Posts Tagged ‘north korea’
Ghost boat with two human heads on board washes ashore on Sado Island
A modern mystery: how did five human corpses and two severed human heads come to be on a boat shipwrecked on Japan’s Sado Island? The boat’s name has not be confirmed, but there are Korean letters on the side.
How long the boat had been at sea is hard to say, but the corpses are “partially skeletonised”.
Were the bodies eaten, perhaps, by a North Korean crew seeking refuge in Japan or South Korea?
The BBC speculates the the boat is a fishing vessel and the crew were forced by the country’s oppressive regime and a desperate need for food to fish too far from shore.
Boats are made from wood. They have no GPS technology. In November 2017, eight men were found alive on a boat at Yurihonjo marina, Japan. They claimed to be fishermen from North Korea who had gotten into trouble at sea. They are all sent back to North Korea.
In 2016, North Korea sold the fishing rights in some of its territorial waters to China. Japanese media reported in September 2019:
But with Chinese ships now operating along the coast, North Korean fishers are forced to risk venturing farther out, often in foreign waters.
Since September, Russia has apprehended more than 800 North Koreans fishing within its exclusive economic zone. A ship and motorboat seizure late that month turned up about 30,000 illegally caught squid, according to Russian media. In another incident, Russian border guards were injured as crew members of a detained vessel resisted arrest. South Korea has seen a surge since this summer in North Korean fishing operations near the Northern Limit Line, the disputed maritime boundary between the two Koreas. The number of illegal crossings swelled from 51 in all of 2018 to more than 400 so far this year, data from the South Korean military shows.
Can fishing trigger a war?
Posted: 28th, December 2019 | In: Strange But True | Comment
Josh Stone plays North Korea
Joss Stone has sang at a bar in North Korea, as part of her Total World Tour. Stone intends to perform in every one of the worlds country’s. She’s ticked off North Korea, Iraq and Syria without problem.
“It was a little scary crossing the border as of course we have absolutely no idea what might transpire,” said Stone to her Instagram followers. “We just have to trust the people on the ground that are advising us and looking after us”.
In Mr Kim’s kingdom, Stone got to hang out with British ambassador to the country, Colin Crooks. “Amazing to meet @JossStone tonight in #Pyongyang and see her perform,” Mr Crooks wrote on Twitter. Given his usual entertainment diet of mime acts and the glorious leader on the telly boasting about the country’s 8th World Cup victory and moon landings, Stone’s show can only have been a huge relief. Crooks must have clapped loudly, and possibly whopped before sobbing about missing out on the Brazil job.
Posted: 14th, March 2019 | In: Celebrities, Key Posts, News | Comment
North Korea’s ambassador to Italy waits an age before defecting
At what point did North Korea’s man in Rome decide to stay in god’s own county indefinitely? I’d wager it’s about a microsecond after the diminuative nutjob Kim Jong-un told him he’s to be posted to…Italy, land of the dolche vita, manbags worn with confidence and food that’s been exported to every Western high street. News that North Korea’s man in Rome, one Jo Song-gil (‘but you can call me Toni’) “may have defected” is shocking only for the uncertainty. Why “may”? You might not flee a Stalinist dictatorship for Hull or Texas. But when Italy beckons you run.
Mr Jo, 48, was despatched to Rome in October 2017 when Italy expelled the previous ambassador in protest over North Korean nuclear testing. His tenure in Italy ended in November – about the time of his vanishing. South Korea’s Joongang Ilbo newspaper claims Mr Jo is seeking asylum in an unidentified western country . Italy is keeping him in a “safe place” her no-one will find him – like Rome’s branch of Gregg’s the bakers.
If he is plotting to defect, Mr Jo will be following in the footsteps of Thae Yong- ho, a former deputy ambassador at the North Korean embassy in London who claimed asylum in South Korea in 2016, claiming he wanted his sons to avoid a “miserable” life in North Korea.
Pyongyang described him as “human scum” and accused him of embezzlement and child rape.
A public shaming or profiteroles? No contest. Bring on the mad dogs!
