North Korea at UN warns US carriers are fueling tensions

North Korea warned at the United Nations Monday that the deployment of three US aircraft carriers in joint navy drills with South Korea was fueling tensions that could lead to nuclear war.

North Korea's Ambassador Ja Song Nam said in a letter to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres that this was "the worst ever situation prevailing in and around the Korean peninsula."

The first such deployment of three US carriers since 2007 "is making it impossible to predict when nuclear war breaks out due to the US nuclear war equipment" taking up a "strike posture," wrote the ambassador.

The four-day exercise in the western Pacific involving the USS Ronald Reagan, USS Nimitz and USS Theodore Roosevelt began on Saturday and included seven South Korean vessels including three destroyers.

The ambassador said the United States had reactivated round-the-clock sorties by B-52 strategic bombers and was making frequent flights of B-1B and B-2 bombers in the air space of South Korea.

"The large scale nuclear war exercises and blackmails... make one conclude that the option we have taken was the right one and we should go along the way to the last," wrote Ja.

North Korea conducted its sixth nuclear test this year and test-fired a series of advanced missiles, including intercontinental ballistic missiles.

In response, the United States led a push at the Security Council to impose tougher sanctions, such as export bans, to deny Pyongyang of hard currency revenue to build up its military programs.

The North Korean ambassador accused the council of "turning a blind eye to the nuclear war exercises of the United States who is hell bent on bringing a catastrophic disaster to humanity."

The exercises come on the heels of President Donald Trump's visits to Tokyo, Seoul and Beijing this week, which were dominated by the question of how to counter Pyongyang's nuclear weapons threat.

N. Korea soldier shot six times as he defected to South
Seoul (AFP) Nov 14, 2017 - A North Korean soldier involved in an extremely rare and dramatic defection to the South was shot six times by his own side as he drove to the heavily guarded border and ran across under a hail of bullets.

The US-led United Nations Command (UNC), which monitors the Panmunjom border truce village where the defection occurred Monday, said the soldier had driven close to the heavily-guarded, military demarcation line separating the two Koreas.

"He then exited the vehicle and continued fleeing south across the line as he was fired upon by other soldiers from North Korea," the UNC said in a statement.

An official with the South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff said the North's border guards fired at least 40 rounds.

A doctor treating the soldier -- who was helicoptered to a hospital for emergency surgery -- said he had been shot half-a-dozen times and sustained a serious stomach injury.

"He has at least six gunshot wounds on his body and the penetrating wound in the abdomen is the most serious", the doctor, Lee Cook-Jong, told reporters.

It is very rare for the North's troops to defect at the truce village, a major tourist attraction bisected by the demarcation line and the only part of the frontier where forces from the two sides come face-to-face.

The 1953 ceasefire ending Korean War hostilities was signed at Panmunjom, and it has since hosted numerous rounds of inter-Korean talks -- sometimes held in huts that straddle both sides of the border line.

The fact that the defector drove to the frontier suggests he may not have been a member of the elite corps of North Korean troops posted to Panmunjom, who are carefully vetted and selected for their loyalty.

No tourists were present at the time, because tours do not run on Mondays.

According to the South Korean military there was no exchange of fire across the border, and the UNC statement stressed that no South Korean or US forces were harmed.

The incident, which happened in broad daylight around 4:00pm, comes at a time of heightened tensions on the Korean peninsula over the North's nuclear weapons programme.

Unlike the rest of the frontier, Panmunjom is not fortified with minefields and barbed wire and the border is marked only by a low concrete divider.

After racing across the frontier, the soldier took cover near a building on the South side.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff official said he was found collapsed in a pile of fallen leaves and recovered by three South Korean soldiers crawling on their stomachs to his position.

In 1984, a Soviet citizen sprinted across the border from North Korea to the South at Panmunjom in a defection bid, sparking a gunbattle that killed and wounded several soldiers on both sides.

North Korean soldiers wielding axes hacked two US soldiers to death at Panmunjom in a 1976 brawl over an attempt to trim a tree there.

N. Korea brands Trump a 'warmonger' as his Asia tour moves to Hanoi
Hanoi (AFP) Nov 11, 2017
North Korea lashed out Saturday at Donald Trump's "warmonger's" tour of Asia as the US president landed in Hanoi on the latest leg of a five-nation regional visit to drum up support against Pyongyang's nuclear weapons build-up. The outburst came as Trump nears the tail end of his sweep through Japan, South Korea, China, Vietnam and the Philippines that has seen him rail against the North's n ... read more

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