Rumor: Kim Jong Il Just Three Years from Becoming “Eternal” Chairman

As much as I admire Open News for its reporting from North Korea’s towns, villages, and markets, these inside-baseball reports from within the royal court in Pyongyang aren’t the sort in which I tend to put much stock, so take this for what it’s worth:

Doctors in North Korea have given the country’s leader Kim Jong-il three years to live, Open Radio for North Korea claimed Friday.

Quoting what it said was a high-level North Korean source, the broadcaster said a comprehensive medical check-up last month by a special medical department under the Guard Command, a military unit assigned to protect Kim, shows that he has “at most three years to live.” His ailments including laryngitis and kidney disorders became chronic after he recovered from a stroke, it said.

We saw a whole series of similarly sources reports right after the stroke. One claimed that South Korean intelligence had intercepted Kim Jong Il’s brain scan, and another giddily reported that Kim Jong Il had recovered the ability to brush his own teeth.