Has there ever been a national leader that has died as many times as Kim Jong-un? He is apparently dead yet again:
Unverified claims that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un had died after suffering a brain hemorrhage have spread on overseas social media, while North Korean state media reported his visit to a public exhibition.
The rumors were reported Tuesday by the British tabloid The Sun, the New York Post and India’s Economic Times, which cited social media posts that had claimed Kim suffered a severe brain hemorrhage, fell into a coma and was rushed to a hospital in Beijing.
The claims reportedly originated from a post on X by Wanjun Xie, a Chinese dissident based in the United States.
In a post Monday, Xie claimed that Kim had suffered a severe brain hemorrhage, lost consciousness and been transferred to Peking Union Medical College Hospital in Beijing because of North Korea’s poor medical facilities but died.
He also claimed Kim’s body had been secretly returned to North Korea and his death was being kept under wraps.
Who even knows how real this claim even is. Regardless I guess the ROK will have to respond with their own weapons test:
This photo, carried by North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency on Oct. 15, 2026, shows the North firing two types of strategic cruise missiles from a submarine the previous day. (For Use Only in the Republic of Korea. No Redistribution) (Yonhap)
North Korea said Saturday it has conducted an underwater test of a new high-speed precision-guided torpedo weapon system that uses artificial intelligence (AI) technology, noting that the test heralds a “significant” change in the North’s naval capabilities.
North Korea test-fired the Zam-2.0 super-speed precision-guided torpedo weapon system Thursday to confirm the successful technical upgrade of the weapon, according to the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA). It did not disclose further details of the weapon.
What is significant about cruise missiles launched from submarines is that missile defenses in the ROK now have to be positioned to account for them. Missile defense planning is much easier when you know the general direction of where threat targets are coming from. In the case of North Korea they fly in from the north and across the DMZ towards high value targets in South Korea. The ROK and the U.S. position air defense assets as required against these threat trajectories.
However, if missiles can be fired at the ROK from the east and the west via naval assets, then air defense positioning has to be adjusted or increased to compensate. With that all said, I doubt any North Korean naval asset would survive very long in a conventional war with the U.S. and the ROK, regardless these threats still need to be planned for:
North Korea said Thursday it tested two types of submarine-launched strategic cruise missiles in the East Sea the previous day.
“The test-fire aimed to examine the current mobilized posture of the underwater combat systems and contributed to getting the Navy skilled in performing its strategic missions and showcasing high reliability, trustworthiness and ability of the war deterrents of the DPRK,” the North’s Korean Central News Agency said in an English dispatch.
This is a clever response by North Korea to try and create doubt about the ROK’s hypersonic capabilities. Even if the Kim regime’s claim is false, they calculate that the leftists in the ROK will believe it is true and amplify the claim. However, since a conservative is not in power the false claim will face much smaller amplification in the media:
South Korea’s defense ministry on Thursday refuted a claim by North Korea’s missile chief that questions Seoul’s recent test launch of a hypersonic glide vehicle (HGV).
Earlier in the day, Jang Chang-ha, director-general of North Korea’s Missile Administration, claimed that South Korea’s test of the HGV may not have achieved hypersonic flight because its outside appearance was “not stained with any soot,” according to the North’s Korean Central News Agency.
Jang cited photos provided by South Korea after last Thursday’s test, but Seoul’s defense ministry countered by saying the vehicle has advanced thermal-protection technology and the visible appearance of “soot” is impossible during hypersonic flight.
It looks like the FBI has shutdown the IT worker scheme being run by North Korea:
The US Justice Department said Tuesday it has clamped down on North Korean remote IT worker schemes that affected more than 70 American companies and generated millions of dollars in revenue allegedly linked to the North Korean regime.
The department announced a series of recent coordinated law enforcement actions in Ohio and Texas, including an indictment, two arrests and the seizure of 187 computers used by North Korean IT workers to obtain fraudulent employment at US companies.
You can read more at the link, but the scheme the North Koreans were running is fooling legitimate U.S. businesses into thinking they were contracting legal remote workers. However, due to sanctions the North Koreans cannot provide remote IT services to American businesses. So the North Koreans were doing actual work, but most of the money was probably being funneled into illicit programs. Supposedly this scheme was generating up to $600 million a year for the regime. Maybe legaling IT workers from North Korea is something that President Trump can offer to Kim Jong-un as a carrot if they do restart any negotiations again.
