North Korea says top official Kim Yang-gon killed in car crash

A top aide to the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has died in a car crash, state news agency KCNA has said. Kim Yang-gon, 73, was a secretary of the ruling Workers' Party and was in charge of ties with South Korea. He was part of a high-level delegation from North Korea that helped ease a stand-off with the South in August, after an exchange of artillery fire. The state news agency called him Kim Jong-un's "closest comrade and a solid revolutionary partner". "Comrade Kim Yang-gon, a Workers' Party secretary and member of the party Central Committee Politbureau... died in a traffic accident at 6:15am, Tuesday, at age 73," KCNA said, without giving details. It added that Kim Jong-un would lead an 80-member state funeral for Mr Kim on Thursday. Tension between North and South Korea increased in August when a border blast injured two South Korean soldiers. Meetings at that time eventually led to the two countries stepping away from a military confrontation.

Analysis of North Korea's computer system reveals spy files

The first in-depth analysis of North Korea's internal computer operating system has revealed spying tools capable of tracking documents offline. Red Star OS was designed to superficially mimic Apple's OS X, but hidden features allow it to watermark files and tie them to an individual. The covert tools were discovered by two German researchers who conducted the analysis over the past month. They presented their findings at the Chaos Communication Congress on Sunday. Florian Grunow and Niklaus Schiess pored over the code of Red Star OS version 3.0, which first surfaced online about a year ago. Advertisement The system's coders "did a pretty good job" of mimicking the basic design and functionality of Apple computers, Mr Grunow tells, but with a twist. Any files uploaded to the system via a USB stick or other storage device can be watermarked, allowing the state to trace the journey of that file from machine to machine. Red Star can also identify undesirable files and delete them without permission.

Ancient Rome vs North Korea: Spectacular 'executions' then and now

 This year saw reports of two executions of high-ranking North Korean officials and an endless stream of speculation about Kim Jong-un and his leadership style. Stephen Harrison, professor of Latin literature at Oxford University, considers the parallels with ancient Rome - as told by its historians. North Korea's vice-premier Choe Yong-gon was said to have been shot in May, after he "expressed discomfort against the young leader's forestation policy", while Defence Minister Hyon Yong-chol was said to have been executed by anti-aircraft weapons in front of an audience of hundreds, reportedly charged with treason for disobeying orders, falling asleep at a military event and being disloyal to the supreme leader. These reports evoke some interesting parallels from the darker side of the history of ancient Rome, or at least from the more colourful stories told about it by Roman historians. The similarities are striking. In both cases, we rely on a small number of reports from potentially biased origins in order to gain a view of a distant and inaccessible society. Arguably, our sources for ancient Rome, some 2,000 years ago, are at least as extensive as those for modern North Korea, and, perhaps, even more reliable.