Kim Jong-un has been the supreme leader of North Korea since 2012, and now he has made an unconventional choice for his successor. Kim has reportedly selected his daughter, Kim Ju-ae, to be the next ruler of the hermit kingdom. Ju-ae is believed to be only in her early teenage years, which would make her one of the youngest world leaders — and also the first woman head of North Korea. But it may be a while before any official plans come to light.

Early life

Kim Ju-ae is thought to be around 13 or 14 years old, though her exact age is unknown. She is the “only known child of Kim Jong-un and his wife, Ri Sol-ju,” said BBC News; South Korean intelligence believes Kim may have an “older son, but this son has never been acknowledged nor shown on North Korean media.”

News of Ju-ae first emerged via an unlikely source: basketball star Dennis Rodman, who spoke of the girl during a 2013 trip to North Korea (Kim is known to be an ardent basketball fan). “I held their baby Ju-ae,” Rodman said to The Guardian, inadvertently revealing her existence to the world. Ju-ae made her first appearance on North Korean state TV in 2022, when she was “shown inspecting North Korea’s latest intercontinental ballistic missile while holding her father’s hand,” said BBC News.

Kim’s successor

The National Intelligence Service (NIS), South Korea’s foreign intelligence agency, believes Kim has long been angling for Ju-ae to take over as supreme leader. But Kim appears to have taken this to the next level by “taking steps to consolidate his daughter's position as successor,” said Reuters, citing the NIS. There are also “signs she is providing input on policy matters.” There were reportedly also signs Ju-ae could be given an official title soon.

The NIS has previously “described Kim Ju-ae as being ‘in study as successor’ but today the expression used was that she ‘was in the stage of being internally appointed successor,’” Lee Seong-kweun, a South Korean lawmaker, said to Reuters. Ju-ae has been featured prominently in North Korean propaganda videos in recent years, and South Korea “believes the role she has taken on during public events indicates she has started to provide policy input and that she is being treated as the de facto second-highest leader.”

One of Ju-ae’s most notable public outings involved an appearance with her father at the Kumsusan Palace of the Sun. The building is the mausoleum for former North Korean Supreme Leaders Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il and symbolizes the “eternal sanctuary of the entire Korean nation,” according to North Korea’s Constitution. And Ju-ae’s first “public trip abroad came last September when she accompanied her father to Beijing to attend Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s military parade,” said CNN.

Even though Ju-ae is the “only Kim child with any visibility,” some experts “argue it’s just a PR stunt to attract international attention,” said CNN, and that she may not actually be Kim’s successor. Viewing Ju-ae as the next supreme leader “reflects a hasty judgment that overlooks the fundamental nature of North Korean power structures,” Hyunseung Lee, a North Korean defector and human rights activist, said at UPI. Her continued media exposure “represents a different packaging approach in North Korean propaganda,” and her “actions and position remain exactly what they are: the daughter of Kim Jong-un, nothing more and nothing less.”

“Whatever you make of his grotesque politics, his execrable human rights record and his lamentable physical condition, Kim Jong Un is one of the most brilliantly successful national leaders in the world,” said Richard Lloyd Parry in The Times. When he succeeded his late father as head of the hermit kingdom in 2011, plenty of people wrote the young leader off as a weak and “callow fattie” who’d be gone within months.

Since then, Kim has purged his potential domestic challengers (including, allegedly, ordering the killing of an elder sibling with a nerve agent); established his own powerful cult of personality in North Korea; and built up a nuclear arsenal that has significantly strengthened his standing on the world stage.

‘Diplomatic victory’

That rise in influence reached its apogee last week, said Katsuji Nakazawa in The Nikkei (Tokyo), when Kim, 41, stood shoulder-to-shoulder with two of Asia’s most powerful leaders, China’s President Xi Jinping and President Vladimir Putin of Russia, at the massive military parade in Beijing. To be given equal billing with Putin was a huge “diplomatic victory”.

Kim had arrived in China in his own unique style, said Tetsuya Fujita in the same paper – travelling the 800-odd miles between Pyongyang and Beijing in an armoured train equipped with a special lavatory “to prevent the leak of any biometric data”. As he moved around the Chinese capital, aides wiped down every surface he’d touched, to stop foreign intelligence agencies from being able to gather any traces of his DNA.

‘Respected child’

The most striking aspect of Kim’s visit, though, said Roland Oliphant in The Daily Telegraph, is that he was accompanied almost everywhere by his 12-year-old daughter. Her name – at least according to ex-basketball player (and unofficial personal envoy to North Korea) Dennis Rodman – is Kim Ju Ae; though the North Korean press only refers to her as “respected child”. She often looks more “Bond villain than pre-teen” (on one previous outing she sported a fur-lined leather trench coat and gloves). But with her near-constant presence at Kim’s side, there is growing evidence she is being groomed to succeed her father as leader of the nuclear-armed nation. She is now potentially “the most powerful – and dangerous – girl in the world”.

Of course, there may be a more cynical reason Kim takes her everywhere, said Julian Ryall in Deutsche Welle (Bonn). The reclusive leader is famously fearful of assassination; “one theory”, says an expert, “is that he keeps his daughter close in the belief that the US would not be willing to kill her as well”.

‘A de facto nuclear power’

Kim’s triumphant tour of China culminated in a one-to-one summit with President Xi, said Choe Sang-Hun in The New York Times. And tellingly, this time Xi made no effort to pressure his neighbour into removing his nuclear weapons from the Korean peninsula. Kim’s main mission is complete: his rogue nation is now effectively accepted by both China and Russia “as a de facto nuclear power”. His economy is also experiencing a dramatic uplift, said Choo Jae-woo in The Korea Times (Seoul), thanks in large part to the war in Ukraine. Putin and Kim have become “blood allies”, after the latter sent 14,000 North Korean troops to fight alongside Russian soldiers in that conflict. In return, Kremlin gold is flooding into North Korea, to pay for millions of shells. Last week, Russia, China and North Korea also struck a trilateral agreement to make their new alliance more “economically formidable”.

All in all, the trio that stood on the podium at Tiananmen Square make for a sinister new force in global politics, said Lina Chang in Asia Times (Hong Kong). But I wouldn’t overplay their new relationship too much. Things between North Korea and China in particular blow “hot and cold”. Remember, it wasn’t long ago that Kim described China’s attempt to reform his country’s economy as a “filthy wind of bourgeois liberty”.

North Korea has opened a huge new beach resort on its east coast in a bid to boost its struggling economy.

The Wonsan-Kalma Coastal Tourist Area, which can accommodate 20,000 people, is a "pet project" for Kim Jong Un, who was pictured by state media "watching a man flying off a water slide in the resort", said France 24. Pyongyang has claimed North Korean visitors were "filled with joy at experiencing a new level of civilisation".

'Benidorm' of North Korea

Photos released by state media showed "children with tubes and inflatable balls dipping into the sea", said The Associated Press. Other people in "colourful swimsuits beamed" from underneath "red-and-white parasols". In the opening ceremony, Kim called it "one of the greatest successes this year", and "the proud first step" towards developing the nation's tourism.

The "mammoth" resort is the "biggest tourist complex in North Korea" and offers various sports, open water swimming, water park attractions and restaurants. It's "at the heart" of Kim's push to boost tourism and improve the country's "struggling economy". Yet, it is unlikely Western tourists will be able to visit the resort "anytime soon".

North Korea "sealed itself off from the world" when Covid-19 struck, said The Economist, and tourists only began to trickle back in last year. "Visits have since been sporadic and mostly for Russians only." Yet, despite the hermit kingdom's "reputation as a joyless place", it does have an "active domestic tourism industry" and "North Korea's Benidorm" is aimed at its own middle classes.

'Prioritising Russia'

The first Russian visitors were due to arrive on Monday, amid the "booming" military relationship between the two nations, said ABC News. Kim's recent foreign policy "prioritises relations with Russia" as he supplies troops and weapons to support the Kremlin's war against Ukraine, in return for economic and military assistance.

Chinese tourism, which made up 90% of visitors to the country before the pandemic, remains "stalled". Analysts say this is because relations with Beijing, which has long been North Korea's "biggest trading partner and aid benefactor", have recently "cooled" due to Chinese reluctance to join an "anti-Western alliance" with North Korea and Russia.

Yet observers say the "huge investment" that has come out of "North Korea's limited budget" to build the resort will eventually push Kim to welcome Chinese and other foreign tourists "to break even".

North Korea appears to have pulled off the world's biggest heist, another worrying sign of the hermit kingdom's growing prowess in cybercrime.

State-backed hackers stole about $1.5 billion from cryptocurrency exchange Bybit last week, according to the FBI. That's more than the largest known bank theft of all time, when Saddam Hussein stole $1 billion from Iraq's central bank on the eve of the 2003 war.

Pyongyang agents took more in the attack on the popular platform than all the funds stolen by North Korean cybercriminals last year, according to cryptoanalysts Chainalysis: more than $1.3 billion. Leader Kim Jong Un is increasingly relying on "elite units" of hackers to prop up the regime's "failing economy", said The Telegraph.

The 'magnum opus'

Just after 2pm on Friday 21 February, a "notorious group of hackers" pulled off what could be "their magnum opus", said The Independent. In just minutes, they stole from one of the world's most popular crypto exchanges and "funnelled" the digital currency "across the internet to anonymous wallets".

Investigators were able to follow the funds in real time using the blockchain – the online ledger of every crypto transaction. They noted a pattern of laundering "closely mirroring a technique" used by The Lazarus Group: one of the world's "most sophisticated hacking operations".

The group, allegedly "backed by North Korea since its inception in 2009", caused "worldwide chaos" in 2017 with the WannaCry ransomware attacks, which infected 200,000 computers across 150 countries – including NHS systems. But this latest theft would be the group's "largest strike to date" – the haul is equivalent to North Korea's entire annual defence budget.

Bybit CEO Ben Zhou has called for a "war against Lazarus", issuing a $140 million bounty to recover the funds. The move, a first for the industry, could mark the beginning of "coordinated global action" to "take down Lazarus".

A 'haven' for hackers

In the past, Pyongyang "relied on its elite hacking cadres to conduct espionage or steal trade secrets", said The Telegraph. Science prodigies are identified at a young age, and "pushed to compete in international maths and programming competitions".

But increasingly, these hackers are being used as "a weapon of economic warfare": a way to "bolster the coffers" of a regime battered by sanctions and the Covid-19 pandemic. And the "virtually unregulated" cryptocurrency industry is a "haven" for hackers.

Attacks by North Korean groups have "plagued the industry for years", said The New York Times.

Last year, hackers linked to the country stole more than $1.3 billion in cryptocurrency: a "dramatic jump" from the $660 stolen in 2023, reported The Guardian, and about 61% of the $2.2 billion stolen globally. The proceeds of The Lazarus Group's "audacious thefts" are believed to have funded the regime's nuclear and missile programmes.

"Hackers linked to North Korea have become notorious for their sophisticated and relentless tradecraft, often employing advanced malware, social engineering, and cryptocurrency theft to fund state-sponsored operations and circumvent international sanctions," Chainalysis said in its report.

These attackers are getting "better and faster at massive exploits".

On January 20, 2025, President Trump placed Cuba back on the State Department's list of State Sponsors of Terrorism just one week after the Biden administration had removed the country's designation. That puts Cuba back on a short list with just three other countries: Iran, North Korea and Syria. With a major regime transition underway in Syria following the abrupt resignation of longtime dictator Bashar al-Assad in December 2024, the country's controversial inclusion on the State Department's list may eventually be scrutinized.

Only eight countries have ever received the designation, which is distinct from the State Department's much larger list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations. How did Cuba, Iran, North Korea and Syria end up on the list and why are they still there?

A short history of a short list

The State Sponsors of Terrorism list was created in 1979 for countries that "have repeatedly provided support for acts of international terrorism," said the State Department. Designation as an State Sponsor of Terrorims carries with it prohibitions on certain kinds of commerce, including the sale of weapons and potentially dual-use items like commercial airplanes and equipment, as well as a ban on U.S. economic assistance.

"Syria is the last country from this original list to remain so designated today," said The Atlantic Council. Its original designation in 1979 stems from the Syrian government's support for "U.S.-listed terrorist groups," including Palestinian guerrilla organizations and the decision to allow those terrorist groups "to maintain headquarters in Damascus," said the Council on Foreign Relations. Over the years, Syria's portfolio expanded to include a significant role in the arming, funding and hosting of the Iranian-backed Lebanese terrorist organization Hezbollah, which was founded after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982.

Hezbollah also played a major role in landing Iran on the State Sponsors of Terrorism list on January 23rd, 1984. The action followed five years of escalating tensions between the two countries that began when dozens of U.S. diplomats and embassy workers were held hostage in Tehran for 444 days during the Iranian revolution and culminated in the 1983 Hezbollah suicide bombing of a Marines barracks in Beirut that killed 241 U.S. military personnel. Today, Iran continues to back Hezbollah as well as "Palestinian terrorist groups in Gaza and various terrorist and militant groups in Iraq, Syria, Bahrain and elsewhere throughout the Middle East," said the State Department.

North Korea was first designated a state sponsor of terrorism in 1988. The bombing of Korean Air Flight 858 from Baghdad to Seoul, which killed all 115 people on board, was "later linked to North Korean agents" said The Washington Post. The designation was rescinded in 2008 "in the hopes of salvaging talks on its nuclear program," only to be reimposed in 2017 by President Trump, said The Atlantic. The pretext was the shocking broad-daylight assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's half-brother at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport on February 13, 2017. Analysts at the time warned that the designation would "make diplomacy more difficult without increasing Washington's leverage," said The New York Times. Despite Trump's subsequent summits with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, the designation has not been lifted.

Cuba was initially placed on the list in 1982 for "providing advice, safe haven, communications, training and financial support to guerrilla groups and individual terrorists," said the State Department. The U.S. claimed that Cuba was aiding a number of armed insurgent groups trying to overthrow governments including in El Salvador and Guatemala, as well as providing "funding, training, arms, safe haven and advice to a wide variety of guerrilla groups, and individual terrorists" in the region, said the Congressional Research Service.

President Obama removed the designation in April 2015, only to see President Trump place Cuba back on the list with just days left in his first term. President Trump's decision to reverse the Biden administration's last-minute order to remove Cuba from the list "aligns with his administration's hardline stance on Cuba," said CBS News. But while the move was expected, the new Trump administration's "rationale for the policy reversal was not immediately explained," said Politico.

Could more places be removed?

After a country is designated as a state sponsor of terrorism, "it is hard to remove even if it does not support terrorism," said the Brookings Institution. Inclusion on the State Sponsors of Terrorism list is not permanent and can be rescinded if the country in question undergoes "a fundamental change in the leadership and policies of the government," as well as provides "assurances that it will not support acts of international terrorism in the future," said the Congressional Research Service.

Prior to President Biden's decision to remove Cuba from the list, the last time such a designation was lifted was in October 2020, when President Trump took Sudan off the list when its government agreed to "pay $335m in compensation for its alleged role in the bombing of two US embassies" in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, said The Guardian. Sudan had allowed al-Qaeda, which perpetrated the attacks, to operate out of its territory between 1991 and 1996.

North Korean soldiers are making their way to Ukraine to fight alongside the Russian army.

That is the "grim reality", said Edward Howell in The Spectator, after South Korea's intelligence agency confirmed what many had long suspected.

The move represents a "huge" escalation risk, Ukraine's Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha warned over the weekend. While the numbers are small compared to the millions of people involved in the overall war effort, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has warned that any third country wading into the conflict in Ukraine would be "the first step to a world war".

What North Korean troops are involved?

Around 1,500 troops from North Korea's special forces have already been deployed to Russia en route to Ukraine, a number that could eventually rise to 10,000, according to Zelenskyy.

It is not clear whether North Korean troops will be involved in frontline fighting or in a support role, but their elite status is "probably more an indication of perceived political reliability than how they will be used", said The Guardian. Sybiha said there is now a "big risk" of the conflict "growing out of its current scale and borders".

Why is North Korea doing this?

As the war drags on into its third year, Russia is "increasingly looking abroad not only for weapons, equipment and other resources, but also for fighters and workers to supply its conflict", said The Guardian.

