All the people in the DPRK most reverently honoured the memory of Chairman Kim Jong Il, the great man who is a peerless patriot and great sage of revolution, on the occasion of the 13th anniversary of his demise.

Officials, working people, service personnel, youth and students visited the Kumsusan Palace of the Sun, the sacred temple of Juche where President Kim Il Sung and Chairman Kim Jong Il are preserved in their lifetime appearance, on the occasion of the greatest national memorial day and made a bow to their portraits at the plaza.

They also placed flower baskets, bouquets and flowers at the statues of the great leaders and mosaics of the peerlessly great men on Mansu Hill in Pyongyang and other parts of the country.

Officials, working people, service personnel, youth and students of the DPRK visited the statues of President Kim Il Sung and Chairman Kim Jong Il across the country and paid floral tribute to them on the greatest national memorial day.

Laid at the statues of the great leaders on Mansu Hill in Pyongyang were bouquets and flower baskets in the name of the organs of the Workers’ Party of Korea, the government and armed forces, social organizations, ministries, national agencies, units of the Korean People's Army and the Public Security Forces, institutions and industrial establishments at all levels, universities and others in Pyongyang.

The visitors made a deep bow at the statues.

Diplomatic envoys and staff members of the Vietnamese, Laotian and Nicaraguan embassies in Pyongyang visited the statues of President Kim Il Sung and Chairman Kim Jong Il on Mansu Hill on December 17, the 13th anniversary of the demise of Kim Jong Il.

They placed flower baskets at the statues of the great leaders, who made immortal contributions to accomplishing the cause of global independence and developing the friendly relations among countries, and paid tribute to them.

Meanwhile, a basket of flowers in the name of Pei Guanglin, general manager of the Chinese Hunchun Taixi Electronics Trade Co. Ltd. was laid at the statues on the same day. 

Families of those related to the anti-Japanese revolutionary struggle held a photo exhibition and seminar at the DPRK embassy in Beijing on December 13 to commemorate the 13th anniversary of the demise of Chairman Kim Jong Il.

Present there were those families and the DPRK ambassador to China and his embassy officials.

The participants laid a flower basket and bouquets before the portraits of President Kim Il Sung and Chairman Kim Jong Il and paid tribute to them.

The base of the Ryesonggang Sports Club has been renovated.

It has training halls equipped with various sports facilities and apparatuses, tactical discussion rooms, a hostel for sportspersons and dining hall. The completion of the base has made it possible to provide the players and coaches of the sports club with better training conditions and living environment.

An inaugural ceremony took place on December 16. 

2024 is a year to be specially recorded in the history of accomplishing the cause of regional rejuvenation.

In 1962, the Workers’ Party of Korea set forth the important task of further developing the regional industry and rural economy and markedly improving the local people’s standard of living by enhancing the role of the county. Over the past 60 years, the WPK steadily promoted regional development. Especially, in this year it set a new revolutionary regional development policy and has put spurs to its thorough implementation.

This policy, which is completely different from previous ones in terms of modernity and scale of regional development, thoroughness of implementation and power of execution, is being pushed ahead dynamically, highlighting different important occasions.

If one of a mother’s children becomes a hero, the mother will be proud before society.

But Choe Ok Ae, a woman living in neighbourhood unit No. 86 in Munsin-dong No. 1 of Tongdaewon District in Pyongyang, takes unusual pride in having brought up her two sons into heroes.

The eldest son became a Labour Hero when he was 38 by successfully completing the design of the climbing path of Mt Myohyang while working as a designer of the Pyongyang Urban Planning and Designing Institute. 

There is a natural primeval forest in the Ogasan Nature Reserve and there grows a yew in Mt Oga, which can be claimed to be the oldest tree.

The 1 100-odd-year old tree is 16.5 metres tall, 4.1 metres round at the root neck, 3.6 metres round at the chest height and about 7 metres wide at the crown.

It is the tallest and oldest tree among the yews in the country.

Recorded in the Japanese imperialists’ history of aggression against Korea are the crimes of plundering Korea of its resources by relying on its vicious predatory colonial system and oppression. Among them is its plunder of Korea’s underground resources.

The Japanese imperialists, who worked out a policy of plundering its underground resources on a large scale in the initial days of their occupation of the country, proclaimed the “Korean Mining Act” in December 1915 as part of their bid to implement it.

The act stipulated it as a principle to allow the one who applied for the mining right first, except for a specific area or minerals. Based on their “survey data of mineral deposits”, the Japanese informed their capitalists of the promising fields and important minerals in advance and let them apply earlier than others, thus enabling them to monopolize the mining rights in the major mining areas.