Korea.

Lack of information makes it difficult to assess the extent to which industrialization and urbanization have damaged North Korea's natural environment.

In 1989 the Central Statistics Bureau released demographic data to the United Nations Fund for Population Activities ( UNFPA ) in order to secure the UNFPA's assistance in holding North Korea's first nationwide census since the establishment of the DPRK in 1946.

If their estimates are correct, 6. 1 percent of North Korea's total population was in the military, numerically the world's fifth largest military force, in the late 1980s ( fourth largest as of 2006 ).

However, the CIA World Fact Book estimated that North Korea's annual population growth rate was 1. 0 % in 1991 and that it has since declined to 0. 4 % by 2009.

North Korea's population is concentrated in the plains and lowlands.

In 1987 North Korea's largest cities were P ' yongyang, with approximately 2. 3 million inhabitants ; Hamhŭng, 701, 000 ; Ch ' ŏngjin, 520, 000 ; Namp ' o, 370, 000 ; Sunch ' ŏn, 356, 000 ; and Sinŭiju, 289, 000.

In theory, North Korea's judiciary is accountable to the SPA and the Presidium.

When the North enthusiastically rallied behind the national flag after the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, Lincoln concentrated on the military and political dimensions of the war effort.

The moderates ' efforts to compromise with Johnson failed, and a political war ensued between the Republicans ( both radical and moderate ) on one side, and on the other, Johnson and his allies in the Democratic Party in the North and the conservative groupings in the South.

The North Borneo Federation, also known as Kalimantan Utara or North Kalimantan was a proposed political entity which would have comprised the British Colonies of Sarawak, British North Borneo ( Sabah ) and the protectorate of Brunei.

Adams wrote, " There are laws of political as well as physical gravitation ; and if an apple severed by its native tree cannot choose but fall to the ground, Cuba, forcibly disjoined from its own unnatural connection with Spain, and incapable of self-support, can gravitate only towards the North American Union which by the same law of nature, cannot cast her off its bosom.

A Canadian Medical Association Journal paper states that " The famine in Cuba during the Special Period was caused by political and economic factors similar to the ones that caused a famine in North Korea in the mid-1990s.

Concurrently, Cairo has established itself as a political and economic hub for North Africa and the Arab World, with many multinational businesses and organizations, including the Arab League, operating out of the city.

Consequently issues like protectionism, welfare reform, privatisation and deregulation are no longer debated in the political space as they are in Europe or North America.

The varieties of Arabic are considerably different from each other-especially those spoken in North Africa ( Maghreb ) from those of the Middle East ( the Mashriq in the broad definition including Egypt and Sudan )-and had there been the political will in the different Arab countries to cut themselves off from each other, the case could have been made to declare these varieties as separate languages.

During the Indian Rebellion of 1857, some British officials suggested restoring Peshawar to Dost Mohammad, in return for his support against the rebellious sepoys of the Bengal Army, but this view was rejected by British political officers on the North West frontier, who believed that Dost Mohammad would see this as a sign of weakness and turn against the British.

According to a controversial essay titled " The Death of Environmentalism " ( Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, 2004 ) American environmentalism has been remarkably successful in protecting the air, water, and large stretches of wilderness in North America and Europe, but these environmentalists have stagnated as a vital force for cultural and political change.

After consolidating political and financial support, William crossed the North Sea and English Channel with a large invasion fleet in November 1688, landing at Torbay.

After World War II, several other forces were also leading the country toward increased equality for blacks, including their accelerated migration to the North, where their political clout grew, and President Harry Truman's desegregation of the military in 1948.

In 2000, after Rushton had mailed a booklet on his work to psychology, sociology, and anthropology professors across North America, Hermann Helmuth, a professor of anthropology at Trent University, said: " It is in a way personal and political propaganda.

In 2007, Loach was one of more than 100 artists and writers who signed an open letter initiated by Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism and the South West Asian, North African Bay Area Queers ( SWANABAQ ) and calling on the San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival " to honour calls for an international boycott of Israeli political and cultural institutions, by discontinuing Israeli consulate sponsorship of the LGBT film festival and not co-sponsoring events with the Israeli consulate.

The new Republican Party, which was created in opposition to the act, aimed to stop the expansion of slavery and soon emerged as the dominant political party in the North, electing its first president, Abraham Lincoln, in 1860.

The turmoil over the act split both the Democratic and Whig parties and gave rise to the Republican Party, which split the United States into two major political camps, North ( Republican ) and South ( Democratic ).

Final construction and the addition of the Kariba North Power cavern by Mitchell Construction was not completed until 1977 due to largely political problems for a total cost of $ 480, 000, 000.

Lithuania entered NATO on full-fledged rights immediately after the procedures of joining the North Atlantic Treaty were completed and Lithuania was able to participate in the political decision-making process of the Alliance.

However, the government is still sometimes referred to as Marxist – Leninist — or, more commonly, Stalinist — due to its political and economic structure ( see History of North Korea ).

When he hastily returned home, the brief attempt at political liberalization in North Korea was ended.

The lack of access to the foreign media and the tradition of secrecy in North Korea means that there is little news about political conditions, but Amnesty International's 2003 report on North Korea says that " there were reports of severe repression of people involved in public and private religious activities, including imprisonment, torture and executions.

China has counseled North Korea ’ s leaders to gradually open the economy to market forces, and it is possible this path will be successfully followed as well as China's policy of keeping political control firmly in the hands of the Communist Party.