Posted: 3rd, January 2019 | In: Key Posts, News, Politicians | Comment
Narcissism saves 30m North Koreans from nuclear destruction
Baseball caps off to Donald Trump. It turns out that he and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un want to make America great again. The paid had “a really fantastic meeting. A lot of progress” says Donald in that manner he of saying things like he’s heard the words for the first time. It’s why he says everything twice, isn’t it, because after guffing out the words the first time he tries to work out what they mean so repeats it. If the first peroration gets a cheer, he might say it three times. So how was it, Don? “Really very positive,” he explains. “I think better than anybody could have expected. Top of the line. Really good.”
And now after the tea and the handshakes, the other guys and gels – “my people”, as Don calls them – will sort out all the details, you know, the stuff about nuclear weapons, trade, human rights, lots of tanks aimed at South Korea, repatriating the dead and other odds and sods. And that’s to say nothing – and nothing was said – about North Korea trading with the EU, the US or even UKplc, North Korean students being able to study overseas and the general opening up Mr Kim’s hermetic camp. But let’s not split hairs. North Korea back in the fold of international relations is good thing. Its people will get richer.
Many papers lead with a photo of Trump looking like gameshow host – Mr Kim, Come On Down! ‘You wanted peace but… you got a prawn cocktail. Hard cheese! Or more like no cheese at all, or meat or much food for your people of any sort.’
In case you missed it, this is the document Don and Kim signed:
1) The United States and the DPRK commit to establish new US-DPRK relations in accordance with the desire of the peoples of the two countries for peace and prosperity
2) The US and the DPRK will join their efforts to build a lasting and stable peace regime on the Korean Peninsula
3) Reaffirming the 27 April 2018 Panmunjom Declaration, the DPRK commits to work towards complete denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula
4) The United States and the DPRK commit to recovering POW/MIA remains, including the immediate repatriation of those already identified.
The media is the message, right? Don’t sweat the details because life will take care of those. The doings will out. So Trump can denigrate his predecessors. Only he can do it the right way. And maybe you can do if you stay tuned, buy the book, watch DVD and work out if the 30m people – that’s the number Trump said he was saving – can be saved from obliteration by the power of narcissism.
Posted: 13th, June 2018 | In: Key Posts, News, Politicians | Comment
Kim Yong Un can’t pay his hotel bill
This is an amusing little story which illustrates how the absurdity of economic sanctions can worm their way into the society at large. Kim Yong Un – you know, fattie who runs North Korea – we’d rather like him to be at a summit where we can all talk through how we’ll beat him up unless he gives up those nuclear bombs. Yet he can’t turn up because he can’t find a place to stay:
Just one day after President Donald Trump announced the US-North Korea summit is back on, the US and Singapore are looking for ways to bear the cost of Kim Jong Un’s accommodation, including the North Korean leader’s preference for a five-star, $6,000 a night hotel.
The Washington Post reports that paying for North Korea’s accommodation during the June 12 summit would conflict with US Treasury Department sanctions and require a waiver to be signed to temporarily bypass them.
North Korea can’t pay the bill. Because that would mean the hotel taking money from North Korea and that can’t happen because of the sanctions against North Korea. The sanctions existing because of the Big Bad Bomb problems.
Kim’s trip to Singapore, which would be the furthest he would have travelled as leader, has posed a number of logistical challenges for White House Deputy Chief of Staff Joe Hagin and Kim’s the de facto chief of staff Kim Chang son.
Although Mr Hagin is open to footing the bill, US Treasure Department sanctions require a waiver to be signed before America can pay for his luxury stay, the Washington Post reported.
America can’t pay the bill because that would mean spending money on Kim Young ‘Un. Something they’re not allowed to do because of the sanctions. You know, the sanctions over the Big Bad Bomb problem. The Big Bad Bomb problem we’d like to sit down and discuss with Kim Young ‘Un.
I admit to finding all of this amusing. Although not quite as amusing as something that happened a couple of decades back. I was doing business with the government of North Korea. No, it’s OK, it was legal back then. They had to issue a letter of credit – it’s a promise to pay, backed up by a bank that there really will be payment – and their bank refused to issue one. It wasn’t for a lot of money, not a lot for a country that is. $250,000. But their bank – one in Singapore as it happens – refused to issue it on the grounds that North Korea didn’t have that much money.
Who knows, maybe it’s not about sanctions now, perhaps they just don’t have the cash?
Posted: 8th, June 2018 | In: News, Politicians | Comment
Not North Korea calls Donald Trump a racist orangutan – orangutants outraged
You know all that corporate guff about how if everyone gets on Facebook, Snapshat or Twitter the world will be made whole and people will speak with one voice?
