Word: ils
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Perhaps it was nothing more than wishful thinking by his many enemies, but the wildest rumor to sweep through Asian financial markets last week was that Kim Jong Il, North Korea's despotic leader, was shot in the head by his brother-in-law's son during a palace coup. Quickly dismissed as pure fantasy, the rumor of Kim's demise was merely the most extreme example of recent speculation regarding the fate of Kim's Stalinist regime...
...home say it does not seem as if Kim's collapse is imminent. Pyongyang's closest ally, China, appears unworried. Vice Foreign Minister Wu Da-wei last week flatly denied that his country was massing troops at the border. Ministry spokeswoman Zhang Qiyue denied any knowledge that Kim Jong Il had been toppled and admonished the world to ignore "groundless reports and news" about North Korea. Kim was on the job as recently as Nov. 22, when he visited a unit of the Korean People's Army and listened to soldiers recite poetry, presenting the young bards with gifts...
Official portraits of North Korea's ruler, Kim Jong Il, and his late father, Kim Il Sung, are considered so sacred that a North Korean caught in a fire is expected to save them before his own children. So experts on the secretive state were puzzled by reports last week that portraits of the younger Kim had been disappearing from public buildings. A Tokyo-based news agency that monitors North Korean media also reported that the national wire service had dropped the usual Dear Leader honorific it used to refer to Kim. Were these signs that his absolute power...
...Trey Parker and Matt Stone production Team America: World Police is a delirious send-up of the international save-the-world action genre spoofing every movie from the Star Wars trilogy to Knightrider and unsympathetically mocks every public figure from Michael Moore to Kim Jong-Il to, curiously enough, Matt Damon. And they do it with puppets. Unlike most politically-motivated comedies these days, there’s no clear slant towards either the left or the right. Team America is a throwback to the kind of movie that casts the establishment as the good guy and everyone who goes...
...proliferation of spoofy websites, even the most minor campaign flubs were endlessly lampooned. Jon Stewart and his gang popped up at both conventions as well as the debates, and The Daily Show became the most trusted name in fake news. The South Park crew turned everyone from Kim Jong Il to Michael Moore into puppets for its movie Team America. On the Web, office bandwidth was tested by jokey videos and gags on sites like billionairesforbush.com and wolfpacksfortruth.org (an aggrieved wolf pack claims it was tricked into filming the G.O.P.'s anti-Kerry ad). At the end of a campaign...