I don't wish to be alarmist but, by the time you read this, life on earth could have taken a devastating turn for the worst. "The moment of explosion is approaching fast," North Korea has announced, and war could break out "today or tomorrow".
That was, um, on Wednesday, so you could say Armageddon's running a wee bit late, but that's certainly no thanks to Kim Jong-un, who has feverishly been upping the ante in his bid to bring on World War Three. Busy as a demented bee, Kim's pudgy little fingers were all a-blur as he tore up the 2007 disarmament deal intended to curtail the country's nuclear ambitions and then scrapped the 1953 armistice with South Korea and declared that a state of war once again exists between the two countries.
He is clearly barking mad and of no use to anyone other than as a sobering example of what happens when ideology has bred with itself. The Chinese know this - and that is why they have voted for UN sanctions against their former ally. But still the whacko stuff comes, courtesy of the state news agency.
"Now that the revolutionary armed forces of the DPRK [Democratic People's Republic of Korea] have entered into an actual military action, the inter-Korean relations have naturally entered the state of war. Provocations will not be limited to a local war, but develop into an all-out war, a nuclear war."
As Kim told troops last month, "Once an order is issued, you should break the waists of the crazy enemies, totally cut their windpipes and thus clearly show what a real war is like."
There is some doubt as to whether the DPRK was currently capable of staging a Boy Scout jamboree, let alone a real war. Thanks to the policies of his father and grandfather, Kim has inherited a country in economic ruin and the population faces a constant threat of mass starvation. For all the talk of "bolstering up the nuclear armed force both in quantity and quality", recent tests revealed they have some way to go when it comes to building missiles of any significance.