It looks like North Korea wants to stay in the headlines and dump on Trump like everyone else it seems like now a days:
North Korea on Friday again vowed to build up its military force to counter what it perceives as U.S. threats and said there would be little reason for a personal relationship between leader Kim Jong Un and President Donald Trump if Washington persists with sanctions and pressure.
On the two-year anniversary of the leaders’ first summit, North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Son Gwon said the North would never again gift Trump with high-profile meetings and concessions he could boast as foreign policy achievements unless it gets something substantial in return.
“The question is whether there will be a need to keep holding hands shaken in Singapore, as we see that there is nothing of factual improvement to be made in the DPRK-U.S. relations simply by maintaining personal relations between our supreme leadership and the U.S. President,” Ri said in a statement carried by state media, referring to North Korea by its formal name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
It is pretty clear that the Kim regime is just putting pressure on the Moon administration to see how much concessions they can extract out of him:
North Korea’s decision to sever all official communication channels with South Korea is further weighing on President Moon Jae-in, who was already frustrated by Pyongyang’s lack of response to his inter-Korean peace initiative.
Experts advise Seoul to take a “timeout” from repeatedly offering something to engage the Kim Jong-un regime, while bracing for any possible fallout from increasing tension on the Korean Peninsula.
On Tuesday, the North cut off all cross-border communication lines, including the hotline between Moon and Kim, due to its apparent anger over the South’s “failure” to prevent North Korean defectors and activists from sending anti-Pyongyang leaflets across the border tethered to balloons. In addition, the North said “the work toward the South should thoroughly turn into the one against an enemy.”
At the start of the year, the Moon administration emphasized the importance of inter-Korean exchanges and cooperation. In March, the President offered cross-border healthcare cooperation and made another proposal last month to deal with inter-Korean projects that could be carried out separately from the North’s denuclearization negotiations with the United States.
You can read more at the link, but what does the Kim regime have to lose by playing hard to get? They know the Moon administration will bend over backwards to accommodate them thus they will keep the pressure on them to maximize concessions.
It appears that the Moon administration wants to treat the balloon launch human rights activists like they do conservative journalists by threatening them with jail:
Members of Fighters for Free North Korea, an organization of defectors from North Korea, send balloons carrying anti-North leaflets across the border from the South Korean border city of Paju, in this file photo dated April 2, 2016
The unification ministry said Wednesday that it will file a complaint with police against two North Korean defector groups for sending anti-Pyongyang leaflets across the border, a day after the North cut off all inter-Korean communication lines over such leafleting.
The ministry said that it will also take action to revoke business permits granted to the groups, Fighters for Free North Korea and Keunsaem, accusing them of putting the safety of people living in border regions at risk by sending leaflets into the North.
“They have violated public interests by heightening tensions between the South and the North and by running squarely against the agreements reached by the leaders of the two Koreas, and also caused danger to the lives and safety of residents in the border regions,” the ministry said in a press release.
You can read more at the link, but this is once again another example of how South Korea is a rule by law nation and not a rule of law nation. These activists have been doing this for years and one of their leaders Park Sang-Hak has faced assassination attempts by North Korean agents and had leftist thugs assault him to stop his balloon protests. Now with a change of government and complaints from North Korea, what they are doing is suddenly illegal.
N. Korean students condemn defectors This photo captured from North Korea’s Rodong Sinmun on June 6, 2020, shows students at Kimchaek University of Technology criticizing North Korean defectors. In a June 4 statement, Kim Yo-jong, the North Korean leader’s powerful sister and first vice department director of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea, threatened to scrap a military tension reduction agreement with South Korea and completely shut down other major cross-border exchanges unless Seoul takes action against anti-Pyongyang leaflets sent into the communist nation. (Yonhap)
An FCO spokesperson"The UK has temporarily closed its embassy in #Pyongyang and our staff have departed the country. This decision has been made because the DPRK restrictions on entry to the country have made it impossible to rotate our staff&sustain the operation of the Embassy"
It looks like Kim Jong-un is feeling much better after having not been seen publicly in three weeks:
North Korean leader presides over an enlarged meeting of the Central Military Commission of the ruling Workers’ Party in this photo released by the North’s official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on May 24, 2020.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un presided over a Central Military Commission meeting and discussed “new policies for further increasing the nuclear war deterrence of the country,” state media reported Sunday.
Also discussed at the enlarged meeting of the Central Military Commission of the ruling Workers’ Party were important military steps and organizational and political measures to further bolster up the overall armed forces, according to the Korean Central News Agency.
“Set forth at the meeting were new policies for further increasing the nuclear war deterrence of the country and putting the strategic armed forces on a high alert operation in line with the general requirements for the building and development of the armed forces of the country,” the KCNA said.
It did not elaborate what the “new policies” for nuclear deterrence were.
North Korea has renewed its claims that it did not hijack Korean Air flight YS-11 back in 1969:
After half a century, North Korea still insists it did not kidnap the South Korean passengers aboard Korean Air Lines flight YS-11 in 1969, according to a letter released by a United Nations human rights agency Monday.
The incident in question refers to the hijacking of Korean Air Lines (KAL) flight YS-11, which was carrying four crew members and 46 passengers, on Dec. 11, 1969. The plane was destined for Gimpo International Airport, but after taking off from Gangneung, Gangwon, a North Korean spy aboard the plane forced the pilots to redirect the plane to land near Wonsan in North Korea that afternoon.
Pyongyang claimed the pilots had voluntarily defected in protest of the military junta that ruled South Korea at the time.
Thirty-nine passengers were repatriated back to the South two months later, but 11 never returned.
You can read more at the link, but the North Koreans made this same claim immediately after the hijacking. The North Koreans even put the two pilots, Yu Byong-ha and Choe Sok-man on radio where they confirmed this claim. However, these claims were dismissed by the ROK authorities because the two pilots were both decorated ROK Air Force veterans who the investigation determined had no reason to defect.
In fact the ROK authorities investigated the backgrounds of all 46 passengers on board the plane and cleared everyone except for two men, Han Chang-gi and Paek In-yong. The ROK authorities could not find any background information on these two men leading them to believe they were the hijackers. The pilots’ so called confession on the radio was likely due to the threats made against them by the North Koreans.
This hijacking ended up causing a huge uproar within South Korean society because this provocation was directed solely at civilians unlike past provocations that were primarily directed at military and government targets. What is really sad about this, is that today in South Korea there is probably a good amount of people who actually believe North Korea’s claim.
You can read much more about this hijacking at the below link:
