North Korea said on Monday it had told the United States it will cut the only channel of communication between them, at the United Nations in NY, after Washington blacklisted leader Kim Jong Un last week for human rights abuses.
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The North’s foreign ministry notified the USA government that it would effectively halt all communications with Washington through the North’s office at the United Nations in NY, state-run KCNA said.
All matters related to the United States, including the handling of US citizens detained by Pyongyang, will be conducted under its “wartime law”, its official KCNA news agency said.
A US website that monitors North Korea says satellite imagery shows a high level of activity at the isolated nation’s nuclear test site.
The US last week imposed new sanctions which describe Mr Kim as being directly responsible for a long list of serious human rights abuses.
Observations suggest that North Korea’s Punggye-ri nuclear test site was a hive of activity as recently as July 7, with a particular focus on the same area that witnessed the country’s last two tests.
Meanwhile, China and Russian Federation have also criticised the defence system. -South Korea alliance, the release said. North Korea refers to itself as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK).
For years now, Seoul and Washington have been nervously watching North Korea, China’s only ally and its client state, totally focused on developing significant nuclear arsenal as well as a variety of ballistic missiles.
Diplomacy with Pyongyang resulted in the liberation of Christian missionary Kenneth Bae, a move that North Korea has indicated it regrets following the publication of Bae’s book, Not Forgotten, which details the life of a captive in a North Korean labor camp. This deployment is a joint response to North Korea’s continual testing of new medium- and long-range ballistic missiles and to its belligerent rhetoric, including the declared intention to attack U.S. military bases in the Pacific and the continental US.
North Korea and the United States remain technically at war because the 1950-53 Korean War, in which Washington sided with the South, ended only with a truce.
The KN-11 submarine-launched ballistic missile was launched off the east coast near the small North Korean coastal town, Singpo, where efforts to develop this kind of system were previously detected by analysts according to an official from Seoul’s Defense ministry.
South Korea’s President Park Geun-hye said Monday she agreed on the US missile deployment because North Korea has openly threatened to launch nuclear and missile attacks on South Korea.
The North threatened to carry out military strikes from the moment the two countries decide on the location of the THAAD batteries in the South.
“As the deployment of the THAAD was decided in a sovereign manner with the aim of defending the country and the people from North Korea’s nuclear missile threats, the issue should not be changed due to opinions of neighboring countries”, Han said.
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Echoing previous assurances that THAAD was only directed at North Korea, Pentagon spokesperson Gary Ross stated that THAAD would essentially be a supplement to existing missile defense systems in the region.
