September 9, 2008

North Korean Dictator suffers stroke?


North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il has apparently suffered a health setback, "possibly a stroke," a US intelligence official said today, noting he had not appeared at a 60th anniversary parade.

While it has not been confirmed, it does appear that Kim Jong-Il has had a health setback, possibly a stroke. Kim has not been seen the last couple of weeks in public. US intelligence is "pretty confident" of its assessment of a health setback.

Kim failed to appear at a massive military parade in Pyongyang Tuesday, marking the 60th anniversary of the founding of the secretive Stalinist state. The North Korean leader has never before missed the parade celebration.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack declined to comment on what intelligence officials were saying about Kim's health and on his absence from the parade.

"Obviously, this is a very opaque regime, so I'm not in a position to offer any comment to you," McCormack said.

He said he could comment only on North Korea's failure to press ahead with arrangements for verifying the internationally-agreed disablement of its nuclear weapons program.

"We don't necessarily have a good picture into the decision-making processes of the North Korean regime, but we can see very clearly outputs or lack of outputs," McCormack said.

"And thus far we have, over the past several weeks, we have not seen outputs in terms of their agreement to a verification regime," he said.

"So that's where our focus is on," he said.

He again acknowledged that North Korea has also taken steps toward restarting the Yongbyon nuclear reactor by putting equipment that had been in storage back to former positions.

However, he said there is no sign it is operational.

North Korea last week announced that it has stopped work on disabling Yongbyon, and would consider rebuilding the plants, because Washington has failed to drop it from a terrorism blacklist.

The Yongbyon reactor is at the heart of Pyongyang's decades-old nuclear weapons drive and produced the plutonium for its October 2006 atomic test.

Last year North Korea sealed a landmark deal with the United States, China, South Korea, Japan and Russia to abandon all its nuclear weapons in exchange for badly needed energy and economic aid and security and diplomatic benefits.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Comments containing links will be marked as spam and not approved. We moderate every comment. If you want to advertise on this blog it is $30 per link.

Affordable Website Design & SEO

Looking for a quality professional website designer? Why not go where the smart money is?! Toronto Website Design and Toronto SEO. Get free SEO advice from people who really know the business.

Featured Posts

The Sarcasm Symbol
Ever had some confusion online or with your cellphone when someone fails to catch the sarcasm? Well now with the SarcMark you can ge...
Behold, the Scorpion Hydrogen Supercar
CARS - To the right is the future of supercars... it is a hydrogen supercar called the Scorpion. The Scorpion from Ronn Motors in Texas is t...
Documents show Stephen Harper misusing public funds
CANADA - According to 950+ pages of documents obtained by the Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act the Privy Coun...
Pink's Rosie the Riveter
ENTERTAINMENT - What I like about this video is how it meshes different social movements like feminism, veganism, anti-capitalism...
California's Dustbowl
ENVIRONMENT - The photo on the right is a farm in California that has been put up for sale. Its just one of thousands of farms that are n...
Is Steampunk the New Goth???
GOTHIC - Watch out what you see on the subway late at night because while in 2001 you might have seen some pretty freakish goths, by 20...
Do you have enough Ice Water in your diet?
HEALTH - A Calorie (large C) is a measurement of the amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of a litre of water (1 kg's worth) ...
North Korean timeline towards Inevitable War
POLITICS - The following is timeline of events that have occurred on the Korean Peninsula. 1945 - Japan surrenders to the United States a...
Judgment Day is Tomorrow, so sayeth Cult
RELIGION - According to a cult based in California, Judgement Day is tomorrow (May 21st 2011) and Jesus Christ will return to the Earth a...
Sex in Space Forbidden
SEX/TECHNOLOGY - Sex in outer space is a big no-no according to NASA. Not for professional astronauts at least, but the growing numb...

Popular Posts / Last 30 Days