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Anonymous ID: 0723bf April 27, 2020, 3:11 a.m. No.8935203   🗄️.is 🔗kun

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is 'alive and well'

Our Foreign Staff The Telegraph•April 26, 2020

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is "alive and well", according to a top security adviser to South Korean President Moon Jae-in.

The adviser downplayed rumours over Mr Kim's health following his absence from a key anniversary.

 

"Our government position is firm," said Mr Moon's special adviser on national security, Moon Chung-in, in an interview with CNN on Sunday. "Kim Jong-un is alive and well."

 

The adviser said Mr Kim had been staying in Wonsan - a resort town in the country's east - since April 13, adding: "No suspicious movements have so far been detected."

 

South Korean officials are calling for caution amid reports that Mr Kim may be ill or is being isolated because of coronavirus concerns.

At a closed-door forum on Sunday, South Korea's Unification Minister, Kim Yeon-chul, who oversees engagement with the North, said the government had the intelligence capabilities to say with confidence that there was no indication of anything unusual.

 

Rumours and speculation about Mr Kim's health have grown since his conspicuous absence from the April 15 celebrations for the birthday of his grandfather Kim Il Sung, the North's founder - the most important day in the country's political calendar.

 

Mr Kim has not made a public appearance since presiding over a Workers' Party politburo meeting on April 11, and the following day state media reported him inspecting fighter jets at an air defence unit.

His absence unleashed a series of unconfirmed media reports over his condition, which officials in Seoul previously poured cold water on. "We have nothing to confirm and no special movement has been detected inside North Korea as of now," the South's presidential office said in a statement last week.

 

South Korea's unification minister reiterated today that it remained the case, adding the "confident" conclusion was drawn from "a complex process of intelligence gathering and assessment".

Daily NK, an online media outlet run mostly by North Korean defectors, has reported Mr Kim was undergoing treatment after a cardiovascular procedure earlier this month.

 

Moar with pics: https://news.yahoo.com/north-korean-leader-kim-jong-030312197.html

Anonymous ID: 0723bf April 27, 2020, 3:28 a.m. No.8935259   🗄️.is 🔗kun

Philip Kahn, 100, Dies; Spanish Flu Took His Twin a Century Ago

Katharine Q. Seelye The New York Times•April 25, 2020

 

Philip Kahn believed that history repeats itself, a truism that has hit home for his family in extraordinary fashion. His twin brother, Samuel, died as an infant during the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-19. Now Kahn himself has died of the coronavirus. He was 100.

 

“He was a very healthy 100,” Warren Zysman, one of his grandsons, said in a phone interview. “He watched the news, he was completely aware of the pandemic. When he started coughing, he knew he might have it, and he knew the irony of what was going on.” Zysman added: “And he would say, ‘Warren my boy, I told you history always repeats itself. We could have been much better prepared for this.’”

 

Philip Kahn, a decorated World War II veteran, died April 17 at his home in Westbury, New York, on Long Island. “Tests confirmed he had COVID-19,” his doctor, Sandeep Jauhar, a cardiologist in nearby New Hyde Park, wrote on Facebook.

 

“Lovely man, wry wit, a kind soul,” Jauhar added. “His twin brother succumbed in a different pandemic, the Spanish flu … 101 years ago.”

The chances of siblings dying a century apart in global pandemics seem beyond remote, but the Kahns are not the only ones. Selma Ryan, 96, who died of the virus in San Antonio, Texas, on April 14, lost her older sister, Esther, to the Spanish Flu 102 years earlier, according to News4SA, a local television station. The sisters never knew each other.

 

Philip Felix Kahn did not know his brother either. The twins, whose father ran a bakery on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, were born Dec. 15, 1919, also in Manhattan, while the Spanish flu was still raging. The boys were just a few weeks old when Samuel died.

“He had this level of sadness about it because, while he was born a twin, he never got to experience being a twin,” said Zysman, who is himself a twin. “He always told me how hard the loss of his brother was for his parents,” he added, “and that he carried this void with him his entire life.”

 

Kahn served in an Army aerial unit in the Pacific during World War II, participating in the Battle of Iwo Jima and later in firebombing raids over Japan. He also helped make aerial surveys after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He earned two Bronze Stars.

 

https://news.yahoo.com/philip-kahn-100-dies-spanish-142119457.html