U.S. COMPANIES OUTSOURCED TECH WORK TO NORTH KOREANS

North Korean tech workers gained employment with hundreds of U.S. companies to fund Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons and missile programs.
The U.S. identified and charged a national from Arizona who helped three North Korean IT workers secure work and earn about $6.8 million USD using fake identities of U.S. citizens starting in October 2020.
A Ukrainian citizen and three North Koreans were also charged with fraud for tricking businesses into remotely hiring North Koreans.
Over 300 U.S. companies were defrauded, and as a result, the U.S. State Department’s Rewards for Justice program is offering up to $5 million USD for information leading to the capture of North Koreans accused of taking part in the scheme that funds the country’s weapons programs.

KIM JONG UN’S SISTER DENIES ARMS EXCHANGE WITH RUSSIA

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un's sister denied that Pyongyang has supplied or is exploring the possibility of exporting any weapons to Russia, labeling this accusation as “the most absurd paradox which is not worth making any evaluation or interpretation.”
The U.S. government accuses Pyongyang of providing ballistic missiles and other weapons for Russia in return for military assistance.
Meanwhile, foreign experts believe that North Korea’s recent series of artillery and short-range missile tests were meant to examine the weapons it was planning to sell to Russia.
According to state-run Korean Central News Agency, Kim said that their weaponry production is limited to defending against South Korea, “What is most urgent for us is not to ‘advertise’ or ‘export’ something, but to make the war readiness and war deterrent of our army more perfect in quality and quantity.”

Kim Ki-nam, a long-serving official who helped all three generations of North Korean leaders forge the personality cult surrounding the ruling Kim dynasty and cement their political legitimacy, has died at the age of 94.
According to state media, Kim, who had been in poor health for several years, died due to old age and “multiple organ dysfunction.”
An official biography was released, describing Kim as an admirable individual who rose from hardships to work at the Central Committee of the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea from 1956. Kim was also commended for leading Pyongyang’s Rodong Sinmun newspaper in the 1970s and for his devotion to the “sacred struggle for defending and strengthening the ideological purity of our revolution.”
The North Korean leader personally visited Kim’s funeral hall and paid silent tribute, while looking around the bier with “bitter grief over the loss of a veteran revolutionary who had remained boundlessly loyal” to the regime.

North Korea has recently sent a large group of workers to China amidst improvement in Beijing-Pyongyang relations and a weakening in the United Nations’ monitoring over sanctions against the North.
A source told Daily NK that thousands of workers have been entering China from North Korea’s North Hamgyong Province since the end of April.
The workers were put to work right away at clothing and electronic parts factories in China’s Jilin Province, shortly after Chinese consular officials inspected the factories at the beginning of April.
This addition of new workers may be a response to vacancies emerging from riots in clothing factories in Jilin Province back in February, when the North Korean authorities responded by detaining those accused of leading the initial riots and sending thousands of workers who participated in the strikes to other Chinese cities and the Republic of Congo.