North Korea relaunches 5K ton warship after embarrassing false start in May
The Korean Central News Agency said the destroyer — the second one Pyongyang has built this year — was back in the water on Thursday.
3 Kim Jong Un brought his daughter along for the relaunch.
KCNA VIA KNS/AFP via Getty Images
The reclusive North Korean leader Kim Jong Un was reportedly at the launch, held along the country's east coast.
Kim said the new battleship stood as 'convincing proof of the rapid transformation of our Navy. … No one will doubt, I think, the rapid transformation of our Navy as they have witnessed the launching of another new-type destroyer less than two months after a similar event at the Nampho Shipyard.'
Kim repeated prior claims he would bolster North Korea's navy in response to perceived threats posed by the US and its Asian allies.
3 Kim and his daughter toured the warship on Thursday.
KCNA/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
'The super-radical growth of our Navy's operations capability is now being proved by powerful entities, not by a prediction or possibility, and this has already become an unstoppable, powerful current of history,' said Kim.
The ruler of the hermit kingdom previously attributed last month's botched launch to criminal negligence. Four officials were later detained, including the vice director of the Workers' Party's munitions industry department.
3 This is the second destroyer the reclusive nation's built this year.
KCNA VIA KNS/AFP via Getty Images
Meanwhile, Kim has been visiting military industrial factories across the country, calling on the country to ramp up production of shells in order to meet the demands of war in the 21st century.
KCNP reported Kim 'gave field guidance at a major munitions industry enterprise' on Friday, and 'learned in detail about shell production, capacity expansion and modernization projects in the first half of 2025.'
Kim 'expressed great satisfaction over the high enthusiasm for patriotic deeds and struggle displayed by the workers at the enterprise,' KCNP reported.
He further noted stepping up production would 'satisfy all the requirements of the national defence strategy and increase the output of new-type powerful shells to meet the requirements of modern warfare.'
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Business Insider
2 hours ago
- Business Insider
Uganda denies pact with the United States concerning its deportation scheme
A top Ugandan official has denied rumors that the nation has agreed to accept illegal immigrants deported from the United States, disputing assertions that Kampala is part of Washington's larger effort to redirect migrants to third countries. Ugandan officials denied approval of an agreement to accept U.S. deportees. Reports suggest that broader U.S. efforts are underway to redirect migrants to third countries. Minister Okello Oryem emphasizes Uganda's infrastructure limitations to accommodate deportees. The statement came on Wednesday, after CBS News reported that Uganda and Honduras had reached deportation agreements with the United States authorities. According to the report, Honduras was slated to receive hundreds of deported individuals from Spanish-speaking nations, while Uganda agreed to accept an unspecified number of African and Asian migrants who had applied for asylum on the US-Mexico border. As per the reported agreement, Uganda agreed to welcome deported migrants as long as they do not have criminal records. The deals were tied to President Donald Trump's immigration policy, which aims to deport millions of illegal immigrants from the United States. However, Uganda has denied the report. "To the best of my knowledge, we have not reached such an agreement," Okello Oryem, state minister for foreign affairs, told Reuters by text message. "We do not have the facilities and infrastructure to accommodate such illegal immigrants in Uganda." The CBS story quoted confidential US government papers indicating that the Trump administration was broadening the scope of deportations, including plans to transfer asylum seekers and convicted criminals to third nations such as South Sudan and Eswatini. Similar incident between America and Eswatini This is hardly the first time an African country has been caught in the crossfire of Washington's deportation campaign. In July, Eswatini denied the United States' claim that deported ex-convicts who could not return to their own countries would be placed in the kingdom. Instead, Eswatini stated that it was collaborating with the United States and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) to guarantee that deportees were finally returned to their respective countries. Earlier reports said that a US deportation flight carrying immigrants from Yemen, Cuba, Laos, Vietnam, and Jamaica had arrived in Eswatini. The move is part of a policy reintroduced by the US Department of Homeland Security that enables migrants to be deported to third-party nations, even if those countries are not their home countries. The contentious policy gained traction in June when the United States Supreme Court decided in favor of the Trump administration, giving it expanded authority to deport migrants without allowing them to demonstrate that they suffer persecution or danger in their home countries. The United States hailed the judgment as a significant triumph in its fight against illegal immigration. However, critics contend that the approach violates international asylum rules and puts vulnerable migrants at risk by transferring them to nations with no linkages or support systems.
