Paper Monitor
11:22 UK time, Tuesday, 10 October 2006
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
Well, the world might be one step closer to a nuclear conflagration, but there's always an amusing headline to while away what remains of our days. Cue the Sun, and its front page tribute to Kim Jong-il: "How do you solve a problem like Korea?" When the world's crumbling around us, what better way to cheer everyone up that with a Sound of Music gag? Shame about that world peace thing, though.
At least the Sun has the manners to put the story on the front page. You have to get to p8 in the Daily Mail to learn about the explosion as large as the Hiroshima bomb which has irrevocably changed our geopolitics. But once there we learn: "Even though most starving North Koreans probably couldn't tell a golf ball from an egg, they know that the Dear Leader has supposedly scored the lowest round of golf in history - 38 below par with five holes in one."
The Daily Mirror can't match the Sun's cracker, but does have "Kim Wild" on p1, with this inside: "[A] Russian envoy travelling with him on a 24-day train trip - Kim hates flying - said he had live lobsters sent to him daily, and ate only with silver chopsticks."
And let's go back to the Sun, which reveals a grasp of the finer details of the international diplomatic scene which we might not have previously associated with the paper. "Kim is a James Bond obsessive who had numerous political enemies put to death and his propaganda machine insists he is an expert horseman." Paper Monitor doesn't quite follow the link, but never mind, there's more: "He quite smoking in 2003 and promptly encouraged his people to do likewise. Smokers, he pronounced, are one of the 'three main fools of the 21st Century', along with people ignorant about music and computers."
So Kim likes films and music. At least that means the Sun's headline won't be wasted on him.
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