Tuesday, December 20, 2011
The regime placed the body of Kim Jong-il, the late dictator who died on Saturday, on display in a glass coffin in the capital, Pyongyang, on Tuesday. His son and successor was among the first to pay his respects and observe a moment of silence.
The official media have begun fashioning a personality cult around Mr Kim, who became a general last year despite lacking any military experience. The young man - officially 29 but probably only 27 - has been officially labelled the "great successor" and a "lighthouse of hope".
Yet his inexperience has opened the way for more practised operators to increase their influence. "For someone who was meant to be all-powerful, this was hardly the kind of succession that Kim Jong-il would have wanted," said Kerry Brown, head of the Asia programme at Chatham House.
Despite "intricate calculations that have gone on for quite a while", there was only a "very rickety consensus" behind the succession of the late dictator's third and youngest son, added Mr Brown. "This choice was a big, big compromise," he said.
Three factions may now be taking shape behind the new leader. Perhaps the most significant is led by Chang Sung-taek, a pillar of the regime who serves as vice-chairman of the National Defence Commission. His wife, Kim Kyong-hui, is the younger sister of the late leader. » | David Blair, Chief Foreign Correspondent | Tuesday, December 20, 2011
The European Commission has imposed tough new restrictions on the export of anaesthetics used to execute people in the US, in a move that will exacerbate the already extreme shortage of the drugs in many of the 34 states that still practice the death penalty.
The EC has added eight barbiturates to its list of restricted products that are tightly controlled on the grounds that they may be used for "capital punishment, torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment". The eight include pentobarbital and sodium thiopental – the two drugs on which almost all American executions currently depend.
The EC said its move, which follows restrictions introduced unilaterally by the UK in November 2010, was designed to forward the European Union's stated mission to abolish the death penalty around the world. "The decision today contributes to the wider EU efforts to abolish the death penalty worldwide," said the commission's vice president, Catherine Ashton. » | Ed Pilkington in New York | Tuesday, December 20, 2011
North Koreans have been introduced to their youthful new leader in a style that befits the last truly totalitarian state on earth. Kim Jong-un, the “Great Successor”, has been hailed variously as a martial genius and the “outstanding leader of our party, army and people”.
The rise of the younger Kim, officially 29 but possibly only 27, has mirrored his father’s physical decline: last year, while the “Dear Leader” ailed, the son was hastily made a four-star general and awarded a senior post in the military high command. When the armed forces bombarded a South Korean island with heavy artillery, before sinking one of their neighbour’s warships with a well-aimed torpedo, stories were circulated giving the new general the credit.
Not many countries would deliberately promote their future leader as a child soldier given to impulsive attacks on other countries. The portrayal of the younger Kim reveals much about the psychology of North Korea’s ossified regime, glorying in its own isolation and obduracy. In particular, it reveals the two principal strands of the impoverished state’s official ideology: militarism and an obsession with racial purity.
Thus North Korea spends about a third of its total gross national product on the armed forces, rendering it probably the most militarised state in the world. If Britain were to follow this example, we would have a defence budget exceeding £400 billion – significantly bigger than America’s. A country in which people eat roots and berries to avoid starvation has built a small arsenal of nuclear weapons.
Instead of being the world’s last Communist state, North Korea is best understood as a murderous laboratory for the utopian fantasies of the fascist Right. Its official propaganda glorifies the moral superiority of the Korean race, as compared with the decadence and depravity of the outside world. The North Korean people are portrayed as being almost childlike in their innocence and purity – so different from the amorality of their neighbours, supposedly corrupted by Western materialism and the corrosive influence of America. Read on and comment » | David Blair | Monday, December 19, 2011
THE TIMES: France and Turkey accuse each other of perpetrating some of the 20th century’s most horrific massacres as their diplomatic ties hit crisis point » | Adam Sage, Paris | Tuesday, December 20, 2011 [£]
REUTERS DEUTSCHLAND: Iligan - Die Folgen des Taifuns "Washi" sind auf den Philippinen möglicherweise durch Menschenhand verstärkt worden.
Präsident Benigno Aquino setzte nach einem Besuch des Katastrophengebiet eine Untersuchungskommission ein, die klären soll, ob die Überschwemmungen und Erdrutsche hätten verhindert werden können. Ermittelt werden soll vor allem, ob ein landesweites Verbot des Holzfällens missachtet wurde. "Wenn wir wollen, dass dies die letzte Katastrophe dieser Art war, müssen wir aus unseren Fehlern lernen", sagte Aquino am Dienstag. Die Zahl der Toten stieg mittlerweile auf fast 1000. » | Reuters | Dienstag 20. Dezember 2011
REUTERS DEUTSCHLAND: Berlin - Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel hat die Gewalt der syrischen Regierung gegen das eigene Volk scharf verurteilt.
