Not isolated enough
KCTV / AFP
shining success.
It appears that, although Kim Jong-un declared a shining success
in dealing with the Wuflu last year, Chongvirus Omicron is now having a gay old time in North Korea. Despite the secretive state closing its borders in January 2020, Omicron has found a way into lil' fatboy's Supreme Leader's playpit.
KCNA said leader Kim Jong-un had vowed to eradicate the outbreak, which it called a "severe national emergency" that had breached the country's "quarantine front".
Frances Mao, BBC News
The most notable aspect of the BBC's report on this story, however, is the revelation of a university in Seoul dedicated to studying the northern neighbour. Not just a department within a university, a whole freakin' university. Cunningly, it's called University of North Korean Studies, presumably so as not to draw the unwanted attention of the North Korean Reconnaissance General Bureau.
I'm just surprised that a country as impoverished and backward as North Korea has so much to offer academic study in the first place. (shock)
North Korean state media has reported half a million cases of fever
in recent weeks. Limited testing means that most cases cannot be confirmed as a gift from the northern neighbour. But Supreme Leader has, for the first time, admitted that they're fucked.
"The spread of the malignant epidemic is [the greatest] turmoil to fall on our country since the founding," the official KCNA news agency quoted Mr Kim as saying. He blamed the crisis on bureaucratic and medical incompetence,…
I wonder if, as part of his unprecedented admission
lil' fatboy will acknowledge that throwing money at a ballistic missile programme, rather than medical infrastructure, was a significant aspect of the bureaucratic incompetence
? Or will he just try to shift all of the blame downwards?