I'm working class. Not because my family have always been skint or because I'm from the grim north, but because I am from a class of people who believe in work. In paying their way.
Televisions and radios are locked on government frequencies - it is a serious crime to listen to a foreign broadcast. As a result, North Koreans think that they live in the best country in the world and that, as difficult as their lives may be, everybody else has it much worse.
Europe and North America, we are told, are less dependent on energy-intensive heavy industry than in the 1960s and 1970s. It seems we squeeze more GDP out of a barrel of oil than in those benighted days.
I just wanted to see China with my own eyes. I wanted to see whether North Korea was the best country in the world or China was the best. I grew up believing that China was much worse than North Kore, because that's what the regime told us.
What Iran wants and what North Korea wants is respect.
My mother is an escaped farm girl from North Dakota and a self-taught artist and painter.
My father was born on Christmas Day in 1934. He grew up in what is now part of North Korea. When the Korean War began, my father was 16, and he found passage on an American refugee ship,thinking he'd be gone for just a few days, but he never saw his mother or his sister again.
I have observed, through many years of living in north Brooklyn, that people, for example an ostensible group of friends, can be dangerous to one another.
We're so willing to dehumanize entire populations in order for us to conveniently go along with our lives. We know exactly one North Korean, for example. The rest of them, we don't know - but it makes it very easy to bomb North Korea if we pretend they're all one person. Literature makes it harder to dehumanize people in this way.
My father, Tommy, who was a trained draughtsman, played for Preston North End in the Finney era. He liked football but did not love it as I do.
North Korea, under its thirtysomething Supreme Leader, Kim Jong-un, is no country for old men. The latest casualty in Kim's ongoing purge of the senior military command was the defense minister, Hyon Yong-chol, who reportedly committed the classic old man's offense of falling asleep in a meeting.
Turkey tail mushrooms have been used to treat various maladies for hundreds of years in Asia, Europe, and by indigenous peoples in North America. Records of turkey tail brewed as medicinal tea date from the early 15th century, during the Ming Dynasty in China.
England was the first true colonial power to use its dominion over a large part of Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Australia, North America, and many Caribbean islands, in the first half of the 20th century.
When you are raised, as John Edwards was, in a small town like Robbins, North Carolina, you get to understand poverty and unemployment, or inadequate health care, first-hand by seeing the daily struggles of your friends and neighbors.
I can't be sure of exactly when and how North Korea will change. But I do believe it will happen, hopefully in my mother's lifetime.
I saw Berry in concert a couple of times in the late '70s - and like almost every North American male of a certain age, I went because a friend was hired by Berry that very day to be part of the legend's backup band.
I haven't had any formal training, but I guess dance comes naturally to us - people from the north. See how much we dance at weddings.
Freedom means everything to me. It is the most essential right that every person deserves. Most people take it for granted, but not North Koreans.
I grew up on the old EC comic books before the Comics Code in North American and with all sort of good-natured fun. I never had nightmares I think because all of the old horror stuff that I was exposed to was well meaning in a certain sense.
From education to broadband, from building roads and bridges to supporting the military, Barack Obama is delivering for North Carolina. And he is delivering for America. A growing middle class is the foundation for a strong America.
The question is whether a confident Europe will be a rival for North America - or whether they will work together and become a more unified bloc.
I'm pretty disappointed in Sony Pictures' decision to pull 'The Interview' under pressure from North Korea.
Maybe I have an affinity for Andy Griffith because we both grew up in North Carolina.
The Conservatives are a confusing lot. They first denied climate change was a serious issue and then suggested strengthening the nuclear industry as a solution to it. They oppose the European Union, but support joining North American Free Trade Agreement, despite its obvious failure.
You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.
I love working with directors who have good taste. It's incredible when a director can say something and things open up for you. I went to The University of North Carolina School of the Arts, and some of my best experiences on sets have been working with other alums.
I worked with Michelle Yeoh on my last film, 'Far North,' and her partner is Jean Todt; at the time, he ran Ferrari. So I went as a VIP to the British grand prix.
The capitalist model, the developed model, the consumer model which comes from the North, which it has forced on the world, is falling apart on Earth, and there is no planet nearby that we can emigrate to.
And Oliver North was really a good soldier, up to the last moment, shoving memos into the shredder and defending the policy to the end.
People in the North are really taciturn and reticent, and they don't really like to talk about the past.
I'm very Belgian, and I will die Belgian. I just have my house in the north of France because I began my career in Paris, even though I don't live there anymore.
Taking the entire globe, if North America and Western Europe can be called the 'cities of the world', then Asia, Africa and Latin America constitute 'the rural areas of the world'.
The Taliban, broadly speaking, are Afghans - farmers, subsistence farmers. As I say, most of those people can't find the United States on the map. Al Qaeda, traditionally, are much more educated, middle-class people, often from Egypt, from Saudi Arabia, North Africa.
I doubt the people of North Carolina will be content to allow the governor to decide or even unduly influence selecting their senator.
My grandmother raised five children during the Depression by herself. At 50, she threw her sewing machine into the back of a pickup truck and drove from North Dakota to California. She was a real survivor, so that's my stock. That's how I want my kids to be too.
Seen from the United States or Europe, Iran's nuclear program often causes most concern, but from the perspective of countries in the Asia-Pacific region, the North Korean program is equally worrying.
