S.Korea to offer $8mn aid to N.Korea

Troops from the 2nd Infantry Division of the US Eighth Army, the country’s major ground combat unit on the Korean Peninsula, are now participating in the “Warrior Strike” operation.

US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis said at the Pentagon there were military options to address the North Korean crisis that would not put the South Korean capital, Seoul, at grave risk.

President Donald Trump has signed an executive order that would enable the United States to sanction individual companies and institutions that finance trade with North Korea. The city is within striking range of North Korea.

“We call on all parties to be calmer than calm and not let the situation escalate out of control”, Wang said, according to a report from the state-run China News Service on Thursday.

The comments are the North’s first response to Trump’s debut speech at the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday, during which he vowed to “totally destroy North Korea” if provoked.

He called Kim a “rocket man on a suicide mission” as he condemned the rogue nation’s most recent wave of missile tests.

Pyongyang launched a second ballistic missile across Japan two weeks later.

Beijing’s foreign ministry said Wednesday Foreign Minister Wang Yi told his French counterpart Jean-Yves Le Drian perceptions in the global community of China not doing enough to solve the North Korea nuclear crisis are “wrong”, South Korean news service News 1 reported.

“That is the jugular of the North Korean economy”.

And the Benin-Korea Amicable Association said nothing could stop the North from “dashing toward a socialist power like the storming wind”. Five of them returned to Japan but Tokyo suspects that hundreds more may have been taken.

Pyongyang has warned the United States and South Korea that ground and bombing drills by the two allies could spark a nuclear war.

The relocation came after a North Korean missile was test-fired last week and flew over southern Hokkaido and landed in the Pacific off the island’s east coast — the second flyover in less than a month. Those sanctions include capping crude oil supplies to North Korea at present levels and reductions in other commodities, as well as banning textile imports.

China is North Korea’s main trading partner and conduit for worldwide transactions, and Washington has been pushing Beijing to scale back economic and financial ties to further isolate Pyongyang.

A foreign ministry spokesman for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), the North’s official name, said the latest sanctions represent “the most vicious, unethical and inhumane act of hostility to physically exterminate the people of the DPRK, let alone its system and government”.