Well, stuff it. War with the apes might well begin with a Tweet. Orangutans are incandescent with rage over this slight from not the North Koreans (probably):
Posted: 30th, September 2017 | In: Politicians | Comment (1)
Kim Jong-Un fills his trousers
Spotter: @MrKenShabby
Posted: 25th, September 2017 | In: Politicians | Comment
Manchester United balls: star fan Kim John-Un makes third visit
Huge news. Huge! The Sun has the scoop: “Kim Jong-un is a Manchester United fan who believes North Korean footballers will eventually be flooding to the Premier League.”
Of course, what hereditary despot Mr Kim believes might be lot more terrifying than his dream of cheering on North Koreans in Manchester United colours.
But there it is. If North Korea wants it badly enough, exporting footballing talent might well be its biggest source of income. But, like you, we wonder how the Sun came by this “exclusive”? Putting North Korea and Manchester United into one headline is sure to attract clicks. But is it true?
The story continues:
A close friend of the nuclear tyrant revealed to SunSport how he loves the beautiful game and never misses a major football tournament.
Tyrant’s pal calls British tabloid to talk foot.
Italian senator Antonio Razzi confirmed the crackpot dictator had told him during private conversations of his love for the Red Devils.
But when asked if Kim compared himself to any United heroes such as Eric Cantona or Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Razzi told The Sun: “No, Kim is Kim — he is the only one.”
So Ibra it is, then.
And be in no doubt that news of Kim’s love for Manchester United is an exclusive, and as such should not be confused with the Mirror’s August 2014 story: “Kim Jong-Un is Manchester United fan”.
And:
The Sun finally catches up with what we reported in RI 265 in Sept 2012 – 5 whole years ago: https://t.co/AmKcx5L6qM
— Red Issue (@RedIssue) September 11, 2017
You heard it there first!
Posted: 12th, September 2017 | In: Back pages, manchester united, Politicians, Sports, Tabloids | Comment
Whoops Apocalypse! Guam radio broadcasts nuclear missile warning in error
North Korea has missiles trained on Guam, an American territory. Will mad Kim Jong-un shoot? KTWG and KSTO radio stations say he already has shot, broadcasting an emergency alert to listeners. But there was no incoming missile. It was an error.
Whoops!
Guam locals have been issued with leaflets telling them “What to do in case of nuclear attack”. One tip: “Do not look at the flash or fireball – It can blind you.” Tip 2: “Take cover behind anything that might offer protection.” Adhere to tips one and two and then: “When possible, take a shower with lots of soap and water to help remove radioactive contamination.”
After armageddon, good to know en-suite bathrooms survive. Oh, and best to take just one bottle into the show: “Do not use conditioner in your hair because it will bind radioactive material to your hair.” Should you have any left.
Don’t panic!
Posted: 15th, August 2017 | In: News, Strange But True, TV & Radio | Comment
Americans are banned from visiting North Korea
Best hurry up with that romantic break to North Korea. Donald Trump has alerted American tourists to the risk of “long-term detention” in Mr Kim’s dystopia. You might argue that being locked up in North Korea is akin to getting the full experience, a chance to be total immersed in the place. Like making a Buckingham Palace guard laugh or setting fire to a car in Paris, a diet of tree bark and curfew is to live like a North Korean.
But US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has signed a “Geographical Travel Restriction” . It makes it vorboten for Americans to enter North Korea. Tillerson’s spokeswoman Heather Nauert tells media:
“Once in effect, U.S. passports will be invalid for travel to, through and in North Korea, and individuals will be required to obtain a passport with a special validation in order to travel to or within North Korea.”
This harks back to the fate of Otto Warmbier, the 22-year-old American who having been sentenced to 15 years hard labor in North Korea last year for trying to steal a propaganda sign while on a tourist visit, returned to the USA in a coma. He died soon after.
North Korea called Warmbier’s death “a mystery”. Other mysteries thought to be befuddling the North Koreans are: why Katie Price sleeps on her back? How come Mr Kim is so fat when his fellow North Koreans are so very thin? And what do materialistic men see in Bernie Ecclestone’s daughters.
