North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s powerful sister has accused South Korea of misleading the public about ties between the Koreas, denying claims that Pyongyang removed some propaganda-blaring loudspeakers from their shared border.
In a statement carried by the state-controlled Korean Central News Agency on Thursday, Kim Yo Jong blasted the claim by South Korea’s military as an “unfounded unilateral supposition and a red herring.”
“We have never removed loudspeakers installed on the border area and are not willing to remove them,” Kim said.
Kim accused Seoul of “building up the public opinion while embellishing their new policy” towards Pyongyang.
“It is their foolish calculation that if they manage to make us respond to their actions, it would be good, and if not, their actions will at least reflect their ‘efforts for detente’ and they will be able to shift the responsibility for the escalation of tensions onto the DPRK and win the support of the world,” Kim said, using the acronym of North Korea’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
Such a “trick” is nothing but a “pipedream” and “does not arouse our interest at all,” Kim added.
“Whether the ROK withdraws its loudspeakers or not, stops broadcasting or not, postpones its military exercises or not and downscales them or not, we do not care about them and are not interested in them,” she said, using the acronym of South Korea’s official name, the Republic of Korea.
“The shabby deceptive farce is no longer attractive.”
In a statement quoted by local media, South Korea’s Ministry of Unification did not directly address Kim’s claims, but said it would continue its efforts toward the “normalisation” and “stabilisation” of inter-Korean ties.
Kim’s broadside comes after South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said on Saturday that Pyongyang had removed some of the loudspeakers, days after the South Korean side took down similar speakers on its side of the border.
North Korea is highly sensitive to criticism of the ruling Kim family, which has ruled the isolated state with iron first for nearly eight decades and is treated with God-like reverence in official commentary.
Since the inauguration of left-leaning South Korean President Lee Jae-myung in June, Seoul has been seeking rapprochement with its reclusive neighbour, after years of elevated tensions between the Koreas under the conservative ex-president Yoon Suk-yeol.
But Kim Yo Jong, who oversees the propaganda operations of the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea, has repeatedly shot down the possibility of reconciliation between the sides.
In a scathing dismissal of Lee’s rapprochement efforts last month, Kim said there was no “more serious miscalculation” than believing that relations could be repaired “with a few sentimental words.”
In her remarks on Thursday, Kim also poured scorn on South Korean media reports suggesting that Pyongyang could use Friday’s summit between United States President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin to communicate with Washington.
“This is a typical proof that the ROK is having a false dream,” she said.
B&M shoppers have been searching stores for the “gorgeous” mirror that’s gone viral on TikTok
B&M shoppers love the new range(Image: Getty)
B&M shoppers are heaping praise on a “gorgeous” floor length mirror that’s left them impressed. The budget retailer is well known for stocking on-trend and affordable homeware – and a new favourite may have hit the shelves.
B&M is stocking the Full Length Mirror with Stand, priced at £35. It comes in black or gold and has proven hugely popular online.
TikTok user @sadaaloves shared a clip of the mirror, alongside the caption: “£35 obsessed guys it’s a NEED!!!!” The video racked up more than 5,000 views, and a number of likes and comments.
Among them, one person said: “I’m hunting for this but my local doesn’t have it.” A second wrote: “I can’t find it anywhere” and a third added: “I CAN’T FIND IT.”
A different person said: “RUN.” Another wrote: “Literally going to a different one today! NEED this for my new flat.”
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Another TikTok user, @sammibrooksx, also shared a clip of the mirror. The caption read: “Run, don’t walk to B&M. I’m obsessed!!!”
The video racked up 196.8k views, more than 9,000 likes and many comments from excited shoppers. One person wrote: “Love it” and a second said: “Been to literally 10 B&Ms not one sold this – so annoying.”
A third added: “How nice is that and the price is insaneee.” A fourth shopper said: “Such a bargain!!”A fifth wrote: “I got mine in gold and I’m obsessed.”
