TIL Desk/World/Seoul/ North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and his wife attended a Lunar New Year’s Day concert in Pyongyang where he received thunderous cheers from audience members and artists who praised him for heralding a new era of national power, state media reported.
The North’s official media has been highlighting Kim’s authoritarian leadership following a spree of missile tests in January, which some experts see as an attempt to pressure Washington over deadlocked nuclear negotiations after two years of pandemic border closures and economic decay.
The Biden administration has called for the U.N. Security Council to meet Thursday to discuss North Korea’s most recent test of an intermediate-range missile potentially capable of reaching Guam, a key U.S. military hub in the Pacific. Sunday’s test signaled a resumption of major weapons testing that Kim had suspended in 2018 while initiating diplomacy with then-U.S. President Donald Trump.
Talks between Washington and Pyongyang have stalled since the collapse of the second Kim-Trump meeting in 2019, when the Americans rejected North Korea’s demands for a major release of crippling U.S.-led sanctions in exchange for a partial surrender of its nuclear capabilities.
