Interesting... Remember when there were reports that they were taking down Kim's picture from public places?

"In the years before he died, Kim took some really big decisions on North Korea's relationships with the outside world," says the professor, pointing to the historic June 2000 summit with South Korean President Kim Dae Jung, a visit from Russian leader Vladimir Putin the following month and then US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in October 2000.

The following January he was in China, met Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi in September 2002 - and admitted that Pyongyang had abducted Japanese nationals to train its spies - and August 2003 saw the opening of six-way talks on halting North Korea's nuclear weapons programmes.

Then, suddenly, Kim disappeared, says Shigemura, and there was chaos in the upper echelons of the country's leadership. "I have been working on the book for four years," said Shigemura, a former journalist for the Mainichi newspaper who was posted to Seoul for six years from 1979 and then served for another five years in Washington D.C. A North Korean agent told him in 1995 that he had met one of Kim's doubles - there have been as many as four - and that he used them to stand in at outside ceremonies because he was fearful of a coup.

After Kim's death, a group of four very senior officials in the regime decided to protect their own positions by making the stand-in more permanent. Whenever anyone meets the North Korean leader, Shigemura says one of the four is alongside him "like a puppet-master."

If it turns out he did die in 2003 and they are covering it up, it would be a shame. That would mean he never got a chance to see Team America.

It wouldn't be all that weird as compared to everything else the North Koreans do. It did take awhile for power to fully transition from Kim Il Sung after his death to Kim Il Jong. So logic would follow that it would take awhile for it to transition from Kim Il Jong to Kim Il Nam, assuming the whole succession process there didn't go completely off the rails.

In Jong's case, it was because he was an alcoholic playboy. In his son's case, I think it's a combination of too many video games and getting caught with his family in Japan trying to visit Disneyland.

If it is true, then North Korea is officially the most crazy regime ever. If it isn't, it's still pretty crazy that North Korea is so cut off from the rest of the world that people are wondering if their leader is dead.

Kim Jong-Il 'died in 2003', says Japanese professor - Telegraph

Nobel Peace Prize winner and international symbol of freedom Nelson Mandela is flagged on U.S. terrorist watch lists and needs special permission to visit the USA. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice calls the situation "embarrassing," and some members of Congress vow to fix it.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff says "common sense" suggests Mandela should be removed. He says the issue "raises a troubling and difficult debate about what groups are considered terrorists and which are not."

I'm at a complete lack for words...

U.S. has Mandela on terrorist list - USATODAY.com

Whether he was up to no good or simply desperate to play BrickBreaker, a Mexican press attach� was caught on camera by Secret Service pocketing several White House BlackBerries during a recent meeting in New Orleans, FOX News has learned.

Sources with knowledge of the incident said the official, Rafael Quintero Curiel, served as the lead press advance person for the Mexican Delegation and was responsible for handling logistics and guiding the Mexican media around at the conference. He took six or seven of the handheld devices from a table outside a special room in the hotel where the Mexican delegation was meeting with President Bush earlier this week.

Sources said Quintero Curiel made it all the way to the airport before Secret Service officers caught up with him. He initially denied taking the devices, but after agents showed him the DVD, Quintero Curiel said it was purely accidental, gave them back, claimed diplomatic immunity and left New Orleans with the Mexican delegation.

Secret Service Catch Mexican Official Nabbing White House BlackBerries

We are currently preparing the big crowning event of Miss Landmine Angola 2008 in close collaboration with the Angolan government (CNIDAH) and supported by the European Union.The event will be taking place in Luanda, Angola on April 4th, 2008, the UN International Day for Mine Awareness and Assistance in Mine Action.

Stay tuned!

The web voting for Miss Landmine Angola is open until April 3, 2008.

Well, that's certainly an effective way to make a statement. Reality is pretty damn surreal.

MISS LANDMINE

A lucky coincidence of economics is responsible for routing much of the world's internet and telephone traffic through switching points in the United States, where, under legislation introduced this week, the U.S. National Security Agency will be free to continue tapping it.

But contrary to recent assertions by Bush administration officials, the proportion of international traffic entering the United States is dropping, not increasing, experts say.

International phone and internet traffic flows through the United States largely because of pricing models established more than 100 years ago in the International Telecommunication Union to handle international phone calls. Under those ITU tariffs, smaller and developing countries charge higher fees to accept calls than the U.S.-based carriers do, which can make it cheaper to route phone calls through the United States than directly to a neighboring country.

Exchanges in Hong Kong and London are emerging as local hubs for Asian and European traffic, while new fiber cables running north and south from Japan around to Europe will divert traffic from the trans-America route. Meanwhile, more countries are building their own internal internet exchanges.