B&M’s Full Length Mirror with Stand(Image: B&M )
The praise continued, with one shopper writing: “Oh wow! It looks gorgeous!” and another saying: “Looks gorgeous, will have to get one.” One shopper dubbed it the “best mirror ever.”
The full B&M description reads: “Add style and functionality to your home with this Full Length Mirror with Stand. This full length mirror is perfect for checking your outfit on the way out of the door, or for adding a decorative piece to any room.”
New Delhi, India – “My right eye swells up in the heat, so I stopped going to the landfill last year,” says 38-year-old Sofia Begum, wiping her watering eyes. Begum married at the age of 13, and for more than 25 years, she and her husband have picked through mountains of rubbish at Delhi’s Ghazipur landfill, scavenging for recyclable waste they can sell to scrap dealers.
Dressed in a ragged, green and yellow kurta and sitting on a chair in a narrow lane in the middle of the slum settlement where she lives beside the dump site, Begum explains that she came into contact with medical waste in 2022, which infected her eye.
Her eye swells up painfully when it is exposed to the sun for too long, so she has had to stop working in the summer months. Even in winter, she struggles to work as much as she used to.
“Now I can’t work as much. I used to carry 40 to 50 kilogrammes of waste a day. Now my capacity has reduced to half,” she says.
As temperatures in Delhi soared as high as 49 degrees Celsius (120 degrees Fahrenheit) in June, causing the India Meteorological Department (IMD) to issue an “orange alert” for two days, three rubbish sites at Ghazipur, Bhalswa and Okhla in India’s capital city became environmental ticking time bombs. Choking with rubbish and filled far beyond their capacity, these towering waste mountains have become hubs for toxic fires, methane leaks and an unbearable stench.
It’s a slow-burning public health threat that every year blights the lives of the tens of thousands of people who live in the shadow of these garbage heaps.
Sofia Begum, 38, in the slum settlement she lives in beside the Ghazipur landfill site in New Delhi. Her eye was infected by medical waste last year and it swells painfully in sunlight [Poorvi Gupta/Al Jazeera]
Making a living from toxic work
Waste pickers are usually informal workers who earn a living by collecting, sorting and selling recyclable materials like plastic, paper and metal to scrap dealers. They are typically paid by those who buy the materials they forage, depending on the quality and quantity they can find and sort.
As a result, they have no stable income and their work is hazardous, particularly in the summer months.
According to a study published in the scientific journal Nature, the temperature at these landfill sites varies based on the size of the dump. The temperature from dumps exceeding 50 metres in height generally lies between 60 and 70C (158F) in the summer. This “heat island effect” is caused by the decomposition of organic waste, which not only generates heat but also releases hazardous gases.
“These landfills are gas chambers in the making,” says Anant Bhan, a public health researcher who has specialised in global health, health policy and bioethics for 20 years. “Waste pickers work in extreme heat, surrounded by toxic gases. This leads to long-term health complications,” he explains.
“Additionally, they are exposed to several gases, like the highly flammable methane, which causes irritation to their respiratory system. The rotting waste also leads to skin-related complications among the waste pickers.”
Ghazipur, which now towers at least 65 metres high – equivalent to a 20-storey building – has become a potent symbol of Delhi’s climate crisis.
Begum’s eye started swelling up in the intense heat last year. “I went to the doctor and he suggested surgery to treat my eye, which would cost me around Rs 30,000 ($350) but I don’t have that kind of money,” she says.
Like other waste pickers, Begum says she is reluctant to visit the government hospital, where she could receive free treatment, as it can take six months to receive a diagnosis there. “It is a waste of time to stand in queue for long hours at the cost of work days, and the diagnosis takes months to come through,” she explains. “I prefer going to the Mohalla Clinic, they check the Aadhaar Card [a form of identification] and instantly give medicines.”
The Mohalla Clinics, an initiative started by former Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, offer free primary healthcare, medicines and diagnostic tests to residents located in low-income areas.
