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UNITED NATIONS - The UN General Assembly granted a request from North Korea to hold a moment of silence on Thursday for Kim Jong-il, the country's former leader who died on Saturday, though Western envoys said they would boycott it. Nassir Abdulaziz Al-Nasser, president of the 193-nation General Assembly, said the moment of silence would take place before a meeting of the assembly at 3:00 p.m. EST (2000 GMT) .

Senate Democrats blocked a “sense of the Senate” amendment yesterday that would have merely urged the State Department to re-list North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism. This comes as the Obama Administration and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton attempt to draw a softer line on the tyrannical communist regime.

Is Kim Jong-il for real? The question has baffled foreign intelligence agencies for years but now a veteran Japanese expert on North Korea says the “dear leader” is actually dead – and his role is played by a double. The expert says Kim died of diabetes in 2003 and world leaders including Vladimir Putin of Russia and Hu Jintao of China have been negotiating with an impostor. He believes that Kim, fearing assassination, had groomed up to four lookalikes to act as substitutes at public events. One underwent plastic surgery to make his appearance more convincing. Now, the expert claims,...

North Korea has informed China that it is prepared to conduct "as many as three additional tests" following the first nuclear experiment Oct. 9, CNN television reported Wednesday. Quoting U.S. intelligence analysts and officials, CNN and Fox News said U.S. spy satellites have detected activities which could be preparations for nuclear explosion tests at three North Korean sites. CNN also said that latest U.S. intelligence show that North Korea's missile sites remain at a "very high state of readiness," and Pyongyang could use them "in the next several days." On Tuesday, NBC News reported that the North Korean military has...

Dictator hires doubles to do the boring jobs By Richard Spencer in Beijing (Filed: 30/09/2006) Korean leader Kim Jong-il (or is it?) inspects a farm run by Korean People's Army The eccentric North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il has hired doubles to carry out his more mundane tasks, according to South Korean intelligence officials. While Kim himself attends major state occasions, two men stand in for him for more routine visits to tractor factories or farms. "They are the spitting image of Kim — the same age, same height and with the same bouffant hairstyle and pot belly," a South Korean...

SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korean leader Kim Jong-il has taken his former secretary as his new wife, South Korea's Yonhap news agency reported on Sunday, citing sources familiar with the country. His wife Ko Yong-hi, the mother of two of Kim's three sons, died of breast cancer in August 2004, the agency said. "I heard Kim has been living together with a woman named Kim Ok, who was his secretary, since Ko Yong-hi died two years ago," Yonhap quoted a South Korean government source as saying.

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - North Korea called Vice President Dick Cheney a "bloodthirsty beast" and said Thursday his recent remarks labeling ruler Kim Jong Il irresponsible are another reason for it to stay away from six-nation nuclear disarmament talks. "What Cheney uttered at a time when the issue of the six-party talks is high on the agenda is little short of telling (North Korea) not to come out for the talks," an unnamed North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman said, according to the state-run Korean Central News Agency. Nearly a year since the last session of the six-nation talks, North...

Something is going on in North Korea, but nobody knows exactly what. Portraits of Kim Jong-il have been taken down from some (but not all) public places. The official Nork news agency denies that any have been taken down, though this is contradicted by several reports. His favorite mistress just died, and he is said to be in mourning. Offical television and radio braodcasts from North Korea appear to be toning down the honorifics they use when uttering his sacred name. Some speculate that Kim is deliberately downplaying the cult of his own personality, in an effort to begin reforming....

Something is happening in North Korea. Maybe something very big, indeed. It is too early to tell, but we will stay posted. Russia's state-run communication agency ITAR-TASS reported from Beijing quoting a diplomat in North Korea yesterday that pictures of the chairman of the DPRK National Defense Committee Kim Jong Il are being removed from public places in North Korea.

TOKYO (AFP) - US President George W. Bush (news - web sites) has rejected a passionate offer from North Korea (news - web sites)'s supreme leader Kim Jong-Il for direct talks between their countries, press reports in Japan said. The offer was conveyed to Bush by Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, who met Kim on May 22, during their talks Tuesday on the sidelines of the Group of Eight (G8) summit in the US state of Georgia, the reports said. "He (Kim) wanted to dance (with Bush) so much as to get thirsty," Koizumi told the US president in a...

U.S. Official Says North Korea's Acknowledgment of Uranium Bomb Program Is Essential Feb. 19, 2004 By George Gedda / Associated Press Writer WASHINGTON (AP) - No nuclear agreement with North Korea is possible until the Communist nation agrees to eliminate the uranium-based program it has refused to acknowledge, a senior State Department official said Thursday. Heading into six-nation talks next week, the United States is looking for a strategic commitment from North Korea to end its bomb-making capability with the same clarity and commitment shown by Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Also...

