China called Tuesday for extra efforts to resolve the North Korean nuclear crisis through talks after US President Donald Trump re-branded Pyongyang as a state sponsor of terrorism. However, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said sanctions and diplomacy could still pressure North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un into talks on nuclear disarmament. “North Korea will consider it as a thing next to a declaration of war,” Professor Yang Moo-Jin of the University for North Korean Studies in Seoul told AFP. “In addition to threatening the world by nuclear devastation, North Korea repeatedly supported acts of international terrorism including assassinations on foreign soil,” Trump said. Trump invoked Otto Warmbier, the 22-year-old who died this year after being repatriated from detention in North Korea in a coma.

Source: The Guardian November 21, 2017 08:37 UTC