Russian forces have become increasingly reliant on millions of rounds of North Korean artillery shells and, in recent months, have used ballistic missiles supplied by Pyongyang in their attacks across Ukraine, in a clear breach of UN Security Council resolutions. Their relationship is "largely transactional", Howell, a lecturer in international relations at the University of Oxford, told Al Jazeera.

Russia's "obstinacy towards continuing the war, coupled with North Korea's desire for financial and technological assistance (and for food), has allowed relations between the two pariah states to reach a whole new level", said Howell in The Spectator.

Last summer, Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un signed a comprehensive strategic partnership treaty that commits both countries to providing military assistance to each other if either is attacked. Now, the deployment of North Korean soldiers to fight in Ukraine "highlights just how far the partnership has escalated".

How worried should we be?

Deepening military ties between Russia and North Korea have "earned condemnation" from the United States, South Korea and Japan, said Al Jazeera, with the three countries last week announcing a new team to monitor arms sanctions on North Korea.

Besides material weapons, Pyongyang will gain Moscow's "unwavering support" in the UN Security Council as part of this deal, Howell told Al Jazeera. "Pyongyang can thus escape scot-free if it chooses to bolster its nuclear and missile programme through testing and launches, which, as we know, is what North Korea intends to do."

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol warned that Pyongyang's involvement in the Ukraine conflict would pose a "grave security threat" to the world. The deployment of North Korean troops to Ukraine is a hugely symbolic moment in the "new, anti-western coalition" being forged between Russia, North Korea, China and Iran, said Howell in The Spectator. Moscow will do "all it can to prolong its now-global war".

Disney World? A Viking cruise down the Danube? A drive from coast to coast with stops at every roadside attraction? When getting out of the house and going on vacation, the options are virtually limitless. Virtually, but not absolutely — particularly for adventurous travelers interested in visiting one of the most isolated countries on Earth, North Korea. The country closed its borders entirely five years ago during the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. 

That may be about to change.

For the first time in half a decade, the avowedly communist enclave is preparing to welcome tourist groups back into parts of the country as early as this coming December, according to China-based tour operators Koryo Tours. "We have received confirmation from our local partner that tourism to Samjiyon and potentially the rest of the country will officially resume in December 2024," the group said in a press release. Described as "the most famous region in North Korea in the winter for tourism," Samjiyon is "the most significant and sacred place" for the entire Korean peninsula, Koryo said. The agency predicts it will have a "finalized itinerary for the area and more information as well as dates and prices in the coming days and weeks."

As the infamously secretive and insular North Korea begins once again accepting foreigners into its midst, what does this mean for the region — and the world? 

'Not a full reopening'

The decision to make Samjiyon the first spot open to foreign tourism is "significant" Semafor said. The tourism-associated area has been a popular destination for Chinese visitors coming across the two countries' shared border in the past, helping North Korea generate "vital revenue amid international sanctions." 

North Korea has dubbed Samjiyon its "'model of a highly-civilized mountain city' with new apartments, hotels, a ski resort and commercial, cultural and medical facilities," Reuters said. Earlier this summer, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un reprimanded a group of senior officials overseeing construction in the region for their "irresponsibility," declaring the city would become an "oasis of our people and the world people and make tourism a major driving force of regional development" while he personally inspected the project, The Korea Times said. 

This winter's planned tourism opportunity is "not a full reopening of the country back to what it was, or more than what it was," Koryo Tours' Simon Cockerell cautioned during a podcast taping at The Independent. "It's a specific opening of one, relatively obscure-up-till-now area." 

Moreover, this coming December will not be the first opportunity for tour groups to enter the country since the Covid lockdown. Last year, "small tour groups from Russia" were granted entry to North Korea "amid Kim's deepening partnership with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin," CNN said. That exchange is more "associated with the North Korean support for the Russian war effort," said Cockerell. Just this month, Russia sent North Korea more than 400 goats as part of a "wide-ranging deal covering sectors including education, agriculture and tourism," Politico said. 

'We can only have peace when this travel ban is lifted'

For as much as North Korea's impending tourism opening may seem like the sort of opportunity an adventurous traveler should jump on, do not expect to be able to hop on a flight to Pyongyang just yet. It will likely be "only Russian tourists and possibly Chinese visiting in any real numbers at first" if North Korea does not offer "direct Samjiyon flights to a neutral connection country like Mongolia," Chad O'Carroll, CEO of US-based analysis firm Korea Risk Group, said at BBC. Even if such countries do, American passport holders are banned from visiting the communist country: The U.S. State Department announced the renewal of its prohibition on travel "to, in or through the Democratic People's Republic of Korea" earlier this month. 

"We can only have peace when this travel ban is lifted," Cathi Choi, co-director of Women Cross DMZ, said at The Hill. "In addition to divided family members, everyday people in North Korea, South Korea and the United States will all suffer from these consequences." 

Allowing tourism "can only bring positives," said Cockerell. "The cure for isolation is not more isolation."

Although they "almost certainly don't know it", Western owners of "shiny new wigs and false eyelashes could owe their look to North Korean slave labour".

By purchasing these products, said The Guardian, Western customers could also be inadvertently helping Pyongyang "skirt the impact of sanctions".

'Skirting sanctions'

According to Chinese customs data, last year's exports from North Korea to China included 1,680 tonnes of false eyelashes, beards and wigs worth around $167 million.

This haul, which The Guardian said adds up to about "135 double decker buses worth", made up 60% of North Korea's declared exports to China, as trade bounced back after Covid lockdowns.

After speaking to 20 people, Reuters uncovered a lucrative arrangement in which China-based firms import semi-finished products from North Korea, which are then completed and packaged as Chinese, before being exported to markets including the West, Japan and South Korea.

Shoppers in London and Seoul "perusing hairpieces and other accoutrements" will find labels telling them the items were made in China, not North Korea, said The Guardian.

Those "made in China" labels give Kim Jong Un's Pyongyang regime a way to "skirt international sanctions", said Reuters, providing a "vital source of foreign currency".

'Labour camps'

Since 2006, the UN Security Council has "sought to stall" Kim's nuclear weapons programme through several sanctions resolutions that restrict North Korea's ability to trade products such as coal, textiles and oil.

The sanctions are supposed to be enforced by UN member states but there is no direct ban on hair products. So trading false eyelashes from North Korea does not necessarily violate international law, three experts said.

But speaking to VOA, Troy Stangarone, senior director at Korea Economic Institute, said that "any efforts" by Chinese firms to "directly or indirectly" export these goods to the United States would be a "violation of US sanctions". Nevertheless, he added, there is still a good chance that those items could end up in the US.

From Beijing's perspective, importing eyelash materials from North Korea makes sense because of the country's "low cost of labour and high-quality eyelashes", said the New York Post. North Korean workers can be paid a tenth of what Chinese equivalents receive for the same service and their products are highly rated in the sector.

Professor Mimura Mitsuhiro, from the University of Niigata Prefecture, told The Straits Times that North Korea is in "a very bad economic depression", so it desperately needs foreign currency to buy oil and staples to support its people.

But although the sales are generating significant sums, the US State Department estimates that North Korea seizes up to 90% of foreign income generated by its citizens.

So "we have to assume" that the "millions of dollars" that North Korea is making through this trade is being used for the Kim Jong Un regime", Seoul-based sanctions lawyer Shin Tong-chan told Reuters.

According to a paper by a think tank funded by the South Korean government, there are wig and fake eyelash-making departments at labour correction camps, where "mostly female prisoners perform the task without receiving any wages", said The Straits Times.

The two nations insist their trade is legal and any suggestion that it violates UN sanctions is "completely without foundation". A spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry said Beijing and Pyongyang "are friendly neighbours" and that "normal cooperation" between the two countries that is "lawful and compliant" should "not be exaggerated".

What happened

Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un signed an agreement Wednesday pledging some sort of mutual assistance if either country faced foreign "aggression." The pledge appears to be the strongest since the collapse of the Soviet Union ended a 1961 pact that required Moscow to step in if North Korea were attacked.

Who said what

Kim said the agreement, signed during Putin's first visit to North Korea since 2000, was the "strongest treaty ever" between Moscow and Pyongyang. Putin said the "breakthrough" pact "does not exclude the development of military-technical cooperation" — a statement analysts said could mean he will reward Kim's flow of munitions for the Ukraine invasion by helping to improve North Korea's nuclear missiles and other advanced weapons.

The scope of the agreement was unclear. South Korean analyst Cheong Seong Chang told The Associated Press it appears the two hermit states have "completely restored their Cold War-era military alliance." Moscow and Pyongyang are declaring a "de facto alliance," Hudson Institute security analyst Patrick Cronin said to The Wall Street Journal, but "there is nothing fundamentally new about this relationship today that was not true before Putin's visit."

What next?

Putin arrived in Vietnam on Thursday to bolster ties with Moscow's longtime ally and demonstrate the "diplomatic support Russia still enjoys in the region," the BBC said. 

It may evoke the darkest days of the Cold War, but Vladimir Putin's visit to North Korea this week also elucidates a very contemporary – and hardening – alliance.

The Russian president touched down in Pyongyang on Tuesday for a two-day "friendly state visit" to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), his first trip to the hermit kingdom since 2000. Ahead of the trip, Putin promised to "build an architecture of equal and indivisible security in Eurasia". The vow came days after the US and EU agreed at the G7 summit to provide Ukraine with a $50 billion (£39 billion) loan using interest from frozen Russian assets. 

Russia and North Korea are "actively advancing their multifaceted partnership", Putin said in an article for Rodong Sinmun, the newspaper of North Korea's ruling Workers' Party. He thanked North Korea for its "unwavering support for Russia's special military operation in Ukraine" and declared that the two pariah states were "ready to confront the ambition of the collective West".

What did the commentators say?

This is a "rare" overseas trip for Putin since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and a "key moment" for North Korea's Kim Jong Un, who has not hosted another world leader in Pyongyang – one of the world's "most politically isolated capitals" – since the Covid-19 pandemic, said CNN.

The visit is expected to "cement further the burgeoning partnership between the two powers", founded on "their shared animosity toward the West and driven by Putin's need for munitions for its war in Ukraine". 

Their "bromance" has "blossomed thanks to geopolitical shifts", said The Economist. They now have an "unbreakable relationship of comrades-in-arms", the North Korean dictator "gushed" recently in a message to his Russian counterpart.

The invasion of Ukraine, a record number of North Korean missile tests and crippling Western sanctions "have deepened both countries' international isolation", said The Guardian, which in turn, has "driven Putin and Kim together in a mutually beneficial challenge to a 'hostile' US and its allies in Europe and northeast Asia".

Putin hosted the reclusive Kim in Vladivostok in 2019 for their first summit, and at the Far East Russian spaceport Vostochny Cosmodrome for their second last year. According to both leaders they discussed "military cooperation, the war in Ukraine and Russian help for North Korea's satellite programme", said Reuters.

Now, said The Independent's world affairs editor Kim Sengupta, "Kim has a new bestie". North Korea has been "stepping in to replenish Russia's exhausted ammunition and missile stock", although Pyongyang denies it, in return for fuel, financial support and technology. Putin has "a lot to thank North Korea for".

Russia, in return, has allegedly circumnavigated sanctions to help Kim "develop his military arsenal", as well as sending "fancy horses and cars".

It is "not clear" what a new agreement might involve, said The Times Asia editor Richard Lloyd Parry. But it is "unlikely to be a full mutual defence treaty" like that which existed between North Korea and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

The "quid pro quo" at the summit could be "another round of advanced military technology transfers to the Kim regime in areas like missiles, spy satellites, and submarines", geopolitical analysts at risk consultancy Teneo told CNBC.

Western officials will watch the two-day visit "closely for signs that the partnership has advanced", said the news site. The deepening relationship is "increasingly hazardous for the West". 

Indeed, it is the "greatest threat to US national security since the Korean War", said Victor Cha, Korea chair of the Center for Strategic & International Studies think tank. The relationship also "undermines the security" of Europe and Asia.

What next?

It is increasingly common among Western nations "to view the various conflicts around the world as part of one big narrative", said Adam Taylor in The Washington Post: one where China, Russia, Iran (and its regional proxies) and North Korea are in direct opposition to the West. 

But unlike the Cold War, in which "ideology at least nominally bound the Communist bloc against the West", this alliance is "better understood as a 'marriage of convenience'" – and desperation. 

Since Putin's last visit 24 years, ago the "geopolitical climate has changed beyond recognition", said The Guardian, "driven by a more hardline Putin and a younger Kim determined to turn his country into a genuine nuclear power".

Amid "front-burner issues" like wars in Ukraine and Gaza, said Cha, the West "relegates this problem to the back burner at its own peril".

Kim Jong Un is rattling cages again.

The North Korean leader "could take some form of lethal military action against South Korea" in the near future, The New York Times reported, after engaging in a "pattern of provocations" and abandoning a long-held policy of trying to engage the United States diplomatically. Is a full-blown war imminent? Maybe not, but Kim "could carry out strikes in a way that he thinks would avoid rapid escalation."

Among the provocations: North Korea this week test-fired a new cruise missile — potentially capable of carrying both nuclear and conventional warheads — with several launches aimed toward the Yellow Sea. That came after Pyongyang ordered the destruction of the Arch of Reunification, a symbol of hopes for peace on the Korean peninsula. Newsweek reported that North Korea even released a series of propaganda posters with alarming slogans: "Let us destroy the U.S. imperialists and the clan of the Republic of Korea without mercy!"

Most importantly, The Associated Press reported, Kim earlier this month announced he had abandoned "the existential goal of reconciling with rival South Korea." That was a move that came as a shock, but was also the "inevitable culmination of years of building tension." And that has raised concerns. "Is Kim Jong Un about to take North Korea to war?" asked NBC News. It might seem like old news: "Threats and angry rhetoric" are an old family tradition for Kim. But some observers say his latest rhetoric goes beyond the usual posturing.

What did the commentators say? 

"We believe that, like his grandfather in 1950, Kim Jong Un has made a strategic decision to go to war," Robert L. Carlin and Siegfried Hecker wrote at 38 North, a website that tracks developments on the peninsula. One reason is the failure of diplomacy. Kim met with then-President Donald Trump in 2019 — an unprecedented summit between the two sides — in hopes of achieving what his predecessors never could: Normalization with the United States. "When that failed, it was a traumatic loss of face for Kim." And that makes the situation unstable. "Pyongyang could be planning to move in ways that completely defy our calculations."

"There's another, more plausible explanation for the despot's behavior," Josh Rogin argued at The Washington Post. Kim's "real priority" is to build his relationship with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, who has been buying and using North Korean weaponry in the war against Ukraine. Raising tensions in Asia lets Kim "justify his use of North Korea's money and industry for its weapons business rather than feeding its people."

Harsh rhetoric from Pyongyang might actually be a way to get diplomatic attention, John Feffer suggested at Responsible Statecraft. This means Kim's provocations might be "perversely, a determination to restart peace talks with newly attentive adversaries." But some analysts believed the same thing about Putin as he threatened war against Ukraine in the waning months of 2021. The lesson? "Beware wishful thinking."

What next?

Whether or not war develops, Voice of America reported, Kim's belligerence — along with his growing ties with Russia — is proving "disruptive to Beijing's efforts to improve its relationship with Washington." And it complicates an already tender picture in the Pacific. "North Korea making trouble for the U.S. is in China's interest," said one expert, "as long as it does not get out of control and risk war that China does not want — at least not until China is ready." 

In the meantime, officials in Washington and Seoul are downplaying the possibility of conflict, Reuters reported. War would be bad for North Korea, too. Count Sydney Seiler, a former U.S. intelligence officer, among the skeptics. "This," he said, "is not a country that is going to a war footing."

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has declared that he will no longer pursue any form of reunification with his country's "principal enemy" South Korea.

The new policy towards the South was announced by Kim at a party meeting in December, and was formally ratified after a speech to the Supreme People's Assembly earlier this week. Kim also ordered revisions to North Korea's constitution, along with changes to propaganda guidelines intended to "instil in his people the view" that the South is the "most hostile state", said The New York Times. Monuments of unification will also be torn down.

