North Korea’s strong performance, according to a BOK official during a briefing, is “mainly due to significant increases in manufacturing, construction and mining industries,” which were brought about by North Korea’s involvement in Russia’s war in Ukraine. BOK also cited “the strengthening of national policy projects domestically, and expansion of economic cooperation between North Korea and Russia externally.” North Korea’s heavy chemical sector, per the bank, saw double-digit growth. South Korea’s bank has been publishing data about North Korea’s economy, based on “various sources including intelligence and foreign trading agencies and data from the South’s unification ministry,” since 1991, Reuters said.

North Koreans in Russia

Per CNN, North Korea recently released a 20-minute propaganda video through state media KCTV, aimed at praising its soldiers who have fought on Russia’s side in Ukraine. The video, per CNN, features “heavily dramatized shots of soldiers on the snow-covered battlefield – handling weapons, holding meetings with Russian soldiers, and installing bombs on trees.” Soldiers in the video are also shown gazing at a portrait of the North Korean leader. It’s not clear, per CNN, how “real” the footage is in the video. Citing Western officials, CNN said that it is believed that up to a third of 12,000 soldiers sent from North Korea as part of the initial deployment were either killed or wounded. Kim held two events in August to meet with families of those killed in the war.

our realistic and honest documentaries, their propaganda videos

citing my ass: “yeah actually a gajilion North Koreans died, and all that footage? CGI, not like our brave Ukrainian friends who have never lied or exaggerated throughout the whole war!”

Kim in China

The economic numbers were released as North Korean leader Kim Jong-un made a rare trip out of North Korea, in order to attend a military parade in China to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II. Russian President Vladimir Putin is also scheduled to attend the parade, as is the president of Iran. There is speculation, NBC News reported, that a trilateral meeting might take place among China’s Xi Jinping, Putin, and Kim. NBC also described the military visit as Kim’s “first multilateral event” since he took power upon his father’s death in 2011. Per NBC News, Kim arrived in Beijing by train, clad in a dark suit. “Standing side by side with Xi Jinping and Putin on Tiananmen Gate, he will reproduce the triangular solidarity structure of the Cold War era,” South Korea’s National Intelligence Service said in a message to South Korean lawmakers this week, NBC reported.

Another Trump/Kim Meeting?

Donald Trump, during his first term, met on three occasions with Kim, in what were the first meetings between a U.S. president and a North Korean leader in decades. The diplomatic opening was historic, but it never led to any lasting agreement. In August, Trump announced that he would be willing to resume his diplomacy with Kim, and did so while seated next to the president of South Korea. The comments came during the first visit to the White House by President Lee Jae-myung, who recently took over as South Korea’s president. Lee offered to “usher in a new era of peace on the Korean peninsula,” and even raised the possibility of a Trump Tower being built in North Korea one day. “We will do that,” Trump told his South Korean counterpart. “We look forward to meeting with him, and we’ll make relations better.”

Damn, I didn’t realize that the Seals murdering civilians leaks were like 10 days after Lee Jae Myung met with Trump. What timing!

also the way other countries’ politicians have learned to just glaze Trump is great, “oh and we’ll build a Trump Tower there too! A Juche Trump Tower!”

“With Fuze, the Army is telling innovators that we’re open for business. Fuze will help us to not only invest but scale promising capabilities — bridging the valley of death,” Army Secretary Dan Driscoll said in a statement to Defense News. Unlike traditional procurement that starts with an Army-defined problem followed by appointing a company to solve the problem, Fuze flips the approach. The new process allows the service to find technology to bring in “that helps us think about what our problems are differently,” Chris Manning, the Army’s deputy assistant secretary for research and technology, told Defense News in a recent interview. Venture capitalists make 100 investments and only end up with a few with outsized returns. The Army is accepting that same risk to capture bigger payoffs. “We’re really taking the approach where we’re going to deliberately make a large number of investments in emerging tech companies,” Matt Willis, the Army’s Fuze program director, said in the interview. “Some tech might not reach the maturity that we want, [but] there’s going to be some companies that are going to have an outsized, revolutionary impact on our soldiers.”

Y’know, there’s this amazing thing called a planned economy, where you can just, like, put in the economic plan “we’ll provide X money/resources to this and that R&D program”, with the same expectation that not all of this research will actually produce something directly usable, and you don’t even need to pad tech CEO’s wallets for that, you can just have guys directly working for the government doing all that! Many valuable pieces of technology were developed under this model!