-You believe John Ashcroft poses a greater danger to America than Osama bin Laden -You think President Bush lied to the nation but his predecessor did not. -You believe President Bush is too dumb to be President and Arnold Schwarzenegger is too dumb to be Governor of California, but the Dixie Chicks, Martin Sheen, Alec Baldwin, Barbra Streisand, Eddie Vedder and Jeanine Garofalo are qualified to discourse at length on foreign policy. -You believe all conservatives are racist, but do not think minorities can ever succeed without Affirmative Action. -You can't decide which is worse: the Patriot Act or the...

<p>The White House yesterday stood behind a top arms-control official's description of life in North Korea as a "hellish nightmare" and rejected Pyongyang's demand that he be banned from upcoming talks on the North's nuclear weapons program. President Bush will decide who represents the United States, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan told reporters in Crawford, Texas, where Mr. Bush is spending a monthlong working vacation. John Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, "was speaking for the administration," Mr. McClellan said. "His remarks last week reiterated things that we have said in the past." In the administration's latest verbal spat with North Korea, Mr. Bolton lashed out in a speech in Seoul in which he called that country's leader, Kim Jong-il, a "tyrannical dictator." Mr. Bolton said: "Hundreds of thousands of [Mr. Kim´s] people [are] locked in prison camps, with millions more mired in abject poverty, scrounging the ground for food. For many in North Korea, life is a hellish nightmare." The North Korean Foreign Ministry issued a response through the official Korean Central News Agency, saying of Mr. Bolton that "such human scum and bloodsucker is not entitled to take part in the talks." On North Korea's demand that Mr. Bolton be excluded from negotiations, Mr. McClellan said yesterday: "The president of the United States makes the decisions about who participates in the delegations for the United States of America." Besides the United States and North Korea, the talks are to include China, Japan, South Korea and Russia. At the State Department in Washington, spokesman Philip Reeker declined to comment on North Korea's response. "We are not going to dignify North Korean comments about our undersecretary of state," Mr. Reeker said. "I think the undersecretary's speech speaks for itself.... It was a speech that reflected some obvious truths, and let's just leave it at that." The United States and North Korea said last week that they would hold six-party talks, but the date and location have not been announced. In another development, former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright writes in a memoir to be published next month that President Clinton invited Mr. Kim to visit Washington in late 2000. Mrs. Albright also chides the Bush administration for not having continued Mr. Clinton's policy of engagement with North Korea. She writes that Mr. Clinton, being forced by the eruption of violence between the Israelis and the Palestinians in fall 2000 to dedicate most of his remaining time in office to the Middle East, decided not to take a trip to Pyongyang. "In a final effort to sidestep this choice, we invited Chairman Kim to come to Washington. The North Koreans replied that they could not accept the invitation," Mrs. Albright says in an excerpt from her book, "Madame Secretary," published by Vanity Fair magazine in its September issue. "Given the public character of Kim's invitation to us, the lateness of our invitation to him and the importance of 'face' in East Asian diplomacy, this response was unsurprising but also unfortunate," she writes. Mrs. Albright is the highest U.S. official to have visited North Korea since the communist state was created more than five decades ago. She met with Mr. Kim in Pyongyang in October 2000, but the two sides failed to reach an agreement on the North's missiles. "We wanted [North Korea] to refrain from the production, testing, deployment and export of whole classes of missiles (including those threatening Japan) in return for our agreement to arrange for civilian North Korean satellite launches under safeguards outside the country," she writes. In exchange for these and other concessions, the Clinton administration was ready to offer "full normalization of relations" between Washington and Pyongyang, which never have had formal diplomatic ties. After assuming office in 2001, Mr. Bush said he did not trust Mr. Kim and refused to deal with his regime. In October 2002, the North admitted to having developed a secret uranium-enrichment program in violation of a 1994 nuclear deal with the Clinton administration. Early this year, it reopened its plutonium plant in Yongbyon and says it has reprocessed 8,000 spent fuel rods to extract plutonium. Uranium and plutonium can be used to make atom bombs. Neither assertion has been independently confirmed, in part because of the absence of international monitors in the reclusive country. The Bush administration began an effort in late winter to convene a multilateral forum to resolve the nuclear standoff, but the North insisted on direct dialogue with the United States. Last month, after the administration agreed to invite Russia to a meeting that was to include only China, Japan and South Korea, Pyongyang accepted Washington's offer. Talks are expected in a matter of weeks, possibly in early September, if not before that. Pyongyang said yesterday that the talks will be held in Beijing, which hosted a U.S.-China-North Korea meeting in April, but no venue has been officially announced.</p>