Free Republic

n late 2013, Jang Song-thaek, an uncle of Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, was taken to the Gang Gun Military Academy in a Pyongyang suburb. Hundreds of officials were gathered there to witness the execution of Mr. Jang’s two trusted deputies in the administrative department of the ruling Workers’ Party. The two men, Ri Ryong-ha and Jang Su-gil, were torn apart by antiaircraft machine guns, according to South Korea’s National Intelligence Service. The executioners then incinerated their bodies with flamethrowers. SNIP In his memoir, a Japanese sushi chef for Kim Jong-il from 1988 to 2001 who goes by the...

I WAS JUST WATCHING FOX NEWS ONLINE ABOUT TRUMPS RALLY BEING CANCELLED AND THEY BROKE IN FOR AN EMERGENCY BROADCAST. THEY SAID NORTH KOREA LAUNCHED A NUCLEAR MISSILE AT 3:45? AND IT IS DUE TO HIT THE LOS ANGELES AREA IN ABOUT 3 HOURS. IT SAID OBAMA WILL BE GIVING A SPEACH ON REGULAR NEWS SHORTLY. THEY SAID TO SHELTER IN PLACE. NOW I WAS WATCHING A STREAMING ONLINE OF FOX NEWS SO I HOPE IT WASN'T SOME NUT WHO BROKE IN AND DID THIS. KEEP LISTENING FOR MORE NEWS.DID ANYONE ELSE HERE THIS?

The North Korean regime lost contact with one of its submarines earlier this week, three U.S. officials familiar with the latest information told CNN. U.S. spy satellites, aircraft and ships have been secretly watching for days as the North Korean navy searched for the missing sub. The U.S. is unsure if the missing vessel is adrift under the sea or whether it has sunk, the officials said, but believes it suffered some type of failure during an exercise.

MCGREGOR RANGE, New Mexico — The most advanced missile system on the planet can hunt and blast incoming missiles right out of the sky with a 100% success rate — and we got to spend a day with it. Meet the US's THAAD system. THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) is a unique missile-defense system with unmatched precision, capable of countering threats around the world with its mobility and strategic battery-unit placement. "It is the most technically advanced missile-defense system in the world," US Army Col. Alan Wiernicki, commander of the 11th Air Defense Artillery Brigade, told Business Insider in...

North Korea fired two ballistic missiles Thursday morning, a South Korean military official said, in the latest controversial move amid U.S.-South Korean military drills that have angered the rogue state. The two missiles flew about 310 miles at about 5:20 a.m. (3:20 p.m. Wednesday ET) and were fired from North Korea's northern shore, the military official said. Analysts said they were Scud-type missiles. The apparent launch comes after heated rhetoric from North Korea in recent days that has included threats of a preemptive nuclear strike.

NKorea tension Published March 09, 2016 Associated Press Facebook7 Twitter0 Email Print WASHINGTON – The U.S. says it has dispatched three B-2 stealth bombers on a training mission to the Asia-Pacific region amid growing tensions with North Korea. The deployment was announced Wednesday by U.S. Strategic Command, which is responsible for U.S. nuclear forces. B-2 bombers are capable of launching nuclear as well as conventional weapons. They are based at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri. Strategic Command said the bombers will conduct training with the Australian military during the deployment, which amounts to a show of force at a...

... But now, after saying that they are deploying their nuclear warheads for quick use, and posting the image above, it may be time to reevaluate the North Koreans nuclear capabilities. That big metallic soccer ball of doom that you see in front of the “Young General” appears to be a compact nuclear implosion device, which is a more complicated alternative than the much more cumbersome gun assembly style nuclear devices, and larger implosion devices, that were thought to have been the limit of North Korea’s technical know-how.

North Korea’s provocative nuclear rhetoric has gotten so bad even the Kremlin has come out against the hermit kingdom, warning continued nuclear threats could justify an invasion. The warning was issued in the form of a written statement from the Russian foreign ministry. It follows North Korea’s threat it would engage in a “preemptive and offensive nuclear strike” in reaction to the start of joint U.S.-South Korean war games Monday. “We consider it to be absolutely impermissible to make public statements containing threats to deliver some ‘preventive nuclear strikes’ against opponents,” said the statement, as translated by the Russian TASS...

U.S. commanders say country has capability to make weapons small and light enough. Tokyo • North Korea has been able to make its nuclear warheads small enough to fit onto ballistic missiles, the state media claimed Wednesday in Pyongyang's latest boast about improvements in its weapons capabilities. North Korea has made the claim before and it is not known whether it is true, but the timing of the announcement is inauspicious. The United States and South Korea are conducting huge military exercises that North Korea views as a pretext for an invasion. On Tuesday, South Korea unleashed a wave of...

