Asia in 3 minutes: If Kim dies, don’t ask CIA; if he fires a missile, read manga

If Kim Jong-un suddenly dies, don’t ask me: CIA chief Pompeo

The US Central Intelligence Agency thinks North Korea’s Kim Jong-un is a rational actor who is focused on staying in power and “waking up in his own bed” each day. But if Kim should suddenly not show up for work, there is no point asking US spy chief Mike Pompeo about it. “If Kim Jong-un should vanish, given the history of the CIA, I’m just not going to talk about it,” he said at a defence forum in Washington when asked what would happen if Kim suddenly died. “Someone might think there was a coincidence. ‘You know, there was an accident.’ It’s just not fruitful.”

What next? The agency has a dark history of involvement in plots to overthrow or eliminate leaders in countries like Iran, Cuba, Congo, Vietnam and Chile. Late Cuban leader Fidel Castro was said to have been targeted hundreds of times. North Korea claimed earlier this year that the CIA working with South Korean intelligence had tried to kill Kim, 33. “Kim Jong-un’s mission is just to stay in power,” he said. Pompeo also said he was revitalising the agency’s field missions. “We are going to become a much more vicious agency,” he said.

Comic’s advice for surviving North Korean missile attack

“Cover your head”. That’s the advice offered in a manga comic published by local authorities in Japan describing what to do in the event of a North Korean missile strike. Officials on the northern island of Hokkaido published a manga survival guide titled In Case a Missile Flies Over. The four-page comic, created by manga artist Manabu Yamamoto, details what the island’s 5.5 million residents should do when they hear sirens, loudspeaker messages and emergency phone alerts.

What next? “We decided to release the manga after hearing from our residents that the current manual is hard to understand,” said Kiyomi Tanabe, a Hokkaido official. In the comic, characters protect themselves by wrapping their arms or cushions over their heads. It also shows students taking cover under their school desks, farmers crouching down in a trench and fishermen in the ocean hiding behind a ship’s wheelhouse. The Hokkaido government has sent electronic copies of the comic to schools, fisheries associations and other public bodies on the island so they can print them out.

Japan’s lunar orbiter finds site for moon base – in a 50km cave

Scientists at Japan’s space agency discovered a huge moon cave that could one day house a lunar base. Data taken from Japan’s Kaguya lunar orbiter confirmed the existence of a 50km long, 100 metre wide cavern that is believed to be a lava tube created by volcanic activity about 3.5 billion years ago. “We’ve known about these locations that were thought to be lava tubes … but their existence has not been confirmed until now,” Junichi Haruyama, a researcher at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, said.