This response from Kim Yo-jong demonstrates how the mentality of the regime has changed under Kim Jong-un. Before North Korea would gladly suck as much aid out of South Korea and the international community as possible, now they view aid as an insult to the regime:
Kim Yo-jong, the powerful sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, on Friday reiterated Pyongyang’s rejection of South Korea’s offer to provide humanitarian medical assistance, criticizing the gesture as a “farce.”
Kim’s statement carried by the North’s official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) came a day after she rejected Seoul’s plan to send 1,431 medical items across 166 categories to a hospital in Pyongyang, as part of a humanitarian medical support program. She called the offer an “insult” and “political provocation.”
“The racket of ‘mine explosion’ and the farce of ‘medical equipment support’ orchestrated by the ROK are just the two sides of the same coin minted by its inveterate bad habit of escalating confrontation with our state.” ROK stands for the Republic of Korea, South Korea’s official name.
Kim claimed that South Korea’s medical aid proposal and its accusations against North Korea over a recent land mine explosion near the inter-Korean border were intended to damage Pyongyang’s reputation and image.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, center, is seen overseeing an intermediate-range strategic missile launch the previous day, in this photo carried by North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency, Sunday. Yonhap
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has overseen the launch of an intermediate-range strategic missile and called for continued efforts to bolster the “fatality” of the country’s offensive weapons, state media reported Sunday.
North Korea conducted a firing drill of the missile toward the East Sea at dawn on Saturday as part of efforts to train missile troops operating the “hypersonic strategic weapon system,” according to the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).
Kim said it is very important to demonstrate the counterattack means of the North’s military in a “constant mobilization posture,” according to the report.
You can read more at the link, but an intermediate range missile is the type that would be used to target Guam. This launch could be a message to Trump that any deal on missiles is not coming cheap.
This should not be surprising to anyone. I would be more surprised if they didn’t have their own prison at their Beijing embassy to hold defectors in:
North Korea allegedly runs a secret detention facility in its embassy in China to interrogate and repatriate its nationals deemed threats to the regime, a report said Tuesday.
The claim was made in a report titled “North Korea’s Transnational Repression: China” released Tuesday by the Transitional Justice Working Group (TJWG), a Seoul-based human rights group.
Based on interviews with multiple sources, including a former North Korean diplomat, the report claimed North Korea operates the facility in the basement of its embassy in Beijing, where surveillance, pursuit and arrest, detention and interrogation, and forced repatriation take place.
The secret operation is overseen by a “security representative” who holds a consular post but is reportedly a North Korean intelligence agency officer on a temporary assignment. Cases are reported to Pyongyang within 12-24 hours, according to the report.
For these POWs going back to North Korea was likely not an option since they were expected to die in combat and would probably face labor camp if they returned after being captured:
Ukraine has recently sent two North Korean soldiers captured by Ukrainian forces to South Korea, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said.
“Recently, we sent two North Korean prisoners of war to the Republic of Korea,” Zelenskyy said during his address at the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday (U.S. time), referring to South Korea by its official name.
Two North Korean soldiers were captured by Ukrainian forces in early 2025 after being deployed to Russia’s Kursk region in support of Moscow’s war against Ukraine. They have reportedly expressed their desire to come to South Korea.
Wasn’t that nice of North Korea to provide some fireworks prior to the Trump-Xi summit? In all seriousness, the Kim regime does these launches to keep themselves relevant on the world stage. Every time there is an important summit involving the ROK, Japan, China, or the U.S., they fire missiles, and the international media dutifully reports on it, justifying why the Kim regime conducts them in the first place, and the cycle continues:
North Korea fired two short-range ballistic missiles toward the East Sea within hours of each other Sunday, ahead of a high-stakes summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping set for later this week.
The missile were detected about three hours apart — the first at around 3:00 p.m. and the second at roughly 5:50 p.m., both launched from the Wonsan area, South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said.
The first missile flew about 450 kilometers, while the second flew more than 600 km, the JCS said, adding that further analysis was under way to determine the exact specifications.
