North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said his country needed to rapidly expand its nuclear armament and called U.S.-South Korea military exercises an “obvious expression of their will to provoke war,” state media KCNA reported on Tuesday.

The United States and South Korea kicked off joint military drills this week, including testing an upgraded response to heightened North Korean nuclear threats.

Pyongyang regularly criticizes such drills as rehearsals for invasion and sometimes responds with weapons tests, but Seoul and Washington say they are purely defensive.

The 11-day annual exercises, called Ulchi Freedom Shield, will be on a similar scale to 2024 but adjusted by rescheduling 20 out of 40 field training events to September, South Korea’s military said earlier. Those delays come as South Korean President Lee Jae Myung says he wants to ease tensions with North Korea, though analysts are sceptical about Pyongyang’s response.

The exercises were a “clear expression of … their intention to remain most hostile and confrontational” to North Korea, Kim said during his visit to a navy destroyer on Monday, according to KCNA’s English translation of his remarks.

He said the security environment required the North to “rapidly expand” its nuclear armament, noting that recent U.S.-South Korea exercises involved a “nuclear element.”

Efforts by the United States and its allies to tackle North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons are expected to be discussed at an upcoming meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and South Korean President Lee Jae Myung in Washington.

“Through this move, North Korea is demonstrating its refusal to accept denuclearisation and the will to irreversibly upgrade nuclear weapons,” said Hong Min, North Korea analyst at the Korea Institute for National Unification.

A report by the Federation of American Scientists last year concluded that while North Korea may have produced enough fissile material to build up to 90 nuclear warheads, it had likely assembled closer to 50.

North Korea plans to build a third 5,000-tonne Choe Hyon-class destroyer by October next year and is testing cruise and anti-air missiles for those warships.

(Reporting by Ju-min Park and Joyce Lee; Editing by Ed Davies and Stephen Coates)

White people “can’t originally invent anything more than they were able to invent good music,” Joy Reid claimed last week in a podcast interview with New York Times contributing writer Wajahat Ali, who echoed Reid’s sentiments.

The host of The Joy Reid Show made the comments during an episode of Ali’s Left Hook podcast titled “How Mediocre White Men and their Fragility are Destroying America.”

“We black folk gave y’all country music, hip hop, R&B, jazz, rock and roll. They couldn’t even invent that,” Reid said.

Reid notably did not attribute all music genres to black people. She also did not touch on inventions beyond the realm of music, besides vaguely mentioning “food” and “the economy.”

“We make the food better. We make the economy better. We make the music better,” Ali added.

“Even Elon Musk didn’t invent them damn Teslas. Two other men invented it. He just bought it,” Reid continued.

Tesla’s two co-founders, Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, are both white.

Reid’s comments come as President Donald Trump, now the board chair of The Kennedy Center, recently announced that he would be hosting the 2025 Kennedy Center Honors.

Trump helped pick this year’s honorees, including George Strait, Michael Crawford, Gloria Gaynor, KISS, and Sylvester Stallone. He says he rejected a lot of artists because “They were too woke. I had a couple of wokesters.”

Liberals — Reid included — are upset that Trump is “taking over” The Kennedy Center and the awards ceremony.

“These people cannot create culture on their own. So they need to take over, dominate, appropriate, and control. Without black people, brown people, the DEIs, there’s no culture in America,” Ali insisted to Reid.

According to Ali, Sylvester Stallone receiving a Kennedy Center honor is emblematic of white male fragility.

“Sylvester Stallone became famous because Rocky is all about a white man, a mediocre white man who has no chance in hell of ever ever ever ever ever beating Apollo Creed,” Ali concluded.

Rocky Balboa beats Apollo Creed at the end of “Rocky II.”