Get Your Kremlinology Fix Here

Interesting speculation presented for your consideration, although I don’t know how much it is actually true:

The KWP has been scrutinizing the ideologies of high-ranking officials of the party and officials at various organizations, and making new appointments and dismissals in an unprecedented scale. Playing the central role in this undertaking is Kim Johng Chol, the second son of Kim Jong Il and deputy chief of the all powerful Leadership Division of the party, who is said to have been handpicked as his father’s successor. The son is following in the footsteps of his father, who in his young days resorted to purging tactics to consolidate his power.

According to diplomatic sources in Pyongyang, Kim Jong Il is preparing to announce his son as the successor after celebrating the centennial of the birth of his father, Kim Il Sung, in 2012.  [Japan Times]

Which assumes a bit much.  They also have a strategy for slipping the noose:

The key strategist in Pyongyang’s relations with South Korea and Japan is Kim Yang Gon, director of the KWP’s United Front Department. One of his principal tasks is to apply pressure on new South Korean President Lee Myung Bak, with a view to minimizing the change in Seoul’s policies toward the North.

He is also said to be the chief architect of the move to establish direct ties with Japanese political parties by circumventing the government of Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda, whose weakness is obvious after his Liberal Democratic Party lost its majority in the Upper House of the Diet last year.