Kim Yong-chol, a former North Korean spy master and vice chairman of its
ruling Workers’ Party, had been the country’s most internationally
visible diplomat in the past year, visiting the White House twice and
leading negotiations for North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s two summit
meetings with President Trump. This week, leading South Korean newspapers reported Kim Yong-chol’s fall
from grace. One of them, the conservative daily Chosun Ilbo, went so
far as to report that Mr. Kim had been banished to forced labor, with many of his negotiating team members either executed or sent to prison camps.
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US cuts funds for ‘anti-propaganda’ Iran group that trolled activists
The US state department has cut off funding to a group that purported to
combat Iranian propaganda, after it was found to be trolling US
journalists, human rights activists and academics it deemed to be
insufficiently hostile to the government in Tehran. The group also focused on supporters of the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, which Donald Trump withdrew from
last year, particularly the National Iranian American Council, which
has advocated nuclear diplomacy with Tehran. It used the hashtag
#NIACLobbies4Mullahs.