This week rumours swirled that Kim Jong Il, North Korea's dictator, was gravely ill. The 66-year-old, officials said in Seoul, had suffered a "collapse". South Korea's president, Lee Myung-bak, was worried enough to call an emergency meeting with senior aides. An anonymous American intelligence official in Washington might have been at the bedside: Mr Kim, she told reporters, was probably half-paralysed following a stroke. (Mysteriously, South Korean spooks later reported he was recovering from surgery.) A North Korean diplomat denied the claims as "nefarious machinations", noting that the Western press had a habit of telling lies (unlike the snow-pure Pyongyang Times).
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