Meanwhile, Reuters reports: “North Korea is currently holding two Korean-American academics and a missionary, a Canadian pastor and three South Korean nationals who were doing missionary work. Japan says North Korea has also detained at least several dozen of its nationals.”
Posted: 24th, July 2017 | In: News, Politicians | Comment
Otto Warmbier and me: The Huffington Post’s disgusting attack on North Korea torture victim
Not long after Otto Warmbier was arrested in North Korea, the Huffington Post produced a hatchet job on the man. Entitled “North Korea Proves Your White Male Privilege Is Not Universal”, writer La Sha laid into Warmbier, using his suffering to nourish her status as the real victim.
Warmbier was a 21-year-old University of Virginia student on a visit to North Korea with China-based travel company Young Pioneer Tours when he was arrested on January 2nd 2016. The North Koreans claim the “student entered the country under the guise of a tourist and plotted to destroy North Korean unity with the tacit connivance of the U.S. government and under its manipulation”.
The dastardly US plot involved Warmbier allegedly attempting to steal a propaganda poster from a hotel the tour group was staying at. For this Warmbier was sentenced to 15 years hard labour at a March court hearing. Warmbier had already been shown “confessing” to “committing a crime” and begging the Korean people and government for forgiveness.
According to the North Koreans, Otto Warmbier “fell into a coma” that same month. The North Koreans never mentioned his stricken state. On June 13 2017 a comatose Otto was flown back to the US. On June 19, 2017, Otto Warmbier died. His family has released a statement:
“Unfortunately, the awful, torturous treatment our son received at the hands of the North Koreans ensured that no other outcome was possible beyond the sad one we experienced today.
Although we would never hear his voice again, within a day the countenance of his face changed – he was at peace. He was home and we could sense that.”
The Times says “the brain damage he suffered was more consistent with the effects of respiratory arrest, which can be caused by physical trauma, suffocation or the misuse of drugs.” Sources suggest he lost a significant amount of brain tissue. Horrific stuff, then.
But to the Huffington Post’s writer, Otto Warmbier’s horrific ordeal is something to be celebrated. On March 23, 2016, the Post stuck the knife in. La Sha tells us:
…my reaction to [a] young white man who went to an Asian country and violated their laws, and learned that the shield his cis white male identity provides here in America is not teflon abroad.
As shocked as I am by the sentence handed down to Warmbier, I am even more shocked that a grown man, an American citizen, would not only voluntarily enter North Korea but also commit what’s been described a “college-style prank.”
La Sha is shocked by a man’s curiosity to see North Korea. Dennis Rodman (not white) has visited the place. Shocked? She continues:
That kind of reckless gall is an unfortunate side effect of being socialized first as a white boy, and then as a white man in this country.
The “reckless gall” of being a tourist whilst white. Salon thought as much, telling its readers: “This might be America’s biggest idiot frat boy – meet the UVA student who thought he could pull a prank in North Korea.” He had it coming. Lark about, get tortured and killed. They’d pick out bits of brain through his nose if they could find it. Ha-ha. What a dick.
La Sha is not alone in her nastiness.
She then slips into full on English student mode, using the kind of convoluted language kids employ when they want to look smart:
Every economic, academic, legal and social system in this country has for more than three centuries functioned with the implicit purpose of ensuring that white men are the primary benefactors of all privilege.
It’s not been working that well of late, then. Barack Obama is away, so too is Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Kim Kardashian, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Sarah Palin, Angelina Jolie, Alice Walton and more and more women and non-white male faces who have made a decent fist of making it in the USA. The list of white males who didn’t rise to the top is long. But who cares for those millions of losers who frittered away all that privilege in The Rust Belt and elsewhere in America’s hinterlands? Maybe there’s a wrinkle in the Matrix?
And on and on she goes:
The kind of arrogance bred by that kind of conditioning is pathogenic, causing its host to develop a subconscious yet no less obnoxious perception that the rules do not apply to him, or at least that their application is negotiable.
Let’s interject, break up this hideous hatchet job. We can share another aspect of Otto Warmbier’s life:
In a tearful statement made before his trial, Warmbier tells a gathering of reporters in Pyongyang he tried to take the banner as a trophy for the mother of a friend who said she wanted to put it up in her church.
He says he was offered a used car worth $10,000 if he could get a banner and was also told that if he was detained and didn’t return, $200,000 would be paid to his mother in the form of a charitable donation.
