Korea fires warning shots after North Korean drone seen

South Korean President Park Geun-hye said further provocations by the North including “cyber-terrorism” were possible, and said new sanctions should be tougher than those in the past, but did not give specifics.

“The worldwide community’s counter measures… must differ from the past”, Park said.

North Korea has sent drones over the border for surveillance of military posts and government facilities in the past, according to the defense ministry. The meeting comes exactly a week after North Korea’s fourth nuclear test last Wednesday.

China, in response to North Korea’s nuclear test, has reiterated a set of basic principles such as denuclearization and communication, but refrained from mentioning actual sanctions. But China is still seen as reluctant to clamp down on the North in part because of fears that a toppled government in Pyongyang would see millions of desperate North Koreans flooding across the border with China and a U.S.-backed South Korean government in control of the Korean Peninsula.

The North’s official name is Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

China’s Communist Party-affiliated newspaper says that China will oppose a UN Security Council resolution aimed at bringing down the North Korean regime.

SEOUL – South Korean soldiers on Wednesday fired warning shots at a suspected North Korean drone that crossed the tense border, the defence ministry said.

But experts are questioning the North’s boast, saying early evidence suggests the blast, which caused a magnitude 5.1 quake, similar to its last test three years ago, wasn’t caused by a hydrogen bomb.

North Korean military personnel clap hands in a rally, after North Korea said Wednesday it had conducted a hydrogen bomb test, at the Kim Il Sung Square in Pyongyang, Friday, Jan. 8, 2016.

South Korean President Park Geun-hye (C) presides over the National Security Council at the Presidential Blue House in Seoul, South Korea.

Last week, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said he had told his Chinese counterpart that China’s approach to North Korea had not succeeded.

Park vowed Wednesday to continue loudspeaker broadcasts across the Demilitarized Zone that have angered the North, apparently rejecting Britain’s call to halt the barrage of propaganda and pop music to avoid further escalating the latest crisis on the peninsula. North Korea has denied any involvement in the attack.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un inspecting a firing contest.

“I believe that China will play a necessary role as a permanent member of the Security Council”, Park said.

“It was a process indispensable for carrying out the WPK’s line on simultaneously carrying out the economic construction and the building of nuclear force to cope with the U.S. ever-more undisguised hostile policy toward the DPRK”, the agency said.

“The five pending labor-related bills are improvement plans to create jobs for youths and strengthen the social safety network”, she said.

That is especially true among the many North Koreans who have turned to private trade to survive after starvation in the 1990s ended government hand-outs and crippled a state rationing system, laying the foundation for a now-thriving gray-market economy. Initiated by Rep. Ed Royce of California, the North Korea Sanctions Enforcement Act of 2015, passed by the House on January 12, includes a number of first-time measures.