Even Mother Nature is mourning the death of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, with ice cracking around his birthplace and expressions of grief from a bird, Pyongyang’s media said yesterday.
On Saturday morning when Kim died, layers of ice ruptured with an unprecedented loud crack at Chon Lake on Mount Paektu and a snowstorm hit the area, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said.
Mount Paektu is considered a holy place for North Koreans as the country’s founding father Kim Il-sung commanded anti-Japanese guerrillas from a secret camp there.
North Korea maintains his son Kim Jong-il was born there in 1942. Historians say he was actually born in Siberia, where his father had taken refuge from Japanese troops.
The snowstorm ended suddenly at dawn on Tuesday and the sunrise lit up the horizon and the mountain peaks, the news agency said.
A message from Kim Jong-il carved on the rocks, “Mt Paektu, holy mountain of revolution. Kim Jong-il,” glowed brightly, it said, in a phenomenon that until Tuesday.
A glow was seen atop the mountain’s Jong-il Peak for half an hour on Monday when the death was announced, according to KCNA.
A natural wonder was also observed around Kim Il-sung’s statue on Tonghung Hill in the northeastern city of Hamhung.
“At around 21:20 Tuesday a Manchurian crane was seen flying round the statue three times before alighting on a tree,” the news agency said. “The crane stayed there for quite a long while with its head bowed and flew in the direction of Pyongyang.”
“Observing this, the director of the Management Office for the Hamhung Revolutionary Site, and others said in unison that even the crane seemed to mourn the demise of Kim Jong-il, born of heaven, after flying down there at dead of cold night, unable to forget him,” it said.
Far from the violence ravaging Haiti, a market on the border with the Dominican Republic has maintained a welcome degree of normal everyday life. At the Dajabon border gate, a wave of Haitians press forward, eager to shop at the twice-weekly market about 200km from Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince. They are drawn by the market’s offerings — food, clothing, toys and even used appliances — items not always readily available in Haiti. However, with gang violence bad and growing ever worse in Haiti, the Dominican government has reinforced the usual military presence at the border and placed soldiers on alert. While the market continues to
An image of a dancer balancing on the words “China Before Communism” looms over Parisian commuters catching the morning metro, signaling the annual return of Shen Yun, a controversial spectacle of traditional Chinese dance mixed with vehement criticism of Beijing and conservative rhetoric. The Shen Yun Performing Arts company has slipped the beliefs of a spiritual movement called Falun Gong in between its technicolored visuals and leaping dancers since 2006, with advertising for the show so ubiquitous that it has become an Internet meme. Founded in 1992, Falun Gong claims nearly 100 million followers and has been subject to “persistent persecution” in
ONLINE VITRIOL: While Mo Yan faces a lawsuit, bottled water company Nongfu Spring and Tsinghua University are being attacked amid a rise in nationalist fervor At first glance, a Nobel prize winning author, a bottle of green tea and Beijing’s Tsinghua University have little in common, but in recent weeks they have been dubbed by China’s nationalist netizens as the “three new evils” in the fight to defend the country’s valor in cyberspace. Last month, a patriotic blogger called Wu Wanzheng filed a lawsuit against China’s only Nobel prize-winning author, Mo Yan (莫言), accusing him of discrediting the Communist army and glorifying Japanese soldiers in his fictional works set during the Japanese invasion of China. Wu, who posts online under the pseudonym “Truth-Telling Mao Xinghuo,” is seeking
‘SURPRISES’: The militants claim to have successfully tested a missile capable of reaching Mach 8 and vowed to strike ships heading toward the Cape of Good Hope Yemen’s Houthi rebels claim to have a new, hypersonic missile in their arsenal, Russia’s state media reported on Thursday, potentially raising the stakes in their attacks on shipping in the Red Sea and surrounding waterways against the backdrop of Israel’s war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The report by the state-run RIA Novosti news agency cited an unidentified official, but provided no evidence for the claim. It comes as Moscow maintains an aggressively counter-Western foreign policy amid its grinding war on Ukraine. However, the Houthis have for weeks hinted about “surprises” they plan for the battles at sea to counter the