The program aligns four existing fundings streams: XTech prize competitions, small-business funding, tech maturation and manufacturing technology — worth about $750 million in fiscal 2025. The Army plans to initiate the program by running an XTech Disrupt live pitch competition, in partnership with Y Combinator — a technology startup accelerator and VC firm — at the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference next month in Washington.

the… hackernews guys?

The competition, according to Willis, will focus on four technology areas important to the Army: electronic warfare, unmanned aircraft systems, counter-UAS and energy resiliency at the edge. The prize pool totals $500,000. Technologies that win out in the competition will go straight into the hands of soldiers in operational environments for real-world evaluation. The Army has spent the better part of a decade trying to match its acquisition speed with the rest of the high-tech world, but trying to break down the bureaucracy and change the culture has been a challenging task. Fuze is central to a broader shift in the Army as it seeks dramatic transformation rapidly. “Continuous transformation is like our once-in-a-generation change for the Army to get at and prepare for the future battlefield,” Brandon Pugh, the Army’s cyber adviser, told Defense News. “But a key part of that is the acquisition process to really make sure that the warfighter and the soldier on the battlefield has the correct technology they need.”

And surely tech-bro dipshits will be able to deliver that. Logistics? Oh, we have an app for that, just pick the ammunition you need from the menu (and don’t forget to tip your BattleDash driver!). This whole program is even named like an app!

Speed is central to that transformation. “We’re hoping to have a capability to an acquisition pathway in 10 days, and hopefully within 30 to 45 days, for the first prototype to be with an Army unit,” Pugh said. “That is extraordinary.” The Army has struggled with the pace of past acquisitions, particularly in fast-evolving fields like electronic warfare. “It’s so quickly evolving, you have to be able to acquire this quickly and iterate quickly, or else you’re instantly behind, even if you do successfully acquire it. I think that’s the risk,” Pugh noted. Army officials stressed that Fuze is not just a bureaucratic reshuffling. “This isn’t just like a rebranding. We’re coalescing these innovation programs from a strategic, operational and execution standpoint… to help companies move through that pipeline more quickly,” Willis said. “The end outcome we want is having the best technology here quickly,” Pugh said.

Hmm, I wonder if maybe there’s a reason that technology which people’s lives depend on has a somewhat slower development process than, like, a fucking app. Now, there obviously is plenty of graft in US military procurement, but throwing stacks of cash at random tech companies doesn’t exactly solve that problem.

Authored by Kamal Aarif Kamaruddin, Reviewed by Aarani Diana Santhananaban, All photos are provided by GEGAR.

Since October 7th – which remains one of the greatest acts of decolonisation by an occupied population in modern history – I joined the millions of people across the world who, out of a sense of moral and historical urgency, became radicalised into joining the mass actions against the ongoing genocide in Palestine.

Along with a few fellow comrades, we formed Gegar Amerika, later known as GEGAR (Gerakan Gabungan Anti-Imperialis), – a progressive, anti-imperialist and anti-zionist collective united for the liberation of Palestine.

We slept in tents for 7 days outside of the U.S. embassy; defended the encampment against police and state authorities; joined hundreds in staging a sit-in against the police for its defence of the U.S. embassy in January 2024, and got called into questioning by the police for organising a protest against the NATSEC military exhibition in May 2024, which hosted the biggest sponsors of the genocide including Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, and Leonardo.

On June 10th last year, we disrupted the U.S. National Independence Day Dinner in KL, which hosted the U.S. Embassy while hundreds were being massacred in a joint US-Israeli operation in Nuseirat refugee camp.

Since then, we continued to organise direct actions against complicit Western imperialist  embassies and zionist corporations; from PNB and Sime Darby’s ties to Caterpillar to the starvation campaigns waged by Israel, America, U.K., and European Union against Gaza.

In response to Bisan Al-Owda’s call for action to stop the US-Israeli siege of Gaza, Malaysian protestors picket the front gates of the US embassy, banging pots and pans, while holding a banner which reads “Israel, Amerikka, UK, & EU: Stop Starving Gaza!“, 30 July 2025.

Yet, as we near the eve of Hari Kebangsaan and Hari Malaysia, the Malaysian government and its institutions, in spite of its nationalistic and superficially pro-Palestinian rhetoric, continues to serve and enforce the agenda of its imperialist masters.