The abandonment of any peaceful reunification between the two countries, which have been separated since the Korean War ended in 1953, has heightened tensions in the region and shows "how far relations have fallen" in the last five years, said The Independent.

What has North Korea done?

Kim insisted that the North does "not want war" with the South, but added that he has "no intention of avoiding it". The abandonment of reunification comes after "a string of recent bellicose statements" and a flurry of military activity in the region, said CNN.

Animosity has been growing since 2019, when Kim's nuclear diplomacy summit with then-president Donald Trump in Vietnam "imploded", said The Independent. That "highly public setback" led to an "accelerated, and unprecedented" expansion of North Korea's nuclear arsenal, as well as a ramping-up of rhetoric and threats against South Korea and the US.

As recently as this month, North Korea has reportedly been testing hypersonic missiles as part of its "five-year plan to boost military power", said Reuters. Hypersonic missiles are a particular concern because they are "difficult to detect and intercept", and China, Russia and the US are leading the way in testing them. Reports suggest the North has also been testing hypersonic missiles since 2021, contributing to the growing anxiety across the border.

How has South Korea responded?

South Korea's President Yoon Suk Yeol said his country "will not be cowed" by North Korean threats and vowed to "punish them multiple times as hard" in response to any acts of aggression. Yoon added that Kim's comments were a "political act aimed at dividing the South", and insisted his government would "further boost efforts" to stop the North from accessing materials and funds for its nuclear programme, said Reuters.

South Korea has already "turned to slapping sanctions on Pyongyang independently" as it faces "gridlock" in the United Nations. It has also carried out new military drills in conjunction with the US and Japan in response to the North Korean threats.

The South is eager to respond quickly and decisively given the North's growing military relationship with Russia. The government views it as a "serious threat to international stability", with President Vladimir Putin meeting North Korea's Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui in Moscow for talks this week.

What are the geopolitical implications?

North Korea's move to rebuke the South is one of its clearest signs yet that it wants to establish its own, greater, footing on the world stage. The North "no longer sees Seoul as a useful middleman to extract concessions" from the US, said The Independent, and Kim is trying to "break out of diplomatic isolation" by playing off the "deepening US tensions with Moscow and Beijing".

Kim's "efforts to carve out a more assertive presence in global affairs" have seen him deepening his country's relationship with Russia in particular, which has been importing munitions and arms from North Korea to aid its war effort in Ukraine. A "sustained partnership" between them could make a "continued battlefield reality" in Ukraine and create a "troubling scenario" for the West, said Business Insider.

The West isn't alone in closely monitoring the deepening cooperation between North Korea and Russia. China has "long enjoyed" and "kept guarded" its influence over Pyongyang, and President Xi Jinping could look to increase "public diplomacy and economic assistance" to maintain that sway, even if Beijing has disapproved of the instability created by missile testing by North Korea.

Interest from Russia and China leaves a "perfect opportunity" for Kim, concluded Business Insider, and he now may "find himself able to play his cards as he chooses".

As Kim Jong Un marks what is believed to be his 40th birthday, the North Korean leader can reflect on over a decade in power in which he has consolidated his regime at home and won important allies abroad through a leadership style best described as ruthless pragmatism.

When he assumed the title of Supreme Leader following the death of his father Kim Jong Il in 2011, some observers speculated that "a 27-year-old with no leadership experience would have to share power with guardians or be guided by regents", said Foreign Policy. Or that the Swiss-educated ruler "would implement economic and political reforms that would change the direction of the secretive authoritarian state".

More than a decade later, neither scenario has come to pass. Instead "he's purged his internal opponents, he's built a formidable nuclear weapons programme, he has tightened his control over society and Russia and China's growing enmity with the US is playing right into his hands", Peter Ward, a fellow at the University of Vienna's European Centre for North Korean Studies, told the Financial Times (FT). Against all the odds, the regime is "much more secure than when Kim came to power in 2011".

A 'ruthless openness' at home

"To the rest of the world, he is almost a figure of ridicule," said The Telegraph. Yet, since 2011 Kim's "ruthless leadership qualities" have established "his unchallenged authority through a series of bloody purges", including the execution of his uncle and mentor and the public assassination of his half brother, The New York Times reported.

While such acts against perceived rivals are nothing new in North Korea, one feature of Kim's leadership style that sets him apart from his predecessors is "his openness, including about his ruthlessness", said Foreign Policy.

He successfully navigated his country through the pandemic, using it as the pretext to unleash a crackdown on "words, acts, hairstyle and attire of young people" and a fresh ban on unsanctioned videos, broadcasts and speaking in a "South Korean" style. Owning a radio risks years in prison, and access to the open internet is blocked, allowing only a heavily censored state intranet.

A sometimes capricious but rational "third-generation CEO", Kim is a man prepared to be brutal domestically, said Andrei Lankov, professor of history at Kookmin University in Seoul, while also building a nuclear weapons deterrent, to protect himself and his family from foreign invasion.

"His goal is very simple – to die a natural death in his palace, decades later. He wants to stay in power. He understands… if he loses power, very soon he will probably lose his life and everyone who he loves," Lankov said. "He is protecting his life, not lifestyle."

A 'pragmatic, rather than ideological, approach' abroad

Kim has adopted a "pragmatic, rather than ideological, approach", said Foreign Policy – especially when it comes to international relations. Here he has shown a preference for leader-to-leader diplomacy and an "ability to adjust to changing geopolitical realities and balance aggression with compromise", reported The Times.

"Contrary to common perception," said The Japan Times, "Kim is anything but a madman bent on nuclear war." He has "steeled himself over the years, playing a calculated, long-term strategy aimed at securing his rule", said the paper, and "building up his country's military in response to what he views as threats to his regime".

Looking back over his 13 years in power, the millennial dictator has "every reason to feel content", said the paper. He survived Donald Trump, the sanctions and the pandemic, said Lankov. "Who in his position would not feel triumphant?"

A senior Hamas official has claimed that North Korea could attack the US over the war in Gaza amid speculation that Pyongyang is supplying the terrorist organisation with weapons. 

"The leader of North Korea is, perhaps, the only one in the world capable of striking the United States," Ali Baraka said, during an interview with Lebanese YouTube channel Spot Shot, according to reports from the Washington-based Middle East Media Research Institute. "The day may come when North Korea intervenes because it is, after all, part of [our] alliance."

Hamas allegedly used North Korean weapons in its attacks on Israel, "a fact later confirmed by the Israeli military", said Radio Free Asia (RFA). South Korea's military has said that, based on photos and videos of the 7 October massacre, Hamas appeared to be using various North Korean weapons. Pyongyang denies the allegations. 

"We are closely watching the situation in the Middle East," said South Korea's foreign minister Park Jin this week. The crisis "can be relevant to the security situation on the Korean peninsula". If the alleged connection between Hamas and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) is confirmed, the North "should be condemned accordingly". 

What did the commentators say?

Steering North Korea through extreme isolation to counter Covid while "defying tough international sanctions", supreme leader Kim Jong Un has "emerged into the warm embrace of Moscow and Beijing", said Christian Davies, Seoul bureau chief for the Financial Times, "amid intensifying geopolitical tensions in the region".

Kim visited Russia in September, his first foreign trip since 2019, meeting Putin in Siberia and inspecting military factories and missile systems. The visit "consummated a relationship that has flourished in the wake of the Russian president's full-scale invasion of Ukraine", said Davies, "illustrating how a fragmenting international order has benefited a country under sanctions from nearly a dozen UN security council resolutions since its first nuclear test in 2006".

Pyongyang is now using the conflict in Gaza to condemn the US, David Maxwell, from the Center for Asia Pacific Strategy, told RFA. From North Korea's perspective, it is "part of its normal blackmail diplomacy".

Meanwhile, military cooperation between Kim and Putin is "growing and dangerous", said US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his South Korean counterpart Park Jin after a meeting in Seoul this week.

Blinken also met South Korea's national security adviser, Cho Tae-yong, and condemned "provocative actions" by North Korea such as sending munitions and other supplies to Russia, according to VOA.

North Korea and Russia have denied any arms deals, though Reuters notes that their leaders pledged closer military cooperation when they met in September. 

South Korea's intelligence agency believes that the North has "already dispatched military advisers and more than a million artillery shells to Russia", according to The Times's Asia editor Richard Lloyd Parry. The National Intelligence Service told South Korean MPs that Pyongyang is "mobilising extra workers in its munitions factories and has increased production to meet Russian demand".

Kim also ordered his officials to support Palestinians, reported The Wall Street Journal last week, and North Korea has sold anti-tank rocket launchers to Hamas in the past. There is "a possibility Pyongyang will attempt to export more weapons amid the war in Gaza".

But North Korea attacking the US over the war in Gaza is "very unlikely", experts told RFA. "I don't take these comments very seriously because Kim Jong Un is not going to risk his own neck to help Hamas," said Michael O'Hanlon, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Kim's "modus operandi is to intimidate adversaries by cultivating a reputation for unpredictability and belligerence", said The Diplomat. In practice, his government "appears rather risk-averse". 

What next?

The US, Japan and South Korea have recently established "a high-level consultative body designed to counter North Korea's cyber activities", to prevent attacks "used to fund North Korea's weapons development", said Infosecurity magazine.

While Pyongyang has "little interest" in Hamas' agenda, "it also has few inhibitions about helping enemies of its adversaries should there be something in it for the Kim regime", Patrick M. Cronin, from the Hudson Institute, told RFA.

"America and our allies need to be vigilant about possible technology transfer, about opportunistic provocations in multiple regions, and about ensuring our allies know they have our full support," he said. But those countries "also need to find diplomatic opportunities to weaken the natural seams between the members of an axis of evil before it coalesces further".

 
The South Korean defence ministry has confirmed that the bulletproof train carrying North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has now entered Russia and is moving towards the city of Vladivostok.

There, Kim will meet Russian president Vladimir Putin for the first time since 2019. They are expected to discuss relations between the two nations and a potential arms deal.

Kim is a "reclusive leader" who is "famously paranoid about his security, rarely stepping beyond the sealed borders of his regime", said The Telegraph. When he does choose to venture overseas, he is more likely than not to be found in an armoured green train that has served the leader of North Korea for decades.

How is the train constructed?

Only glimpses of the train have been seen over the years, with a picture put together through "intelligence reports" and "rare state news media footage", The New York Times reported. On board, security appears to be prized above all else. 

It is thought there are "at least 90 high-security carriages", all bulletproof, resulting in them being "thousands of pounds heavier than average", the newspaper added.

For this reason, the heavy train "moves at a glacial pace", said NPR, at an estimated "28 miles per hour on tracks in North Korea". 

The train is also complete with "bulletproof windows and reinforced walls and floors" to offer the ultimate protection against explosives, Al Jazeera added. It has been nicknamed the "Moving Fortress" for its immense level of protection, equipped with "attack weapons and a helicopter for escape in case of emergency". 

 What is life like on board? 

Its "drab green" exterior may not conjure up thoughts of luxury, but Kim's train has "all the comforts of home", The New York Times said.

The most recent footage of the interior of the train dates back to the time of former leader Kim Jong Il. It features "glossy white interiors with long tables for briefings" as well as rooms with "red leather armchairs", the newspaper said. 

This train, alongside others at the North Korean leader's disposal, is also thought to be complete with "reception halls, conference rooms and high-tech communication facilities", Al Jazeera stated, citing South Korean media reports.

The leaders have attempted to counteract the length of their journeys by making sure they travel in style – with fine dining at the top of their list of priorities.

Aboard the train a "barbecue is on hand, along with Bordeaux and Beaujolais", the New York Post said, with "cases of live lobsters and other delicacies" shipped in. A Russian official, Konstantin Pulikovsky, suggested in a 2002 account that "chefs are on call" to create dishes from across the world on demand.

Pulikovsky also noted that "'beautiful lady conductors' frequently serenaded the elder Kim in Korean and Russian" as a form of entertainment. 

Kim Jong Un does not appear to differ too much from his father in his desires for travel. However, he "reportedly prefers Swiss cheese, Cristal Champagne and Hennessy cognac", The New York Times added.

 What is the significance of the train in North Korea?

The opulence of the North Korean train and its extensive facilities reflects the supreme status of its leader, but also his fear.

Kim Jong Il, who frequently used the train for trips across North Korea and overseas, reportedly stated that he would "never travel by air due to concerns about being shot out of the sky", The Washington Post said. Local media reports later suggested he died on the train of a heart attack in 2011. 

While his son Kim Jong Un has used air travel, the train continues to be a convenient mode of transport, perhaps safer due to the "ageing nature" of North Korea's aircraft, the newspaper added.

The train is also a symbol of the nation, having been "at the centre of state propaganda" around the Kim family's travel for decades, Reuters reported. It frequently features on state television as the leader conducts his affairs.

But Kim is not the only leader with this mode of transport. Putin also has his own secret armoured train, "a luxurious gym and spa on wheels", according to CNN.

The world’s second-largest tobacco company has agreed to pay $635m (£510m) in fines plus interest after a subsidiary admitted violating sanctions by selling cigarettes to North Korea.

The US had imposed “severe sanctions” on North Korea in recent decades over its nuclear and ballistic missile activities, said the BBC. “Almost all Western multinationals cut ties with the pariah state – now led by Kim Jong Un, himself a chain smoker – by the late 2000s,” said the Financial Times (FT).

In 2007, British American Tobacco (BAT) sold its shares in a joint enterprise with the state-owned North Korean Tobacco Company to a third-party company, and claimed to have exited the North Korean market. But according to the US Justice Department, “in reality, BAT continued to do business” there through its subsidiary BAT Marketing Singapore.

A long-running US investigation found that in the following decade, the Singapore-based subsidiary earned about $418m through the sale of tobacco products in North Korea.

Brian E. Nelson, Treasury undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, said BAT “partnered” with the hermit kingdom to “establish and operate a cigarette manufacturing business and relied on financial facilitators linked to North Korea’s weapons of mass destruction proliferation network in the process of enriching itself”.

In effect, said Quartz, the company was “accused of funding North Korea’s nuclear programme”.

The settlement is a “victory” for the Joe Biden administration “during a period of rising tensions with North Korea”, said The New York Times. Biden has “taken a tougher stance on corporate misconduct,” said the FT, “after critics accused former president Donald Trump’s White House of excessive leniency”.

BAT chief executive Jack Bowles said “we deeply regret the misconduct arising from historical business activities” that “fell short of the highest standards rightly expected of us”.

Given her shocking and highly-publicized entrance into public society, many now believe Kim Ju Ae, Kim Jong Un's daughter, is being primed to eventually succeed her father as leader of North Korea. Here's everything you need to know:

What do we know about Kim Ju Ae?

Given the sheltered nature of her upbringing, not much is confirmed — but we're pretty sure she's named Kim Ju Ae, and we're pretty sure she will soon turn 11 … at least according to retired NBA star Dennis Rodman, who allegedly held Kim's daughter during a 2013 visit to North Korea, The Washington Post reports. "I held their baby Ju-ae and spoke with Ms Ri [Sol-Ju, Kim's wife] as well. He's a good dad and has a beautiful family," Rodman told The Guardian at the time. South Korean intelligence has since separately backed up the girl's name and age.

Ju Ae is also believed to be one of three children, second to "an older brother, born in 2010, and a younger sibling born in 2017, gender unknown," the Post writes.

Why do people think Ju Ae is being primed to succeed Kim?

The girl has notably attended multiple high-profile events in recent months, starting with an intercontinental ballistic missile launch in November. Immediately, the world took note — Kim had never before shown one of his children in public, let alone at a rocket launch. Not long after, Ju Ae was seen again taking photos with missile scientists and officials, before eventually accompanying her father to both a military banquet and a military parade in early February. The nation also recently debuted eight new commemorative stamps, five of which feature the "beloved" young girl, as state media calls her.

Why show her off?