Die Kanzlerin sei zutiefst besorgt über die fortdauernde Verletzung der Menschenrechte und der elementaren Grundfreiheiten in Syrien, sagte Regierungssprecher Steffen Seibert am Dienstag in Berlin. "Sie fordert die syrische Regierung auf, die brutale Gewalt gegen Zivilisten und Kinder und Frauen sofort einzustellen, wie auch die Gewalt gegen Deserteure aus der syrischen Armee", fügte Seibert hinzu. » | Reuters | Dienstag 20. Dezember 2011
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president, has signed into effect a law imposing the death penalty on anyone arming "terrorists", according to state media amid mounting clashes with rebel troops.
"The law provides for the death penalty for anyone providing weapons or helping to provide weapons intended for the carrying out of terrorist acts," the official SANA news agency said.
The decree also imposes life imprisonment with hard labour for arms smuggling "for profit or to carry out acts of terrorism," and 15 years' hard labour for arms smuggling for other purposes.
The Syrian authorities contend that protests raging since March are the work of "armed terrorists" not civilian demonstrators as maintained by Western governments and human rights groups. » | Tuesday, December 20, 2011
After the hysterical scenes which greeted news of Kim Jong-il's death, North Korean media struck a more solemn mood on Tuesday as mourners filed past his body and the state prepared for the succession of Kim's youngest son.
North Korean state TV showed weeping mourners pass their former leader, whose body is on display in a glass coffin at the Kumsusan memorial palace in the capital, Pyongyang.
TV screenshots show Kim dressed in his trademark khaki suit, his head on a white pillow and a plain red sheet covering him from the chest down. The bier supporting his casket is bedecked with red and white flowers.
Among the mourners was his youngest son and successor, Kim Jong-un, accompanied by senior figures from the military and ruling Workers' party.
The younger Kim was quoted as expressing the "bitterest grief" over his father's death – a significant choice of words as it was used to describe the nation's mood during the funeral of his grandfather and North Korea's founder, Kim Il-sung, in July 1994. » | Justin McCurry in Tokyo and Tania Branigan in Beijing | Tuesday, December 20, 2011
THE GUARDIAN: Kim Jong Il body displayed, North Korea media hail son » | AP foreign | Tuesday, December 20, 2011
They howled and whimpered and scrubbed raw eyes with fists. They flailed their arms in grief and marched in their thousands to the capital's landmarks. But no one, outside of North Korea, really knows what North Koreans felt at news of Kim Jong-il's death.
There was shock, of course. Some perhaps wept from sorrow for their Dear Leader, some from sorrow for themselves. Some cried for fear that inadequate public anguish might damn them, and some from anxiety about what lay ahead. Kim veiled his country throughout his life and uncertainty shrouded his death.
State media said he died at 8.30am on Saturday, felled by a heart attack "due to physical and mental overwork", as he travelled by train on one of his innumerable inspection visits. There had been not a whisper of anything unusual in the two days before the announcement.
The official news agency KCNA swiftly hailed his third son, Kim Jong-un, as the "great successor" and "the eminent leader of the military and the party". The young man, thought to be just 28, has been groomed as heir since his father's apparent stroke in 2008.
The 69-year-old left his son a nuclear-armed but impoverished country where food is scarce and human rights abuses rife, and his unexpected death sent a chill far beyond the 24 million inhabitants of North Korea. Politicians in Washington, Seoul, Tokyo and beyond weighed the prospects of a third generation of this communist dynasty with the risk of regional instability. Concerns were underscored by South Korean media reports on Monday that the North had fired short-range missiles, although the Yonhap news agency said the tests had been conducted before the death announcement. The defence ministry in Seoul did not comment.
The South's military was already on high alert, while a spokesman for the Japanese prime minister said he had set up a crisis management team. » | Tania Branigan in Beijing and Justin McCurry in Tokyo | Monday, December 19, 2011
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: Just days before Christmas, a new study has emerged that suggests that one of Christianity's most prized but mysterious relics – the Turin Shroud – is not a medieval forgery but could be the authentic burial robe of Christ.
Italian scientists have conducted a series of advanced experiments which, they claim, show that the marks on the shroud – purportedly left by the imprint of Christ's body – could not possibly have been faked with technology that was available in the medieval period.
The research will be an early Christmas present for shroud believers, but is likely to be greeted with scepticism by those who doubt that the sepia-coloured, 14ft-long cloth dates from Christ's crucifixion 2,000 years ago.
