North Korea convenes top-level meeting over 'tense situation': KCNA

Seoul: North Korean leader Kim Jong Un called a full meeting Wednesday of a top committee of the ruling Workers' Party to address what he described as the "prevailing tense situation", state media reported.

The gathering of the Central Committee comes after Kim's Hanoi summit with US President Donald Trump broke up without agreement in February, and as South Korean President Moon Jae-in flies to Washington for talks with the US leader. But the North's official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) appeared to indicate that Kim may be focussing on Pyongyang's continued push to develop its economy.

In a meeting with senior officials Tuesday, Kim ordered them to display "an attitude befitting the masters of the revolution and construction under the prevailing tense situation and thus follow through on the new strategic line of the Party", KCNA reported. Last April Kim declared that the ruling party's "new strategic line" would be "socialist economic construction" and its quest for nuclear development was complete. Kim made "a deep analysis of the matters pending urgent solution in the party and state", KCNA said, adding that at Wednesday's meeting the central committee will "decide the new orientation and ways of struggle in line with the need of the prevailing revolutionary situation".

It comes ahead of the opening of the country's rubber stamp legislature on Thursday. Trump and Kim held their first landmark summit in Singapore last June, where the North Korean leader signed a vaguely-worded deal on the "denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula". But the failure by the pair to reach agreement at their second summit in Hanoi on walking back Pyongyang's nuclear programme in exchange for relaxation of the measures against it has raised questions over the future of the wider process.

In Vietnam both sides expressed willingness to talk further and Trump has repeatedly said he maintains good relations with his North Korean counterpart. But shortly after the Hanoi summit, a series of satellite images emerged suggesting increased activity at the North's Sohae rocket site, triggering international alarm that the nuclear-armed state might be preparing a long-range or space launch. A senior Pyongyang diplomat told reporters last month that the North was considering suspending nuclear talks with the US.