Shouldn't they take the plane?

KCNA, North Korea's official state news agency, reports:

Koreans in U.S. Vow to Take Van in Reunification Movement
Pyongyang, January 19 (KCNA)

Representatives of 17 organizations of Koreans in the United States including the Federation of Koreans in the western part of the United States and the People for Opening Tomorrow reportedly held a New Year's meeting on Jan. 14 at which they declared they would take the van in the movement for Korea's reunification.

Okay, but they better drop it off with a full tank of gas when they're done.

Technically, "van" is an old-fashioned abbreviation of "vanguard", but only KCNA ever uses it that way nowadays.

Somehow, I doubt any Korean living in the U.S. used such weird, stilted English. I just can't see it: "Gentlemen, in the movement for Korea's reunification, let us declare that we will take the van!"

No, that sounds like the kind of English written by someone who is looking it up a word at a time in the dictionary, who has little to no contact with native speakers, probably because he lives in a pariah state that has closed itself off from most of the world.

Note that the writer can't even verify that the meeting he's writing about even took place: he says it "reportedly" happened, but he's not 100% sure. Unusually for a news article (but not a North Korean one), there are no quotations of what anybody involved in the story actually said.

That means this writer got his information at second or third hand -- if, that is, he didn't simply fabricate the entire thing. Notably, a Google search for the group "People for Opening Tomorrow" yields zero results.

We Americans like to complain about our biased media, but sometimes I think we forget how good we really have it.