US House overwhelmingly passes new sanctions against North Korea

The US State Department has said it is looking into a report of a US citizen being held by the North Korean government.

North Korea claimed that it is holding captive another US Citizen, named Kim Dong Chul.

“We are cooperating closely with the United States and allies to come up with effective sanctions that will make North Korea feel bone-numbing pain, not only at the Security Council but also bilaterally and multilaterally”, she said in a speech. Later, he said, he ran a trading and hotel services company in Rason, a special economic zone.

Kim told the network that he lived in Fairfax, Va., but moved in 2001 to the Chinese city of Yanji, near North Korea. Since Friday, South Korea has been blasting anti-Pyongyang propaganda and K-pop songs from huge speakers along the border, and the North is using speakers of its own in an attempt to keep its soldiers from hearing the South Korean messages.

A photograph from a small Korean-American online publication showed a man it said was Kim talking at an unidentified church in the Washington, DC area. Kim claims to have smuggled the materials to South Korea or China.

Matthew Todd Miller, a Californian from Bakersfield, was arrested in April that year and sentenced to six years of hard labor on charges of entering the country illegally and trying to commit an act of espionage. “They asked me to help destroy the (North Korean) system and spread propaganda against the government”. He stressed that his decision to spy on the North was not for financial gains.

A Korean-Canadian pastor imprisoned in North Korea was interviewed with CNN on Monday, after which his family urged the Canadian government to accelerate his return home. However, it is unclear if he was forced to say the things he did.

Kim Bum-soo reports.

In November 2014, North Korea released its last two American prisoners.

Lim, of the Light Presbyterian Church in Toronto, lost contact with the church when he went to North Korea a year ago on his humanitarian missions.

Experts from the USA and other countries have expressed doubts about the North’s claims that last week’s test was of a more powerful hydrogen bomb, as the blast was of about the same size as that from an atomic bomb test in 2013.

Local media said strategic assets the United States may deploy to its military bases in South Korea include B-52 bombers, F-22 stealth fighter jets and nuclear-powered submarines. The U.S. has reiterated its commitment to defending South Korea and ensuring peace and stability in the highly militarized region.