In bringing Ju Ae to military parades and missile launches, Kim Jong Un is likely attempting to paint himself as a father working to protect his nation, rather than a stalwart autocrat basking in his gluttonous appetite for weapons, said Wall Street Journal reporter Dasl Yoon. Indeed, not only does Ju Ae's presence "soften the image of the military, it also portrays Kim Jong Un as a loving father." And it's support Kim may very well need — analysts believe that in touting Ju Ae, the government is hoping to inspire confidence among the public, especially after it carried out a record number of missile launches despite ongoing public health issues and a sagging economy.

"[T]hese types of big military parades are meant as a message to us in the outside world, also to the North Korean people, so clearly showing us and showing their people that they want to convey an image of strength," Jean Lee, a North Korea expert at the Wilson Center, told NPR. "And they want to be associated with these missiles, massive missiles, and nuclear weapons. And that indicates their strength, the Kim family's strength in taking the country forward. But it does hint to us that it's going to be a rough ride in the year ahead."

Why might Ju Ae have been chosen to succeed Kim?

Not only does North Korean state media describes Ju Ae as "the most beloved" child, but she also appears to have a close relationship with her father, should their body language at public events be any indication, the Post notes. Though she has made only five public appearances, the young girl has been photographed holding her father's hand or affectionately grabbing his face. In fact, according to Ryu Hyun-woo, who defected from his post as North Korean ambassador to Kuwait in 2019, "Kim Jong Un's exceptional love for his daughter has long been famous among Pyongyang officials," he told the Post.

Is there a chance Kim Ju Ae does not succeed her father?

South Korea, for one, is skeptical of any setup. "There are views that (her appearances) are aimed at talking about a hereditary power transition," South Korea Unification Minister Kwon Youngse said during a mid-February parliamentary committee meeting, referring to Ju Ae. "But considering Kim Jong Un's age and the fact that North Korea has a much more patriarchal nature than ours, there are also lots of questions about whether North Korea having a woman (prepared to) inherit power now is indeed right." More than likely, Ju Ae's turn in the public is meant to galvanize support for Kim Jong Un's family and prepare for an eventual transfer of power, to whomever that may be, Kwon continued.

Duyeon Kim, a senior analyst at the Center for a New American Security in Washington seemed to agree, telling The Associated Press that it's "too soon" to assume Ju Ae will takeover because "the son has always succeeded the throne in North Korea." "We don't yet know if Kim Jong Un is willing to break tradition regarding the gender of his successor or if she will play a key role to support whoever Kim appoints," he said.

Even so, Seong-Chang Cheong, a senior analyst at South Korea's Sejong Institute, nonetheless suspects Ju Ae has been "internally appointed" as her father's successor, citing the way Kim struggled with how his father handled his appointment years ago. "If the outside world had known early on that Kim Jong Un had been 'internally appointed' as the successor to Kim Jong Il at the age of eight, foreign experts would not have underestimated Kim Jong Un's grip on power and made groundless speculation," Seong-Chang has said, per CBS News. "Kim Jong Un seems to have judged that it would do more good than harm to informally appoint his daughter Kim Ju Ae as the successor and make it public about her at her early age."

Well, if not her, who?

If not one of his children, analysts believe Kim Yo Jong, Kim Jong Un's sister, likely has the best shot at succession, since she too comes from the "Mount Paektu bloodline" and carries a "direct lineage to the country's founder Kim Il Sung," writes the Journal. Not to mention most of Kim's other family members are either too old, too uninterested in politics, exiled, or dead. But of course, Yo Jong is a woman, which could prove an obstacle if and when the time comes.

Regardless, will Kim Jong Un, 39, be stepping aside any time soon?

Don't count on it. Both his father and grandfather "ruled until their deaths and it's likely that Kim Jong Un is going to do the same," said the Journal's Yoon.

Kim Jong Un has been appearing at official military events with his young daughter by his side, prompting suggestions that Kim Ju Ae – thought to be only nine or ten years old – is being groomed to become North Korea’s next leader.

Little has so far been revealed in North Korea about the leader’s children. The first time Kim Ju Ae made a public appearance was November 2022, when she joined her father at the test launch of a Hwasong-17 missile, said The Guardian. “She has since been seen at a meeting with military scientists and at a ballistic missile inspection,” the paper added.

Last week marked the fifth time that Kim Ju Ae accompanied her father to an event, and this occasion was seen as particularly significant. It was the country’s “biggest display yet of long-range missiles”, according to The Guardian, a parade to mark the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Korean People’s Army, North Korea’s military force.

The leader’s daughter was seen cheering alongside her father as the missiles passed in the parade, and was seated between her parents at the preceding military banquet.

What do we know about Kim Ju Ae?

The international press first learnt of Ju Ae’s name via Dennis Rodman, the controversial former US basketball player who has been a confidant of the North Korean leader, said The Spectator. Rodman leaked the name, saying he had held the baby on a visit. The timelines match up with the child being roughly nine or ten years old.

“Western observers believe Kim Jong Un has three children and that Ju Ae is his middle child, though this can’t be verified by anyone outside North Korea,” said CNN.

Why this child is being singled out is impossible to say with the information available. However, there is precedent for selecting a future leader at a young age. Kim Jong Il – Kim Jong Un’s father – apparently did the same thing, and also did not select his eldest child.

“It is known that Kim Jong Il told his aides that Kim Jong Un would be his successor while performing a song called ‘Footsteps’ to praise Kim Jong Un on his 8th birthday,” Cheong Seong-chang,​ a senior analyst at the Sejong Institute in South Korea, told CNN. However, he added that this was a private announcement and one the outside world had not been aware of at the time.

Could her appearances mean anything else?

It might be too soon to assume this young girl has been selected to run a dangerous nuclear power.

“Some analysts believe her presence may be a ploy to cultivate Kim’s image as a family man,” said The Daily Telegraph.

It could also be a way to “redirect the world’s attention back to Pyongyang’s military after audience fatigue set in following a year of record missile testing”, Chun In-bum, a retired South Korean general, told CNN.

“I think the North Koreans have either stumbled upon or have figured out that this is one way of getting international attention. And so with all the interest that is accumulating, they’re enjoying themselves,” he said.

The events selected for Kim Ju Ae’s attendance are also significant, focusing heavily on military strength. At the anniversary banquet last week the leader’s wife, Ri Sol Ju, was even spotted wearing a pendant in the shape of North Korea’s largest intercontinental ballistic missile, the Telegraph said.

“By ostentatiously including his wife and daughter, Kim wants observers at home and abroad to see his family dynasty and the North Korean military as irrevocably linked,” said Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ewha University in Seoul, told CNN.

How is Kim Ju Ae’s presence understood in North Korea?

One of the clearest signs that Kim Jong Un’s daughter is being groomed for power is the way she has been referred to in the state-owned media.

While the media still does not reveal her name, she has begun being referred to as his most “beloved” and “respected” daughter, terms usually reserved for those with very special status, said CNN.

In addition to this, the South China Morning Post has reported that multiple unnamed sources in North Korea told Radio Free Asia that the North’s authorities are forcing people named Ju Ae to change their name. This is “part of the regime’s effort to idolate the young girl”, said the Hong Kong-based paper.

North Korean authorities are compelling girls and women with the same name as leader Kim Jong-un's daughter, Ju Ae, to change it to something else, per a Radio Free Asia report.

The report cited two anonymous sources from North Pyongan and South Pyongan provinces who said local government officials issued orders for women to change their birth certificates in the cities of Jeongju and Pyongsong.

One of the residents told Radio Free Asia that "the Ministry of Security in Jeongju City summoned women registered with the resident registration department under the name 'Ju Ae' to the Ministry of Safety to change their names." Officials said the name is now reserved for persons of "the highest dignity," per the unnamed resident.

Recent attention on Kim Ju Ae, the only one of Kim's children to be revealed to the public, "has led to speculation that she might be groomed to succeed her father," Insider wrote. Ju Ae, believed to be ten years old, made her public debut at an intercontinental ballistic missile launch late last year. She was also in attendance at a highly publicized state banquet, where she took photos with North Korea's top generals.

The name change directive follows what The Guardian calls "a tradition upheld by the reclusive state's ruling Kim dynasty." The year before assuming the role as the country's leader, Kim ordered those holding the name "Jong Un," to change their birth certificates legally.

"The directive was 'voluntary,'" Soo Kim, a former CIA analyst, told Insider, "but as we know, few things are voluntary in North Korea, especially when it comes to orders from the leadership." While "this most recent name ban is not anything out of the ordinary for North Korea," Kim says it's early to determine if Kim's daughter is being groomed for leadership. Still, she added that the recent public appearance shows that he wants his child to be seen.

South Korea has fired missiles into waters off North Korea in response to what it described as an “unprecedented and unacceptable” violation of its territory.

On Wednesday morning, the North fired more than ten missiles from its eastern and western coasts, with one projectile crossing the Northern Limit Line (NLL), the disputed maritime demarcation line between the two countries, and landing in the East Sea, just 35 miles off the coast of South Korea. The South said its three missiles landed a similar distance beyond the NLL.

It was the “first time a ballistic missile had landed near the South’s waters” since the division of the peninsula in 1945, said Reuters, as “tensions spiralled in the region”.

The animosity between the nations has “been running high in recent months”, said AP, with the North ramping up testing of nuclear-capable missiles this year. It could “up the ante in coming weeks” having completed preparations to detonate its first nuclear test device since 2017.

The North has maintained that its missile launches have been in response to regular military drills held between allied South Korea, the United States, and Japan in the region, which it described as “aggressive and provocative”.

The US State Department said recent drills were “purely defensive in nature”, adding that there was no military threat towards the north. Upping the pressure in the region by the North through nuclear tests would be a “dangerous, destabilising step”, it said.

What did the papers say?

The prospect of new nuclear tests by North Korea “underscores the limited options” available to the US and the South in preventing it from developing further nuclear weapons, said Reuters. “Sanctions, diplomatic pressure and shows of military force” have had limited effect, and the US and South Korea are now “looking to simply dissuade the North from military action” rather than stopping it from becoming a nuclear power.

In September, North Korea enshrined in law the ability to carry out preemptive nuclear strikes to protect itself, with its leader Kim Jong Un saying there would be no negotiations on denuclearisation. “Kim may be no stranger to colourful language, but it is worth taking his vow seriously,” wrote Paula Hancocks at CNN, who said it was time to “call a spade a spade and accept that North Korea is in fact a nuclear state”.

The US is, however, reluctant to do so for fear of “sparking a nuclear arms race in Asia” and it shows “no signs of abandoning” its tactic of convincing the North to give up its nuclear arms.

Pyongyang’s “strategic goal” in becoming a recognised nuclear state was to pressure the US into removing “the sanctions that are hampering its trade”, said Nam Hyun-woo in The Korea Times. However, it is “becoming more difficult to predict the ultimate purpose of the North’s recent provocations” and the enmity between the North and the South is only growing as both nations take “hardline approaches”.

Accepting the North as a nuclear state and lifting sanctions would not lead it to “change its core philosophy”, argued former US special envoy for North Korea Stephen Biegun, at Politico. He said it would “weaken the global non-proliferation regime” and “create new incentives for other countries to have nuclear weapons”.

What next?

The ongoing “round of war games” by the US and the South in the region “may well provide Kim Jong Un with the pretext he has been waiting for”, wrote Jean Mackenzie at the BBC. The North “has blamed its enemies for escalating tensions” and is “preparing the ground for a more provocative test”, with the expectation that he is waiting for the “opportune political moment” to test a nuclear device.

The major problem for the allied nations in easing tensions is that “all the options on the table rely on some form of engagement with North Korea”, said Hancocks at CNN, “something entirely lacking at present”. She said that the “reticence” for talks with the US is “not all down to Pyongyang” and that “no offers of talks from the Biden administration or others have yet turned [Kim Jong Un’s] head in the slightest”.

Moving to “turn the volume down” on military drills in the region could help reduce tensions, a senior former US defence official told Reuters. “Stepped-up drills ensure readiness,” but the “publicity and chest-beating surrounding them can be counterproductive”.

North Korea has dismissed Seoul’s proposal of financial support in exchange for denuclearisation, instead declaring that the offer showed South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol was “really simple”, according to state media.

In a speech on Monday, Yoon had said his government would implement a major food programme, offer help for power generation and boost farming in North Korea, in exchange for nuclear disarmament.

But the offer was rejected by Kim Yo Jong, a member of the politburo and sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, who said it was “pipedream-like”. She described the South Korean president as a “shameless person who talks about ‘audacious initiative’ today and forces invasion war practice tomorrow,” reported The Korea Herald.

Kim’s sister also stated her dislike of Yoon “as a human being”. Sky News reported Kim Yo Jong as saying: “It would have been more favourable for his image to shut his mouth, rather than talking nonsense as he had nothing better say”.

Unsurprising response

Although the “democratic South Korea’s economy has flourished over the past few decades”, said the BBC, “the communist-ruled North has always struggled with food shortages” and “consistently faced international sanctions over its nuclear programme”.

However, the North’s response has surprised few. Analysts said the chances of Pyongyang accepting Yoon’s offer were “vanishingly slim”, reported The Guardian, because North Korea invests a “vast chunk of its GDP into developing its nuclear arsenal” and has “long made it clear it will not make that trade”.

As recently as last week, added France24, Pyongyang warned it would “wipe out” Seoul authorities over a recent outbreak of Covid-19. The latest threat came just weeks after Kim Jong Un said his country was “ready to mobilise” its nuclear capability in any war with the US and South Korea.

Kim Jong Un has claimed that North Korea is “ready to mobilise” its nuclear weapons if South Korea and its “confrontation maniac” president were to make a move against the nation.

At an event on Wednesday marking the 69th anniversary of the end of the Korean war, Kim was reported by state media to have said: “Our armed forces are completely prepared to respond to any crisis, and our country’s nuclear war deterrent is also ready to mobilise its absolute power dutifully, exactly and swiftly in accordance with its mission.”

South Korea and Washington are preparing for their first joint, large-scale military exercises since 2018, when drills were “scaled down” ahead of a meeting between Kim and former US president Donald Trump, said the Financial Times (FT). The exercises have been “reduced to computer-simulated command post-training” for the past three years.

Threats ‘not something new’

A spokesperson for South Korea’s defence ministry said the threats were “not something new”. “It’s a situation that has continued constantly, where North Korea’s nuclear and missile threats have increased,” they continued, adding that they were “responding” to the report.

Rupert Wingfield-Hayes, the BBC’s Tokyo correspondent, said North Korean rhetoric “is often fiery, especially on significant anniversaries”. Kim’s comments indicate “just how angry” the North Korean regime is about South Korea’s new president, Yoon Suk-yeol, who has “laid out a new, more aggressive defence policy” since coming to power in May.

North Korea is also “quite unhappy with the lack of engagement from Washington” since President Joe Biden came to power, said Wingfield-Hayes.

Pyongyang is expected to soon carry out its seventh nuclear test, the first since 2017. It has also carried out at least 28 ballistic missile tests this year, “the most ever in a single year”, said the FT.

North Korea could be on the brink of a health crisis, experts have said, after the country was plunged into a national lockdown amid what it claims is its first major outbreak of Covid-19.

State media reported last week that a sub-variant of the highly transmissible Omicron strain had been detected in the capital, Pyongyang. The notoriously secretive country has since admitted that 56 people have died and 269,510 have been infected.

Exacerbating fears that the country is being consumed by infections is its disclosure that another 1.5m people are suffering from “fever”, The Economist said, a term being used because it “lacks the testing infrastructure necessary to confirm diagnoses of Covid”.

The one party state has a population of about 25 million and is one of only two countries in the world, along with Eritrea, whose population is “completely unvaccinated against the coronavirus”, The Times reported.

‘National emergency’

Revealing the Covid outbreak, the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said: “There occurred the greatest state emergency incident that made a hole in our emergency anti-epidemic front we have firmly defended for two years and three months since February 2020.”

The state outlet said that Kim has vowed to eradicate further infections in keeping with the nation’s zero-Covid strategy, describing it as a “serious emergency”.

Admitting to an outbreak of Covid-19 marks “an abrupt change for a secretive country that had long insisted it had no cases of the virus”, The New York Times said. But it confirms the suspicions of “sceptical” experts who said “a lack of extensive testing and the North’s threadbare public health system” may explain the lack of cases.

