Kim Jong Il's "Recent" Photos Stoke Rumors About His Health (SLIDESHOW)

The AP reports:

SEOUL, South Korea -- The first photos of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il released in two months show him in a setting very similar to photographs from August.

And the verdant background looks more like summer than autumn, adding to uncertainty about Kim's health after reports he underwent brain surgery.

North Korea released the undated still photos and video frame grabs Saturday accompanying a report by North Korean television that Kim visited an all-female military unit. They were the first photos of Kim published since Aug. 14; and both sets of pictures he wears his trademark dark sunglasses and a khaki jumpsuit.

"They didn't appear to have been taken recently," Kim Yong-hyun, a North Korea expert at Seoul's Dongguk University, said Monday of the pictures carried by the North's official Korean Central News Agency. "To me, it looked like they were taken in June or July."

• • • • • The first of the two undated pictures released today by the North Korean government