Warmbier said he accepted the offer because his family was “suffering from very severe financial difficulties.”
Check your privilege, whitey.
But the Huffington Post’s writer isn’t listening. She’s making it all about race. It’s very nasty:
Yeah, I’m willing to bet my last dollar that he was aware of the political climate in that country, but privilege is a hell of a drug. The high of privilege told him that North Korea’s history of making examples out of American citizens who dare challenge their rigid legal system in any way was no match for his alabaster American privilege.
She then likens Otto Warmbier – a young man who allegedly tried to nick a sign for larks – to mass murderers who gun down innocent people in a church and run amuck at a fast food restaurant. You see, Otto’s skin colour makes him a suspect:
When you can watch a white man who entered a theatre and killed a dozen people come out unscathed, you start to believe you’re invincible. When you see a white man taken to Burger King in a bulletproof vest after he killed nine people in a church, you learn that the world will always protect you.
Not stopping there, she attacks his parents.
And while I don’t blame his parents for pressuring the State Department to negotiate his release, I wonder where they were when their son was planning a trip to the DPRK.
Dunno. Is it relevant?
What a mind-blowing moment it must be to realize after 21 years of being pedestaled by the world simply because your DNA coding produced the favorable phenotype that such favor is not absolute. What a bummer to realize that even the State Department with all its influence and power cannot assure your pardon. What a wake-up call it is to realize that your tears are met with indifference.
A “bummer” to see your son ripped away from you and vanished. Biased, bigoted and wholly objective, the article is the antithesis of good journalism. Pause from casting aspersions over all whites and the dead man’s grieving parents to wonder how this bilge passed before the editor’s eyes and wasn’t spiked.
She continues:
As I’ve said, living 15 years performing manual labor in North Korea is unimaginable, but so is going to a place I know I’m unwelcome and violating their laws.
No. Visiting North Korea is not unimaginable. It’s something you can do legally with a ticket. And if you find it so hard to imagine the hell of enslavement in a work camp, I can commend If This is A Man by Primo Levy and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Reading when you’re a writer can be useful. Also manual labour – yeah, who does that for 15 years? That question to coal miners and anyone else employed in one of those “unimaginable” blue collar industries that keep the lights on and writers in laptops.
She concludes:
I’m a black woman though. The hopeless fear Warmbier is now experiencing is my daily reality living in a country where white men like him are willfully oblivious to my suffering even as they are complicit in maintaining the power structures which ensure their supremacy at my expense. He is now an outsider at the mercy of a government unfazed by his cries for help. I get it.
No. You don’t. Because in the race to the bottom that is competitive victimhood, your moral compasses has gone haywire. Otto Warmbier appears to have been tortured to death. His trial and treatment should earn our utmost sympathy. To use his plight as a means to showcase you’re own victimhood and self-aggrandisement, to stand on his grave and shout ‘But what about me?’ is anti-human, needy and ultimately self-defeating.
Posted: 20th, June 2017 | In: Key Posts, News | Comments (3)
North Korea wakes its citizens with this eerie alarm call
Cock your ear towards Pyongyang, and in the morning you can hear the city’s PA systems waking citizens up to another rosy-fingered dawn. The North Korean regime’s choice of alarm is, well, alarming:
Spotter: Richard Littler
Posted: 20th, June 2017 | In: Music, Strange But True | Comment
North Korea uses anti-aircraft gun to execute man who fell asleep as the leader spoke
North Korea finds a use for its vast haul of bullets:
Two senior North Korean officials were executed with an anti-aircraft gun in early August on the orders of Kim Jong-un, South Korea’s JoongAng Ilbo newspaper reported, citing people it did not identify.
Unless North Korea is saving every bullet it can and the officials were beaten with the anti-aircraft gun or it was dropped on them?
Ri Yong Jin, a senior official in the education ministry — possibly minister — was arrested for dozing off during a meeting with Kim and charged with corruption before being killed, the paper said. Former Agriculture Minister Hwang Min was purged over a proposed project seen as a direct challenge to Kim’s leadership, it said.
Sleeping in class is a crime:
Since taking over after his father’s death in late 2011, Kim has carried out a series of executions of party and military officials. The most high-profile was the December 2013 execution of Jang Song-thaek, Kim’s uncle and former political guardian. Another high-profile execution was that of Hyon Yong-chol, North Korea’s former defense chief, who South Korean intelligence said was executed by firing squad in April 2015 on charges of dozing off during a meeting attended by the supreme leader.
