“The action of North Korea is the greatest source of its instability”, Blinken said.
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“We are looking to China to show leadership on the issue”, Blinken said, after talks with South Korean Foreign Minister Yun Byung-Se. U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken, left, shakes hands with South Korean Defense Minister Han Min-Koo during their meeting at the Defense Ministry in Seoul, South Korea Wednesday, Jan. 20, 2016.
After the bomb test, the rival Koreas resumed psychological warfare with Seoul blasting anti-Pyongyang broadcasts from border loudspeakers, while Pyongyang does the same and also floats propaganda leaflets over the border by balloon, according to South Korean officials.
“We could interpret Kim’s appointment [to head the UFD] as Pyongyang’s declaration that its business with the Park government is now over”, Lim Eul-chul, a professor of North Korean studies at Kyungnam University, told the Korea JoongAng Daily.
“If strong and substantive steps are not taken again this time, the worldwide community would send the wrong signal to North Korea that should it carry out a fifth or sixth nuclear test, (the global community) can’t do anything about it”, Park said. The leaflets referred to her as “human filth”.
He added, “Also since it claims to have succeeded in testing a thermonuclear weapon, the North may try to get the upper hand in inter-Korean relations by threatening Seoul with the deployment of a hydrogen bomb”.
South Korean shares rose modestly on Tuesday on hopes that China will roll out more stimulus measures after reporting its slowest annual economic growth in 25 years.
An analyst from a state-run think tank, who asked not to be named, said it is “not usual” to have someone with a military background lead South Korea-related operations within the Party, but there has been precedent in the 1960s.
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The United Nations has suspended a major training program for North Korean diplomats in response to Pyongyang’s recent nuclear test. Another leaflet posted posted on the photo-sharing site Imgur showed half of Park’s face photoshopped to look like a skeleton, and described a speech she gave past year and other remarks as “insane ramblings of a half-corpse”.
