Word: jonge
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...rare trip last month, another traveler told me it was like going to ?the moon, with people.? I had my own epiphany: North Korea is Pleasantville. Just as in the Gary Ross satire of the 1950s sit-com vision of reality, life in the kingdom of Dear Leader Kim Jong Il is always as pleasant as a picture postcard. The streets are tidy and orderly, the citizens patriotic and the children sing in perfect harmony. From the plastic flowers in the hotels to the plastic music of the Arirang mass-gymastics-and-propaganda fest we were expected to attend, sugar...
...literally) benighted nation. But Delisle uses drawings of a dim hotel lobby with a lonely turtle swimming in a tank, or of people carrying loads down stygian streets, to convey a powerful sense of gloom. At one point he decides to see how many effigies to Kim Jong Il he can find in a single day. After counting more than 30 of them, he looks in the mirror and is horrified to see the Dear Leader staring back at him. It takes a minute for him to realize that it's merely the reflection of a wall portrait...
...Dining with Kim Jong Il A verbatim item quoted an excerpt from Chris Patten's new book in which he recounted a meeting with North Korea's Kim Jong Il [Oct. 17]. Patten, former Hong Kong Governor and European Union Commissioner for External Affairs, wrote, "We banqueted with Kim and a group of grumpy old men, with faces like Christmas walnuts ... We were served much better burgundy than we would have drunk in Brussels. Outside, the people starved." It is unfair to criticize Kim for indulging in excesses while the poor of his country starved since, with the exception...
...group, Western journalists granted a rare visit to the North by Kim Jong Il's secretive regime, would get no closer to this supposedly showcase example of economic reform. The government's reluctance to show off anything that smacked of capitalism was symptomatic of an ominous new mood in Pyongyang. Recent baby steps toward reform and greater openness kindled a glimmer of hope that the North could be coaxed out of isolation. Now Kim, perhaps fearful that private enterprise and greater contact with the outside world would undermine his power, seems to have reversed course. Earlier this month, Pyongyang banned...
...assassins and saboteurs, seized warships and cargo vessels at sea, blown up at least one civilian airliner, hacked U.S. truce guards to death with axes and committed other barbarities without the slightest sign of self-doubt. After Kim Il Sung died in 1994, his son and apparent successor Kim Jong Il displayed the same steely confidence in his own political correctness. So last September, when a North Korean submarine ran aground on the South's coast and 26 armed infiltrators dashed ashore, Pyongyang erupted with the standard bluster. Not only was the North the "victim," its spokesmen said, but because...