"Because the decisions are made by the private sector, you're always going to go the direction where you have the cheapest fiber," Woodcock says. "That's likely to be through the U.S. for a while yet, (but) that's changing as more and more fiber gets installed around South Asia."

The trend may leave U.S. spooks longing for a simpler time; like 1992, when the first -- and at the time, only -- internet exchange point, called MAE-East, was erected in Washington D.C.

"All the traffic in the world went through Washington," Woodcock says. "But it was coincidence that it was Washington, more or less, and it was private-sector. And it probably wasn't tapped for at least a couple of years."

I don't think it was luck and coincidence as much as it was convenience and forethought.

NSA's Lucky Break: How the U.S. Became Switchboard to the World

Iraq's Interior Ministry has revoked the license of Blackwater USA, an American security firm whose contractors are blamed for a Sunday gunbattle in Baghdad that left eight civilians dead.

Sunday's firefight took place near Nusoor Square, an area that straddles the predominantly Sunni Arab neighborhoods of Mansour and Yarmouk.

In addition to the fatalities, 14 people were wounded, most of them civilians, the official said.

The ministry said the incident began around midday, when a convoy of sport utility vehicles came under fire from unidentified gunmen in the square.

The men in the SUVs, described by witnesses as Westerners, returned fire, and the witnesses said the vehicles are the kind used by Western security firms.

"We have revoked Blackwater's license to operate in Iraq. As of now they are not allowed to operate anywhere in the Republic of Iraq," Interior Ministry spokesman Brig. Gen. Abdul Kareem Khalaf said Monday. "The investigation is ongoing, and all those responsible for Sunday's killing will be referred to Iraqi justice."

Blackwater security firm banned from Iraq - CNN.com

Just wait for the "5 Things You Didn't Know about UBL" meme to get going.

Spies and teenagers normally have little in common but that is about to change as America’s intelligence agencies prepare to launch “A-Space”, an internal communications tool modeled on the popular social networking sites, Facebook and MySpace.

The Director of National Intelligence will open the site to the entire intelligence community in December. The move is the latest part of an ongoing effort to transform the analytical business following the failure to detect the 9/11 terrorist attacks or find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Two thoughts:

Goal: Ultimately make the social graph a community asset.

If you trust us, you're stupid.

With so many agencies in the IC, analysts have been wasting a lot of time checking sixteen different sites to see what their 'friends' are up to.

Yes, a little infrastructure consolidation project is just what the doctor ordered. There must be an ESX pony in there, somewhere.

Look out for Long Bets on when 'Twitter for spies' and 'Zivity for spies' will be announced.

US launches 'MySpace for spies'

The Iranians finally got around to showing Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith on TV last month, and their ruling mullahs couldn't help but add some commentary of their own. It turns out we Americans have the story all wrong. George Lucas's sci-fi saga, they tell us, is in fact a parable about our own day and age. And guess who the bad guys are...

"In what seems like a children's film, [Lucas] predicts the dark and gloomy future of the U.S.A. Elsewhere in the film, the discussions between Lord Sith and Anakin remind the viewer of the opinions held by White House politicians. It shows that for the sake of popularity, regimes talk about the rule of the people and democracy, but, in fact, they are tyrannies and dictatorships."

MEMRI did the translation. The link on their site appears to be dead. I can't seem to find the full video.. Could Lucas Film have made them pull it?

Bad Guys Blog | Watching Star Wars in Tehran

"This isn't just about going in and blowing things up."

US military and civilian authorities must stop thinking of themselves as a "good-idea factory" whose every thought has greater merit than those of their customers.

It could be too late for extensive rebranding of the US effort in Iraq.

Much of what works for consumer advertising in the US might not translate well in Baghdad. But urban ops is all about experimenting and adapting to new realities.

The study is available.

The Pentagon Gets a Lesson From Madison Avenue

"I want you to know that the gum arabic which runs all the soft drinks all over the world, including the United States, mainly 80 percent is imported from my country," the ambassador said after raising a bottle of Coca-Cola.

A reporter asked if Sudan was threatening to "stop the export of gum arabic and bring down the Western world."

"I can stop that gum arabic and all of us will have lost this," Khartoum Karl warned anew, beckoning to the Coke bottle. "But I don't want to go that way."

As diplomatic threats go, that one gets high points for creativity: Try to stop the killings in Darfur, and we'll take away your Coca-Cola.

Truly amazing..

Denying Genocide in Darfur, and Americans Their Coca-Cola