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Beijing must recognize that anxiety about North Korea's intentions threatens a nuclear arms race not just on the Korean peninsula but in the entire region. It also should realize that if it doesn't put meaningful pressure on North Korea, the U.S. may go forward with a high-altitude missile defense system in South Korea that China sees as a threat to its own arsenal. However justified it might be, a strengthening of South Korea's defenses would make it even less likely that there would be another round of negotiations involving the two Koreas, the U.S. China, Russia and Japan. The last version of such talks collapsed in 2009.

“It’s now a process designed to measure not how much progress we’re making, but how much damage is being done,” the senior administration official said.

If the trip is another failure, internal critics and some in Congress will push for more pressure on North Korea, more sanctions, a resumption of U.S.-South Korea military exercises, and other measures to show Kim he can’t jerk around the United States. The argument against these measures is that they could create a rift in the U.S.-South Korea alliance and risk sinking the whole process — with the blame falling on the U.S. government.

But the fundamental problem with the Trump-Kim scheme remains: Until there is tangible evidence Kim is actually willing to denuclearize, each concession only plays into his strategy to stall for time, relieve financial pressure and normalize his regime’s status as a de facto nuclear state.

Even then, however, Mr. Kono noted that the recruiting had been conducted mainly by private agents working at the request of the Japanese military, and by administrative and military personnel. For outraged South Koreans, the caveats rendered the apology useless.

others said the talk of academic freedom missed the main point of the backlash. This month, 380 scholars and activists from South Korea, Japan and elsewhere accused Ms. Park of “exposing a serious neglect of legal understanding” and avoiding the “essence” of the issue: Japan’s state responsibility.

Yang Hyun-ah, a professor at the Seoul National University School of Law, said that Ms. Park’s most egregious mistake was to “generalize selectively chosen details from the women’s lives.”

Ms. Park said she had tried to broaden discussions by investigating the roles that patriarchal societies, statism and poverty played in the recruitment of comfort women. She said that unlike women rounded up as spoils of battle in conquered territories like China, those from the Korean colony had been taken to the comfort stations in much the same way poor women today enter prostitution.

She also compared the Korean comfort women to more recent Korean prostitutes who followed American soldiers into their winter field exercises in South Korea in the 1960s through ’80s. (The “blanket corps,” so called because the women often carried blankets under their arms, followed pimps searching for American troops through snowy hills or built field brothels with tents as the Americans lined up outside, according to former prostitutes for the United States military.)

“Korean comfort women were victims, but they were also collaborators as people from a colony,” Ms. Park wrote in one of the redacted sentences in her book.

she added that even if the Japanese government did not directly order the women’s forced recruitment and some Korean women joined comfort stations voluntarily, the government should still be held responsible for the “sin” of creating the colonial structure that allowed it to happen.

“Whether the women volunteered or not, whether they did prostitution or not, our society needed them to remain pure, innocent girls,” she said in the interview. “If not, people think they cannot hold Japan responsible.”

Hyon was seen nodding off during a meeting organized by Kim Jong Un

A spokesman for South Korea's Unification Ministry said the government considered the execution to be another display of "fear politics" in North Korea.

Hyon was a longtime Kim family loyalist who spent years working under North Korea's former leader Kim Jong Il as a high-ranking military official.

During 2014, Hyon was promoted again to the National Defense Commission (NDC), described as a supreme organ of the state which has authority over the Ministry of People's Armed Forces and Ministry of People's Security.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has been accused of ordering the executions of as many as 15 top officials so far this year. However, during a rare trip by CNN to Pyongyang last week, a top official dismissed the allegation as "malicious slander."

North Korea is one of the most closed and repressive countries on Earth.

"Kim Jong Un has shown a ruthless side that we haven't seen since his grandfather consolidated power back in the 50s and 60s -- going after rivals and potential rivals and having them executed."

The U.S. maintains nearly 30,000 troops on the Korean Peninsula. These troops operate in alliance with the 655,000-strong South Korean armed forces, while North Korea fields a military of 1.19 million service members, according to a tabulation by the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

North Korea's recent nuclear and long-range missile tests have prompted formal discussions on the deployment of the THAAD missile defense system, which can target short, medium and intermediate ballistic missiles in flight.

He added, "China is clearly militarizing the South China Sea, and you'd have to believe in the flat Earth to think otherwise."

North Korea has long sought improved ties with the United States because it wants sanctions relief and a better security environment to focus on reviving its moribund economy. The high-stakes diplomacy between the countries fell apart in early 2019 after the Americans rejected North Korea’s calls for extensive sanctions relief in return for partial disarmament steps.