Remains are then tossed to the dogs. Well, maybe. The source for this story offers no evidence. In fact, we never see any evidence of Mr Kim’s toughness:
In late April [2015], the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea uncovered “a ghastly sight” at a military firing range: analyzed satellite images showed six anti-aircraft gun systems being fired upon a small target at short range last October. The group assessing the bizarre scene decided it was an execution that had been watched by high-level officials who’d driven in from the capital of Pyongyang.
“Anyone who has witnessed the damage one single U.S. .50 caliber round does to the human body will shudder just trying to imagine a battery of 24 heavy machine guns being fired at human beings. Bodies would be nearly pulverized,” the report reads. “The gut-wrenching viciousness of such an act would make ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ sound like a gross understatement.”
He’s a vicious sod is Mr Kim. Well, so they say…
The victims of this brutality are unknown, but there is no shortage of past examples. In 2012, a shocked international press reported that a military officer was sentenced to death for drinking during the official mourning period for Kim’s father, Kim Jong Il. The method of execution was reportedly by short-range mortar firing squad. According to a source talking to South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo, it was ordered that “no trace of him [be left] behind, down to his hair.”
Show me the body.
Posted: 30th, August 2016 | In: Politicians, Reviews | Comment
Juche kitsch: North Korea just created 310 new slogans
The supreme leaders of the North Korean republic have moved to further unite the populace by creating 310 new slogans. Something might be lost in translation. But, then, it might also have been an improvement on the original.
Here are some choice slogans to chant:
Let us turn the whole country into a socialist fairyland by the joint operation of the army and people!
Should the enemy dare to invade our country, annihilate them to the last man so that none of them will survive to sign the instrument of surrender!
Let us turn ours into a country of mushrooms by making mushroom cultivation scientific, intensive and industrialized!
Make fruits cascade down and their sweet aroma fill the air on the sea of apple trees at the foot of Chol Pass!
Should the enemy dare to invade our country, annihilate them to the last man!
Let the strong wind of fish farming blow across the country!
Let the wives of officers become dependable assistants to their husbands!
Top tip: keep it simple:
Posted: 12th, February 2015 | In: Politicians | Comment
Kim Jong-un flies with the power of mind control
Kim Jong-un, Supreme Leader of the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea, does not only stand still pointing at things. He can fly!
Kim is flying a Korean People’s Air Force Antonov An-148.
Asn you can see, Kim Jong-un can fly with the power of mind control:
Spotter: Reddit – r/aviation
Posted: 2nd, January 2015 | In: Politicians | Comment
How to beat the imperial USA with maths: a charming North Korean children’s film
As North Korea fulminates agaisnt the USA olence, attacks the craven Sony Japanese mob and coerces America’s four largest theater chains into shelving the pretty poor film The Interview, kids in the DPRK learn that geometry can vanquish the enemy.
Spotter:The Week
Princess Beatrice implicated in North Korean hacking shocker
Princess Beatrice has been ‘HACKED”.
Not to death. Her phone calls have been recorded. This hacking has to do with her salary.
As the Mirror reports:
Hackers working for North Korea are thought to have been behind the security breach in revenge for a new film The Interview, starring James Franco and Seth Rogen. It mocks the country’s leader Kim Jong-un.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: 8th, December 2014 | In: Celebrities, Royal Family | Comment
North Korean Airline Koryo Air Rejects The Ryanair Steak Sandwhich And Anger
THE Telegraph says North Korea’s state-owned Koryo Air is thre world’s worst ailrine. It must be joking. The jets, staff and food all look fine, a world above the crap served aboard Ryanair by its barking, angry staff. Photos of the airline comes from Aram Pan, who travelled to Juche Travel to North Korea – “now the only country in the world where you can reliably fly on all major Soviet-era aircraft in one place”.
I’ve been to Cuba with Aeroflot in the late 1990s. The guard opened the plane’s hold with a crowbar. The entire air system fell from the ceiling when touched. The seats folded flat back and never came back up. The plan dived and soared to ‘save fuel’. But we lived. And it was cheap.
And it had no flies on the (barf!) poached salmon like on Air India.
