Word: kim
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...telescope. Not because they're not smart enough to look through the proper end, but because North Korea is so sealed off from the rest of the world that the wrong end is all they've got. The North Korean government - in the person of 80-year-old Kim Yong Nam, ostensibly Kim's second in command - said on Sept. 10 that there was "no problem" with the Dear Leader. Still, a senior South Korean intelligence analyst told TIME that "something strange has clearly happened. We know Kim Jong Il has been out of sight for a few weeks...
...Kim is indeed incapacitated, dying or already dead, what might that that mean for the Korean Peninsula, for 60 years now one of the most heavily militarized neighborhoods on the planet? Korea watchers insist his demise is unlikely to mean the collapse of the North Korean regime, at least in the short run. Regime change is something the North's border mates most emphatically do not want to see. As the analysts at Control Risks Group in London put it, Pyongyang's "brutal authoritarianism may be repugnant, but its unraveling would raise questions the North's neighbors would much rather...
...Governments in Washington, Seoul, Beijing and Tokyo are now running this drill, because anonymous intelligence sources are saying Kim Jong Il, the 66-year-old dictator in Pyongyang, is ill. He might even have had a stroke, the reports say; in any case he did not show up for the mass celebration the country threw for its 60th anniversary on Sept. 9, a pretty unusual absence even for a reclusive leader not known for his predictability...
...With reporting by Stephen Kim / Seoul...
...photos of Kim Jong Il here...