And on the rare occasions these days when Ri Chun Hee appears on North Korea’s state-run news network, the audience knows the looming declaration is serious. According to a 2008 profile in a North Korean magazine, Ri lives in a modern home with her husband, children and grandchildren in Pyongyang, the capital. Younger anchors don’t have the same gravitas, said Nam Sung-wook, a professor of North Korean Studies at Korea University in Seoul. The nearly 40-minute flight of what North Korea calls a Hwasong-14 left plenty of immediate clues about what the country had accomplished. United States officials, after first questioning whether North Korea had crossed the ICBM threshold, also arrived at that assessment.

Source: Los Angeles Times July 05, 2017 17:01 UTC