Word: il
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When it comes to sticking a finger in the rest of the world's eye, Kim Jong Il is always as good as his word. For days, the U.S. and North Korea's neighbors in east Asia kept insisting that Pyongyang stand down from plans to test an intercontinental rocket. But on Sunday morning, North Korea launched it anyway - as it pledged to - saying the rocket bore nothing more than a communications satellite. With six U.S. cruisers equipped with Aegis anti-missile systems deployed in the region - to watch and gather intelligence, not fire on the rocket, Pentagon officials...
There are pictures released recently by the Korean Central News Agency, the propaganda arm of the North Korean government, that are meant to give the impression that Kim Jong Il is back running his benighted country after a stroke last summer. And then there are those shown here, of Kim at an indoor swimming pool. He looks old, frail and sick. The pictures, according to diplomats and intelligence analysts in East Asia and Washington, capture reality. Kim is 68, and though it is thought he has made a reasonable recovery, he has apparently not resumed all his duties as North...
...says Andrew Scobell, a political scientist from Texas A&M University, who wrote a paper for the Pentagon last year assessing the North's future. Baek Seung Joo, who watches North Korea at the Korea Institute for Defense Analysis, says, "We have been through a transition before." When Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il's father, died suddenly in 1994, Kim Jong Il succeeded with little apparent problem. "Outsiders," Baek says, "constantly underestimate the durability of this government...
...breast cancer in 2004, she pushed Kim to name one of their two sons as his successor. (Kim's third son is by a different wife.) By 2007, Jong Un and his older brother Kim Jong Chul were enrolled in a program created specifically for them at Kim Il Sung Military University. Kim is said by his former sushi chef, Kenji Fujimoto, who wrote a memoir of his days in the North, to think that Jong Chul was "soft and effeminate." But he adores Jong Un, who Fujimoto says has a hot temper, like his father. There are unconfirmed reports...
...about any relationship between Kim Jong Un and Chang. If Kim died suddenly, analysts think, Chang would become the de facto leader even if one of the sons was put forward as a front man to maintain the dynasty. That implies that in all likelihood, the post-Kim Jong Il era will look a lot like the present. The country's unifying ideology, called juche, is usually translated as "self-reliance." But as a Western diplomat in Seoul says, "it's more like 'up yours.' " No sign of that changing...