DAILY EXPRESS: NORTH Korea will “pay a price” for its nuclear missiles tests, the American ambassador to the UN warned last night.
Susan Rice said international pressure on the country would increase until it realised the tests had left it “further isolated and further debilitated”.
She told a US television news channel that Pyongyang’s actions were “clearly provocative and destabilising actions which threaten international peace and security”.
She said the international community would not “throw up our hands and let them pursue this path”, adding: “North Korea needs to understand that its actions have consequences.” >>> By Mark Reynolds | Wednesday, May 27, 2009
DAILY EXPRESS: He is the ultimate renaissance man, superlatively gifted at everything he attempts. He has composed six operas and his genius at staging musicals makes an Andrew Lloyd Webber production look like amateur dramatics in your village hall.
When playing golf, he regularly shoots a hole-in-one three or four times in a single round and he personally designed his country’s most symbolic monument, the Juche Tower. No wonder his countrymen worship him.
Or he is an irredeemably flawed individual who cannot distinguish between fact and fiction, a tyrant who rules by fear and punishes ruthlessly any hint of dissent. No wonder his countrymen worship him.
If you thought Britain suffered under the manipulative skills of Alastair Campbell, then spare a thought for the poor benighted souls of North Korea living under the rule of the man they are obliged to call their “Dear Leader”: Kim Jong Il.
This is a man who, even when his people were reduced to eating grass because there was nothing else, still managed to convince them there wasn’t a famine raging through the country and that it was an ugly rumour cooked up by pro-Western agitators – or, as we know them, the Red Cross and the United Nations World Programme, the relief agencies who saved more than a fifth of the North Korean population from dying of starvation and disease in the Nineties. Meanwhile, he had his favourite dish, lobster, flown in every day, eating it with silver chopsticks.
For the past five years, Kim Jong Il has even succeeded in keeping the outside world guessing as to whether he is still alive or not; rumours persist that he died in 2003 and that since then foreign leaders have been dealing with one of four lookalikes.
It has been all too easy for the West to scorn Kim Jong Il as something of a figure of fun, a vain playboy in built‑up shoes presiding over all those eerily robotic mass rallies before retiring to watch the American action films he adores.
But North Korea’s nuclear tests this week are a sharp reminder of Kim Jong Il’s other side as arguably the most dangerous man in the world at the moment.
“Know thine enemy” is sage advice but when it comes to Kim Jong Il, the West is hamstrung by the paucity of fact and the abundance of fable. >>> By Anna Pukas | Wednesday, May 27, 2009
THE GUARDIAN: Photo Gallery: Kim Jong-il: a life in pictures >>>