Sceptics have long claimed that the shroud is a medieval forgery, and radiocarbon testing conducted by laboratories in Oxford, Zurich and Arizona in 1988 appeared to back up the theory, suggesting that it dated from between 1260 and 1390.
But those tests were in turn disputed on the basis that they were skewed by contamination by fibres from cloth that was used to repair the relic when it was damaged by fire in the Middle Ages.
The new study is the latest intriguing piece of a puzzle which has baffled scientists for centuries and spawned an entire industry of research, books and documentaries. » | Nick Squires, Rome | Monday, December 19, 2011
Monday, December 19, 2011
La mort soudaine du «cher leader» nord-coréen complique l'agenda de Barack Obama dans la région. L'Administration américaine devait prendre ce lundi d'importantes décisions sur la reprise des négociations sur le dossier nucléaire et l'octroi d'aide alimentaire au «royaume ermite». Ces arbitrages devraient, au minimum, être retardés.
La Maison-Blanche a réagi avec prudence à l'annonce du décès de Kim Jong-il, se gardant de commenter la disparition du dictateur. «Nous exprimons à nouveau l'espoir d'une amélioration de nos relations avec le peuple de Corée du Nord et restons profondément soucieux de son bien-être», a indiqué lundi soir Hillary Clinton, espérant une transition «stable et pacifique». Washington stationne toujours 29.000 GI en Corée du Sud.
Dès minuit, dans la nuit de dimanche à lundi, Barack Obama a appelé le président sud-coréen, Lee Myung-bak. L'Administration est également en contact étroit avec les autorités japonaises. Le président s'est toutefois gardé pour l'heure d'offrir ses condoléances à la Corée du Nord. S'il devait faire un tel geste, cela indiquerait une volonté de saisir l'opportunité de la succession à Pyongyang pour tendre la main au nouveau leader désigné, Kim Jong-un. Mais cela pourrait se révéler prématuré, compte tenu de l'incertitude qui enveloppe l'avenir politique de la Corée du Nord et les intentions du «grand successeur». » | Par Adèle Smith | lundi 19 décembre 2011
China has endorsed Kim Jong-un as North Korea's new leader in a gesture of support designed to bolster Pyongyang and avoid regional instability.
The Chinese government announced that co-operation with North Korea would continue. It hailed the late Kim Jong-il as a great leader and a close friend, and called on the North Korean people to unify under the leadership of "comrade Jong-un" and turn their "anguish into strength".
China is crucial to the survival of Pyongyang in the face of international isolation. It has provided economic assistance to North Korea since 2006, when US and South Korean aid dried up after Pyongyang carried out the first of two nuclear tests. In the past 18 months Kim Jong-il travelled four times to China. He also visited Russia, North Korea's other key partner.
Beijing is anxious to avoid any collapse of its often troublesome neighbour, reasoning that this would lead to a flood of refugees and economic migrants across its border. Unlike the US, which wants North Korea to scrap its nuclear capabilities, China's chief strategic concern is to maintain regional stability.
The White House said it was closely monitoring developments on the Korean peninsula following Kim Jong-il's death. It restated its commitment to the "freedom and security" of its allies, with Barack Obama phoning South Korea's president, Lee Myung-bak, at midnight. They agreed to stay in close contact. » | Luke Harding, Tania Branigan in Beijing and Justin McCurry in Tokyo | Monday, December 19, 2011
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: Religious groups are boycotting Tesco after a senior executive at the supermarket giant described Christians as “evil” for opposing gay marriage.
Nick Lansley, Tesco’s head of research and development, said he was actively taking a stand “against evil Christians” who opposed the right of same-sex couples to marry.
In a message on his profile page on Flickr.com, he said: “I’m…campaigning against evil Christians (that’s not all Christians, just bad ones) who think that gay people should not lead happy lives and get married to their same-sex partners.”
The remarks, which have now been removed from the photo sharing website, caused outrage among Christian groups, who said they would refuse to shop in the chain’s stores in protest.
Colin Hart, director of the Christian Institute, said: “I won’t be shopping at Tesco this Christmas, and I am repeatedly hearing from other Christians who have already come to the same conclusion.
“Mr Lansley is entitled to his opinions, and Christians are entitled to choose not to shop at Tesco.” » | Monday, December 19, 2011
"Don't mention the war", lautet die Grundregel für deutsche Besucher in Großbritannien. Das hinderte Außenminister Guido Westerwelle nicht daran, bei seinem London-Besuch am Montag ausführlich über seine prägenden Kindheitserlebnisse im Nachkriegseuropa zu berichten.
