There has been reports of North Korea sending troops to Ukraine, but NK News is reporting this has not been verified and currently just misinformation:

North Korea has not announced that it will dispatch troops to support Russia’s war against Ukraine within a month, despite multiple news reports that have made this claim this week.

Picking up on comments made during a U.S. government briefing, the British tabloid Daily Express, Ukrainian website Kyiv Post and other outlets have reported as fact that Pyongyang stated it would send engineers to Russian-occupied Donetsk to rebuild the war-torn city. 

The reports come after Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un signed a mutual defense treaty last week and as North Korea has allegedly been sending artillery and ballistic missiles to Russia in support of its invasion.

While this possibility cannot be ruled out completely, neither North Korea nor Russia has made any such announcements so far. 

The unconfirmed rumors of deployment instead spread through a combination of anonymized single-source reports and multiple levels of misinterpretation as those reports spread globally, a familiar pattern for DPRK-related misinformation.

NK News

You can read more at the link.

Considering how most of the fatalities from this deadly fire were foreign nationals, it is not surprising the company is being investigated for hiring illegal workers:

Police officers carry boxes confiscated from battery maker Aricell and workforce suppliers in Hwaseong, Gyeonggi Province, Wednesday, as they, together with the labor ministry, ratcheted up the investigation into a deadly fire at the company’s factory that killed 23 workers on Monday. Yonhap

The Ministry of Employment and Labor has launched an investigation into lithium battery maker Aricell over suspected illegal hiring of foreign workers after Monday’s deadly fire at its factory killed 23 employees, including 18 foreign nationals, officials said Thursday.

In particular, the ministry is looking into whether Aricell had directly imposed work orders on foreign temporary laborers hired by subcontractors, which is an illegal practice.

Korea Times

You can read more at the link.

It appears the North Koreans are relying on misinformation to hype up their military capabilities:

A contrail of what appears to be a North Korean missile launch is seen from South Korea’s northwestern border island of Yeonpyeong in the Yellow Sea on June 26, 2024. (Yonhap)

South Korea’s military on Thursday dismissed North Korea’s claim of successfully conducting a multiple-warhead missile test earlier this week as a form of “deception,” reaffirming its assessment the missile exploded in the air.

Earlier in the day, the North said it conducted a successful missile test Wednesday aimed at securing multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle (MIRV) capabilities, contradicting South Korea’s earlier assessment the launch ended in failure.

“North Korea’s missile launched yesterday exploded in an early stage of the flight,” Col. Lee Sung-jun, spokesperson of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), told reporters in a briefing. “North Korea made a different announcement this morning but (we) believe that this is merely a method of deception and exaggeration.”

Lee said photos released by the North this morning of the missile launch appeared to be similar to its launch of the Hwasong-17 liquid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) launched in March 2023.

Yonhap

I sure hope the US negotiators are using a possible Trump presidency as leverage during these negotiations:

A U.S. delegation for defense cost sharing talks with South Korea arrives at the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses in Seoul to hold a three-day fourth round of negotiations on June 25, 2024. (Yonhap)

Seoul and Washington launched the negotiations in April to renew the cost-sharing deal, known as the Special Measures Agreement (SMA), amid the view that South Korea is seeking an early deal to avoid tough bargaining in case former U.S. President Donald Trump returns to the White House. 

Under Trump’s presidency, Washington had demanded more than a fivefold increase in Seoul’s payment to US$5 billion. 

The current six-year SMA, due to expire at the end of next year, committed South Korea to paying $1.03 billion for 2021, a 13.9 percent increase from 2019, and increasing the payment every year for the subsequent four years in line with the rise in Seoul’s defense spending. 

South Korea has said it seeks to have negotiations based on the position that its share should come at a “reasonable level,” to create an environment for the stable stationing of the U.S. Forces Korea (USFK) and to strengthen the allies’ combined defense posture.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

South Korea has definitely come a long ways in the past twenty years in regards to how it treats sex crimes. The Miryang Rape Case was a major example of how lenient the government treated sex crimes at the time:

Government officials and community leaders in the southeastern city of Miryang, South Gyeongsang Province, jointly issued a public apology Tuesday for an infamous gang rape case that occurred two decades ago, saying it was “all of our responsibility.”

“We all share the responsibility to make a better community, yet we (the people of Miryang) have not apologized or reflected on this tragedy, just because it is not directly related to our family or friends,” said Mayor An Byeong-gu, a Miryang native himself who took helm of the city in April this year. “We apologize for everyone who has been hurt.”

Officials of the city government, city council and some 80 civic and religious groups based in the area participated in the public apology at the city hall, collectively bowing their heads for one of the worst sex crimes in South Korean history. They did not take questions from reporters who attended the event.

The 2004 Miryang gape rape case has recently reentered the national consciousness after YouTubers began revealing the personal information of some the alleged perpetrators. Forty-four high school boys in South Gyeongsang Province were alleged to have brutally assaulted a then-middle school girl physically and sexually over the course of a year, but all of them escaped criminal punishment on account of them being minors at the time.

A subsequent investigation found that four other underage girls, including the primary victim’s older sister, had been raped by the group who called themselves the “Miryang Coalition.”

What fueled public furor was the widespread victim-blaming by the local community and secondary damage inflicted by the police. A 2005 survey of 645 residents of the city showed that 64 percent pointed the finger of blame at the victim for the heinous crimes, and a police officer’s blunder led to the victim’s family having their information leaked to the public.

Korea Herald

You can read more at the link, but there was another horrible sex crime back in 2004 that involved a U.S. Soldier getting rape by a taxi driver soon after she arrived in Korea:

This should give everyone further indications on how healthy the people in North Korea are:

Parasites have been detected in some of the trash-filled balloons sent by North Korea to South Korea, but no harmful substances were found, Seoul’s unification ministry said Monday.

In recent weeks, North Korea has sent more than 1,000 trash-carrying balloons toward the South on multiple occasions in retaliation for South Korean activists’ leaflet campaigns condemning the North Korean regime.

“Numerous parasites, such as roundworms, whipworms and threadworms, were found in the soil contained in the trash,” the ministry said in a press release, adding that the parasites are believed to originate from human excrement.

The findings are based on an examination of 70 balloons.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.