
Kim Jong Un warns of 'grave consequences' and fires top officials after Covid-19 incident
CNN
Kim Jong Un fired several senior officials who failed to enforce North Korea's stringent Covid-19 prevention, a dereliction of duty which the young dictator said will have "grave consequences" for the impoverished and isolated nation, state media reported Wednesday.
It is unclear who or exactly how many officials were responsible for the unspecified incident, which Kim called a "great crisis." But it appears some members of the upper echelons of the ruling Workers' Party of Korea were replaced, according to the state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA). An outbreak of Covid-19 could prove dire for North Korea. The country's dilapidated health care infrastructure is unlikely to be up to the task of treating a large number of patients with a highly infectious disease.
More than two decades ago, on January 24, 2004, I landed in Baghdad as a legal adviser, assigned an office in what was then known as the Green Zone. It was raining and cold, and my duffle bag was thrown into a puddle off the C-130 aircraft that had just done a corkscrew dive to reach the runway without risk of ground fire. Young American soldiers greeted me as we piled into a vehicle, sped out of the airport complex and then along a road called the “Highway of Death” due to car bombs and snipers.