In den siebziger Jahren sei er mit zwei Schulfreunden zum Zelten in der Bretagne gewesen, erzählte er staunenden britischen Journalisten in einer Pressekonferenz. Als sie sich in einem Tante-Emma-Laden eindecken wollten, brach die französische Inhaberin in Tränen aus und verschwand, als sie den starken deutschen Akzent des Teenagers hörte. Kurz darauf erschien ihre Tochter und erklärte den verdutzten Jungs, sie sollten es nicht persönlich nehmen, ihr Vater sei im Krieg von den Deutschen getötet worden.
Westerwelle erzählte die Anekdote - und eine weitere über die Berliner Mauer -, um den Briten die Bedeutung der EU aus deutscher Sicht zu erklären. "Bitte verstehen Sie: Für uns ist Europa mehr als eine Währung oder ein gemeinsamer Markt", sagte der Liberale in fließendem Englisch. "Wir wollen eine politische Union".
Die britischen Zuhörer schwiegen betreten, das Wort "politische Union" ist auf der Insel eine Chiffre für EU-Diktatur. Gastgeber William Hague, britischer Außenminister und führender Euro-Skeptiker, lobte pflichtschuldig den "eindringlichen" Beitrag seines deutschen Kollegen. Doch verzichtete er selbst komplett auf Pathos, als er das britische Verhältnis zu Europa beschrieb. Gemeinsam mit den Deutschen wolle man für mehr Wettbewerb im Binnenmarkt kämpfen, sagte Hague. Man plane eine Reihe von neuen Initiativen.
In den beiden Aussagen wurde das ganze Ausmaß der Entfremdung zwischen Kontinentaleuropa und Großbritannien deutlich. Die einen betrachten die EU als Schicksalsgemeinschaft, die anderen sehen nichts als einen großen Absatzmarkt. Und an diesem fundamentalen Unterschied, das machte die Pressekonferenz deutlich, wird sich auch künftig nichts ändern. » | Von Carsten Volkery, London | Montag 19. Dezember 2011
SPIEGEL ONLINE INTERNATIONAL: In Britain, distrust of Europe goes hand-in-hand with distrust of Germany. Relations between the two countries have cooled following the furore caused by the latest EU summit, and British euroskeptics are once again resorting to old stereotypes.
British Prime Minister David Cameron had only been in office for seven weeks when he and German Chancellor Angela Merkel decided to watch a football match together to get to know each other better.
It was on June 27, 2010, and it was the World Cup quarter final in South Africa. It was also a match between two classic rivals: Germany and England. Thomas Müller scored a goal in the 67th minute, bringing the score to 3:1 -- to the consternation of British fans and the delight of the Germans.
In Toronto, where the two leaders were attending the G-20 summit, a beaming Merkel leaned over to Cameron and said, with typical German anti-triumphalism but a lack of linguistic finesse: "I really am terribly sorry."
When the Germans scored another goal three minutes later, Merkel said she was "sorry" again. As Cameron later said, half-jokingly, the shared experience was "a form of punishment I wouldn't wish on anyone." Nevertheless, he added, Mrs. Merkel "is one of the politest people I have ever met."
After that, Merkel and Cameron made a concerted effort to get along with each other. A little more than a year ago, Cameron reached into his bag of tricks once again. He invited the chancellor to Chequers, the magnificent country residence of Britain's prime ministers, where he and Merkel watched her favorite crime series, "Midsomer Murders," which led to another, urgently needed upturn in German-British relations. Merkel had, in fact, never really forgiven Cameron for having led his Conservatives out of the European People's Party, a conservative group in the European Parliament.
For a while, the charming Cameron was far up on Merkel's list of favorite European colleagues -- until, with his lone veto against EU-wide treaties to resolve the debt crisis, he catapulted himself back to the bottom.
The English Channel has suddenly become wider, deeper and foggier once again. The London-based Daily Telegraph newspaper has warned its readers against what it calls Berlin's blatant effort to dominate Europe and already sees "a new era of Anglo-German antagonism" on the horizon -- again characterized by two leaders who are bound together in their sincere dislike for each other, like past leaders of the two countries: Helmut Kohl and Margaret Thatcher, or Gerhard Schröder and Tony Blair. Reverend Peter Mullen, the Anglican chaplain to the London Stock Exchange, where he is not popular for his crude views, goes even further. According to Mullen, Germans tried to achieve hegemony in Europe by military force in 1870, 1914 and 1939, and now Merkel is trying to do the same with the weapons of the financial system. 'Welcome to the Fourth Reich' » | Marco Evers | Monday, December 19, 2011
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