A theory for the use of the term “fever” to describe the outbreak is that it is a “ploy to disguise the seriousness of the crisis” even as the country enters a national lockdown, said The Economist.

But regardless of the “two-tier” system being used to report new cases, “the prevalence of tuberculosis and malnutrition” in North Korea – both of which are linked to an increased risk of dying with Covid – only “increases the urgency of getting shots into arms”.

Euphemisms aside, the virus is evidently “spreading like wildfire”, the paper said.

Kim held an emergency politburo meeting last week, KCNA said, calling on “all the cities and counties of the whole country to thoroughly lock down their areas”. NK News, a specialist news site based in Seoul, reported that areas of Pyongyang had already been locked down for two days, with reports emerging of panic buying.

According to KCNA, Kim has also ordered that people continue working, but said that “each working unit, production unit and living unit” must be kept “from each other​”. He also called for unity, the agency said, warning that “unscientific fear, lack of faith and weak will” are a “more dangerous enemy” than the “malicious virus”.

Vaccine pariah

North Korea “so far has shunned vaccines offered by the UN-backed Covax distribution programme”, The Guardian said, “possibly because administering the jabs would require international monitoring”.

The leadership in Pyongyang likely “fears that information gathered by international public health workers” will “expose the developmental shortcomings of the country and weaken the blind loyalty of its citizens”, The Diplomat reported.

Delivering vaccines is also logistically complicated by “the North’s obsession with secrecy”, as well as its inability “to develop a modern public health infrastructure” and refusal to accept “any significant international assistance”.

It is also possible that “vaccine snobbery” influenced the decision to reject vaccines offered by the UN-backed scheme, the Asia-Pacific focused news site added.

Observers said that officials may have been put off from using the “less effective Sinovac and Russian Sputnik V vaccines” and were “spooked by early safety concerns associated with the AstraZeneca vaccine”.

Caught in the spotlight

Why North Korea has chosen to admit to an outbreak now may be explained by it being “too serious and too difficult to hide”, said BBC Seoul correspondent Jean Mackenzie. Given that the pariah state has “no vaccines, poor healthcare and a limited capacity to test people”, its “options are very limited right now”.

The authorities in Pyongyang “have clearly decided they have no choice but to put the country into lockdown”, she added. But “in order to do this, they simply have to tell people and the rest of the world”.

Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ewha University in Seoul, agreed that the regime’s public acknowledgement of coronavirus cases must mean that the outbreak is too large to hide, telling The Guardian: “The public health situation must be serious.”

But this “does not mean North Korea is suddenly going to be open to humanitarian assistance and take a more conciliatory line toward Washington and Seoul”, he said.

South Korea’s government has said it has renewed its offer of humanitarian assistance in response to the news of the outbreak. Pyongyang has yet to respond.

In the meantime, The Guardian said that the Covid outbreak could already be “unleashing a humanitarian crisis” in a nation whose “economy has been battered by the pandemic-enforced closure of its border with China”, a series of “natural disasters” and “years of international sanctions imposed in response to ballistic missile tests”.

“It looks really bad,” Owen Miller, a lecturer in Korean studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, told the paper.

“They are facing the rampant spread of Omicron without protection from vaccines, without much – if any – immunity in the population and without access to most of the drugs that have been used to treat Covid elsewhere.”

Kim Jong Un has issued a threat that he is planning to speed up development of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal and have missiles ready to fire without warning.

During a military display in the capital city Pyongyang, at which The Times said “intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), hypersonic weapons and other military hardware were on display”, the North Korean leader vowed to ramp up the development of atomic weapons despite international opposition to further tests.

“We will continue to take steps to strengthen and develop our nation’s nuclear capabilities at the fastest pace,” Kim said at the event held to mark the 90th anniversary of the Korean People’s Revolutionary Army. “The nuclear force of the Republic must be ready to exercise its responsible mission and unique deterrence anytime”.

How many nuclear weapons does North Korea have?

According to the Arms Control Association, a US organisation that tracks nations’ military capabilities, North Korea was estimated to have between 40 and 50 nuclear weapons and enough fissile material to build six to seven nuclear weapons per year as of 2022.

In 2003, North Korea withdrew from the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. And since 2006 it has conducted a series of six nuclear tests displaying increasing levels of expertise, prompting the introduction of Western sanctions.

Since the start of 2022, the country has tested “hypersonic as well as short-range, intermediate-range and long-range ballistic missiles”, the BBC reported last month. Its latest test was of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), according to South Korea, which if confirmed would be “the first time an ICBM has been fired since 2017”.

What type of nuclear weapons?

Kim has a “diverse arsenal of ballistic missiles”, The Wall Street Journal reported, including “a nuclear-powered submarine”, “hypersonic missiles” and “powerful ICBMs”.

Most of North Korea’s missile tests in recent years have “sought to strengthen shorter-range missiles”, the paper added, with experts in Pyongyang boasting “successes firing weapons from submarines and train cars”.

However, the dictator is also known to have “missiles that can reach the US”, the BBC said, including the Hwasong-14 which has a “potential range of 8,000km”. This would place New York comfortably within striking distance.

Its Hwasong-15 missile “is believed to have a range of 13,000km”, the broadcaster added, a range that puts “all of the continental US in its sights”. And in March Kim unveiled a new, unnamed missile that North Korean experts claim is “able to carry a payload of 2.5 tons – so capable of in theory carrying a nuclear warhead”.

How dangerous are they?

In recent years, North Korea has kickstarted “an accelerated buildup of nuclear weapons” alongside the “modernization of its already large conventional force”, said the Washington-based Council of Foreign Relations.

Some experts now think that it may have “more than 60 nuclear weapons”, the think tank continued, while the notoriously secretive state has also “successfully tested missiles that could strike the United States with a nuclear warhead”.

The US and its Asian allies view North Korea as “a grave security threat”, especially given Kim’s tendency to use “aggressive rhetoric” when threatened, the think tank added. Sanctions have also proven “ineffective in slowing its path to acquire nuclear weapons”.

What will happen next?

Addressing the crowds in Pyongyang’s Kim Il Sung Square, Kim said that the build-up of his nuclear capabilities was intended as a deterrent, warning: “If any force attempts to usurp the fundamental interests of our country, our nuclear force will have no choice but to carry out its second mission unexpectedly.”

Pictures released by the state-run Korean Central News Agency showed that the display “featured submarine-launched ballistic missiles” and the “Hwasong-8 hypersonic missile”, The Times reported, as well as “a guided missile system for tactical nuclear warheads”.

Speaking to the paper, Yang Moo-jin, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul, said that it was “noteworthy that Kim is now talking more specifically about the purpose of his nuclear weapons”.

South Korean presiden-elect Yoon Suk-yeol has previously “threatened a pre-emptive strike on Pyongyang if needed”, he added. “Kim seems to be indirectly saying that he may have to respond with nuclear tactics should Yoon indeed proceed.”

Kim’s remarks “suggest he will continue provocative weapons tests in a pressure campaign to wrest concessions from the US and its allies”, The Guardian said. He appears to have revived “nuclear brinkmanship” as a means to force “the US to accept North Korea as a nuclear power and to remove crippling economic sanctions”.

Donald Trump was quick to make his height advantage shown during last week's in-person meeting with Vladimir Putin.

Greeting him at the plane, the US president towered over his Russian counterpart, using his assertive handshake as a "status reminder" and "his way of telling Putin that he's the man in charge", body language expert Dr Peter Collett told Sky News.

Once seated, however, it was Putin who appeared more dominant, spreading his legs and adopting a more aggressive posture. "In spite of their difference in height, Putin, although he's very short, sits upright, ramrod, looking very confident, whereas poor old Trump is crumpled and turned inwards," he said.

Accusations that the former KGB officer suffers from a "Napoleon complex" – acting aggressively in an attempt to compensate for his physical stature – might be "overly simplistic and potentially problematic", psychologist Emma Kenny told The Sun. Yet it is true that "height can play into how a leader is perceived, especially when they're interacting with taller counterparts on the international stage".

Does Putin have a complex about his height?

To understand why his height deserves attention, "one has to understand the significance of Putin's cult of personality in cementing his rule", said the Kyiv Post.

Over the years Putin has sought to portray a tough-guy image in a series of infamous photoshoots, but "even the best publicity stunts cannot alter reality – or in this case, Putin's average height".

He is "famously self-conscious about his height", said the Daily Express, which reported that the Russian premier was left "red-faced" in 2015 when aides forgot to tell a group of women invited to the Kremlin not to wear high heels, leaving several of the guests "towering over" him.

He is officially 5ft 7in tall, but the paper estimated he could in fact be as short as 5ft 2in. During the recent Alaska summit between Putin and Trump, "it was the noticeable height difference between the two leaders that stole the internet's attention, reigniting debate over the Russian leader's true stature", said The Economic Times.

Like his North Korean counterpart, Kim Jong Un, Putin has been photographed wearing heeled shoes to boost his elevation, and social media was again full of speculation he had used such lifts during his recent meeting with Trump.

The Russian leader's detractors abroad have also "seized on his size", said The Times.

In 2014, the Ukrainian oligarch Igor Kolomoisky described Putin as a "schizophrenic of short stature" for taking Russia and Ukraine to the brink of war. After Russia's full invasion began in 2022, the Tory MP Julian Lewis told the House of Commons that Putin was "firmly in the grip of small-man syndrome".

How does Putin measure up to other leaders?

"World leaders don't always publicise their height, which means estimating often comes down to comparing them as they stand beside one another or with other celebrities whose heights are public," said Business Insider.

What is true is that Putin is in surprisingly similar company on the world stage.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva measure just over five-and-a-half feet, while French President Emmanuel Macron and Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelenskyy both stand between 5ft 6in and 5ft 7in. Standing at 5ft 3in tall, Italy's PM Giorgia Meloni – who is the same height as European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen – was awarded damages last year from an Italian journalist who made fun of her petite stature on social media.

Keir Starmer, at 5ft 8in, is half an inch taller than the global male average height. China's President Xi Jinping is slightly taller at 5ft 9in, "unusually tall" compared to the Chinese average and "the country's tallest leader for decades", said the Daily Express.

By contrast, Trump (6ft 2in, according to his driving licence, even though he claims to be 6ft 3in) and Serbia's hardline president Aleksandar Vucic (6ft 6in) are among the world's tallest power-players. Earlier this year they were joined by German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who is also 6ft 6in. The title of world's tallest leader, however, goes to Albanian PM Edi Rama, who has an inch on his Serbian and German counterparts.

Does height actually matter?

"In politics, height matters," said The Economist in 2020. Not only are US presidents "becoming taller relative to average Americans" but research suggests that "long-limbed politicians outperform their stumpier rivals" in the polls because "taller people enjoy higher self-esteem, on average, and are perceived to be healthier, more intelligent and more authoritative."

Yet the idea that height is bound up with leadership and masculinity is "looking increasingly shaky" as older "notions of patriarchy wobble" and a "new generation of short kings rise", said The New World.

"Stature is a physical quality," said Maureen Dowd in The New York Times, "but, more important, it is a human and moral quality."

"We all – pundits, politicians, the public – should try to stifle the notion that tallness grants superiority and shortness is a shortcoming," wrote Gideon Lasco, professor of anthropology at the University of the Philippines, in Sapiens. "By participating in a politics of diminution, we diminish our politics."

A rare appearance was made by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s wife today when she attended an art performance in Pyongyang as part of the country’s Lunar New Year celebrations.

Wearing traditional attire, Ri Sol Ju was seen chatting and smiling with her husband during the show at the Mansudae Art Theatre. She then took to the stage to shake hands and pose for photos with the art performers, said North Korea’s official news agency KCNA.

Kim Kyong Hui, Kim’s aunt and the first woman in North Korea to join the country’s exclusive politburo, was also seen watching the performance. Kim Kyong Hui disappeared from the public eye for four years in 2013 after her nephew ordered the execution of her husband before making a “surprise comeback” in 2019, said Reuters.

In and out of the public eye

Ri has not been seen publicly since 9 September last year when she visited the Kumsusan Palace of the Sun where the embalmed bodies of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il – her husband’s late grandfather and father – are enshrined.

Before that, she was last seen attending a concert commemorating the birthday of late leader Kim Jong Il on 16 February the same year. Rodong Sinmun, the government’s official newspaper, released several photos of Kim and Ri laughing and smiling as they watched the performance.

Ri had been absent from state media for more than 12 months before the concert, stoking “speculation over her health or a potential pregnancy”, reported the BBC last year. South Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS) said she had avoided appearing in public due to concerns over Covid-19 and had been “playing well” with her children.

‘Something of a fashion icon’

Ri, who is thought to be in her early 30s, has not always been out of the public eye. Unlike the wives of previous North Korean leaders, she used to regularly join her husband at “high-level diplomatic engagements” and helped establish a more “family-friendly image” for the dictator, said the Wall Street Journal (WSJ).

These engagements included a state visit to China in March 2018 and the April 2018 inter-Korean summit. She also helped host the state visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping and his wife in 2019, reported Deutsche Welle.

The Pyongyang daughter of a professor and obstetrician often wears Western clothes and high heels, and has been described as “something of a fashion icon to North Korea’s women” by ABC News.

Not much is known about Ri, despite the WSJ describing her as a “trailblazing” first lady. She is believed to have married Kim in 2009 with the marriage arranged by his father after he suffered a stroke the year before.

She wasn’t seen publicly until 2012 when she was spotted at a gala concert “dressed in a trim black suit in the Chanel tradition”, said The New York Times (NYT). Her sudden announcement was perceived to be an indication by Kim that he was breaking away from his father’s more private, dour leadership style.

Reporting on the public introduction of Ri in 2012, the NYT said that she appeared not to be “the old flame that some media reports say Mr Kim was forced to abandon on his father’s orders”.

Believed to have three children

Reports suggest that before her marriage, Ri was a singer in North Korea’s elite Unhasu Orchestra and a student at Kim Il Sung University, where she pursued a PhD in science.

Kim and Ri are believed to have three children, the eldest being a son.

One of their children is a daughter called Ju-ae, the name revealed by former US basketball star Dennis Rodman after he made a trip to North Korea in 2013. “I held their baby Ju-ae and spoke with Ms Ri as well,” he told The Guardian that year.

North Korea fired two suspected cruise missiles into the sea early Tuesday, the South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff said.

This is the fifth time North Korea has launched missiles in the last month. South Korean and U.S. intelligence officials are analyzing the latest round of testing, The Associated Press reports, with one military official telling AP the tests were conducted in an inland area of North Korea.

Nuclear talks between the U.S. and North Korea are stalled, with the Biden administration saying the only way sanctions will be eased is if North Korean leader Kim Jong Un stops his nuclear program. Some experts told AP Kim is likely authorizing so many missile launches because he wants to refocus attention on his country and his demands.

North Korea fired what appeared to be a ballistic missile early Tuesday, Japanese and South Korean officials said.

The object landed in the waters off North Korea's east coast, near Japan's exclusive economic zone, Japanese media reports. This is believed to be the country's second weapons test in less than a week. Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said the tests are "extremely regrettable," while the South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff released a statement saying it is "closely monitoring" the situation "in close cooperation with the United States."

Nuclear talks between the U.S. and North Korea are at a standstill, and on Monday, several members of the United Nations Security Council, including the U.S. and Japan, released a joint statement saying last week's missile launch was a "clear violation" of several resolutions and shows North Korea's "determination to expand its unlawful weapons capabilities."

Last week, Pyongyang said it successfully tested a "hypersonic gliding warhead" that hit a target 435 miles away, a claim that South Korean military officials called an exaggeration.

Sorry, conspiracy theorists — that really is North Korean leader Kim Jong Un making public appearances, not a body double.

South Korea's National Intelligence Service gave lawmakers a private briefing on Thursday about the secretive leader, and said it appears that over the last two years, he's dropped about 44 pounds. While he does have some medical conditions, they are not serious, intelligence found. His weight loss is what prompted some members of the public to speculate that Kim is sick and a body double is being used to trick the masses, but intelligence said that's just not true.