Tanzila, 32, who works as a waste picker at Ghazipur landfill site in New Delhi, fainted in the scorching sun last year and now works mostly at night [Poorvi Gupta/Al Jazeera]
A ticking time bomb
On a blazing summer day in July as temperatures reach 40C (104F), Tanzila, 32, who also lives in the slum next to the landfill site, is preparing for her night shift of waste picking. “It’s just too hot now,” she says. Tanzila, a mother of three children aged eight to 16, who has done this job for 12 years, says she passed out from dehydration while working under the sun last year. “Now I only go at night. During the day, it feels like being baked alive.”
Slender and dressed in a full-sleeve red, floral kurta with a headscarf, Tanzila appears exhausted and weary. She explains that when she did work during the day, “I would go early in the morning, come back around 9am, then again go around 4pm and come back around 7pm. But for the past two years, I have been going with other women only at night during summers because it has become harder to work during the day in this weather.”
Sheikh Akbar Ali, cofounder of Basti Suraksha Manch and a former door-to-door waste picker, has been campaigning for the rights of waste pickers across 52 sites in Delhi for the past 20 years. He explains that the conditions can be more dangerous at night than during the day.
“There are many vehicles like the tractors and JCBs operating on the landfills at night, and the waste pickers who work at night wear torchlights on their head, which indicates their visibility on the landfill. However, waste and gas leaks are more visible during the day.” This is because fires and smoke can more easily be seen in the daylight.
Despite the government’s repeated assurances that these garbage mountains will be cleared, little has changed on the ground. In the latest assurance made in May 2025, Manjinder Singh Sirsa, Delhi’s environment minister, claimed that the “garbage mountains” would be completely cleared by 2028, contradicting his own statement from April 2025, in which he had said that they would “disappear like dinosaurs” in five years.
The entrance of Ghazipur landfill through which all the trucks carrying the city’s waste enter [Poorvi Gupta/Al Jazeera]
As the summer heat accelerates the decomposition of organic waste, the release of hazardous gases has worsened the air quality in Delhi, something environmentalists and public health experts have sounded the alarm over.
According to a report from AQI, an open-source air quality monitoring platform based in New Delhi, since 2020, satellites have detected 124 significant methane leaks across the city, including a particularly large one in Ghazipur in 2021, which leaked 156 tonnes of methane per hour.
Even though the same work which puts food on the table also makes them ill, waste pickers like Begum and Tanzila say they have little choice other than to continue with their work. “Garbage is gold to us. We don’t get bothered by the smell of waste. It feeds our families, and why would we leave?” asks Tanzila.
Their labour, unrecognised as a profession by the government, comes with few protections, no health insurance and no stable income. Rubbish pickers must fashion their own safety gear from whatever they can afford – such as used disposable masks which can be bought in the market for 5 to 10 rupees (6 to 11 cents) – but nothing is particularly effective at keeping workers free from hazards.
“They don’t wear gloves because the heat makes their hands sweat easily and they aren’t able to hold waste properly. Even the masks are a total waste because all the sweat gets collected in the mask, which makes it difficult for them to breathe,” adds Akbar.
‘The garbage grows, and we keep working.’ Shah Alam, a Delhi waste picker who also drives an electric rickshaw [Poorvi Gupta/Al Jazeera]
When climate change and waste mismanagement meet
New Delhi’s civic bodies, which are under pressure from environmental and health activists to demonstrate some visible progress in tackling the city’s waste and pollution problems, have largely responded with quick fixes, most notably plans to build four incinerator plants in Okhla, Narela, Tenkhand and Ghazipur. But experts warn that such infrastructure-centric solutions only mask deeper problems and could also cause further environmental damage.
Incinerators often release various harmful pollutants such as dioxins, furans, mercury contamination and particulate matter into the air, which pose serious health risks, they say.
According to a 2010 report by the World Health Organization, dioxins are “highly toxic and can cause reproductive and developmental problems, damage the immune system, interfere with hormones and also cause cancer”.
Furthermore, if incineration plants replace landfill-based recycling, many fear the erasure of their livelihoods altogether.