It’s no frills simplicity with grace and poise:
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: 14th, October 2014 | In: The Consumer | Comment (1)
We’re All Going To Die: North Korea Readies For Total War In 2015
A man watches a TV news program showing North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, at the Seoul Railway Station in Seoul, South Korea, Thursday, Jan. 16, 2014. North Korea’s top government Thursday proposed the rival Koreas stop slandering each other from later this month, halt hostile military acts and work toward preventing a nuclear disaster on the divided peninsula. The letters read “Stop slandering and joint military exercise”. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)
EVEN though Kim Jong Un is the Sexiest Man Alive, has a weakness for cheese and was probably born in a lotus flower while scoring a hole in one as a sperm before emerging as a flying baby, let us not forget that he’s completely mental.
North Korea’s premier is a man who likes to keep his people under his waddling, hypnotic spell, while plotting constant war. You see, when you have everything and everyone is cow-eyed in your presence, the threat of nuclear war is probably the only thing you’ve got that gets the blood pumping around your regal underpants.
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Posted: 7th, October 2014 | In: Politicians, Reviews | Comments (3)
British Newspapers Duped By North Korea Win World Cup Story
NORTH Korea have made it to the World Cup final. The Metro reports:
“North Korea’s state controlled media is brazenly telling the country’s football fans that the national team have reached the World Cup final in Brazil… In a report posted on YouTube, the media have been caught broadcasting that North Korea are on course to win the biggest prize in football, despite not actually qualifying for the World Cup.”
Read the rest of this entry »
Pyongyang Choi Seongho: The North Korean Satirist Who Fooled The West’s News Hounds
AN update on the news that Kim Jong-un fed his uncle to 120 dogs.
The story was created by someone going by the name Pyongyang Choi Seongho. He said North Korea’s leading Kim had killed his uncle Jang Songtaek not by firing squad but by dogs.
One example of the satirist’s work says:
Today is Thanksgiving Day. Thanksgiving Day is the day for giving thanks to Kim Jongun. The American people eat turkey to thank him. What do you people eat?” It also includes a poster of Kim Jongun in sunglasses saying, “Don’t know how to be thankful, then you’ll get shot.”
He’s a joker:
Liu Chengcheng told the Global Times that Choi’s posts impartially display the lives of Pyongyang residents but rarely offer valuable new information. “Choi reiterates the North Korean mainstream media’s exaggerated style and makes the news funny,” said Liu.
Beijing Cream notes:
“At my residence in Beijing, with Coke toast first to the supreme leaders!”
And with that first message on June 29, Sina Weibo user @作家崔成浩 – literally, “Writer Choi Seongho” – launched himself into Chinese social media fame. From the very beginning, as a self-proclaimed North Korean patriot, he has written solely to glorify the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and has attracted more than 480,000 followers while following no one in turn.
But all is not what it seems. Far from being a true believer in the Juche Ideal, Choi just might be this country’s foremost satirist.
Hong Kong tabloid Wen Wei Po picked up the story of Kim’s hounds.
Zhang and five cronies after being stripped of clothes into the railings into the 120 hungry hound biting northeast three days until eaten. The whole process lasted one hour, Kim Jong-un, North Korea more than 300 main-belt Li Xue officials watch.
The tabloid cited Pyongyang Choi Seongho as the original source.
Who does the research?
Dennis Rodman Is Back In North Korea – Photos Of Kim’s Basketball Pal
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, left, and former NBA star Dennis Rodman watch North Korean and U.S. players in an exhibition basketball game at a sports arena in Pyongyang, North Korea. Rodman arrived in Pyongyang on Monday with three members of the Harlem Globetrotters basketball team to shoot an episode on North Korea for a new weekly HBO series.
DENNIS Rodman has swapped Celebrity Big Brother for another kind of prison. He’s back in North Korea, touring Kim’s Kingdom with his “all-star team” of American basketball players. They’re going to play match to mark Kim Jong Un’s birthday. Kenny Anderson, Cliff Robinson Vin Baker and former Knick Charles D. Smith will shoot hoops without the approval of the NBW, which decrees: “Although sports in many instances can be helpful in bridging cultural divides, this is not one of them.”
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In photos: North Korea marks Armistice Day – 60th anniversary of Korean War ending
ON July 27 1953, the Korean War ended.
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