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Groton Daily Independent
Monday, Dec. 04, 2017 ~ Vol. 25 - No. 148 ~ 27 of 43
Shunned by society, it is not uncommon for patients to contemplate suicide.
Ahmed, 40, is one of them. He has been trying to gain asylum status in the U.S. because, he says, he has lost hope in a future in Egypt.
“I do not want to be living a life always feeling strapped down and imprisoned,” he told his therapist during a session attended by an AP reporter. Fearing further stigma, he asked that he be identi ed only by his rst name.
In an anonymous testimony given to UNAIDS and seen by the AP, one woman said she was infected by her late husband and later found it hard to live in a society that rejects people carrying the virus. She was beaten and denied by her family an inheritance she and her children were legally entitled to when her husband died. When she attempted to start a new life with her children in a different neighborhood, her in-laws made sure her new neighbors learned about her condition.
AP word cloud: The message in Pyongyang’s propaganda By ERIC TALMADGE and PENNY YI WANG, Associated Press
TOKYO (AP) — Kim. Nuclear. War.
Nothing sums up the message embedded in North Korea’s propaganda better than those three words. That’s exactly what the world hears — and what’s revealed in this word cloud, a visual display of terms used by the Korean Central News Agency’s English-language service.
The Associated Press boiled down 1,542 stories led between July 1 and Oct. 11 by the of cial North Korean news agency to a list of the 183 words that appear most frequently. The resulting word cloud reveals some of the key patterns Pyongyang employs in its rhetorical wars with Washington.
Just as important, it re ects the way the government wants to be seen by the outside world.
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‘KIM’ AND ‘NUCLEAR’
The rst takeaway (no surprise) is that North Korean propagandists spend nearly all of their time hailing
be-all-end-all leader Kim Jong Un.
The appearance of his surname in KCNA reports 2,793 times, way more than “nuclear” at 1,671, is the
predictable result of the North’s inescapable cult of personality.
The reverence goes deeper. While it doesn’t show in the word cloud, when the North Korean media
mentions the leader’s name, or the names of his father and grandfather, it uses a special font reserved especially for that purpose. Even the dates on the pages of the ruling party newspaper come from a calendar that counts the years in terms of the birth of Kim’s grandfather, Kim Il Sung. This year in North Korea isn’t 2017; it’s “Juche 106.”
In contrast, the frequency of “nuclear” is telling because of the relatively narrow range of contexts in which it is used.
The primary mission of the North Korean media is to chronicle Kim Jong Un’s frequent “on-the-spot- guidance” trips, the heaps of laurels he receives from foreign dignitaries, the vows of devotion from his countrymen. “War,” the third-most common word in the AP cloud, is also used not just when talking of a looming con ict with the United States but in connection with the historical one — the 1950-53 Korean War, which North Korean propaganda uses as the prime example of American imperialism and barbarism.
“Nuclear,” however, is almost always used in just two ways.
It’s either cited in defense of the North’s development of nuclear weapons as a just act of self-defense, or in threats that Pyongyang is willing and ready to use them to counter the “nuclear” blackmail of the United States. That it shows up so much attests to just how obsessive the North’s rhetorical defenses of its nuclear program really are.
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LIKE A SNAPSHOT
A caveat is probably in order at this point.
When it comes to North Korean propaganda, word clouds produce a more impressionistic than scienti c