Rep. Kim Byung-Kee told reporters after the briefing that a variety of scientific methods were used to assess Kim from afar, including "super-resolution video analysis and a stereometry analysis model that gauges facial fat and weight," ABC News reports. Kim has been in the spotlight more this year, making 70 appearances in North Korean state media so far. Byung-Kee said it seems the leader is "working on building a people-friendly image by releasing photos of him drinking beer and smoking together with high-level officials."

During a weapons system exhibition, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un vowed to build an "invincible" military.

Kim said the United States has "frequently signaled it's not hostile to our state" but that "there is no action-based evidence to make us believe that they are not hostile," calling the U.S. a source of instability and accusing it of "continuing to create tensions in the region with its wrong judgments and actions," The Associated Press reports. The North Korean leader also said the country's top objective is to possess an "invincible military capability," per AP.

Photos from the event seemed to show a ballistic missile that analysts say is one of the largest in the world, CNN reports. The comments from Kim came after North Korea said last month that it had successfully fired a hypersonic missile.

Professor and nuclear weapons expert Jeffrey Lewis told CNN that Kim's exhibition focused on the "vast array of new missiles developed over the past five years," serving as "both a display of past achievements, as well as a warning of what's to come."

Yang Wook, a military expert at Hannam University in South Korea, also told AP, "Basically, North Korea wants to send this message: 'We'll continue to develop new weapons and arm ourselves with nuclear force, so don't slap sanctions with these as we can't agree on the double standards.'"

North Korea has announced successful tests of a new long-range cruise missile that the secretive state described as “a strategic weapon of great significance”.

According to ​​the state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), the missiles hit targets 1,500km (932 miles) away during testing on Saturday and Sunday.

The reported launches are the first by North Korea since March and have been condemned by the US amid the ongoing battle over denuclearisation.

What we know

Pictures in North Korea’s Rodong Sinmun newspaper of the tests “showed a missile exiting one of five tubes on a launch vehicle in a ball of flame, and a missile in horizontal flight”, said The Guardian.

The missiles reportedly “travelled for 126 minutes” before “hitting their targets and falling into the country’s territorial waters”.

Experts say the weapon appears to represent a major step forward in the weapons technology being developed by the ruling Korean Workers Party. The newly tested missiles are feared to be “better able to avoid defence systems to deliver a warhead across the South or Japan - both of them US allies”, The Guardian added.

“This activity highlights [North Korea’s] continuing focus on developing its military programme and the threats that poses to its neighbours and the international community,” the US military’s Indo-Pacific command said in a statement.

As Reuters noted, the hermit kingdom's cruise missiles are not explicitly banned under UN Nations Security Council Resolutions and “usually generate less interest” than ballistic missiles, which can be used to carry large nuclear warheads.

But Ankit Panda, a senior fellow at the US-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told the news agency that the new weapon was “the first cruise missile in North Korea to be explicitly designated a ‘strategic’ role”, which is “a common euphemism for a nuclear capable system”.

Baiting Biden

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un “was not present” for the test launches, which were announced as “Sung Kim, US President Joe Biden’s nuclear envoy, headed to Asia for talks with counterparts from Japan and South Korea aimed at reviving disarmament talks with Pyongyang”, The Telegraph reported.

The negotiations stalled in 2019 after a failed summit in Hanoi between Kim and then president Donald Trump.

Last month, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported that the North had resumed the use of a nuclear reactor widely believed to have produced plutonium for nuclear weapons.

The agency said that “there were no indications of reactor operation from early December 2018 to the beginning of July 2021”, but that there had since “been indications, including the discharge of cooling water, consistent with the operation of the reactor”.

According to The Telegraph, analysts “believe that the reactivation of the nuclear reactor was an attempt to test Joe Biden’s resolve”.

In response, the Biden administration “has said it is open to diplomacy to achieve North Korea’s denuclearisation, but has shown no willingness to ease sanctions”, reported The Guardian.

What next?

“As international negotiations have made little progress in stopping North Korea from growing its weapons arsenal, South Korea has embarked on building more powerful missiles and missile-defence systems of its own to counter North Korean threats,” said The New York Times (NYT).

The South’s Defence Ministry said earlier this month that it would “develop stronger, longer-range and more precise missiles so as to exercise deterrence and achieve security and peace on the Korean Peninsula”, as Reuters reported at the time.

Meanwhile, the US has removed limits allowing the South “to build ballistic missiles with larger warheads that hold destructive power”, the NYT added. “The tit-for-tat weapons build-up signalled that the rival militaries were arming themselves with increasingly powerful missiles that can fly farther and carry more destructive power, and that are harder to intercept.”

“We cannot rule out that the resumption of plutonium production and reprocessing at Yongbyon is Pyongyang’s way of reminding the US of the dangers posed by the nuclear facilities,” Evans Revere, a former state department official, told Voice of America last month.

The North could be attempting to scope out “what ‘price’ the United States might be willing to pay to freeze or shut down these facilities if negotiations resume”, he added.

As representatives from the US, South Korea and Japan now meet in Tokyo to explore ways to end the stand-off, Pyongyang may be hoping the missile tests announcement has increased that price.

Kim Jong Un’s younger sister has accused the US and South Korea of triggering a “serious threat to security” on the Korean Peninsula after the defence allies announced impending joint military drills.

In a statement released by Pyongyang’s KCNA news agency, Kim Yo Jong claims that the planned exercises are a “rehearsal” for an invasion “aimed at stifling our state”. But Washington and Seoul would pay a high price for this “undesirable self-destructive act”, she warns.

The “dangerous war exercises” endanger “peace and stability” in the region, according to the dictator’s sister, who serves as deputy department director of the Workers’ Party of Korea’s Publicity and Information Department.

Expressing her “strong regret for the perfidious behaviour of the South Korean authorities”, she vows that the North will bolster its “national defence capability” to see off the “daily-increasing military threat” of the US.

The military allies will begin their “biannual exercises with four days of preliminary training on Tuesday, ahead of computer-simulated drills next week”, The Telegraph reports.

The drills “often trigger a hostile reaction from Pyongyang”, the paper adds, and were suspended in 2018 “during unprecedented meetings between Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump, then US president, to attempt to curb the North’s nuclear weapons ambitions”.

Kim Yo Jong’s intervention this week follow reports that the North and South reopened communications in July after cutting ties more than a year ago. The easing of hostilities was “prompted by a series of personal letters between her brother and the South Korean president, Moon Jae-in”, says The Guardian.

The apparent threat to that truce comes as Seoul tackles widespread flooding, an economic crisis and food shortages.

Kim Jong Un last week “called on the military to carry out relief work in areas recently hit by heavy rains”, the BBC reports. More than 1,000 homes are reported to have been damaged, with around 5,000 people forced to flee.

In June, he also dismissed a series of top officials after accusing them of causing a mysterious “crisis” in North Korea’s anti-Covid campaign.

Kim Jong Un has launched a blistering verbal attack on his top officials for triggering a “great crisis” in North Korea’s anti-Covid campaign.

According to the state-run KCNA news agency, Kim told a politburo meeting of his Workers’ Party yesterday that by “neglecting important decisions by the party that called for organisational, material and science and technological measures to support prolonged anti-epidemic work in the face of a global health crisis, the officials in charge have caused a grave incident that created a huge crisis for the safety of the country and its people”.

The North Korean leader “is also said to have replaced several politburo members and state officials at the meeting”, Sky News reports.

The exact nature of the “grave incident” remains unclear, but “analysts believe Kim’s outburst indicates North Korea is no longer free of Covid-19”, The Guardian says.

The hermit state “has told the World Health Organization it has not found a single case of Covid-19 after testing more than 30,000 people”, the newspaper continues. But the “claim has been greeted with scepticism by the international community”.

Kim’s accusations against officials appear to be “a rare sign of the pandemic's severity in North Korea”, says the BBC.

The notoriously secretive nation closed its borders with China and Russia at the beginning of the pandemic, and imposed tight restrictions on movement and travel.

But while those measures appear to have proved insufficient to keep out Covid, “there is no possibility that North Korea will ever admit to an infection”, according to Hong Min, a senior analyst at Seoul’s Korea Institute for National Unification think-tank.

“Even if there were mass transmissions, the North will definitely not reveal such developments and will continue to push forward an anti-virus campaign it has claimed to be the greatest,” Hong said. “But it's also clear that something significant happened and it was big enough to warrant a reprimanding of senior officials.”

Chan Il Ahn, a North Korean defector who is now a researcher at the World Institute for North Korea Studies, insists that the public rebuke “basically means North Korea has confirmed cases”.

“The fact that the politburo discussed this, and that the KCNA reported it, signals Pyongyang is probably in need of international aid,” he told Agence France-Presse. “Otherwise they would not have done this, as it inevitably involves acknowledging the regime’s own failure in its anti-epidemic efforts.”

The closing of North Korea’s borders, coupled with international sanctions on the rogue state, has “led to food shortages and a worsening economy”, says the BBC.

Kim told a meeting of senior officials earlier this month that the “food situation is now getting tense”. And his country is also facing shortages of “medicines and warnings of rising unemployment and homelessness”, The Guardian reports.

Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ewha University in Seoul, told the paper that Kim’s latest intervention “indicates that health conditions are already deteriorating inside the country”.

“Kim will likely find scapegoats for the incident, purging disloyal officials and blaming their ideological lapses”, Easley added. “This may provide Pyongyang justification for demanding that citizens hunker down more, but it could also be political preparation for accepting vaccines from abroad.”

North Korea has been allocated nearly two million doses of vaccines through Covax, the global vaccine-sharing programme, but deliveries have been delayed owing to global shortages.

North Korean ruler Kim Jong-un has told a rare meeting of his party that “bitter lessons” have been learned from a “national economic development” strategy that has failed in the face of his country’s “worst ever trials”.

Addressing the first congress since 2016 of the ruling Workers’ Party, Kim admitted that “almost all sectors fell a long way short of the set objectives” of the five-year plan, which ended last month.

“We should further promote and expand the victories and successes we have gained at the cost of sweat and blood, and prevent the painful lessons from being repeated,” he said yesterday at the opening of the meeting in Pyongyang, according to state media.

Foreign observers have speculated that North Korea is facing a serious crisis as a result of the brutal combination of long-term economic sanctions and the almost complete isolation of the country during the Covid-19 pandemic.

In a bid to protect against the virus, North Korea - which has not reported a single case of Covid - “has all but closed off land and sea connections with China, with which it conducts 90% of its external trade”, says The Times.

Beijing’s economic data suggests that “trade between the two countries was down last year by four-fifths”, and in October was at just 1% of the previous month, the newspaper reports.

The secretiveness of the Pyongyang regime means that its most of North Korea’s economic data is kept under wraps, but independent calculations suggest the economy has shrunk by between 8.5% and 10%, and possibly more.

“This is worse than 1992, when the economy shrank by 7.1%, shortly before a famine that killed as many as a few million people,” says The Times.

Amid mounting speculation about the current state of the economy, the Workers’ Party meeting, which is expected to sit for several days, is “being closely watched for signs of a shift in economic policy”, The Guardian says.

North Korean defector Ahn Chan-il, now a researcher at the World Institute for North Korea Studies in Seoul, said: “The party congress has to serve as a spark to restore faith among a frustrated public.”

Donald Trump tried to use Elton John as peacemaker with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, according to a new book. Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton, says the president is a big fan of John’s music and tried to get Kim a CD of Rocket Man after discovering the North Korean leader had never heard the track. “Boy, I bet Elton will get a kick out of this!” the president reportedly said.

Panic over mushroom cloud near Chernobyl

Officials told the public not to panic as a huge mushroom-shaped cloud filled the sky above Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine. One concerned resident took to social media to ask: “Is it Putin is testing a new nuclear weapon?" The city is located just 60 miles from the site of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

Irish ghost hunters say they’ve got footage of a ghoul

Ghost hunters insist they have “proof” a 19th century spirit is haunting an Irish castle. Paranormal Supernatural Investigations Ireland says the ghost is of Walter Peter Lambert who died in 1892 at the Imperial Hotel in Tuam, Co Galway after choking. The team say they have footage that proves the ghost’s presence in the area.

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The uneasy truce that has existed between North and South Korea for almost 70 years is under threat once again following a fresh outbreak in hostilities.

The two neighbouring nations failed to reach a peace agreement at the end of the Korean War in 1953, instead signing an armistice deal that included a “suspension of open hostilities” and a 2.4-mile demilitarised zone (DMZ) along their border.

But North Korea is now threatening to enter this zone and take “action” against the South, sparking fears of another all-out conflict on the peninsula.

What has happened so far?

North Korea warned over the weekend that its army was prepared to enter the demilitarised zone in response to defector groups in the South sending propaganda material across the border, reports the BBC.

Large helium-filled balloons are often used to carry leaflets into the North along with other items, including food, $1 bills, radios and USB sticks loaded with South Korean dramas and news.

Despite the South Korean government warning its citizens to stop the practice, the authorities in Pyongyang say that the continuing onslaught demands retaliatory military action.

Kim Yo Jong, the sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, announced on Saturday that she had ordered her country’s army to prepare to strike back, adding: “I feel it is high time to surely break with the South Korean authorities.”

“Rubbish must be thrown into the dustbin,” added Yo Jong, who has risen rapidly through the ranks of the ruling Communist Party to become the most important figure in the regime after her brother.

Tensions had been soaring since the North Korean military announced early last week that its leader were “studying an action plan” to move “into the zones that had been demilitarised”.

Pyongyang then cut all communications with the South, including a hotline between the two nation’s leaders.

Yesterday, North Korea turned the threats into action, blowing up a liaison office that had been set up in the northern border town of Kaesong in order to improve communications with the South.

Kim Yo Jong had warned on Saturday that Seoul would soon witness “a tragic scene of the useless North-South liaison office being completely collapsed”.

No one is believed to have been in the office when it was blown up, at around 3pm local time (5:49am GMT) on Monday. Al Jazeera reports that the four-storey base had been temporarily closed since January owing to the coronavirus pandemic.

Pyongyang’s official Korean Central News Agency subsequently said the North had destroyed the office to “force human scum and those who have sheltered the scum to pay dearly for their crimes”.

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What next?

The possibility of North Korea’s military entering the DMZ remains a real possibility.

Following Kim Yo Jong’s announcement at the weekend, the North Korean military said it was ready to “turn the front line into a fortress and heighten military vigilance”, in a statement released through state news agency KCNA.

The army is on “high alert” and ready to “rapidly and thoroughly” carry out any orders from the government, the statement added.

North Korea has also threatened to start is own propaganda campaign as part of a “large-scale leaflet-scattering struggle against the enemy”, reports The Guardian.

In a bid to defuse to growing tensions, the South’s President Moon Jae-in is calling for a continuation of peaceful communications between the two countries’ governments.

“I regret that North Korea-US and inter-Korean relations have not made progress as expected,” he said in a message to mark the 20th anniversary of the first inter-Korean summit. “But what’s most important is trust, which the South and North should build through constant dialogue.”

The South may also step up action against the defector groups sending propaganda to the North, after warning that the lives of people living on the border were being endangered. Seoul has already filed a police complaint against two such groups, saying their activities were not helping “efforts to achieve peace and prosperity of the Korean Peninsula”.

However, Human Rights Watch has called the defectors’ leaflets a “relatively harmless expressive act” that should not be banned, reports The Independent.

“It is shameful how President Moon and his government are totally unwilling to stand up for the rights of North Koreans,” the international rights group’s deputy Asia director, Phil Robertson, said in a statement.

“Instead of proposing a blanket ban on sending balloons with messages and materials to the North, President Moon should publicly demand that North Korea respect freedom of expression and stop censoring what North Koreans can see.”

As the world watches the unfolding crisis, defector groups say they are planning to send further leaflets across the DMZ and into the north later this week.

China has sent a team of medical experts to advise on North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s health amid conflicting reports that he is in a vegetative state or has died following complications from heart surgery.

Reuters reports a delegation including medical experts and officials from a Chinese Communist party liaison office responsible for handling North Korean affairs left Beijing for North Korea on Thursday, “according to three people familiar with the situation”.

“A third-generation hereditary leader who came to power after his father’s death in 2011, Kim has no clear successor in a nuclear-armed country, which could present major international risk,” says the news agency.