“Delhi’s shift to incinerators has completely excluded informal waste pickers, particularly women,” says Bharati Chaturvedi, founder of Chintan Environmental Research and Action Group. “It threatens their livelihoods and pushes them into deeper poverty. It is an environmental disaster in the making. Incinerators emit toxic fumes and undermine recycling efforts.”
“Beyond just closing landfills or building incinerators, we need to ensure that waste pickers have alternative livelihoods and are part of the formal waste management system,” says Chaturvedi.
“This is not just about clearing garbage,” she argues. “It’s about including waste pickers in the formal economy. It’s about creating decentralised, community-level waste management systems. And it’s about acknowledging that climate change and poverty are deeply interconnected.”
A view of the Ghazipur landfill site from its entrance [Poorvi Gupta/Al Jazeera]
Activists and public health professionals advocate for the creation of a decentralised waste system, one that includes segregating waste into separate places according to type, ward-level composting (processing organic waste locally to avoid transportation), and robust recycling systems.
Formalising the role of waste pickers by offering legal recognition, fair wages, protective gear and access to welfare schemes would not only empower one of the city’s most vulnerable communities but also help build a climate-resilient waste management model, say environment activists.
Back at the Ghazipur landfill, the reality remains grim. Fires break out with increasing frequency, and the acrid air clings to nearby homes. For residents and waste pickers, the daily battle against the heat, stench and illness is a matter of survival.
More than 100 aid groups have accused Israel of obstructing life-saving aid from entering Gaza, resulting in vast quantities of relief supplies remaining stranded in warehouses across Jordan and Egypt as more Palestinians starve.
Aid trucks have massed on Gaza’s borders amid Israel’s blockade of the famine-stricken territory, and new rules are being used by Israel to deny the entry of food, medicine, water and temporary shelters, the groups said in a joint statement released on Thursday.
“Despite claims by Israeli authorities that there is no limit on humanitarian aid entering Gaza, most major international NGOs [nongovernmental organisations] have been unable to deliver a single truck of life-saving supplies since 2 March,” the groups said.
“Instead of clearing the growing backlog of goods, Israeli authorities have rejected requests from dozens of NGOs to bring in life-saving goods, citing that these organisations are ‘not authorised to deliver aid’,” the groups, which include Doctors Without Borders (known by their French acronym, MSF) and Oxfam, said.
Relief organisations that have worked in Gaza for decades are now told by Israel that they are not “authorised” to deliver aid due to new “registration rules”, which include so-called “security” vetting.
Hospitals in Gaza are now without basic supplies as a result, and children, the elderly and those with disabilities are “dying from hunger and preventable illnesses”, the statement continued.
Bushra Khalidi, Oxfam policy lead, said her organisation has more than $2.5m worth of humanitarian aid supplies that “have been rejected from entering Gaza by Israel”.
MSF’s emergency coordinator in Gaza, Aitor Zabalgogeazkoa, said the restrictions on aid are part of Israel’s militarised distribution of relief supplies, spearheaded by the notorious GHF.
“The militarised food distribution scheme has weaponised starvation and curated suffering. Distributions at GHF sites have resulted in extreme levels of violence and killings, primarily of young Palestinian men, but also of women and children, who have gone to the sites in the hope of receiving food,” Zabalgogeazkoa said.
At least 859 Palestinians have been killed attempting to access aid supplies around GHF distribution sites since May.
The more than 100 relief organisations that signed the statement have called for pressure to be exerted on Israel to end its “weaponisation of aid”, for Israel to end its “bureaucratic obstruction” and for unconditional delivery of life-saving humanitarian aid to Gaza.
Israel’s Diaspora Minister Amichai Chikli, who had a role in the new rules imposed on aid groups, told the AFP news agency that registration of humanitarian groups could be rejected if Israeli authorities deem that its activities deny the democratic character of Israel or ” promote delegitimisation campaigns”, such as the movement to boycott Israel over its war on Gaza.
The joint outcry by aid groups comes as Israeli forces launch a new operation to take over Gaza City, which will displace more than a million people and force them to move south to concentration zones.
