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US should replace armistice with peace treaty, says North Korea

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NEW YORK: North Korea said on Friday that the United States should replace the armistice agreement between the two countries with a peace treaty.


The Trump administration should adopt a new policy towards Pyongyang to ensure lasting peace on the Korean Peninsula, North Korean Deputy UN ambassador Kim In Ryong said at a press briefing in New York. However, Kim didn’t say how the US could take such an action unilaterally. In Washington on Friday, Defence Secretary James Mattis said the US will continue working on diplomatic efforts to find a solution to North Korea’s provocations, in a bid to avoid potentially “tragic” results that could come from a military solution.


“As you know, if this goes to a military solution, it is going to be tragic on an unbelievable scale, and so our effort is to work with the UN, work with China, work with Japan, work with South Korea to try to find a way out of this situation,” Mattis said at a press conference.


The UN Security Council this week condemned North Korea’s most recent missile launch and met to discuss toughening up sanctions on Pyongyang. US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley said on Tuesday that the US was not past imposing sanctions on third-party countries ignoring Security Council sanctions on Pyongyang.


Kim said Sunday’s launch of the missile, which North Korean state news agency KCNA reported was capable of carrying a nuclear warhead,was a legitimate act of self-defence. He said the US must roll back its “hostile attitude” to North Korea.


He also added that it was “ridiculous” to link North Korea to the mass cyber attack that affected 150 countries worldwide last week.


Some cyber security analysts have said some of the code of this week’s WannaCry malware attack indicates a North Korean connection.


Kim said it was typical of the US to start a “noisy anti-DPRK[Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] campaign” whenever “something strange happens.” WannaCry has infected more than 300,000 computers in 150 nations.


It threatens to lock out victims who have not paid a ransom within one week of infection.


French researchers said on Friday they had found a last-chance way to save encrypted files.


Symantec and Kaspersky Lab said on Monday that some code in an earlier version of the WannaCry software had also appeared in programs used by the Lazarus Group, which researchers from many companies have identified as a North Korea-run hacking operation.


A spokesman for the Italian mission to the United Nations, which chairs the UN Security Council North Korea sanctions committee, said on Friday that a member of the UN panel of experts who monitor sanctions violations had been hacked.


No further details on the extent of the hack or who might be responsible were immediately available.


The UN Security Council first imposed sanctions on North Korea in 2006 and has strengthened the measures in response to the country’s five nuclear tests and two long-range rocket launches.


Pyongyang is threatening a sixth nuclear test. — Agencies


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