Speculation something was amiss was first sparked after the 36-year-old leader failed to appear at ceremonies marking the birth of Kim Il Sung, his grandfather and the country’s revered founding leader.

He was also not present on Saturday as North Korea celebrated the 88th anniversary of the founding of its armed forces, the Korean People’s Revolutionary Army.

The Financial Times, which has not verified the Reuters report, says “the dictator had previously missed important public events and past speculation over happenings inside the reclusive state had later been proven incorrect”.

In 2014, he vanished for more than a month and North Korean state TV later showed him walking with a limp. “Speculation about his health has been fanned by his heavy smoking, apparent weight gain since taking power and family history of cardiovascular problems,” reports CNBC.

“Still, the absence of the leader from a big event, while not unprecedented, raised questions about his whereabouts,” says the FT.

A train believed to belong to Kim has been spotted near his compound at Wonsan on the country’s east coast, 38 North, a Washington think-tank that monitors North Korea via commercial satellite imagery has confirmed.

“The train’s presence does not prove the whereabouts of the North Korean leader or indicate anything about his health, but it does lend weight to reports that Kim is staying at an elite area on the country’s eastern coast,” analysts from the think-tank said.

Forbes says his extended absence, coupled with no official statement, “has spurred speculation over his health, with reports ranging from that he is gravely ill after a cardiovascular operation to that he’s already dead”.

The vice-director of Hong Kong Satellite Television (HKSTV) Shijian Xingzou, who the Daily Mail claims has “15 million followers on Chinese social media Weibo, and is also the niece of one of the country's foreign ministers” has said a “very solid source” has told her Kim is already dead.

Separately, a Japanese media outlet has claimed Kim is in a “vegetative state” after he underwent heart surgery earlier in the month.

Other unconfirmed reports in The Times, which have been attributed to senior party sources in Beijing, “said Kim had died after the Chinese medical team arrived too late to save him following failed heart surgery. In one version, an operation to insert a stent went wrong because a North Korean doctor’s hands were shaking so badly”.

However, a South Korean source told Reuters on Friday their intelligence was that Kim was alive and would likely make an appearance soon.

US Senator Lindsey Graham, who is a member of the US Foreign Relations Committee, has said although he has no direct information about Kim’s health, his lack of public appearances is telling.

“It’s a closed society. I haven’t heard anything directly, but I'll be shocked if he’s not dead or in some incapacitated state because you don’t let rumors like this go forever or go unanswered in a closed society," he told Fox News.

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Reports that North Korea’s leader is seriously ill cannot be confirmed, South Korean officials have said.

Responding to rumours that Kim Jong Un has undergone critical heart surgery, the presidential office in Seoul claims to have received no intelligence to suggest that the 36-year-old is “gravely ill”.

A spokesperson for President Moon Jae-in said the South “has so far detected no special signs inside North Korea” - a stock phrase used to cast doubt on unsubstantiated news reports about the neighbouring nation.

How did the rumours begin?

The claims can be traced back to Daily NK, a Seoul-based website that reports on North Korea using anonymous sources from within the hermit kingdom. The site published a story late on Monday that said Kim had undergone heart surgery at Hyangsan Hospital, a clinic dedicated to treating North Korea’s ruling family, on 12 April.

The report followed a flurry of speculation over Kim’s absence from national celebrations on 15 April to mark his grandfather’s birthday.

“This is one of the biggest events of the year, marking the birth of the nation’s founder,” reports the BBC. “Kim Jong Un has never missed it - and it seemed very unlikely that he would simply choose not to turn up.”

The Daily NK article was picked up by international news outlets, with the rumours further fuelled by claims that multiple sources have reportedly told CNN that US intelligence was “closely monitoring reports on Kim’s health”.

Is there any truth to the claims?

Daily NK issued a correction on Tuesday morning that said: “A previous version of this article incorrectly referred to multiple sources for this story; this article is based on a single Daily NK source in North Korea.”

Combined with statements by both the South Korean government and Chinese intelligence officials dismissing the health claims, the climbdown indicates there is little factual basis to the initial report.

However, the BBC points out that “it is very much worth noting that at no point has anyone denied that Kim Jong Un has had heart surgery... South Korea and China merely deny that the North Korean leader is seriously ill.”

What is North Korea’s succession plan?

Kim was groomed by his father, Kim Jong Il, to lead the country, but is not believed to have any confirmed successor himself.

The most obvious candidate is his younger sister, Kim Yo Yong, who hails from the sacred “Paektu bloodline” of the Kim dynasty and who has become an increasingly visible presence in North Korea in recent years.

“Kim Yo Jong has become the single most important figure in the North Korean regime after her brother,” says The Guardian. “She is rumoured to be the brains behind Kim’s carefully constructed public image, at home and abroad. In return, she enjoys the absolute confidence of her brother.”

CNN reports that US intelligence officials have been reaching out to North Korean experts, “particularly those who have studied the Kim regime”, to talk about contingency planning for the event of his death.

His sister is on the radar of US officials, who in 2017 placed her and other North Korean officials on a blacklist for “severe human rights abuses”.

North Korean has expanded a factory linked to the production of long-range missiles, according to an analysis of satellite images released just weeks after nuclear talks with the US came to a grinding halt.

The Associated Press reported on Monday that images released by private earth imaging firm Planet Labs show what a US expert said appeared to be new construction at the facility near Pyongyang.

Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia nonproliferation programme at California’s Middlebury Institute of International Studies, said the seeming expansion was “big news” and was probably tied to North Korea’s desire to increase production of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), The Hill reports.

“I would think North Korea would want 50-100 such systems... This would probably be some mix of ICBMs we have seen and the new system that North Korea claims is under development,” he added.

North Korea has previously warned that its choice of “Christmas gift” to the US this year will depend on what action Washington takes on the global diplomatic stage.

The US has requested further talks since negotations with Pyongyang broke down in November, but North Korea’s vice minister of foreign affairs, Ri Thae Song, dismissed the offer as “nothing but a foolish trick hatched to keep the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] bound to dialogue and use it in favour of the political situation and election in the US”, Politico reports.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has taken a significantly more belligerent stance on US-North Korea relations in recent months. In early December, his Foreign Ministry warned that its year-end deadline for Washington to change its “hostile policies” was coming up.

“What is left to be done now is the US option and it is entirely up to the US what Christmas gift it will select to get,” said foreign minister Ri.

ABC News reports that the latest threat “even has commercial airliners on edge”, while the US Federal Aviation Administration issued an alert warning of “longer-range missile test launches prior to the end of 2019, or in the early part of 2020”.

The Japan Times reports that “one option for Kim could be firing a nuclear-capable intermediate-range ballistic missile [IRBM] over Japan”.

J. Berkshire Miller, a senior fellow at the Japan Institute of International Affairs in Tokyo, says that if negotiations “go south”, there is “a strong possibility of more flagrant provocations in the new year – such as another IRBM test over Japan’s air space”.

Indeed, The Guardian notes that Pyongyang has used the threat of a “gift” before, to refer to its first test launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) in 2017.

“They might not necessarily wait until the end of the year to show their displeasure on how the diplomacy with the United States has gone,” Joshua Pollack, a senior research associate at the Middlebury Institute, told the newspaper. “I wouldn’t be surprised to see an ICBM go over Japan on Christmas Day itself.”

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Following the announcement that North Korea would be sending a “gift”, the country’s state-run Korean Central News Agency announced that the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea would meet at the end of December “so as to discuss and decide on crucial issues in line with the needs of the development of the Korean revolution and the changed situation at home and abroad”.

The US has long called for North Korea to give up parts of its nuclear arsenal in exchange for the lifting of punishing international sanctions. Kim has met US President Donald Trump twice, in June 2018 and February this year, in what was hailed as a warming of relations at the time.

However, North Korea signed only a non-committal promise of denuclearisation at the first meeting and the latter Trump/Kim summit in Vietnam was cut short with no deal.

North Korea and the US announced they would hold new talks to limit Pyongyang’s snowballing nuclear programme this weekend, resuming efforts that collapsed after Donald Trump cut short his Hanoi summit with Kim Jong Un in February this year.

Only hours after the announcement, however, North Korea launched at least one projectile towards Japan, in a move that is likely calibrated to provide leverage during the talks - but could just as possibly scupper them altogether.

South Korean military officials “did not immediately confirm what the weapons were, how many were fired or how far they flew”, reports CNBC. “But Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said the North fired two ballistic missiles from the country’s east coast, and one of them appeared to have landed inside Japan’s exclusive economic zone off its northwestern coast.”

Some reports indicate that the projectiles, which landed in the sea and caused no damage, could have been fired from a submarine.

The resumption of US-North Korea talks was announced yesterday, initially by North Korea’s state news agency KCNA, which carried a statement from vice foreign minister Choe Son-hui.

“It is my expectation that the working-level negotiations would accelerate the positive development of the DPRK [North Korea]-US relations,” said Choe, adding that preliminary contact would take place between the two administrations on Friday, followed by working-level talks on Saturday.

“I can confirm that US and DPRK officials plan to meet within the next week,” Morgan Ortagus, a spokesperson for the State Department, told reporters. “I do not have further details to share on the meeting.”

“Although North Korea has lately expressed willingness for working-level talks, messages carried by its state media attached a caveat that Washington should show more flexibility,” reports Reuters. “North Korea’s chief nuclear negotiator Kim Myong Gil said in a statement last month that the United States should present the 'right calculation method at the upcoming talks'.”

In response to the news of the missile tests, Shinzo Abe, the Japanese prime minister, said: “We will continue to cooperate with the US and the international community and do the utmost to maintain and protect the safety of the people as we stay on alert.”

The conditions that have allowed the talks to continue have been helped considerably - at least as far as Pyongyang is concerned - by the departure of former US national security adviser John Bolton last month.

Bolton’s hawkish attitude to negotiations put him at odds with Trump, who prefers a personality-driven approach - or “bromance diplomacy”, as some critics have labelled it.

Kim’s regime “has called Mr. Bolton a ‘war maniac’ and ‘human scum’ at various times,” reports The New York Times, and “was particularly incensed when he championed the so-called Libyan model of forcing North Korea to quickly give up and ship out its nuclear arsenal before granting the country any rewards”.

After Bolton was ousted from his post, Kim Myong-gil, North Korea’s new envoy to nuclear talks with the United States, said he was pleased “a nasty troublemaker” had been removed from the equation, describing the move as a “wise political decision,” according to Reuters.

“Since the Hanoi talks collapsed, North Korea has threatened to abandon diplomacy completely unless Washington returns to the negotiating table with a more flexible offer by the end of the year,” writes Choe Sang-Hun in The New York Times. It appears that, following Bolton’s departure, this has now happened.

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“We hope that both sides will use these working-level talks to make quick and concrete progress for the complete denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula and a permanent peace there,” said Ko Min-jung, a spokeswoman for President Moon Jae-in of South Korea, whose policy is to endorse the talks.

Kim Jae-chun, a professor at Sogang University and a former South Korean government adviser, said in reality, each side’s positions are mutually incompatible. “The US wants to define denuclearisation and specify the scope of it even if it gets implemented step by step, but North Korea still finds it burdensome to draw a big picture. The two sides have too big differences of opinion over denuclearisation to narrow the gap.”

Saturday Night Live is back.

On the premiere of the 45th season of NBC's iconic sketch comedy series, Alec Baldwin returned to the trenches to portray President Trump for the episode's cold open. Unsurprisingly, the show tackled the impeachment news, as Baldwin's Trump tries to finagle his way out of the jam without much help from his friends.

Throughout the sketch he tries to prevent Kate McKinnon's Rudy Giuliani from causing him any more damage, concocts a plan to pin the whole thing on Beck Bennett's Mike Pence, asks new cast member Bowen Yang's Kim Jong Un for advice on how to handle the whistleblower, and gets a pep talk from Cecily Strong's Jeanine Pirro.

Seemingly out of options, Baldwin's Trump makes one last, desperate phone call, only to discover that Ray Donovan is actually just a fictional character portrayed by Liev Schreiber. Watch the full clip below. Tim O'Donnell

North Korea has fired two short-range missiles into the sea, according to a statement from South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff.

It says the missiles, which were launched early this morning, travelled for 270 miles and reached an altitude of 31 miles before falling into the Sea of Japan, also known as the East Sea.

“Our military is closely monitoring the situation in case of additional launches and maintaining a readiness posture,” said Seoul’s Joint Chiefs of Staff. “The US and South Korea are in the process of analyzing the details in relation to the launches.”

The BBC reports that the launches come “after anger from the North over planned military exercises between South Korea and the US”.

The Guardian adds “the North has warned the war games could affect the planned resumption of denuclearisation talks”.

The launches come as US National Security Adviser John Bolton, seen as a hawk on North Korea, visited South Korea this week. He was reportedly there to discuss the denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula as well as ways to strengthen the alliance between Washington and Seoul.

Meanwhile, in Japan, Kyodo News reported that the missiles did not reach Japan’s exclusive economic zone and had no impact on its own national security.

Vipin Narang, an associate professor of political science at MIT, said that the launches are part of the regime’s response to the lack of tangible progress from Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un’s high profile meeting in the demilitarized zone in June.

“There’s no date for working level talks. Instead, they’re still testing - Kim is touring potentially nuclear capable submarines and firing missiles,” said Narang.

It is believed that the launch was similar to the one North Korea conducted in May, its first missile test since 2017.

North Korea’s Foreign Ministry calls the drills planned by South Korea and the US a “rehearsal of war”.

North Korea says the US is “hell-bent on hostile acts”, despite a recent agreement between the two countries to resume nuclear talks.

Just days after the countries’ leaders, Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un, held a historic meeting in the heavily fortified demilitarised zone between North and South Korea, Pyongyang’s delegation to the UN said that Washington was “obsessed with sanctions”.

It also accused the US of attempting to “undermine the peaceful atmosphere” on the Korean peninsula and added that it was “quite ridiculous” for the US to view sanctions as a “panacea for all problems”.

The BBC says the accusations “marked a shift in tone and a return to the angry exchanges that have marred relations between the countries in recent times”, while ITV adds that “there was nothing positive” in the statement “which made no mention of nuclear talks, focusing instead on sanctions”.

North Korea’s delegation said it was responding to an allegation from the US that it had breached a cap on refined petroleum imports that was set in 2017. It has an annual limit of 500,000 barrels, which is key for its economy.

It said it was also reacting to a joint letter sent by the US, France, Germany and the UK to all UN member states calling for further sanctions on the hermit kingdom. The same letter is believed to have asked all members to send expatriate North Korean workers home.

The North Korean statement said: “What can’t be overlooked is the fact that this joint letter game was carried out... on the very same day when President Trump proposed [a] summit meeting.

“[It] speaks to the reality that the United States is practically more and more hell-bent [on] hostile acts against the DPRK [North Korea]. All UN member states will have to keep vigilance against deliberate attempts by the United States to undermine the peaceful atmosphere that has been created on the Korean Peninsula.”

Although North Korea said the letter was sent on 29 June, it was in fact sent on 27 June. The US is yet to respond to the statement.

The Week’s daily round-up highlights the five best opinion pieces from across the British and international media, with excerpts from each.

1. Michael H Fuchs in The Guardian

On Donald Trump’s bizarre relationship with Kim Jong Un

Trump in North Korea: history as farce first time round

“Over the last year, we’ve all watched Trump’s made-for-TV bromance with the world’s most brutal dictator. Trump thinks Kim is his ‘friend’ and a ‘great leader’. He even claims he ‘fell in love’ with a man who runs concentration camps and has people killed for speaking their minds. It would all be comical if it came from a Hollywood studio. But this is real life, with real lives at stake. Trump has embarrassed himself and what the US stands for by defending Kim’s human rights abuses.”

