It looks like there will be a vodka shortage for a little while for the Kim regime elite:
Vodka bottles that were seized by the customs authorities in the port of Rotterdam. Photograph: Robin Utrecht/AFP/Getty Images
Dutch customs officials at the port of Rotterdam have seized 90,000 bottles of vodka believed to be destined for the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, and his army chiefs. The discovery, on the eve of Kim’s two-day summit with Donald Trump in Hanoi, was made after Dutch authorities flagged up the suspicious route and records of a Chinese-owned container ship, Nebula.
The Russian vodka, contained in 3,000 boxes, had been recorded as being due for unloading in China, via the ports of Hamburg and Rotterdam. When officers sought to retrieve the container from the ship’s hull, it was found to be concealed and hemmed in by the fuselage of an aircraft also due to be exported to China.
The Warmbier case is clearly taking a backseat to the larger US goal of trying to get North Korea to denuclearize:
Donald Trump took Kim Jong Un’s word that he knew nothing of the torture of an American college student while in North Korean custody, an about-face that sparked a bipartisan backlash back home on Thursday. The US president appeared to side with the reclusive leader about the 2017 case of Otto Warmbier, drawing outrage from incredulous Democrats who accused Trump of repeatedly aligning with tyrants. The 22-year-old Ohio native was returned to the United States in a coma and died shortly afterwards. A US judge concluded Warmbier was tortured by North Korean authorities. At the conclusion of his Hanoi summit with Kim, Trump told reporters he talked with Kim about the “horrible” Warmbier case. “He knew the case very well, but he knew it later,” Trump said, adding that “some really bad things” happened to Warmbier while he was detained. Kim “tells me that he didn’t know about it, and I will take him at his word.”
It will be interesting to see if whoever was responsible for this is caught by Spanish authorities:
The North Korean embassy in Madrid.
The Spanish Ministry of the Interior is currently investigating an incident alleged to have occurred at the DPRK embassy in Madrid, an official confirmed to NK News on Wednesday. Spanish outletEl Confidencial first reported that the DPRK embassy had been the subject of an attack and break-in last Friday, with diplomatic staff said to have been tied up and gagged while computer equipment was stolen. “We can confirm that this is under investigation, but that is the only thing we can say,” an official from the communications department of the Ministry of the Interior said. When pressed to confirm a robbery had in fact taken place, the official reiterated that they had nothing more to add.
We promised Libya’s dictator Gaddafi that if he gave up his nuke program, we wouldn’t overthrow him. He gave them up, and we blew him away. NK’s Kim won’t make the same mistake. Just another negative consequence of short-sighted regime-change war policies
As long as these companies are allowed to operate without facing consequences, the Kim regime will continue to be able to break sanctions:
A Russian tanker violated international trade sanctions by transferring fuel to a North Korean vessel at sea at least four times between October 2017 and May 2018, two crew members who witnessed the transfers said.
Such transactions could have helped provide North Korea with an economic lifeline and eased the isolation of the secretive communist state, whose leader, Kim Jong Un, is due to meet U.S. President Donald Trump in Vietnam this week. Primportbunker, the owner of the vessel the crew members said made the transfers, did not respond to requests for comment by telephone. No one answered the door when Reuters visited the building where Primportbunker has its headquarters in the port city of Vladivostok on Russia’s Pacific coast.
On the four voyages between Oct. 13, 2017, and May 7, 2018, the Tantal tanker gave its destination as the Chinese port of Ningbo when it set sail, according to port documents seen by Reuters and tracking data from financial data company Refinitiv. It then met up in international waters with a North Korean vessel to which it transferred its cargo of fuel, the two crew members who witnessed the transfers said. The two crew said the fuel transfers took place when the Tantal’s transponder, which allows the vessel to be tracked at sea, was not operating. Shipping industry experts said this indicates the transponder was deliberately turned off or the Tantal had entered a zone not covered by ship-tracking radar. On each occasion, the transponder started operating again when the Tantal was close to port in Russia, the two crew said.
So far nothing surprising by the President’s comments to Kim Jong-un:
Donald Trump has met Kim Jong-un for the second time at a summit in Vietnam, shaking hands and praising North Korea’s “unlimited” economic potential. The American and North Korean leaders greeted each other before a backdrop of their countries’ interwoven flags at a luxury hotel in Hanoi, the Vietnam capital. The pair shook hands for around 10 seconds, with Mr Trump patting Kim on the back before the men shared a laugh as they posed for photographs. In opening remarks before a one-on-one conversation due to last for 20 minutes, Mr Trump talked up the possibilities for growth and development in North Korea. “I think that your country has tremendous economic potential, unbelievable, unlimited,” Mr Trump told Kim. “And I think that you will have a tremendous future with your country, a great leader.”
He added: “I look forward to watching it happen and helping it to happen. And we will help it to happen.” Asked by a reporter if the pair might formally end the Korean War during their two-day summit, Mr Trump responded: “We’ll see.”
You can read more at the link, but those who closely follow North Korea know that it will never reach its full economic potential if the Kim regime remains in charge. Vietnam style economic development would lead to a challenge of the Cult of Kim. So isolated and highly regime controlled economic projects within North Korea such as the Kaesong Industrial Complex and the East Coast Tourism scheme is the type of economic development North Korea wants.
It also appears that the negotiators were not able to lock in whether a peace treaty would happen during the summit prior to the two leaders meeting. I guess we will see if anything big comes out of this summit over the next 24 hours.
Im skeptical of any NK watcher who does not recognize the primacy of ideology and the Kim family cult in all affairs and decisions in the DPRK. Instead of arrogantly retrofitting Western presumptions about what motivates NK behavior, see NK as it sees itself. NK is immutable. https://t.co/azbTmb6ox3
It looks like the Vietnamese authorities do not have a sense of humor:
A Kim Jong-un impersonator was hauled from his hotel Monday ahead of his planned deportation from Vietnam before the real North Korean leader meets US President Donald Trump in Hanoi later this week.
Howard X arrived in town with Trump impersonator Russell White last week, staging a fake summit on the steps of Hanoi’s Opera House amid a swarm of press and hired security guards.
The real Trump and Kim will meet for a summit in Hanoi on February 27-28 to build on their first meeting in June in Singapore which failed to produce any concrete moves to dismantle Pyongyang’s nuclear arsenal.
The Kim lookalike was questioned by Hanoi police on Friday and informed he would be put on a plane back to Hong Kong where he lives.
The impersonator was told by Vietnamese immigration officials his visa was “invalid”, but said he received no further explanation.
“The real reason is I was born with a face looking like Kim Jong Un, that’s the real crime,” he told reporters Monday, getting into a van headed for the airport with three Vietnamese men, not in uniform and who did not identify themselves.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s special train raced through central China on Monday, traveling for the third day en route to Vietnam for a summit between Kim and U.S. President Donald Trump. The train passed through the central Chinese city of Hengyang of Hunan Province around 3:30 p.m. after briefly stopping at the city of Changsha earlier in the afternoon and heading south. The route, which does not pass through the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, is regarded as the shortest way of moving from Pyongyang to Vietnam.
