North Korea

I don't know much about North Korea, but its people have long been suffering and literally starving: apparently its citizens are on average five inches shorter than their southern neighbors because of malnutrition.

And no one admires or respects a leader who willfully starves his people.

I have no problem believing that there are power outages, rationing and blackouts--perhaps that is why they are trying to develop nuclear power.

Rumsfeld can't contain his glee over this photo from a satelite showing a darkened North Korea compared to a light-speckled South Korea. And that makes me suspicious because of what we know of Rumsfeld. Perhaps another explanation for the blackouts is that they have intentionally darkened the country for fear of US bombing raids as happened over Iraq. Understandably this is a real fear as Bush and his administration, and the US media have been threatening war and bombings for years.

Also as an aside, primarily because of the smaller than expected richter scale readings from the North Korean nuclear test, there were suspicions that the test had failed. The AP has more on this today:

Results from an initial air sampling after North Korea's announced nuclear test showed no evidence of radioactive particles that would be expected from a successful nuclear detonation, a U.S. government intelligence official said Friday.

. . .

In Beijing, a government official said Friday that Chinese monitoring has found no evidence of airborne radiation from North Korea's claimed nuclear test. The official with the State Environmental Protection Administration said China has been monitoring air samples since the test-explosion Monday.

This adds further evidence to the possibility that there was no nuclear explosion or that the test had not been a complete success.