Chongjin North Korea

His day begins at 4:30 a.m. The 64-year-old retired math teacher doesn't own a clock or even a watch, but the internal alarm that has kept him alive while so many of his fellow North Koreans have starved to death tells him he had better get out to pick grass if his family is to survive. Soon the streets of his city, Chongjin, will be swarming with others doing the same. Some cook the grass to eat. The teacher feeds it to the rabbits his family sells at the market. At 10 a.m.

For most of her life, Kim Hui Suk had spouted the sayings of North Korea's founder Kim Il Sung and never for a moment harbored a doubt: Capitalists were the enemy. Individualism was evil. But then disaster rained down on her hometown, Chongjin, on North Korea's remote east coast. Factories ran out of fuel. Food rations stopped. Watching her family slowly succumb to the famine -- her mother-in-law, husband and son eventually would die of starvation -- Kim realized she had to change.

For most of her life, Kim Hui Suk had spouted the sayings of North Korea's founder Kim Il Sung and never for a moment harbored a doubt: Capitalists were the enemy. Individualism was evil. But then disaster rained down on her hometown, Chongjin, on North Korea's remote east coast. Factories ran out of fuel. Food rations stopped. Watching her family slowly succumb to the famine -- her mother-in-law, husband and son eventually would die of starvation -- Kim realized she had to change.

His day begins at 4:30 a.m. The 64-year-old retired math teacher doesn't own a clock or even a watch, but the internal alarm that has kept him alive while so many of his fellow North Koreans have starved to death tells him he had better get out to pick grass if his family is to survive. Soon the streets of his city, Chongjin, will be swarming with others doing the same. Some cook the grass to eat. The teacher feeds it to the rabbits his family sells at the market. At 10 a.m.

Six historically hostile nations took a step Friday on a long journey toward creating a new growth center in Northeast Asia. North and South Korea, China, Mongolia, Russia and Japan set up a management committee to work out plans and methods to finance the development of the Tumen River region, where the borders of North Korea, China and Russia come together. Krishan G. Singh, regional director for Asia and the Pacific of the U.N.

Steve Kim went to China to make money. The furniture dealer from Huntington, N.Y., sniffed an opportunity to manufacture colonial reproductions at a fraction of the cost for export to the U.S. market. He had no interest in politics or human rights. That was until one Sunday morning, when he ran into a couple of North Korean defectors at the church he attended in Guangdong province. They were thin with bad skin and shabby clothing and had the terrified, needy look of stray kittens.

At 16, Myung Bok is old enough to join the North Korean army. But you wouldn't believe it from his appearance. The teenager stands 4 feet 7, about the size of an American sixth-grader. Myung Bok escaped the communist North last summer to join his mother and younger sisters, who had fled to China earlier. When he arrived, 14-year-old sister Eun Hang didn't recognize the scrawny little kid walking up the dirt path to their cottage in a village near the North Korean border.