Kim has called such an offer “cunning” attempt to conceal U.S. hostility against North Korea

The date marks explorer Christopher Columbus’ Oct. 12, 1492 sighting of land while traveling under Spanish royal sponsorship in search of what came to be known as the Americas. That event heralded centuries of colonization of the Americas by European nations while bringing violence, disease and death to indigenous people.

In Spain, the suffering of native populations during that period has not received the same attention or prompted the kind of historical reevaluation as it has, for example, in the United States, where in many places Columbus Day has been paired or replaced with Indigenous Peoples Day to switch the focus of the annual holiday.

But at a separate far-right rally in the northeastern Spanish city, participants argued that the Spanish conquests were benign. “But now things are being twisted around,” said Ester Lopez, a 40-year-old office worker.

"They have other people, too... These are all very, very disturbing choices by the North Koreans."

The US State Department revised its travel guidance for North Korea this week, saying: "US citizens crossing into North Korea, even accidentally, have been subject to arbitrary arrest and long-term detention." However, a small number of tourists do enter North Korea every year.

US troops backed South Korea in the 1950-1953 Korean War, which killed at least two million people.

The following year, Trump became the first sitting U.S. president to step foot in North Korea.

Despite the historic meetings between Trump and the North Korean ruler, discussions over denuclearization stalled, and an agreement for the volatile nation to halt its nuclear program dissolved.

Biden's team consulted with predecessors from previous administrations as well as South Korean and Japanese counterparts

“North Koreans are really committed to shifting their nuclear policy,” according to Lewis.

North Korea closed the entrances to its nuclear test tunnels in 2018, but they have likely already reopened them, Lewis said.

“If we know one thing, we know that there’s going to be a nuclear test when Kim Jong Un feels like it,” he added.

"We agreed that the provocative act by North Korea is unacceptable... We will deal with this situation in a firm manner through the cooperation with the United Nations Security Council."

"agreed to work together to forge a united and strong international response to North Korea's latest reckless behaviour"

Barack Obama had spoken separately to South Korea's President Park Geun-Hye and Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

considering measures unique to our nation".

"must make sure that North Korea pays the corresponding price" for the nuclear test, reported

The United Nations' Security Council held an emergency session on Wednesday and condemned the test claim as "a clear threat to international peace and security."

“It’s a good idea for everybody to keep some perspective, take a deep breath, keep in mind that we’ve have a long history, about 27 years of history, of talking to the North Koreans, and the results over the 27-year history are of them breaking every agreement that they’ve ever made with the United States and with the international community,” that official said. “So, we are open minded, we look forward to hearing more, but ... the North Koreans have also earned our skepticism, so we’re a bit guarded in our optimism.”

While the idea of a May summit is seen by many as an encouraging step toward peace on the Korean Peninsula — no sitting American president has ever met a North Korean leader — others are puzzled by Washington's marked change in tone.

"It is striking how fast this has moved forward ... This is encouraging news, but it's very important to manage expectations," said Park. "We don't have all the details yet to make an assessment on how viable this process will be."

North Korea test fired a new type of missile, known as the Pukguksong-2, into the sea early last month, and has said it will continue to launch new strategic weapons.

"The launches are clearly in violation of Security Council resolutions. It is an extremely dangerous action,"

"Not only Pukguksong-2 but newer independent strategic weapons will fly high vigorously in the sky off the ground as long as the United States and the puppet regime are going ahead with their nuclear threat to us and an exercise for invasion war against the North," North Korea's Rodong Sinmun newspaper, the mouthpiece of the ruling Workers' Party said in a commentary last week.

“Because China’s SSBNs [nuclear missile submarines] are in the South China Sea, the US navy will try to send spy ships in there and get close to the SSBNs. China’s navy hates that and will try to push them away,” Wu said.

Warheads and missiles would be put together and handed over to the navy, allowing a nuclear weapon to be launched much faster if such a decision was taken. The start of Chinese missile patrols could further destabilise the already tense strategic standoff with the US in the South China Sea.

China has been working on ballistic missile submarine technology for more than three decades, but actual deployment has been put off by technical failures, institutional rivalry and policy d

Behind the ominous warnings is growing concern in the People’s Liberation army that China’s relatively small nuclear arsenal (estimated at 260 warheads compared with 7,000 each for the US and Russia), made up mostly of land-based missiles, is increasingly vulnerable to a devastating first strike, by either nuclear or conventional weapon

The decision to deploy Thaad anti-ballistic interceptors in South Korea was taken after North Korea’s fourth nuclear test, and the stated mission of the truck-launched interceptors is to shield the south from missile attack.

China is developing a similar missile but officials in Beijing fear that the Chinese nuclear arsenal is so small it could be almost completely wiped out without notice, with the few missiles launched in reprisal being destroyed in mid-air by US missile defences.