2. Michael Bociurkiw for CNN

On modern-day international summits

At the G20, those who yelled the loudest were heard

“The G20 is supposed to be the time and place for multilateral consensus. Instead, it’s become more of a display of the tantrum diplomacy leaders have embraced -- whoever screams the loudest or bullies the hardest is permitted to get their way. Once again, major discord among the world’s superpowers -- this time sparked by America’s refusal to endorse the Paris climate accords -- calls into question whether such multilateral meetings are becoming an anachronism. Whether they meet in Japan, Argentina or Papua New Guinea, the drift of Russia, China, Saudi Arabia -- and yes, the United States -- outside the familiar sandbox of the rules-based international order makes the summit less of a venue for compromise and unity. That, in turn, has translated into host nations having to settle for watered-down final communiques with little accountability -- and even less substance.”

3. Charles Moore in the Daily Telegraph

On the conundrum of the Labour party leader

Jeremy Corbyn is very extreme and very dull, and poses no electoral threat to the Tories

“As leader, his situation seems simultaneously secure and impossible. Secure, because he still has far more followers in the membership than any of his centrist rivals; impossible, because he cannot control his own parliamentary party, most of whom exhaust themselves plotting coup after unsuccessful coup against him. Now aged a not very energetic 70, and with views that have been unaffected by reality for at least 50 years, Mr Corbyn is perhaps the least persuasive or powerful person ever to lead one of our two main political parties. So, while Conservatives may not be able to say so publicly, it is greatly in their interest that Mr Corbyn stays exactly where he is.”

4. Fiona Fox in The Times

On knowing when to intervene in a neighbour’s dispute

A fierce row is not the same thing as domestic abuse

“Surely there is a world of difference between couples who have feisty relationships and homes where there is serious domestic abuse? If we are not even making this distinction, what are the chances we will make considered and measured decisions about when to intervene? Many commentators are urging us not to think too hard. Better to call the police and get it wrong than live to regret a woman being harmed. Well possibly, but not for couples having a private row who will be reported to the police. However well intended, for me that would be mortifying and far more traumatic than our rows.”

5. Hettie O’Brien in the New Statesman

On climate change inequality

The uninhabitable city: what happens when heatwaves become the new normal?

“‘Because it costs money [and] is no longer free, conditioned space inevitably becomes conditional space,’ writes the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas. Entry to air-conditioned shopping centres, gymnasiums, cinemas and supermarkets hinges on disposable income. As cities prepare for climate change, they have a choice: finding solutions that share the cold, or becoming more like Dubai – a place where the rich escape the heat in air-conditioned malls while the urban poor swelter in the sun outside. Air conditioning, in other words, deepens existing forms of social exclusion. In the cities of the future, the rich may wall themselves into privately owned refrigerators, while those without air conditioning sweat for want of shade.”

Donald Trump has become the first serving American president to cross the border into North Korea, after meeting Kim Jong Un in the area dividing the two Koreas.

The two countries agreed to resume stalled nuclear talks after Trump and the North Korean leader posed for handshakes and talked for nearly an hour in the heavily fortified demilitarised zone.

“We don’t want speed, we want to get it right,” Trump said after the meeting. “It’s good for North Korea, it’s good for South Korea, I think it’s good for the world.”

Sky News said the “historic handshake” was “in terms of optics” a “triumph for both leaders”. CNN added that it “took to a new level Trump's showman instincts and view of diplomacy as a test of interpersonal skills”.

Writing for Fox News, Harry J. Kazianis, the director of Korean Studies at the Center for the National Interest, said: “If President Obama received a Nobel Prize for nearly nothing, then I think there is only one obvious thing to do, and that’s to make sure Donald Trump receives the award as well.”

However, the BBC says Trump’s critics will dismiss the meeting, arguing that it will only serve to “legitimise a totalitarian regime with one of the worst human rights records on the planet”.

Victor Cha, a former American negotiator with North Korea, told The Times: “Theatrics are no substitute for denuclearisation.”

History was certainly made when Trump stepped into North Korea. “Would you like me to step across?” the US President asked Kim as they shook hands. “I am OK with it.”

“Good to see you. I never expected to meet you at this place,” Kim told Trump through an interpreter.

The North Korean leader added that the moment held “a lot of significance”, as a “courageous and determined act” as they tried to “put an end to an unpleasant past.”

“Big moment,” Trump agreed, “tremendous progress.”

The two country’s last summit broke down in February with no progress on denuclearisation in North Korea. Since then the negotiations have been at a standstill, though Kim and Trump have exchanged letters in recent months.

Sunday’s meeting had been set up through a tweet sent by Trump, and it was on his beloved Twitter that the US President shared further thoughts on the moment. “Leaving South Korea after a wonderful meeting with Chairman Kim Jong Un,” he wrote. “Stood on the soil of North Korea, an important statement for all, and a great honor!”

The Dalai Lama has accused Donald Trump of showing a “lack of moral principle” - and possibly of having a screw loose, too.

The spiritual leader of Tibetan Bhuddists offered his unflattering views on the US president during a wide-ranging, and sometimes politically incorrect, interview with the BBC this week.

Asked about Trump, the Dalai Lama said that “his emotions [are] a little bit” and made a gesture waggling his finger near his temple, reports The Guardian.

The monk continued: “One day he says something, another day he says something. But I think [there is a] lack of moral principle. When he became president, he expressed America first. That is wrong. America, they should take the global responsibility.”

This it not the first time that Trump has been riciduled by the Dalai Lama, who has been exiled from Tibet since 1959, following a failed uprising against Chinese rule. During an ITV interview in 2016, the holy leader did an insulting physical impersonation of the-then presidential candidate.

Nor is the Dalai Lama the first global figurehead to criticise the US president. Here is what other world leaders have said about Trump.

Kim Jong Un

The North Korean dictator may not be the best judge of sanity, given his own outlandish behavour and claims. But that didn’t stop Kim giving his views on Trump’s mental status back in 2017, before the two leaders met.

As The Guardian reported, Kim scorned the president for allowing “eccentric words to trip off his tongue”, before dismissing him as “the mentally deranged US dotard”.

The North Korean’s equally eccentric phrasing may have been the result of his refusal to employ a translator, but there was no mistaking the contempt behind his remarks about the older man.

Australia’s prime minister

In June 2017, audio leaked of Australia’s then prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, “apparently mocking” Trump, as the BBC reported. Turnbull could he heard doing an impression of the president as he entertained journalists at an annual dinner that is usually kept off-record.

“The Donald and I, we are winning and winning in the polls. We are winning so much, we are winning, we are winning like we have never won before,” he said. The joke was that Turnbull had just dropped ten points in opinion polls.

Most damningly, Turnbull also referred to Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia to get himself elected, saying: “We’re winning in the real polls. You know, the online polls. They are so easy to win... I have this Russian guy…”

Pope Francis

While Pope Francis has refrained from actively rebuking Trump, many observers have noted that the pontiff’s messages to the faithful in the wake of the president’s most controversial actions often seem pointed.

During the presidential campaign, in which Trump vowed to build a wall along the US border with Mexico, the Holy Father shared his thoughts that “a person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian”.

On a more personal note, the man regarded by Catholics as the voice of God on Earth appears to have decreed that Trump is fat. During a visit to the Vatican by the president and first lady in 2017, the Pope asked Melania Trump through a translator: “What do you give him to eat - potica?”

Potica is a nut-filled cake from Melania’s native Slovenia, says The Cut, which claims that the pontiff was fat-shaming her husband.

Queen Elizabeth II

The Queen does not usually make jokes at the expense of world leaders but slipped in off-the-cuff gag during filming of an interview with David Attenborough last year, according to Politico.

Complaining about the noise of a helicopter interrupting the filming, the British monarch said: “Why do they always go round and round when you want to talk? Sounds like President Trump...” After a tiny pause, she added diplomatically: “...or President Obama.”

North Korea executed a number of senior officials involved in failed talks with the US in February, according to a report.

The Choson Ilbo, a South Korean newspaper, said Kim Hyok Chol, the special North Korean envoy to the US, and other officials were held responsible by Pyongyang for the summit’s collapse and killed as part of a massive purge in March.

Another senior official, Kim Yong Chol – who co-ordinated with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo ahead of the summit – is reported to have been subjected to forced labour and ideological education. Meanwhile, Kim Jong Un’s sister Kim Yo Jong, who attended the summit is said to be “lying low”.

A source told the newspaper: “Kim Hyok Chol was investigated and executed at Mirim airport with four foreign ministry officials in March.”

North Korea has neither confirmed nor denied the executions, but the state newspaper Rodong Sinmun spoke of “traitors and turncoats” in a commentary yesterday.

It said: “Acting like one is revering the leader in front [of others] but dreaming of something else when one turns around, is an anti-party, anti-revolutionary act” that “has thrown away the moral fidelity toward the leader, and such people will not avoid the stern judgment of the revolution.”

It is believed the executions were carried out by firing squad. The Chosun Ilbo claims that Kim launched a purge of senior officials to divert attention from internal turmoil and discontent.

Sky News points out that a recent UN report claims the country's population is living in a "vicious cycle of deprivation, corruption and repression".

The Guardian notes that the North Korean leader has instigated several high-profile purges since he took over in 2011.

In 2016, he ordered the execution of Ri Yong Jin, a senior official in the education ministry, for falling asleep during a meeting chaired by the North Korean leader.

The previous year, Hyon Yong Chol, a former defence chief, was reportedly executed with an anti-aircraft gun, for dozing during a military rally attended by Kim.

Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un have met for the first time, pledging to boost ties and find a diplomatic solution to the nuclear stand-off on the Korean Peninsula.

The North Korean leader travelled by armoured train to the eastern city of Vladivostok in Russia before meeting the president on a remote island off the coast on Thursday.

Kim said the two leaders had a “very meaningful one-on-one exchange of opinions on issues of mutual interest and current issues”, while Putin said he was “satisfied with the results” of the talks, which he said spanned denuclearisation, sanctions and the United States.

CBS News says Kim travelled to Russia with “a long wish list and a strong desire to notch a win after the failure of his second summit with President Donald Trump”.

The biggest takeaway appears to be North Korea’s willingness to abandon its nuclear programme providing it receives international security guarantees backed by multiple countries in return.

According to the Russian presidential spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin believes the six-party talks on North Korea, which began in 2003 but are currently stalled, are the only efficient way of addressing the issue of nuclear weapons on the peninsula.

The Independent reports that “the Kremlin has long sought a summit with the North Korean leader, with analysts saying Putin is ‘desperate to be considered a person of significance on the Korean peninsula, and to use that in diplomatic games with Washington’.”

In addition, “Moscow is interested in gaining broader access to North Korea’s mineral resources, including rare metals”, Sky News reports.

The two nations were staunch allies during the Cold War, but “since the collapse of the Iron Curtain the relationship has suffered”, says the BBC.

“With weakened ideological ties there was no reason for special treatment and support,” the broadcaster reports. “And as a regular trading partner, North Korea was not very attractive to Russia, as it was unable to pay international market prices.”

But Russia’s increasing estrangement with the West has led to revived links with Pyongyang, “based on the old logic that my enemy’s enemy is my friend,” says Professor Andrei Lankov of Seoul’s Kookmin University.

“While military cooperation between the states was stopped by United Nations sanctions, Moscow provided grain and humanitarian aid to the North,” says Deutsche Welle. “Meanwhile, tens of thousands of North Korean migrant laborers have worked in Russia’s underpopulated Far East.”

Kim is hoping Russian investment will help modernise the country’s Soviet-built industrial plants and railways and ease the economic strain caused by Western sanctions.

But “while the meeting is an important gesture for both sides, analysts do not expect Russia to invest heavily in cash-strapped North Korea”, says The Guardian’s Andrew Roth.

For one thing, Putin “has a lot on his plate and good reason to be cautious about making any big new commitments”, says CBS.

He particularly wants to avoid any move that might strain relations with China. Immediately after seeing Kim, Putin is due fly to Beijing for a major international meeting on China’s “Belt and Road” initiative, which could be hugely lucrative for Russia.

North Korea has fired a new tactical guided weapon in a test Kim Jong Un says has “very weighty significance”.

The launch, the first since the country’s summit with the US ended without an agreement in Vietnam in February, is shrouded in secrecy. State media said only that the weapon had a “peculiar mode of guiding flight” and “a powerful warhead”.

Although it has not been revealed if the test was of a missile, most observers agree it is likely to be a short-range weapon and that it is unlikely to mark a return to the long-range missile tests.

Sky News says the test is “a warning” to the US and an attempt to “grab America's attention”. On Twitter, the North Korea analyst Ankit Panda linked the move to recent US-South Korean military exercises, describing the launch as “another tit-for-tat”.

Since the nuclear disarmament summit in Hanoi between Kim and US President Donald Trump broke down earlier this year, the two sides have had little reported contact.

But Trump has previously said he fell “in love” with Pyongyang's leader and that they could hold further talks.

The White House said it was aware of the launch report and had no comment. The US Strategic Command and US Northern Command say they haven't detected any missile.

The announcement of the test came after reports of new activity at a site where the North was believed to have built long-range missiles.

Earlier this week, Kim visited the North Korean air force, inspecting a military drill and expressing “great satisfaction” at their combat readiness.

Analysts agree that the test was a message to Washington but have varied theories on what that message was. “Kim is trying to make a statement to the Trump administration that his military potential is growing by the day,” said Harry Kazianis, of the Center for the National Interest.

While Koh Yu-hwan, professor of North Korean studies at Dongguk University, agreed the test was a message to the US, he added that the fact that it was not a long-range missile or nuclear test “underscores that Pyongyang wants to keep alive dialogue with Washington”.

Meanwhile, the Daily Telegraph claims that North Korea has sent teams to neighbouring China to track down and kill, if necessary, as many as seven members of the ministry of state security who have fled in a “snowballing” series of defections.

A shadowy group committed to overthrowing the North Korean regime has claimed responsibility for a violent raid on the country’s embassy in Madrid last month.

Ten members of the Cheollima Civil Defence (CDC), a self-styled human rights group and “government-in-waiting”, shackled beat and interrogated embassy staff during the incident on 22 February, a Spanish high court judge has revealed.

Writing on its own website that it had “responded to an urgent situation in the Madrid embassy”, “it remains unclear why the raid took place”, says the BBC.

It took place less than a week before the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, met US President Donald Trump in Hanoi for denuclearisation talks, “prompting speculation that the group was attempting to obtain information about North Korea’s former ambassador to Spain, Kim Hyok Chol”, reports The Guardian.

The intruders reportedly made off with computers, a phone and hard discs. “The group’s brazen actions led some to speculate that there could be serious dissent against Kim Jong Un taking shape”, reports Reuters “but other analysts were more sceptical, and say there are lingering questions over possible ties to foreign intelligence agencies”.

In a post the CDC, also known as Free Joseon, said it had “shared information of enormous potential value” with the FBI, the US intelligence agency, “under mutually agreed terms of confidentiality”.

El Pais had initially reported that investigators from the Spanish police and National Intelligence Center (CNI) had linked the embassy attack to the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), something if proven “could lead to a diplomatic spat between Madrid and Washington”.

The group has denied it was working with FBI or any other foreign organisation and the US government has also denied any involvement in the raid.

However, Reuters quoted “a judicial source as saying that [high court judge Jose] de la Mata believes all of the identified suspects fled to the US after the raid”.

“The Cheollima Civil Defence has been a topic of conversation among journalists for months”, says the BBC’s Laura Bicker, “but there are still so many questions”.

Cheollima Civil Defence, which takes its name from a winged horse commonly featured in East Asian mythology, first came to prominence after taking credit for getting Kim Jong Un's nephew, Kim Han Sol, safely out of Macau after the assassination of his father.

On 1 March the group published a statement declaring itself the North Korean provisional government in exile and vowed to overthrow the regime for committing crimes against humanity.

Justin McCurry in The Guardian writes that “the group’s use of direct action contrasts with other movements, which have traditionally used propaganda, sent inside the country via leaflets and USB drives, to foment popular opposition to Kim Jong Un’s regime”.

The CDC is believed to be led by Adrian Hong Chang, a Mexican citizen and well-known North Korean human rights activist who lives in the US.

He has helped defectors flee North Korea in the past “but where would he get the funding and the know-how to carry out an operation such as this?” asks Bicker.

Whoever is ultimately behind it, the BBC says the raid “has exposed a group which was once in the shadows and put it firmly in a legal spotlight where it may not want to be”.