So says … KCNA, which also reported the discovery of a unicorn lair in 2012, and a series of supernatural events after Kim Jong Il’s death in 2011. Personally, I’m still skeptical. If Kim Jong Un is really as healthy as they want us to believe he is, why don’t they just do what Kim Jong Il did and release some oil paintings to prove it? ~   ~   ~ Update: Well, damn. Now I want to see him holding up the newspaper....

North Korea held a national meeting Tuesday to mark the 17th anniversary of late leader Kim Jong-il’s election as general secretary of the Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK). The communist nation’s leader, Kim Jong-un, however, was absent from the annual event to commemorate his father. [Yonhap] I don’t know if Kim Jong Un is sick or well, and North Korean emperors have a tendency to go missing for extended periods, but it’s starting to look like September wasn’t his best month. ~  ...

OK, I’m convinced. The rheumy-eyed, snaggletoothed old Trotskyites at The Guardian didn’t enable the embed feature — hypocrites! — but you can watch Reuters’s video here. No official word yet on whether Kim acquired the limp by stumbling over a starving orphan on the doorstep of one of his palaces. Hat tip to a valued reader. You could also characterize this slight limp as a waddle, the kind that would be cute if a penguin walked with it; less so when...

What are the odds that Jang Song Thaek was eaten by a pack of dogs, or that Ri Sol Ju made a sex tape with Jang? Probably not greater than 10%, and I’d put the odds that the South Korean NIS planted both stories at roughly twice that. Lurid stories like these have never held much appeal to me, because I’ve never believed that anyone in a position to know them first-hand would ever tell them to a South Korean...

Kim Jong Un has delivered a long-winded harangue to a conference of ideological workers. This isn’t the sort of thing I tend to dwell on, because almost all foreign analysis of North Korean speeches is useless, for reasons I’ve already explained here. Perhaps I write this mostly in the interest of preempting the acceptance of even more useless analysis, but I also write this because the plain meaning of the words seems clear enough to me, and what those words...

What a difference the last six weeks have made. Since the December purge of Jang Song Thaek, the consensus about North Korea’s ruler has moved from “undecided” to “negative.” Maybe I should have said “strongly negative.” It’s rare that I make this observation, but for once, I believe that this can be said of the prevailing views in all five of the cities where it matters most — in Beijing, Washington, Seoul, Pyongyang, and Chongjin. In each case, this is...