Japan’s UN Ambassador Motohide Yoshikawa, also a council member, said that during the closed-door meeting “everybody condemned the latest failed launches of missiles”.
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“The accused confessed to all crimes he had committed and gathered and offered information on its party, state and military affairs to the South Korean puppet regime, which are tantamount to state subversive plots and espionage”, it said. One certainly hopes that our intelligence agencies are justified in taking a relatively relaxed stance towards Pyongyang.
The last party congress was held in 1980, during which Kim Jong-un’s father – Kim Jong-il – was confirmed as the successor to the state’s founder, Kim Il-sung.
About 29,000 people have left North Korea and arrived in the South since the Korean war, including 1,276 past year, with numbers declining since a 2009 peak.
That particular scenario is too awful to contemplate.
The Foreign Ministry said Monday the instruction was issued in response to North Korea’s threat to retaliate for the recent group defection by 13 North Koreans.
Heading to North Korea for a wedding this week?
North Korea said Tuesday that a South Korean civic group has proposed holding friendly football matches between workers from the two Koreas in Seoul in August to promote cross-border civilian exchanges. South Koreans defecting to the impoverished, authoritarian North is rare.
The two Korea’s have been fierce rivals since the 1950-53 Korean War and tension on the peninsula has been high since January when North Korea conducted its fourth nuclear test.
North Korea has often waited until senior US officials or statesmen came personally to seek the release of the detainees, all the way up to former President Bill Clinton, whose visit in 2009 secured the freedom of American journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling.
“The real source of power in our country isn’t nuclear weapons or any other military means, but the single-minded unity of the people and the leader”.
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Following the latest tests, the United Nations imposed the strongest-ever package of sanctions on North Korea, including a ban on all weapons trade by Pyongyang.
