After sending hundreds of balloons loaded with trash and excrement across the border into South Korea, North Korean officials said on Sunday the effort would be halted.
“We will temporarily suspend the action of scattering waste paper beyond the border,” said the official Korean Central News Agency. “This is because our action is a thorough countermeasure.”
They warned that the balloons would fly south again if Seoul sent any anti-North Korean leaflets northwards.
South Korea has accused the North Korean regime of sending balloons containing garbage and animal feces into its territory.
Over 260 inflated balloons with plastic bags tied to them had been detected by Wednesday, according to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
IN FEBRUARY OF LAST YEAR, Donggang Jinhui Foodstuff, a seafood-processing company in Dandong, China, threw a party. It had been a successful year: a new plant had opened, and the company had doubled the amount of squid that it exported to the United States. The party, according to videos posted on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, featured singers, instrumentalists, dancers, fireworks, and strobe lights. One aspect of the company’s success seems to have been its use of North Korean workers, who are sent by their government to work in Chinese factories, in conditions of captivity, to earn money for the state. A seafood trader who does business with Jinhui recently estimated that it employed between fifty and seventy North Koreans. Videos posted by a company representative show machines labelled in Korean, and workers with North Korean accents explaining how to clean squid. At the party, the company played songs that are popular in Pyongyang, including “People Bring Glory to Our Party” (written by North Korea’s 1989 poet laureate) and “We Will Go to Mt. Paektu” (a reference to the widely mythologized birthplace of Kim Jong Il). Performers wore North Korean colors, and the country’s flag billowed behind them; in the audience, dozens of workers held miniature flags.
North Koreans starved to death during the Covid-19 pandemic, according to a recent defector from the country, who also described the execution of a man for listening to South Korean music.
The man, identified only as Kim, escaped last May with eight other members of his family, including young children, and made the dangerous escape to South Korea by boat. His account is impossible to verify independently but, if accurate, it suggests that food shortages in parts of North Korea have been worse than many outside observers have assumed.
Justin is salivating.
Not only is the Biden administration turning a blind eye on the growing alliance between Iran, Russia, China and North Korea, and looking the other way on their evasions of sanctions, it is also financing the ruling mullahs of Iran with billions of dollars to put the finishing touches on the country’s nuclear program and for delivering more weapons to Russia with which to attack Ukraine.
Henry VIII had Hans Holbein the Younger, who painted him as overweight and beset by ill health, yet with the lingering swagger of a monarch projecting power to the world.
In the opaque court of Kim Jong-un, though, it is hard to know which artist painted the vast portrait of North Korea’s supreme leader atop Mount Paektu, said to be part of a wave of new images he commissioned to further his “cult of personality”.
The mother of the US soldier who has been detained in North Korea after crossing into the country without authorization said the risky behavior was unlike her son.
The 23-year-old Army private, Travis King, was stationed in South Korea and was on a tour of the demilitarized zone between the two countries Tuesday when he strayed from the group and ran across the border.
North Koreans who use the “obsequious” accent and expressions of South Korea face execution under a harsh new law aimed at eliminating South Korea’s’s growing influence on the language used by its communist neighbour.
In May the authorities began to enforce the Pyongyang Cultural Language Protection Act, which aims to “purify” the Korean dialect.
Just like CanCon!
North Korea has held rallies across the country to mobilise hatred against the United States and South Korea in a renewed hardening of its propaganda effort.
Participants in the rallies, which marked the 73rd anniversary of the beginning of the Korean War, carried banners bearing images of nuclear missiles bound for the US. Slogans included “Pulverise the American empire into dust!” and “Let’s mercilessly beat the shabby and dirty puppet traitor group to death!”, a reference to the South Korean government.
People in North Korea have told the BBC food is so scarce their neighbours have starved to death.
Exclusive interviews gathered inside the world’s most isolated state suggest the situation is the worst it has been since the 1990s, experts say.
The government sealed its borders in 2020, cutting off vital supplies. It has also tightened control over people’s lives, our interviewees say.
Pyongyang told the BBC it has always prioritised its citizens’ interests.
Tipped to be the future leader, she is also a ruthless force who reportedly ordered the executions of officials for ‘getting on her nerves’
Under a foggy February sky, a plane made its descent towards Incheon International Airport in South Korea. Inside sat 23 passengers – five officials, three reporters and the rest bodyguards. But one mattered above all.
At 1.46pm, Korea Standard Time, on 9 February 2018, the Soviet-era Ilyushin-62 touched down. It was the first time a direct descendant of North Korea’s dynastic founder Kim Il-sung had set foot on South Korean soil since Kim Il-sung himself in July 1950, one month after invading the South.
A toddler was sentenced to life imprisonment in North Korea after the child’s family was found in possession of a Bible, according to a new report by the US State Department.
Although the incident took place in 2009, it has been highlighted in the department’s new report on international religious freedoms this month, citing data from Korea Future, a non-governmental organisation documenting human rights abuses in North Korea.
“One case involved the 2009 arrest of a family based on their religious practices and possession of a Bible.
North Korea has used advanced video technology to digitally erase a disgraced actor from an old television series in the latest demonstration of the lengths to which the regime will go to eliminate those who displease it.
The lead actor in The Taehongdang Party Secretary, which was screened from 1998 to 2000, has been replaced by another man by using digital technology that leaves the rest of the series unaltered.
North Korea was behind the theft of $100 million from an American crypto-currency exchange last year, the US government said, part of the Communist regime’s effort to beat sanctions and fund its missile and nuclear weapons programmes.
The FBI said that the Lazarus Group, a hacking organisation believed to be run by the North Korean government, was responsible for the theft last June of $100 million from Harmony’s Horizon, a crypto “bridge” that enables owners of different digital currencies to convert them into one another.
South Korea’s president has just told the world that he no longer has confidence in the United States.
“It’s possible that the problem gets worse and our country will introduce tactical nuclear weapons or build them on our own,” said President Yoon Suk Yeol on January 11, at a joint briefing by his country’s defense and foreign ministries. “If that’s the case, we can have our own nuclear weapons pretty quickly, given our scientific and technological capabilities.”