After 2 years of being on the frontlines against genocide, it is clear that the question of Palestine is no longer just a struggle against a 77-year old zionist occupation. In the heart of Malaya, it is also a struggle against the oppressive neo-colonial state in Putrajaya, which upholds the interests of Washington and its Western allies, while oppressing workers and Indigenous peoples at home.

A Malaysian police officer carries a gun during a GEGAR protest at the US Embassy on the anniversary of the First Intifada, 13 December 2024.

Our solidarity as Malaysians falls flat as long as we refuse to confront a basic but uncomfortable reality: that until Malaysia breaks away from the forces of U.S. imperialism, we are and continue to be complicit in the U.S.-Israeli death machine. We have been and are still enabling the genocide of Palestinians.

Recently, in July 2025, the Malaysian military hosted U.S. and Australian armed forces in Perak, as the Western-imperialist war machine actively committed genocide and mass murder across Palestine, Yemen, Lebanon, Iran, and Global South. Not only does it partner us in genocide: it invites the presence of war criminals in our communities; polluting our environment and neighbourhoods with tanks, fighter jets, and armed trucks, muddying our moral standards, and tainting our obligations to the oppressed.

Meanwhile, next year, in 2026, the Royal Malaysian Navy will participate in the bi-annual RIMPAC naval exercise in Hawaii alongside the imperialist America and zionist state of  Israel. The RIMPAC exercises is a microcosm of capitalism’s murderous tendencies: the fascist militaries of the global ruling class gather in the Pacific to exchange the technologies, tactics, and strategies that they have gained from waging wars and counterinsurgencies against poor and oppressed bodies around the globe.

Not only does our navy participate in a military exercise alongside genocidal forces, but activists in Okinawa and Hawa’ii have long protested the RIMPAC exercises for its destruction of Indigenous lands, contamination of air and water, and sexual and patriarchal violence against Indigenous women, girls, queer and gender-diverse people.

Soldier or policeman brandishes a rifle while overlooking a pots-and-pans banging action at the gates of the US embassy to protest the US, Israeli, EU, and UK-imposed starvation of Gaza, 30 July 2025.

After 2 years of boycotts and rallies, it is clear that the Malaysian state remains firmly loyal to the forces of Capital and Empire. The same government that shook hands with Ismail Haniyeh has no qualms joining forces with the zionist army bombing patients in Al-Shifa and massacring hundreds in a single 10-minute operation in Nuseirat.

Meanwhile, global corporations, financing the genocide have further entrenched their neo-colonialist interests in Malaysia. In July 2024, as humanitarian zones in Mawasi were relentlessly bombed, a joint consortium led by Khazanah, EPF, Abu Dhabi Investment, and Blackrock acquired shares of Malaysian Airport Holdings Berhad (MAHB), handing control of 39 Malaysian airports to the Blackrock monopoly.

Blackrock is a major sponsor of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, funding American weapons manufacturers such as Lockheed Martin Corp., Boeing Co, Raytheon Co, General Dynamics Corp, and Northrop Grumman Corp. For decades, Blackrock has funded America’s overseas wars of aggression, The cumulative death toll from the post-9/11 wars of counterterrorism has reached over 4.5 million in Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Yemen in what could only be considered a modern Holocaust.

As it spreads war and devastation across the globe, Blackrock has maintained a monopolistic grip over the Malaysian economy; owning equity shares in hundreds of firms including Simes Darby, Petronas, Tenaga Nasional, and more. Since the past decade, Blackrock has played an increasingly influential role in almost every aspect of working-class life in Malaysia from EPF pensions to healthcare to “Syariah-compliant” banking.

Activists stage a sit-in in front of the Employee Provident Fund (EPF) headquarters in Jalan Palestin to protest Blackrock investments in retirement funds, 29 August 2024.

Meanwhile, in its drive to secure financial investments from Western imperialist entities, Anwar’s government is pushing for the construction of Microsoft and Google cloud infrastructure and data centres across Malaysia, exploiting our environment, and polluting our land, water, and air. In allowing our resources to be colonised by Western tech giants, Malaysia becomes an integral link in a long imperialist supply chain from the mining and exploitation of minerals in the Congo and Bolivia, to the supply of digital infrastructure and services for Israeli and American war criminals.

continued in reply

US Treasury secretary Scott Bessent on Sunday met Chinese vice-premier He Lifeng in Madrid for a fourth round of negotiations that some hope will pave the way for President Trump to visit Beijing just before the October 31 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in South Korea.

