Word: jong
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...North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il had any inclination to leverage the moment of good feeling generated by last week's New York Philharmonic concert in Pyongyang, he has a funny way of showing it. North Korea earlier this week publicly executed 15 of its citizens for trying to flee the country by crossing the Tumen River on the border with China, a South Korean human rights organization reported on Wednesday...
...because I'm a U.S. citizen, and we're still technically at war with North Korea. More likely it was because my stories about this little-known country had not exactly flattered its despotic rulers: the late Great Leader Kim Il Sung and his son, Dear Leader Kim Jong Il. Now, thanks to the Philharmonic's historic visit, I was finally going to see the place for myself...
...North since a 1953 armistice. Partly it may be because some of the things I've written over the years haven't exactly been flattering to the family dynasty that runs the place: the late Kim Il Sung (the "Great Leader") and now his son, "Dear Leader" Kim Jong Il. But mostly it's because the North Koreans, in their bull-necked isolation, pretty much don't give a damn what the outside world thinks of them...
...Momentous Journey" is how the Phil's p.r. director Eric Latzky had called it in Beijing the day before the flight to Pyongyang. Immediately after the concert, he had seemed prescient. But momentous things sometimes last just a moment. This is still North Korea we're talking about. Kim Jong Il has run the place now for nearly 14 years. He has not, to date, shown himself to be an agent of change. He still runs a rogue regime, suspected recently of aiding Syria in building what Israeli intelligence believes to have been a nuclear-weapons facility before the Israelis...
...North Korean government operates. About a year and a half ago, at the behest of another acquaintance who helps aid refugees, I sat in a small apartment outside the town of Yanjie in northeast China. There sat two people - two among thousands - who had fled Kim Jong Il's North Korea in recent years. The mother of one young woman, Park Dae, had been taken to a political prison, gotten ill and died about three years ago, she said. Another, a young man, said he was simply tired of the poverty he faced in a small village in the northeast...