satellite launch

North Korea responded to an unusually harsh verbal attack by South Korea’s president against the North’s leader and its recent nuclear test and rocket launch with a characteristically colorful invective of its own Saturday, calling her policy traitorous and adding that Washington’s newly enacted sanctions are “laughable.”

As the world focuses on the war in Syria, the refugee crisis in Europe, and the primary slugfest in the U.S., the two Koreas are heading toward a catastrophe in the Far East.

With a storm brewing all around them, North Koreans have their own take on things—and it’s decidedly unapologetic.

The United States temporarily deployed an additional Patriot missile battery in South Korea in response to North Korea’s nuclear test and a long-range rocket launch, ahead of talks next week to set up an even more sophisticated U.S. missile defense in a move that has worried China and Russia.

The collective global roar of disapproval that greeted North Korea’s launch of its satellite Kwangmyongsong-4 is a familiar sound by now. The universal fury at Pyongyang’s actions was similar to that which greeted its purported recent underground test of a hydrogen bomb.

Hours after the rest of the world already knew, North Korea’s state media triumphantly announced in a special news bulletin to the nation Sunday it had successfully launched a satellite into orbit, calling it a major milestone in the nation’s history and the “greatest gift of loyalty” to the country’s young leader, Kim Jong Un.

North Korea has moved up the window of its planned long-range rocket launch to Feb. 7-14, South Korea’s Defense Ministry said Saturday. The launch, which the North says is an effort to send a satellite into orbit, would be in defiance of repeated warnings by outside governments who suspect it is a banned test of ballistic missile technology.

Weeks after its fourth nuclear test, North Korea announced plans Tuesday to launch an Earth observation satellite on a rocket later this month, in what critics see as a covert test of banned technology for a ballistic missile that could strike the U.S. mainland.