North Korea has been hailed as “the world’s most surprising economic success story” by US financial daily The Wall Street Journal. Despite being tightly controlled, technologically backward and subject to crippling Western trade embargoes, the country has recorded year-on-year GDP growth of more than 3%, far exceeding many advanced economies.

What has changed?
Five years after making a rare admission that the nation’s economic policies were falling short, Kim Jong Un told the Workers’ Party Congress in February that “everything has fundamentally changed”. But while the supreme leader may have taken the credit, “he has Russia and China to thank” for the boom, said Forbes.

North Korea has earned an estimated $14 billion providing military support to the Kremlin during the Ukraine war, and hundreds of millions in trade and foreign aid from China. North Korea’s “emergence as a modern-day pirate state on the back of its lucrative cryptocurrency theft operations” has also helped, Shreyas Reddy of Korea Risk Group, told the Financial Times.

What does it mean for North Korea?
The so-called hermit kingdom has used some of this windfall to modernise Pyongyang, building high-rise apartment blocks and brightly lit shopping districts filled with luxury and high-tech goods. Cars, once a rarity, are increasingly common and frequently electric, and can now be hailed with ride-sharing apps.

Outside the capital, the regime’s ambitious “20x10” regional development initiative aims to build new factories, housing and public infrastructure in 20 counties every year over a 10-year period. All of this is an “incredible accomplishment for a country that is this poor”, regional expert Stephan Haggard told the Wall Street Journal.

Can it last?
Around 17 million of North Korea’s 27 million citizens are still believed to live in extreme poverty, and the UN estimates that more than 40% of the country’s people are undernourished. Analysts are sceptical that Kim can turn the short-term gains from the war in Ukraine into sustainable long-term growth. The country is in the throes of a “Russian sugar high”, said Peter Ward of the Sejong Institute in Seoul to the FT. It’s fuelling a slew of “shovel-ready, exciting-looking projects that will catch the eye of the leader, but aren’t necessarily sustainable”.

If there’s to be a “new dividing line” in British politics, said Patrick Maguire in The Times, Andy Burnham would like it to be “hope versus despair, hope versus anger, hope versus learned helplessness” and “all the other stodgy, unappetising staples” served up by his predecessors.

Burnham has pledged to “bring back hope”, and favourable polling for the new prime minister suggests this is what the public wants. But “hope is one thing”: fulfilment of those hopes “is quite another”.

‘Excessive expectations’
Burnham’s “abstract emphasis” on optimism “sits comfortably” alongside his “concrete focus” on the cost of living, wrote politics expert Matthew Barnfield on The Conversation. If he can successfully sell voters the idea that “marginal relief” on energy bills and bus fares represents “just the first step on the road to making life more affordable”, they may “look beyond” the gloom of monthly expenses and “start hoping for meaningful improvements” in living standards.

But beating the drum of hope “also often brings problems”, by creating “excessive expectations”, said Andy Beckett in The Guardian. Labour’s optimism underestimates the “complexity of changing Britain” and downplays the “enemies and barriers” that a Labour government “always faces”.

‘Hopey, changey thing’
Other national leaders, including Margaret Thatcher and Bill Clinton, have evoked hope during their campaigns and victory speeches, said Philip Johnston in The Telegraph. The “most prodigious user” of the word was Barack Obama, who had it “emblazoned in capital letters” on campaign posters and titled his memoir “The Audacity of Hope”. The former US president was later mocked by Republican Sarah Palin for relying on what she called “that hopey, changey thing”.

Hope as a concept has been “almost entirely colonised by the left”, which creates the “danger that those on the right will feed this pernicious agenda by overdoing the gloom and catastrophism”, said Johnston. While “fear and alarmism” may “play to a particularly jaundiced political audience”, more broadly such rhetoric is “corrosive”. The right will ultimately need to “reclaim the idea of hope” to win. 

A tractor-drawn bus takes visitors on a scenic tour through Japan’s Shikisai-no-oka (“Hill of Seasonal Colours”) flower gardens. Hundreds of thousands of blooms blanket more than 17 acres of hills at the popular attraction in central Hokkaido.

BJ Warnick / Newscom / Alamy Live News

Most people who visit Ireland head straight for Dublin or Galway, said Andrea Bussell in National Geographic. Even some locals aren’t familiar with the “great green valley that stretches through County Tipperary” in the heart of the country’s “Ancient East”. But, tucked between the Galtee Mountains and a “forest-clad sandstone ride known as Slievenamuck”, the Glen of Aherlow is the perfect place for a “slower, nature-centric” holiday. Here, “tall emerald mountains” rise from “cattle-grazed pastureland flecked with miles of trees” and “scattered rural villages”. 

To get to know this stunning landscape and discover its “most sacred corners”, explore the Heritage Trail. There are many artefacts and landmarks to visit along the way, including the “striking, well-preserved” remains of Moor Abbey on the banks of the River Aherlow, and St Pecaun’s Holy Well between Bansha and Cahir, which people have visited for centuries to pray and drink the “therapeutic waters”.

County Tipperary is known as Ireland’s equestrian capital and a visit here “wouldn’t be complete” without taking a riding lesson; Ballyhoura Trekking Centre and Hillcrest Equestrian Centre are good options.

“For me, nothing beats an evening by the water at Garrykennedy,” said Vic O’Sullivan on Lonely Planet. This tiny village on the eastern shore of Lough Derg is a “sublime” setting, with an “old stone harbour” and bobbing sailboats moored at the pier. Enjoy “hearty pub fare” and a pint in the Larkins’ beer garden before wandering down to Ryan’s to listen to live music and watch as “sky and shoreline darken to an inky blue”.

Revisiting the Lockerbie bombing, 37 years later
Patti Waldmeir in the Financial Times
“I was booked on” the Pan Am flight “that exploded over Lockerbie” in 1988, writes Patti Waldmeir. My life was saved by a travel agent who switched my flight “at the last minute”. The “ageing families” of the 270 people “who were not so lucky” are now hoping for justice at the US trial of former Libyan intelligence officer Mohammad Mas’ud Kheir Al-Marimi, “a suspect for decades”. They “deserve another day in court”.

I wouldn’t let any young man behind the wheel before 25
Sean O’Grady in The Independent
Fast “cars have always attracted the reckless”, writes Sean O’Grady, “but there are things” we could do “about what we stupidly call ‘joyriding’”. We could require automakers to “limit the speed a car can be driven at”, as we do with coaches. That would surely make “stealing hot hatches” a lot “less thrilling”. And “for boys as opposed to girls, for obvious reasons”, I would raise the minimum “eligible age” for a driving licence to 25.

Why the French hate Parisians
Gavin Mortimer in The Spectator
“I live in rural Burgundy” and have been “warmly welcomed” by locals, writes Gavin Mortimer. But they’re markedly “less friendly towards affluent Parisians”. There’s a “simmering” resentment in the regions about “Macron-supporting” urban dwellers and their “demand for holiday homes” that squeezes locals out of the property market. As in Britain, “there is now a distinct disconnect between the cities and the ‘sticks’”: “frankly, Paris is another country to the rest of France”.