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Yahoo
Crypto Offers Answer to Money Laundering Crisis: Global Alert Network Called 'Beacon'
Money laundering has long been a scourge of the cryptocurrency sector, and the industry has a new answer meant to demonstrate it can head off major problems before they accelerate: the Beacon Network. The new system of illicit-activity alerts, which has been building behind the scenes under the management of TRM Labs, is now officially operational under a broad coalition of law enforcement agencies, exchanges, analysts, individual crypto sleuths and digital assets issuers. Exchanges such as Binance, Coinbase and Kraken have joined issuers and freelance investigators to share real-time information about bad actors, potentially offering an answer to several government efforts to clamp down on costly abuses, TRM announced on Wednesday. As U.S. regulators and Congress actively write legislation and new rulebooks to remedy what's arguably the industry's worst reputational challenge — anti-money laundering controls — TRM Global Head of Policy Ari Redbord said the bad guys are getting "faster and faster." "We need this ecosystem to be locked down, and we need it to be locked down in real time," he told CoinDesk in an interview. As long as North Korean hackers can rip off more than $1 billion and launder it faster than the industry can respond, the crypto ecosystem is in trouble, Redbord said. The massive recent theft from the Bybit exchange served as a wakeup call. 'Real-Time interdiction' Beacon, which has already started work identifying a few cases that TRM couldn't yet discuss, is designed as a "real-time interdiction network" where membership is non-commercial and doesn't require any existing business relationships between members. The system is supposed to quickly highlight addresses connected to threats and trigger alerts to block bad actors from cashing out illicit assets from scams, frauds, hacks and criminal activity. 'There's no program like Beacon Network,' said Valerie-Leila Jaber, global head of anti-money laundering at Coinbase, in a statement. 'It's a true early-warning system that helps us identify and freeze illicit assets so law enforcement can recover them." And Binance Chief Compliance Officer Noah Perlman added in his own statement that 'Beacon Network further enables private and public sector collaboration to ensure that we continue to lower crime on the blockchain," which he said is one of the "most powerful tools" for fighting financial crime. The network's inaugural membership features the prominent exchanges and also includes such names as Robinhood, Ripple, OKX, Poloniex, Anchorage Digital and payments firms PayPal and Stripe. The list of involved companies is extensive and represents the vast majority of global crypto activity, though missing from the current list are leading stablecoin issuers Tether and Circle. And while TRM assures that most of the key law enforcement entities in the U.S. and around the world are participating, the company said it's unable to name them just yet, apart from the Australian Federal Police. There's some precedence in the realm of traditional finance (TradFi) for public-private intelligence sharing about bad actors, including at the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), which runs the FinCEN Exchange for trading information. Automated The crypto sector's project doesn't have a dedicated staff beyond the compliance and investigative personnel already at the involved companies, led by TRM's Chris Wong, an ex-FBI crypto investigator. The network will rely on automation for round-the-clock alerts and transaction delays, which will be followed up by human investigators. The automation is necessary, Redbord said, because the bad actors seek to strike when they're least likely to be spotted. "They don't sleep, and they know exactly when we are sleeping," he said. President Donald Trump has directed his administration to make crypto a top policy priority, and it recently issued a report and recommendations on how to tackle that task, including a directive "encouraging domestic and cross-border information sharing, greater participation in sharing programs by digital asset financial institutions and improved information sharing between digital asset and traditional financial institutions." The current draft of a U.S. Senate bill to regulate the crypto markets includes a section on illicit finance that also considers a path for agencies to "securely share information about potential illicit finance violations and threats and emerging risks." And the recently passed Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act spurred the U.S. Treasury Department to open a comment period this week encouraging the public to submit new ideas for addressing illicit crypto usage. "This is absolutely the answer to how we can do anti-money laundering and illicit finance investigations way better in crypto," Redbord said. He said the network will also delve into artificial intelligence to analyze so-called "pig butchering" networks and criminal cartels to potentially be able to anticipate their strategies. And it'll tap independent crypto sleuths such as ZachXBT to raise their own flags. "There's no ZachXBT for TradFi," he said. Adds Binance comment.
Wall Street Journal
4 hours ago
- Wall Street Journal
I'm Alive Thanks to Truman
Paul Benjamin Linton says our use of the atom bomb was immoral (Letters, Aug. 18). Perhaps. But 80 years ago, I was 18, waiting at Newport Naval base in early August, to become a gunner on a new cruiser, one of a half million set to invade Tokyo Bay. Then President Truman intervened. In the ensuing years, I was married to a wonderful woman for nearly eight decades and raised a family that now numbers 30 with nine great-grandchildren—all over-achievers. My wife and I led not inconsequential lives as well.
