Word: ils
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Carter brought peace in our time? The standoff with North Korea seems to have genuinely cooled off in the wake of his talks with the late Kim Il Sung. An American invasion of Haiti was averted partly because of his last ditch efforts...
Both lonely places are in some respects still locked in 1953 (the year when Fidel Castro launched his first rebel assault and when Kim Il Sung began building his ghost republic), and both are further hemmed in by their commitment to guerrilla leaders who really did help to free their people from foreign domination. Yet beneath those surface similarities, North Korea and Cuba are as different as Doctor Strangelove and Doctor Zhivago, as different as a made-to-order Stalinist dystopia where not a thought is out of place and an unruly Caribbean island that is the stuff of Marx...
When I flew into North Korea, I felt as if I had landed in another galaxy. It was not just the spotless, carless streets, the loudspeakers broadcasting propaganda at dawn, the faceless groups of people filing silently from Kim Il Sung Stadium to Kim Il Sung University to Kim Il Sung Higher Party School (all with badges of Kim Il Sung on their hearts); it was, even more, the spooky unreality of a country that was building a 105-story tourist hotel while allowing almost no tourists, and showing off an Olympic stadium for the Games that were never held...
...dogs at Yankee Stadium, been carried by cheering students around the Princeton campus and appeared on the Tonight Show. Though none of that ensures affection and all those memories are distant, someone who spent his honeymoon in New York City knows at least a little of America. Kim Jong Il, by comparison, is famous as the one leader who may never have met an American. And, being unable to put a face to his enemy, seems much more liable to set his cross hairs...
...Jong Il's power is threatened, it is more likely to be by a palace coup than by popular rebellion. One rival power center could be the million- man armed forces, commanded by Defense Minister O Jin U. Other potential rebels might be ambitious members of Kim's own family: his stepmother Kim Song Ae; his uncle, Vice President Kim Yong Ju; or his half brother Kim Pyong Il...