North Korea's Kim Jong Un oversees air drills, calls for stepped-up war preparation
Mr. Kim, who inspected anti-aircraft combat and air strike drills by North Korea's first Air Division on Thursday (May 15, 2025), called for "all units in the entire military" to bring about "a breakthrough in war preparation," KCNA reported.
Read latest stories on North Korea here
Footage of the drills on North Korean state TV showed a MiG-29 jet launching a missile, which appeared to be a North Korean version of a Russia-developed mid- to long-range air-to-air missile, said Hong Min, North Korea analyst at the Korea Institute for National Unification.
So far this month, Mr. Kim has overseen a missile test, inspected tank and munitions plants, made a rare visit to the Russian embassy in Pyongyang reaffirming the country's alliance with Russia, and supervised tank firing drills and special operations unit training.
South Korea says North Korea fired several missiles toward its eastern waters
North Korea also slammed the U.S. State Department for placing it on a list of countries that do not fully cooperate with U.S. counterterrorism efforts. Pyongyang has been placed on the list every year since 1997, South Korea's Yonhap News Agency said.
"The more the U.S. provokes the DPRK with unnecessary and inefficient malicious acts, the further it will escalate the irreconcilable hostility between the DPRK and the U.S.," a North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesperson said, using the country's official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK.)
"The DPRK will... take effective and proper measures to cope with the U.S. hostile provocations in all spheres."
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Economic Times
16 minutes ago
- Economic Times
Trump's trade adviser Peter Navarro reminds India of America's exorbitant privilege & diktats
Synopsis Peter Navarro's op-ed reveals the US expectation that India, to maintain its strategic partnership and trade benefits, must align its economic policies with Washington's interests. This includes purchasing American weapons without technology transfer demands and ceasing the use of dollar surpluses to buy Russian oil for re-export. Agencies Without saying anything really new, Peter Navarro has revealed something important. If India wants to keep earning dollars by selling goods and services to America, it has to recycle them as per Washington's diktats. The White House trade adviser's op-ed in the Financial Times is aimed at critics who have been shocked by the summary disdain with which President Donald Trump has alienated an ally that past administrations have spent a quarter-century cultivating. Navarro's main message: 'If India wants to be treated as a strategic partner of the US, it needs to start acting like one.' Also Read: Who is Trump's trade guru giving gyan to India? Basically, the White House expects the same level of loyalty as it got from the Germans in 1967. Back then, the Lyndon B. Johnson administration prevailed upon Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger to not exchange any of the Bundesbank's dollar holdings for gold, even though they were well within their rights to do so under the prevailing Bretton Woods arrangement. Bonn made a public pledge to not join the rebellious French who were beginning to question what Valery Giscard d'Estaing called America's exorbitant relations in the 1960s were rooted in the calculus of the Cold War. Historically, New Delhi and Washington have never been as close, yet the latter is going to decide how the most-populous nation will use its trade dollars. That means Prime Minister Narendra Modi has to buy American weapon systems without insisting on technology transfers or local production. The US has no desire to gift cutting-edge military capabilities to a country cozying up to both Russia and China, Navarro says. The second constraint is on how dollar incomes are not to be used. Recycling greenbacks from its $43 billion trade surplus with the US to buy crude oil from Russia — only to sell refined petroleum products to other countries in Asia, Europe and Africa to earn yet more dollars — was 'deeply corrosive of the world's efforts to isolate Putin's war economy,' Navarro says. It has to stop. The tone of the piece suggests that the Trump administration is making a calculated bet. However much Modi tries to flex his muscles against US hegemony, he really can't afford to put $87 billion in annual exports to America at risk of a prohibitive 50% tariff from Aug. 27. Without dollars from its single-largest export destination, how will India pay for the $109 billion it spends on everything from power equipment to kitchen appliances from China? Or buy more from it, as Beijing is bound to insist?One way to square