Tag: North Korea

People best watch President Trump’s actions more than what he says. He is clearly talking nice about Kim Jong-un in an effort to keep dialogue open while at the same time continuing to enforce sanctions on them to pressure them into a deal:

U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday appeared to downplay North Korea’s recent missile launches amid assessments that they violated international sanctions.

In a phone interview with the Fox News program “Fox & Friends,” Trump said North Korea is “not testing nuclear and not testing anything.”

He said the North sent some short-range missiles out which he said “everybody else does too.”

Regarding alleged sanctions violations by Pyongyang, such as illicit ship-to-ship transfers of oil, Trump said in the interview that “everybody tries to break sanctions” but that the sanctions are hurting North Korea badly and the U.S. “never took the sanctions off.”

Trump continued to note the U.S. has a “good relationship” with the North and that he is in no rush to resume negotiations for a nuclear deal.

KBS World Radio

The suspense will become unbearable. https://t.co/yZLWtX4lFM

— 🇰🇷Edward Oh🇺🇸 (@EdwardHBOh) June 11, 2019

This is something that has been speculated on before and if true it would explain why the Kim regime took such risky measures to kill him inside a busy international airport:

“Several former U.S. officials said the half brother, who had lived outside of North Korea for many years and had no known power base in Pyongyang, was unlikely to be able to provide details of the secretive country’s inner workings,” the Journal said.

The former officials also said Kim Jong Nam had been almost certainly in contact with security services of other countries, particularly China’s, the Journal said.
Kim Jong Nam’s role as a CIA informant is mentioned in a new book about Kim Jong Un, “The Great Successor,” by Washington Post reporter Anna Fifield that is due to be published on Tuesday. Fifield says Kim Jong Nam usually met his handlers in Singapore and Malaysia, citing a source with knowledge of the intelligence.
The book says that security camera footage from Kim Jong Nam’s last trip to Malaysia showed him in a hotel elevator with an Asian-looking man who was reported to be a U.S. intelligence agent. It said Ki’s backpack contained $120,000 in cash, which could have been payment for intelligence-related activities, or earnings from his casino businesses.

Reuters via a reader tip

You can read more at the link.

This is a good idea that hopefully will lead to more ship seizures:

The U.S. State Department has pledged up to five million dollars for informants on North Korea’s violations of sanctions, including its illegal transshipment of coal and oil. 

According to Radio Free Asia on Tuesday, the State Department announced to offer rewards for information that leads to the disruption of financial mechanisms of persons engaged in certain activities that support North Korea, including money laundering, sanctions evasion, cyber-crime, and WMD proliferation on the Rewards for Justice (RFJ) website run by the department. 

The State Department has run the RFJ program since 1984 to obtain information about international terrorists. The newly announced reward prioritizes information about maritime illicit transshipment by North Korea for its export of coal and import of crude oil. In particular, a wanted poster with a caption to urge people, especially Chinese maritime workers, to stop North Korea’s illegal maritime activities was produced in both English and Chinese. The detection of maritime illicit transshipment is a challenging task as it requires a large scale oversight and North Korea has adopted ever more elaborate schemes to avoid sanctions. 

Those who provide a critical piece of information to identify hackers who have stolen data or spread malicious codes under the orders of North Korea will be rewarded as well.

Donga Ilbo

You can read more at the link.

The Moon administration is not going to like this news:

Eight out of ten South Koreans think economic issues are more important than unification with North Korea, according to a new government survey.

The Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs released on Friday the results of their survey of three-thousand-873 South Korean adults, which indicates that 77-point-one percent of respondents would choose the economy over unification if only one of the two problems could be solved.

In the survey, 55-point-nine percent agreed with the proposition that South Korea and North Korea don’t necessarily have to form a unified country.

A full 53-point-two percent answered negatively when asked if they were willing to partially give up their quality of life for unification with North Korea.

KBS World Radio

You can read more at the link.

Which begs a fundamental question: if true that no amount of sanctions can convince NK to make the strategic decision to denuclearize, then why do we think unbridled concessions would? If we asked Kim what it would take for him to willingly go to zero, he wouldn’t have an answer. https://t.co/7n5QSpxLGp

— 🇰🇷Edward Oh🇺🇸 (@EdwardHBOh) June 5, 2019

It appears that the North Korean uranium enrichment facility has never slowed down operations during the recent peace initiative:

North Korea’s main nuclear complex shows continued activity around its uranium enrichment facility, indicating ongoing operations at the plant, a U.S. monitor said Wednesday.
38 North, a project run by the Stimson Center think tank, said recent commercial satellite imagery shows the movement of vehicles, equipment and personnel near the uranium facility at Yongbyon.
“Our observation, that periodic material transport (e.g., possibly to deliver liquid nitrogen) has continued at the Uranium Enrichment Complex over time, provides a new indicator that the complex is operational, and therefore that it is also most likely producing enriched uranium,” 38 North said on its website, citing satellite imagery from past months up to May 28.
“However, we do not have any definitive means to determine either the actual levels of enrichment or the total production throughput of the ~4000 centrifuges at this time,” it added.
North Korea has built nuclear weapons from both plutonium and uranium, with some estimating that the regime now holds an arsenal of 20 to 30 nuclear weapons.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but the original 38 North article can be read at this link.

I can still remember the days when the North Korean apologists were all saying that former President Bush was lying about North Korea having a uranium program. Now many of these same people are still giving advice about North Korea.

If Kim Jong-un’s sister, Kim Yo-jong was supposedly disciplined, it sure didn’t last very long because she is back in the spotlight:

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s powerful younger sister has appeared in public for the first time in 53 days, contradicting rumors that she was disciplined in the wake of the leader’s embarrassing no-deal summit with U.S. President Donald Trump.

Kim Yo-jong attended North Korea’s propaganda group gymnastics and artist performance called “The Land of the People” held in Pyongyang’s May Day Stadium on Monday, along with leader Kim, according to the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).

It marked the first time that Kim Yo-jong has appeared in public since she was last seen in North Korean media during the Supreme People’s Assembly in April. Until then, she played the role of a personal secretary for the leader, and was seen holding an ashtray when he was having a cigarette break at a Chinese train station on his way to Vietnam for the summit with Trump.

The report came after rumors of a purge spiked following a news report that leader Kim had carried out a massive punishment of officials responsible for the breakdown of the Trump summit and that Kim Yo-jong was disciplined.

Korea Times

You can read more at the link.