reports continue to emerge saying that North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un is in critical condition after a recent surgery.

I'm joined in a bonus episode of the Daily Single

podcast by Bruce Klinger, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation who covers

Northeast Asia to discuss the situation. Bruce, it's great to have you on the Daily Signal Podcast.

Well, thanks for having me.

Well, thank you for being with us.

We've all seen reports coming out this week that North Korea's dictator Kim Jong-un is in critical condition

after a recent surgery. Can you tell us what you make of all of these reports?

Well, with anything in North Korea, it's always hard to discern what is going on. Even when I was at the CIA,

we had difficulty getting as much information as we would like. It seems though that the rumors are overblown. We're still waiting for more definitive information.

But it seems that it's all based on one single source report which simply said that Kim Jong-un had heart surgery and he was

recuperating in a villa. The next thing we knew is that CNN had a pretty

sensationalist headline of Kim is in grave condition even though the wording of the article didn't seem to back up the headline and then that just led to a frenzy where some media even reported he was brain dead though they later deleted that tweet.

So right now the South Korean presidential blue house is down plain.

The reports, they say they haven't seen anything different or unusual in Pyongyang.

People with sources in North Korea are saying that life in Pyongyang the capital does seem to be

normal even some schools resuming after a COVID shutdown.

North Korean broadcasting is normal and even today they announced that in Kim's name,

greetings were sent to the Cuban president.

Now, you know, we tend to be fairly cautious when we're longtime career

watchers.

We've seen a lot of rumors in the past of not only Kim but his father and

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