It was lost in translation. An editorial, not news and better translation is 'he was maybe rumored to say'. This Korean editorial translator makes the point if they had the quote solid, they would have put it in a news story because it's a big deal.
Bump for historic meeting between the leaders of North and South Korea. A month ago Kim Jong-un was in Beijing, so maybe they told him he is on thin ice.
Wow nobody who looks so jolly could be that bad! Maybe I was wrong about him. I used to think these guys too were kinda sinister until I saw their anthem & how happy they all looked, smiling away...
Wow nobody who looks so jolly could be that bad! Maybe I was wrong about him. I used to think these guys too were kinda sinister until I saw their anthem & how happy they all looked, smiling away...
The jolliness of murderous despots is often misinterpreted by the West, as though we expect them to be as sinister-looking as Stalin and Saddam.
The jolliness of murderous despots is often misinterpreted by the West, as though we expect them to be as sinister-looking as Stalin and Saddam.
Actually I think Stalin in the 40s (especially circa 1939-45) had that friendly pipe smoking kindly old uncle thing going for him (which was probably very deliberately put out by the west also, seeing as a certain whacky Austrian was getting all expansionist at the time), & wasn't regarded as sinister by the western populace funnily enough, although I always personally felt he even looked like a thug.
Have you ever seen the film Raid on Entebbe (1976) btw? Yaphet Kotto plays Idi Amin really well & has his mannerisms down pretty tight. I preferred his portrayal to Forest Whitaker's actually clip of him here.
North Korea's state newspaper accused the US of "hatching a criminal plot to unleash a war against the DPRK" while "having a dialogue with a smile on its face" Sunday following a report on South Korean radio that American forces in Japan were running drills aimed at invading Pyongyang.
"We can not but take a serious note of the double-dealing attitudes of the US as it is busy staging secret drills involving man-killing special units while having a dialogue with a smile on its face," the commentary from North Korea's Rodong Sinmun said, citing South Korean reports that US special units had been flown to the Philippines as part of an invasion drill.
"The US would be sadly mistaken if it thinks that it can browbeat someone through trite 'gunboat diplomacy' which it used to employ as an almighty weapon in the past and attain its sinister intention," it added.
Vice President Mike Pence told American ambassadors on Wednesday that North Korea has failed to take any substantive steps to give up its nuclear weapons, even as President Trump is moving toward a second meeting with Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader.
“While the president has started a promising dialogue with Chairman Kim,” Mr. Pence told the gathering at the State Department, “we still await concrete steps by North Korea to dismantle the nuclear weapons that threaten our people and our allies in the region.”
With the unequivocal statement, Mr. Pence seemed to directly contradict the president’s claim on Twitter, after his first summit meeting in June, that “there is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea.” At the time, many of Mr. Trump’s top aides cringed at the declaration, fearing it would take the economic pressure off the North to disarm.
The fear seems well founded: China and Russia have resumed many economic enterprises with North Korea.
“The president launched into several unrelated diatribes. One of those was commenting on the recent missile launches by the government of North Korea. And, essentially, the president said he did not believe that the North Koreans had the capability to hit us here with ballistic missiles in the United States. And he did not believe that because President Putin had told him they did not. President Putin had told him that the North Koreans don’t actually have those missiles,” said McCabe.