But insufficient progress in the US-China talks have reduced the odds of a Beijing summit and made it more likely that Trump and Xi will hold a lower profile meeting at Apec, according to people familiar with the situation.

One person familiar with the talks said a big stumbling block was US frustration at Beijing for not cracking down on export of chemicals used to make fentanyl, a deadly synthetic opioid. Beijing has offered to take action, but only in tandem with the US eliminating fentanyl-related tariffs that Trump imposed on China. The US insists that China should take action and show results before any tariff relief.

Recent developments have also cast doubt on whether the pieces will fall into place for a summit in Beijing. Trump on Saturday urged Nato countries to impose 50-100 per cent sanctions on China to pressure Beijing to stop it buying oil from Russia. That came days after he urged the EU to impose a 100 per cent levy on imports from China.

“The Chinese are willing to host without conditions but, so long as parts of the administration say a fentanyl package must be implemented first, the US will remain the obstacle to a visit,” said the former official

Evan Medeiros, a China expert at Georgetown University, said whether Trump would go to Beijing would be a “very close call in the history of close calls” and would “depend on Trump and come down to the last minute”.

After the Gen-Z movement became explosive, an organization called ‘Hami Nepal’ suddenly started being promoted. Those who initially led the movement, called for people to take to the streets, and applied for permission from the CDO office for the program suddenly disappeared. Suddenly, Hami Nepal, Kathmandu Mayor Balendra Sah, and Hami Nepal President Sudan Gurung came to the front, claiming to be the real organizers of the movement.

…

According to the organization’s [Hami Nepal] website, he [the group’s chairman] appears to be involved in anti-China activities, namely the Free Tibet movement. He still has the logo and link of ‘Students for a Free Tibet’ on his group’s website as a supporting organization.

…

Their [RAW and CIA] pre-plan was to turn the supposedly peaceful movement into violent, to create an uncontrollable situation and achieve their goal. According to a source, they mobilized schoolchildren to the front line [on the first day of the protest]. They created a situation where the police would open fire and as soon as the police opened fire, they would order sharpshooters kept on standby to open fire and shoot students in their college uniforms targetting the head and chest.

…

The source claims that the protesters themselves cleaned the streets and even managed the garbage themselves, as they suspected that such bullet casings would be found.

… within two days of the formation of the government, the same group has started demanding the resignation of the newly appointed Prime Minister Sushil Karki, saying that she has not paid due attention to the treatment and compensation of the families of the martyrs and the injured.

Prince’s latest venture has been security contracting in weak countries, primarily Haiti and Peru. He has carved out a niche for himself by offering a market-based option for functions typically performed by sovereign states—in particular, the exercise of violence for both domestic order and operations abroad. In Haiti, Prince’s services have been retained to combat rampant gang violence near Port-au-Prince, where opportunistic non-state actors have all but taken over territories surrounding the capital city. In Peru, Prince’s company Vectus Global recently signed a contract worth $10 million a year to eliminate criminal networks that threaten the country’s gold mines. Governments too strained to monopolize violence within their borders engage Prince, who brings the organization, discipline, and technology that local security forces lack. While Prince’s reputation took a hit in the wake of the Iraq War, he is now back in favor with the US government. The brother of Betsy DeVos and occasional swimming partner of Pete Hegseth, the tycoon has maintained close ties with the Trump administration. Prince has pitched the White House a $25 billion contract for mass deportations, with a plan for privately run processing camps as well as the transportation and manpower necessary for such operations. On the matter of Trump’s deportation goals, Prince commented that “if they’re going to hit those kinds of numbers and scale, they’re going to need additional private sector” support. His vision of contracting out mass deportations shows how the same logic of privatized violence migrates seamlessly between domestic and foreign spheres, where state functions are delegated to private companies. One can imagine Prince having similar proposals at the ready for overseas endeavors should Trump desire to don “the imperial hat.”

