From South Korea's Cheongwadae, the executive office and official residence of the Republic of Korea's head of state, a cryptic statement about North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un's recent absence from public life. Read the rest
Man, 2020 is weird. And it's only May. Read the rest
No one really knows where Kim Jong-un is right now, but the New York Post and The Sun speculate that the supreme ruler of North Korea is at his seaside resort consorting with his "pleasure squad" of 2,000 sex slaves some as young as 13. "Foreign intelligence services think he's actually sheltering from the coronavirus pandemic in a secure luxury compound," reports The Sun:
The Pleasure Squad or Kippumjo began during the reign of North Korea's founder, Kim Il-sung, who is still considered the country's Eternal President, despite dying in 1994.
In the late 1970s, at the height of his power, he sent out his officials to scour the nation for its most attractive young women and girls to act as singers and dancers.
Some of them also began working as maids, but the most sexually attractive were ordered to become "comfort women" for powerful officials.
Many were aged around 13 and 14, and were sometimes even recommended for the sick service by their schools.
KCNA reports North Korea leader Kim Jong Un resuming public activity https://t.co/Xp8MwHCT5E pic.twitter.com/f8vbOlx1q2
— Reuters (@Reuters) May 1, 2020
Image: Korean Central News Agency/Flickr Public Domain. Read the rest
Reuters reports that China dispatched medical experts to North Korea to "advise on leader Kim Jong-Un", suspected to be very ill after a heart operation.
The trip by the Chinese doctors and officials comes amid conflicting reports about the health of the North Korean leader. Reuters was unable to immediately determine what the trip by the Chinese team signalled in terms of Kim’s health. A delegation led by a senior member of the Chinese Communist Party’s International Liaison Department left Beijing for North Korea on Thursday, two of the people said. The department is the main Chinese body dealing with neighbouring North Korea.
Japanese weekly Shukan Gendai claims Kim is in a "vegetative state" and unlikely to recover.
Read the restThe Chinese expert told the magazine that Kim clutched his chest and fell to the ground on a visit to the countryside earlier this month. A doctor accompanying Kim performed CPR and took him to a nearby hospital.
Kim, believed to be 36, needed a stent procedure, which calls for placing a tube into a congested blood vessel to allow blood to keep flowing to the heart, according to Shukan Gendai.
In a coronavirus briefing at the White House just now, impeached and manifestly unfit United States President Donald Trump wished North Korea's murderous dictator Kim Jong Un “good luck.”
In so doing, Trump expressed greater concern for Kim than he has at any point so far for the nearly 45,000 Americans who have died of COVID-19. Read the rest
A newspaper operated by defectors from North Korea claims that Kim Jong-Un is gravely ill following heart surgery.
Daily NK, a speciality website run mostly by North Korean defectors, cited unidentified sources inside the isolated state saying Kim is recovering at a villa in the Mount Kumgang resort county of Hyangsan on the east coast after getting the procedure on April 12.
CNN writes that US intelligence services are monitoring reports.
Kim recently missed the celebration of his grandfather's birthday on April 15, which raised speculation about his well-being. He had been seen four days before that at a government meeting.The National Security Council and Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment when reached by CNN on Monday. CNN has also reached out to the CIA and the State Department for comment and sought comment from the South Koreans.Gathering intelligence out of North Korea is notoriously difficult -- one of the most challenging targets for US intelligence.
Kim is only 36 years old, but South Korea's intelligence services claim he is increasingly obese and lives an unhealthy lifestyle of binge eating and drinking. Anna Fifield, the Washington Post's Beijing bureau chief, tweeted that his poor health is now obvious and wrote last year that he was a "heart attack waiting to happen."
Read the rest
On Tuesday morning, North Korea launched short-range cruise missiles in the country's fifth weapons test this year. So we got that going for us. Which is nice. Read the rest
Well, there it is. Read the rest
(PHOTO: Kim Hyok Chol, left, and Kim Yong Chol at Beijing airport on Jan. 17, 2019, KYODO NEWS)
Donald Trump appears to believe it is fun to yuk around with North Korea, but North Korea does not yuk around. Read the rest
“Do not travel” to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the U.S. State Department warned American citizens in a renewed advisory on Friday. Read the rest
Journalist Ankit Panda has a bombshell report over at the Diplomat today that identifies the location of Kangson, a covert North Korean uranium enrichment site situated just outside the capital city of Pyongyang. Read the rest
The recent Trump-Kim man-child summit in Singapore was already awkward and now Bad Lip Reading has made it even more so by redubbing some of their conversations.
Nailed it!
No, really. You gotta see this. Read the rest
When Yeonmi Park was just 13 years old, after suffering inhumanely under the North Korean regime, she and her family escaped to China (and eventually to South Korea).
She is now 24 years old and has become a vocal advocate for human rights in the country she once fled from. In this New York Times video, this brave young defector describes the terrible conditions for people in her home country and asks Trump to hold its dictator Kim Jong-un accountable for these human rights violations.
You may remember Park from a few years ago when she told her story at the One Young World Summit 2014 in Dublin, Ireland:
If her story interests you, give her powerful and inspiring 2016 memoir, In Order To Live, A North Korean Girl’s Journey To Freedom, a read:
Read the restPark’s family was loving and close-knit, but life in North Korea was brutal, practically medieval. Park would regularly go without food and was made to believe that, Kim Jong Il, the country’s dictator, could read her mind. After her father was imprisoned and tortured by the regime for trading on the black-market, a risk he took in order to provide for his wife and two young daughters, Yeonmi and her family were branded as criminals and forced to the cruel margins of North Korean society. With thirteen-year-old Park suffering from a botched appendectomy and weighing a mere sixty pounds, she and her mother were smuggled across the border into China.
I wasn’t dreaming of freedom when I escaped from North Korea.
In a White House press briefing with Nigeria's president Muhammadu Buhari at his side, U.S. President Donald Trump said he believes a summit with North Korean president Kim Jong-Un will happen, and that Singapore and the Korean DMZ are possible sites for the historic summit. Read the rest
Huge news from North Korea in advance of the North-South summit next week, and planned denuclearization talks with the U.S. President. Read the rest