There seems to have been some discussion of moving to a “launch on warning” policy, to fire Chinese weapons before incoming missiles land and destroy them. That appears to be a minority view, however

The core aim is to have a second strike capacity that is “survivable” and “penetrative”. Submarines, on patrol in the ocean depths, fulfil the first requirement, they say.

Partly to help penetrate US missile defences, China has in recent months also started putting multiple warheads on its largest missile, the DF-5, another development that has set alarm bells ringing in the Pentagon, where some analysts view it as the first step towards a massive nuclear armament drive aimed at obliterating the US arsenal.

Evidence for China’s more “relaxed” approach is the length of time it took to deploy multiple warheads, two decades after developing the necessary technology. China has similarly taken decades to deploy nuclear missile submarines.

The slow pace has not just been for practical reasons. China’s guiding principle has been to have a capacity for “minimum means of reprisal” while minimising the chance of accidental or unauthorised launch.

However, to follow the British Royal Navy model – in which each Trident submarine commander has a signed letter from the prime minister in his safe, to open in the event of a strike on London – would entail a huge leap in the alert status of the Chinese nuclear arsenal, and a similarly huge delegation of responsibility to one of the armed forces.

marking the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II on Aug. 15. “From now on, Japan and South Korea will enter a new era.”

There might be other explanations. With any infection, there are four basic questions to ask when looking at broad differences in death rates. Is the virus different here versus there? NO. Right now, there is no evidence that the virus is mutating toward a more potent strain in the US.Is one country diagnosing the virus sooner than another? YES. As above, this may be skewing German and South Korean results by identifying asymptomatic and mildly symptomatic persons unlikely to require medical care. Hospitalization rates by country, currently not tracked, would help sort out the contribution of aggressive testing to survival rates. Is the infected patient different here versus there? YES. South Korea (young patients) and Italy (old patients) are unique in the outbreak, and the characteristics in Iran are not well known. All other countries with specific information, from China to even the US epicenter of New York City, have shown the same basic distribution with respect to age, sex (more men than women) and smoking. Is the health care system different here versus there? OH YES. Health care system differences at the country level are hard to examine: information is sparse and, given the 50,000-foot view, possibly misleading. However, health care experts typically can rely on "structural measures" to determine the quality of a hospital or a state or a country.

The World Bank tracks health care information by country on three relevant structural measures (though recentness of information varies country to country), each measured per 1,000 general population: doctors, nurses and hospital beds. They and other sources also track two other relevant variables: lifespan per country and health care spending per individual. Neither of these demonstrate differences in affected Western European countries that might explain a difference in Covid-19 survival.

Among the nine countries with the highest number of Covid-19 cases, the country that has the highest nurse rate also has the lowest death rate from the disease. Germany has 13.2 nurses per 1,000 (echoing a trend for high nurse numbers throughout Northern Europe) far above the other heavily Covid-19 affected countries. This may be just another armchair epidemiologist observation of course. But higher numbers of nurses may reflect one of two beneficial factors (or both): first, that nurses, the backbone of hospital (and especially ICU) care, are essential to patient management and, ultimately, survival.

Either way, it is a reminder that Covid-19 will continue to reveal the strengths and weaknesses of health care systems across the world. The current observed differences also mandate that, when we finally are out from underneath the weight of the current crisis, we must work to determine how we can deliver better health care to large populations across the world.

The United States, which fought on South Korea’s side during the war, still keeps 28,500 troops in South Korea.

Japan and American Pacific bases are within range of North Korea’s medium-range missiles, according to South Korean defense officials.

The hacking attack on Wednesday brought down the servers of the South Korean broadcasters

"We are aware of the reports. We are closely monitoring the situation on the Korean Peninsula in coordination with our regional allies," the Pentagon said in response to Friday's news

North Korea is believed to have an untested capability when it comes to nuclear weapons. As one U.S. official told CNN's Barbara Starr, the regime has tested nuclear devices that it says have been miniaturized.

Then, in February, Pyongyang said it had successfully launched an Earth satellite into orbit via the long-range Kwangmyongsong carrier rocket.

Yun stressed that he does not think the North Koreans are suicidal: "They know that if they did a pre-emptive attack or used nuclear weapons, they would cease to exist.

The U.N. resolution that brought about the sanctions aims to cripple the economic factors that fuel North Korea's nuclear and ballistic missile programs.

Fu Ying, a spokeswoman for China's Parliament, said it will abide by the Security Council sanctions, but she highlighted the need for six-party talks to resolve the issue.

"Kim Jong Un has got a large party congress that's going to be happening in May. And this is all about, for him, again, additional consolidation of power. He'll want to get rid and justify getting rid of any enemies he may have.

"And, also bear in mind, we're just a couple of days away now from the joint military drills between the United States and South Korea. These happen every year. Washington and Seoul say they're defensive in nature, but every year they irritate Pyongyang," she said.