the circle may be to give the Chinese equity stakes in local joint ventures, so that some of their $91 billion bilateral trade surplus comes back as investment. This may well happen. According to a Bloomberg News report this week, India's biggest tycoons — from Gautam Adani and Mukesh Ambani to JSW Group's Sajjan Jindal — have been pursuing under-the-radar deals with Chinese firms that have the most mature and cost-efficient technology in renewable sectors like electric vehicles and lithium-ion Washington sending a natural ally into the arms of its biggest rival? Not really. At best the fraught relationship between the two Asian giants will normalize. After their border clashes five years ago, New Delhi actively suppressed investment proposals from the bigger economy next door. The Modi government announced, with some pride, that between April 2020 and December 2021, China's share in total foreign direct investments into the country had fallen to only 0.43%. Although that would change now, there's little risk of India moving into China's strategic sphere, not after Beijing's liberal defense assistance to Islamabad in the recent India-Pakistan military conflict. Washington's orbit is hard to escape. To see why, it's illustrative to look back at the early days of the India-Russia oil trade after the start of the Ukraine war. Back then, there was a great deal of chest-thumping in New Delhi that Moscow will agree to sell crude for rupees. Russian importers would then pay rubles to buy tea and other stuff from India. The rupee-ruble transactions were supposed to be relayed over SPFS, the Russian alternative to the SWIFT messaging system, the 'financial data panopticon' through which Washington surveils global trade and I noted in April 2022, any such deal wasn't in India's long-term interest. Bypassing SWIFT would help Russia, whose banks faced Western sanctions. New Delhi had nothing to gain. Ultimately, the rupees-for-oil trade didn't even work out. The Russian exporters got tired of holding funds in a non-convertible currency in Indian bank accounts. So refiners went back to buying crude with dollars and dollar-linked UAE dirhams, placing India squarely in the grip of the mighty greenback even as discounted Urals crude came to account for more than a third of its imports, from barely 1% before the Ukraine war. Had the benefits of cheaper oil flowed to local motorists, the middle class would have been all for standing up to Trump. That isn't the case, and Modi has to appease voters now with a long-overdue cut in consumption Chinese have done the same Russian oil trade, and yet the US has singled out India for exemplary punishment. That isn't hard to explain. Not all sides of this relationship are equal. While advanced economies like the US 'are more exposed to China as a supplier, China is becoming less reliant on them as a market,' concludes a new study by Federal Reserve economist Florencia Airaudo, and her coauthors. Control over hard-to-replace inputs, such as rare earths, graphite, and battery materials gives Beijing leverage, they note. New Delhi has no such bargaining chips. The dollars India garners from exporting textiles, carpets, gems and jewelry, shrimp, and software code are its to spend, but not entirely freely. As Navarro reminded the critics of the sudden US-India estrangement, America's exorbitant privilege comes in many hues.
Time of India
16 minutes ago
- Time of India
Russia Decimates Ukrainian Army Crucial ‘War Control Centre'
/ Aug 20, 2025, 09:50AM IST Russian forces carried out overnight strikes on Ukrainian military infrastructure, targeting a fuel refinery supplying troops, along with missile warehouses and a drone assembly site. The Russian Defence Ministry claimed high-precision weapons and drones were used, reporting heavy Ukrainian losses across multiple fronts. The escalation comes as peace talks remain stalled due to a dispute over the venue. President Putin proposed Moscow for a bilateral meeting, but Ukrainian President Zelensky rejected the offer outright, responding with a clear 'no' and refusing talks on Russian terms.
News18
21 minutes ago
- News18
Foreign News Schedule for Aug 20, Wednesday
Agency: PTI Last Updated: **** Interim govt committed to holding polls in Feb 2026: B'desh law adviser Stories on EAM Jaishankar's visit to Russia Stories on developments in Pakistan. Stories on political developments in Bangladesh. Stories on Russia-Ukraine war. Stories on West Asia wars.**** PTI GRS GRS GRS Disclaimer: Comments reflect users' views, not News18's. Please keep discussions respectful and constructive. Abusive, defamatory, or illegal comments will be removed. News18 may disable any comment at its discretion. By posting, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Loading comments...
