US wants more pressure on China to help on NKorea sanctions

“North Korea needed a good result to celebrate at the congress and that was the hydrogen bomb test”, said Lee Cheol-woo, a member of South Korea’s parliamentary intelligence committee, citing a briefing by the South’s intelligence agency.

Some reports said the North Korean military used balloons to launch as many as 1 million leaflets across the border, with most of the materials landing in South Korea’s northern Gyeonggi province. While avoiding direct military confrontation that could easily escalate into a hot war both the North and South resumed psychological war games and tactical maneuvers to demonstrate military readiness and resolve.

Riding the wave of the popularity of K-pop and culture in China, Kim said his ministry will develop various tour packages specialized in fashion, beauty, culture and leisure.

But there are doubts that the messages from Pyongyang will have the same cut-through with more affluent citizens of South Korea. “Stop the loudspeaker broadcasts immediately!”

South Korean President Park Geun-hye on Tuesday expressed worry about sending a wrong signal to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) unless strong United Nations sanctions are imposed on Pyongyang over its fourth nuclear test.

On Friday, North Korea said in a statement it wasn’t planning to “aggravate the situation”, offering to halt nuclear tests if the US stopped its joint military drills with South Korea. North Korea quickly responded by restarting its own border broadcasts and floating the balloons over the border carrying anti-South leaflets, according to Seoul officials. The government in Seoul is considering setting up giant electronic screens on the DMZ to show images of life south of the border.

She also claimed that South Korea’s democracy is undermined by political in-fighting, the world’s highest suicide rate, and a corrupt relationship between the National Intelligence Service and Christian human rights activists. Another leaflet posted posted on the photo-sharing site Imgur showed half of Park’s face photoshopped to look like a skeleton, and described a speech she gave a year ago and other remarks as “insane ramblings of a half-corpse”. The regime has previously called Park a “prostitute” and compared President Barack Obama to a monkey.