Mercenaries have long been derided as disloyal and undisciplined, with Niccolò Machiavelli designating them “useless and dangerous” in his serendipitously titled The Prince. To rely on hired arms, Machiavelli argued, was to put oneself at risk of either incompetence or mutiny. This danger was realized quite recently by Evgeny Prigozhin’s ill-fated march to Moscow with his Wagner Group, the mercenaries on whom Russia relied in Ukraine, Syria, and throughout northern and central Africa. Despite Machiavelli’s warnings, governments have long depended on private actors to supplement state capacity: Queen Elizabeth I engaged privateers to cripple Spanish command of the seas, Hessians were employed to suppress American revolutionaries, and, notably, joint-stock companies ran the business of empire. Historian Philip Stern popularized the term “the company-state” in his eponymous 2011 book to capture the public–private hybridization that characterized imperial projects from the mid-16th century onward. Stern focuses on the innovation of the chartered joint-stock corporation, an organizational form notable for the merchant imperialism of the British Empire. The paragon of this form is the East India Company. Originally formed to manage trade in the East Indies, the Company would later account for half of the world’s trade in the 18th century and govern the Indian subcontinent with an army twice the size of the British military. Alongside the East India Company were other shareholder-owned enterprises granted monopolies over trade in various parts of the globe: The Muscovy Company monopolized trade between England and Russia, while the Hudson Bay, Virginia, and Plymouth companies directed trade and colonization in North America.

Cooperation with private capital allowed the British to expand their political influence and control without exhausting state resources to maintain a far-flung empire. In India, the East India Company performed the dirty work of imperial extraction as a private actor. To do so, it assembled a pseudo-state to administer and coerce. The British Army was not needed to protect the property of European merchants. The Company had its own incentives to maintain order and created a private army to do so. It was this delegation to private actors that enabled the relatively weak British state to transform a minimalist “trading post empire” into the territorial domination of the British Empire in the 18th and 19th centuries. However, it would be a mistake to view such public–private relationships as purely one-directional. Narratives that cast the state as simply “outsourcing empire” obscure the blurred boundaries between public and private. In the 1770s, nearly a quarter of East India Company shares were held by members of Parliament. As the Company expanded British commerce and power overseas, it also redirected state policy toward shareholder interests and away from the public good. This was not mere delegation of empire’s dirty work. Rather, it was the erosion of the state for private gain. Empowering private actors to wield violence and extract revenues from subject populations creates entities that perform the functions of a sovereign state without the legitimacy that comes from accountability to the people in whose name they rule. The state’s acquisition of territory and its exercise of violence were not directed by the public good but by private profit. Edmund Burke, advocating for more oversight of the Company, argued that Parliament “had not a right to make a market of our duties.” In short, the state had endowed a private entity with a power that was not the state’s to give away.

On September 16, 2007, a team of private security contractors opened fire on a crowd of civilians in Baghdad’s Nisour Square. The contractors, a Blackwater team answering to call sign “Raven 23,” fired upon a Kia sedan that failed to yield to their warnings, believing it to be a car bomb. Seventeen Iraqi civilians were killed in the ensuing chaos and 20 more were wounded, with several of the victims shot in the back as they tried to flee. The shooting only stopped when one of the Blackwater guards drew his weapon on a fellow guard who would not stop firing. The Nisour Square massacre prompted a crisis of jurisdiction. A United Nations report on the event concluded that private security contractors were performing military actions, which are forbidden by the United Nations’s 1989 Mercenary Convention; however, the United States is not a signatory. As private citizens, the Raven 23 guards were not subject to the laws of the US military and could not be court-martialed. The Iraqi government demanded that the perpetrators face criminal charges in Iraq, but Order 17 of the Coalition Provisional Authority—the governing body of occupied Iraq—specified that private contractors were not subject to Iraqi law. The FBI eventually carried out an investigation, the validity of which was disputed by Erik Prince during a seven-hour testimony before Congress. Four Blackwater employees were convicted of murder and manslaughter charges in 2014. All four were later pardoned by President Donald Trump in December 2020. During the Iraq War, private military contractors outnumbered US military personnel on the ground. When four Blackwater employees were ambushed and brutally murdered in Fallujah by Iraqi insurgents, the deaths of these “private American citizens” led Lt. Col. Gary Brandl to claim that “the enemy has got a face. He’s called Satan. He’s in Fallujah. And we’re going to destroy him.” The subsequent siege and aerial bombardment of the city led to estimates that over half of its 50,000 homes were destroyed, along with 60 schools and 65 mosques and shrines. Blackwater was far from alone. Kellogg, Brown & Root, a Halliburton subsidiary, had the largest presence of any US contractor in Iraq, with approximately 14,000 personnel on the ground for logistical support operations. KBR’s actions in Iraq revived a nickname the company had acquired during the Vietnam War: Burn & Loot. The company received over $40 billion in federal contracts during the Iraq War. Private contractor CACI Premier Technology, Inc. was found legally responsible by a federal jury for the torture of three Iraqi men at Abu Ghraib in 2004 after 15 years of legal limbo.

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