North Korea is embarked on a steady, methodical, and relentless journey whose intended endpoint is a credible capability to hit New York and Washington with nuclear weapons. Pyongyang's nuclear test in January is only the latest reminder that America's policy response to nuclear proliferation in North Korea is a prolonged, and thoroughly bipartisan, failure. Our policy is a failure because our public and our leaders do not understand our adversary and his intentions. We cannot hope to cope successfully with the North Korean threat until we do. The late “Dear Leader” Kim Jong Il (son of regime founder “Great Leader”...

North Korea has threatened "indiscriminate" nuclear strikes against South Korea and the US if they push ahead with joint military drills.

North Korea threatened a pre-emptive nuclear strike against South Korea and the U.S., including the American homeland, over the two nations’ joint military exercises. In a statement Monday on the official Korean Central News Agency, Pyongang said the annual military exercises were a pretext for war, and that the situation on the peninsula had been brought to a boil by last week’s United Nations sanctions against North Korea.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has ordered his country's nuclear weapons made ready for use at a moment's notice, the country's official state news agency reported Friday. Kim also said his country will ready its military so it is prepared to carry out pre-emptive attacks, calling the current situation very precarious, according to the Korean Central News Agency. The threats in the statement are part of the authoritarian nation's regular propaganda effort to show strength in the face of what it sees as an effort by its enemies South Korea and the United States to overthrow its leaders; it follows...

Given North Korea’s track record, the Security Council reserved the right to take further significant measures in the event of continued North Korean nuclear tests or launches The United Nations Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution on March 2nd that imposes tough new sanctions and tightens some of its existing measures against North Korea. Resolution 2270 (2016) was the Security Council’s latest and strongest response to the rogue North Korean regime’s ongoing nuclear and ballistic missile-related test activities in violation of a series of prior Security Council resolutions. Led by the United States, which collaborated extensively with China to reach...

As many of us suspected, the Clinton Foundation "business" was intertwined with Hillary Clinton's official duties at State. Emails made public through FOIA have shown that Hillary Clinton aide Cheryl Mills passed on classified information to the Clinton Foundation: Hillary Clinton's top State Department aide sent internal agency correspondence to Clinton Foundation officials, raising new questions about how her inner circle handled sensitive information. The internal emails, which were obtained by Citizens United through the Freedom of Information Act, have since been classified. They were passed to the Clinton Foundation by Cheryl Mills, Clinton's former chief of staff. In one...

The U.S. Navy has a serious problem. After a decade and a half of focusing on supporting land wars, its basic ability to sink other ships is seriously lacking. To reverse that trend, the sea service wants to buy the new Long Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM)-and it wants it ASAP. Admiral Harry Harris, commander of the U.S. Pacific Command, wants the Navy to put LRASM into service ASAP to counter surface threats in the Chinese, Russian, and North Korean navies. In comments to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Harris described LRASM as a "great capability we need to bring online...

SEOUL, Feb 22 (Reuters) - Chinese banks including a branch of China's biggest bank Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) have frozen accounts belonging to North Koreans, a South Korean newspaper reported on Monday. Citing phone conversations with an unnamed employee of ICBC's office in the northeastern Chinese border city of Dandong, the Dong-A Ilbo reported that since late December it had suspended all deposits and transfers of foreign currencies in and out of accounts with North Korean names. "(The bank) had never told me why it was taking such measures, but it seems that they are related with...

Days before North Korea's latest nuclear-bomb test, the Obama administration secretly agreed to talks to try to formally end the Korean War, dropping a longstanding condition that Pyongyang first take steps to curtail its nuclear arsenal. Instead the U.S. called for North Korea's atomic-weapons program to be simply part of the talks. Pyongyang declined the counter-proposal, according to U.S. officials familiar with the events. Its nuclear test on Jan. 6 ended the diplomatic gambit.

Gwynne Dyer: Turks and Saudis know any Russia fight will be lonely one 9:32 AM Wednesday Feb 17, 2016 Between last Thursday and Monday, the Turkish government, in league with Saudi Arabia, made a tentative decision to enter the war on the ground in Syria - and then got cold feet about it. Or more likely, the Turkish army simply told the government that it would not invade Syria and risk the possibility of a shooting war with the Russians. The Turkish government bears a large share of the responsibility for the devastating Syrian civil war. From the start, Turkey's...

(LEAD) S. Korea braces for possible terror attacks from N. Korea: official 2016/02/19 11:59 (ATTN: UPDATES with comments by ruling party lawmaker) SEOUL, Feb. 19 (Yonhap) -- South Korea is bracing for any possible terror attacks from North Korea, an official said Friday. "The presidential office of national security is thoroughly in control of every situation related to terror," presidential spokesman Jeong Yeon-guk told reporters. Still, he declined to comment on whether National Security Adviser Kim Kwan-jin or other South Korean officials are included on North Korea's alleged hit list. South Korea believes that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has...