Kim Jong-un
Kim Jong-un (officially transcribed Kim Jong Un; ; ; born 8 January 1984) is a North Korean politician serving as Supreme Leader of North Korea since 2011 and Leader of the Workers' Party of Korea since 2012. Kim is the second child of Kim Jong-il (1941–2011) and Ko Yong-hui (1952–2004). The grandson of Kim Il-sung, the first leader of North Korea from 1948 to 1994, he is the first North Korean leader to have been born after the country's founding.
Jang Song-thaek
Analysts of North Korean politics agreed that Jang's execution was the most significant since purges carried out in the 1950s by Kim Il-Sung, Kim Jong-un's grandfather and North Korea's founder; since 1960, purged top officials have not usually been killed, and the denunciations of purged figures have not typically been so extreme and public. Professor Charles K. Armstrong, an expert on North Korea at Columbia University, stated that "although high-ranking leaders, including members of the Kim family, have been deposed before, we haven't seen anything this public or dramatic since Kim Jong-un's grandfather Kim Il-sung purged his last major rivals in the late 1950s. This seems to indicate the divisions within the Kim regime were more serious than previously thought." Former U.S. National Security Council director for Asian affairs Victor Cha said that the purge and execution of Jang "tells you that everything's not normal ... When you take out Jang, you're not taking out just one person – you're taking out scores if not hundreds of other people in the system. It's got to have some ripple effect."