Asia/Pacific

The White House has criticized the North for rising tensions and urged leaders to tone down their rhetoric.

Recent U.S. military action on the Korean peninsula is not intended to start a war with North Korea but to ward Pyongyang off the "dangerous" path toward regional conflict, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Thursday. 

The mission highlights the “United States’ ability to conduct long range, precision strikes quickly and at will,” the military said.

North Korea said Wednesday it was shuttering a military hotline with South Korea as tensions between the two countries continue to escalate amid repeated threats from Pyongyang.

North Korea’s state-run Korean Central News Agency said South Korea had been informed Wednesday that the North would no longer use the direct line of communication, after two others were also shut off in recent weeks.

"Under the situation where a war may break out at any moment, there is no need to keep north-south military communications which were laid between the militaries of both sides," KCNA quoted a military spokesman as saying, according to Reuters.

North Korea's recent posturing and threats of military action will "achieve nothing" except to further inflame tensions on the peninsula and increasingly isolate the country's regime within the international community, according to the Pentagon. 

Secretary of State John Kerry wanted to visit Pakistan during his surprise trip to the region, but was advised doing so could upend the May 11 legislative elections in a country where anti-American sentiment runs strong.

Kerry made a surprise trip to Afghanistan on Monday to talk about the country's future after U.S. troops leave next year. Kerry had wanted to meet with Pakistani leaders as well, but the State Department concluded the timing did not bode well for productive discussions, a senior administration official told reporters on the way to Afghanistan.

“Given the kind of historic nature of where Pakistan is right now, we wanted to be holier than the Pope on this one on staying away ... while the electoral process unfolded,” the official said. “Given the state of conspiracy theorists, given the state of [everything] else, we did not want to lead anyone to conclude anything about where our interests may lie.”

Karzai, said Allen, must balance domestic, regional and international politics amid the decade-long Afghanistan war.

Lawmakers and the administration applauded Thursday's vote by the U.N. Human Rights Council to open an investigation into North Korea's human rights abuses.

The world body agreed to establish a commission of inquiry into reports that as many as 200,000 people are imprisoned in the country's concentration camps. Regional powers Japan and South Korea had expressed concerns in the past about antagonizing North Korea, but its recent nuclear test and missile launch have united the world into confronting the communist regime's practices.

“The new Commission of Inquiry on DPRK [Democratic People's Republic of Korea] Humanrights demonstrates the world's unity in its concern over deteriorating conditions there,” the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, tweeted Thursday.

Secretary of State John Kerry said during a Monday speech in Washington, D.C., that policymakers have "the responsibility as human beings" to combat climate change in defense of oceans and aquatic ecosystems.

Kerry called climate change an economic and national security issue — as well as an environmental one — because it affects oceans, aquatic ecosystems and the food they produce.

“Climate change is coming back in a sense as a serious international issue because people are experiencing it firsthand. The science is screaming at us, literally, demanding that people in positions of public responsibility at least exercise the so-called ‘precautionary principle’ to balance the equities and not knowing completely the outcomes at least understand what is happening and take steps to prevent potential disaster,” Kerry said.

U.S. business groups, lawmakers and automakers want specifics as to how Japan will open its markets.