North Korea has blown up the northern sections of disused roads that connect it to South Korea, according to South Korea’s military.

Some parts of the road north of the military demarcation line dividing the two countries were blown up at about midday (03:00 GMT), the Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a message sent to media on Tuesday.

The military fired warning shots south of the demarcation line, it said. Seoul had warned on Monday that Pyongyang was preparing to blow up the roads.

Tensions on the Korean Peninsula have risen since North Korea accused its neighbour of sending drones carrying propaganda leaflets over the country’s capital Pyongyang.

One showed North Korean soldiers in military uniforms setting up what appeared to be cameras on tripods ahead of a huge explosion, which blew up sections of the Gyeongui road and kicked up billowing clouds of smoke and dust. More footage, apparently from after the blasts, showed excavators digging, while North Koreans in military uniforms worked nearby. There was also footage showing North Korea blowing up a section of the Donghae road, on the east coast.

“This is a practical military measure related to the hostile dual-state system that North Korea has frequently mentioned,” Yang Moo-jin, president of the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul, told the AFP news agency.

The blasts came a day after Kim called a meeting with his top military and security officials to discuss the drone issue.

During the meeting, Kim described the flights as the “enemy’s serious provocation” and laid out unspecified tasks related to “immediate military action” and the operation of his “war deterrent” for defending the country’s sovereignty, North Korean state media reported on Tuesday morning.

North Korea earlier put frontline artillery and other army units on standby to launch attacks on South Korea, if its drones were found over North Korea again. South Korea has refused to confirm whether it sent drones but warned it would sternly punish North Korea if the safety of its citizens was threatened.

Destroying the roads is in line with Kim Jong Un’s push to cut off ties with South Korea, formally cement it as his country’s principal enemy and abandon North Korea’s decades-long objective to seek the peaceful unification of the two Koreas.

In 2020, North Korea blew up the empty liaison office for the two Koreas, signalling the end of a period of detente.

In November last year, Pyongyang said it would move more troops and military equipment to the border and would no longer be bound by a 2018 joint military agreement after Seoul suspended parts of the agreement in response to Pyongyang’s launch of a military spy satellite.

South Korean officials have said that North Korea began adding antitank barriers and laying mines along the border earlier this year.

South Korean author Han Kang has won the 2024 Nobel Prize in literature “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”.

Mats Malm, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy’s Nobel Committee, announced the prize in Stockholm on Thursday.

Han, 53, is the first South Korean writer to win the Nobel literature prize.

Malm said he was able to talk to Han by phone. She was having an ordinary day and had “just finished supper with her son” when he broke the news to her.

Nobel committee chairman Anders Olsson praised her “physical empathy for the vulnerable, often female lives” of her characters.

He said her work “confronts historical traumas and in each of her works exposes the fragility of human life”.

The 2023 prize went to Norwegian author and dramatist Jon Fosse, who was honoured for “his innovative plays and prose, which give voice to the unsayable”.

The literature prize has long been male-dominated, with just 17 women among its laureates. The last woman to win was Annie Ernaux of France, in 2022.

The prize carries a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1m) from a bequest left by the award’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. Alongside the cash prize, the winners will be presented with a medal on December 10.

Han was born in 1970 in the South Korean city of Gwangju before moving with her family to Seoul at the age of nine.

She comes from a literary background as her father, Han Seung-won, is a reputed novelist.

She began her career in 1993 with the publication of several poems in the magazine Literature and Society, her prose debut coming in 1995 with the short story collection, Love of Yeosu.

Her major international breakthrough came in 2007 with the novel, The Vegetarian. Written in three parts, it is an unsettling novel in which a woman’s decision to stop eating meat has devastating consequences.

In the 2014 novel Human Acts, set in the city of Gwangju where she herself grew up, she confronted her country’s history of state violence by giving voice to the victims of a massacre carried out by the South Korean military in 1980.

The committee said her work is characterised by a “double exposure of pain, a correspondence between mental and physical torment with close connections to Eastern thinking”.

Mentioned as a case in point is her 2013 novel Convalescence, which involves a leg ulcer that refuses to heal and a painful relationship between the main character and her dead sister.

“She has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead, and in her poetic and experimental style has become an innovator in contemporary prose,” the committee said.

Spotify’s free music and podcasts service option is now available in South Korea, the audio streaming platform said on Thursday, as it looks to widen its audience base.

The streaming giant’s freemium business model offers both a free, limited ad-supported service and an unlimited premium subscription service.

Spotify said that the move will enable them to better connect global audience with Korean music, which includes K-pop.

Users in South Korea can now sign-up for a free account to access Spotify’s playlists, podcasts, and daily mix among others and can further choose to upgrade to premium on-demand, ad-free music.

“Brands who advertise on Spotify’s free tier can deliver their message effectively as Spotify ads capture twice as much attention than social media platforms globally,” the company said.

Since the launch of Spotify in South Korea in 2021, the average monthly streams of artists from the country on the platform now surpass 5.8 billion streams, Spotify said.

© Thomson Reuters 2024

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

North Korea’s army has said it will sever road and railway access to South Korea and fortify areas on its side of the border, state media reported.

The Korean People’s Army said on Wednesday that it will “completely cut off roads and railways” linked to South Korea and “fortify the relevant areas of our side with strong defence structures”, according to the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).

The move was viewed as symbolic, given that cross-border travel and exchanges have been halted for years.

The army said in its statement carried by KCNA that it was a response to war exercises that have been held in South Korea as well as frequent visits by United States strategic assets to the region.

South Korea’s Ministry of Defence said in a statement that it had notified the US-led United Nations Command, a multinational military force that oversees affairs in the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) between the two Koreas, which are still technically at war.

The two sides signed an armistice that ended fighting in the 1950-1953 Korean War, but not a peace treaty.

North Korea had already been installing landmines and barriers and creating wasteland along the heavily militarised border for months this year, South Korea’s military has previously said.

The new steps, which mark a further escalation of conflict between the two Koreas, were described in the army’s statement as a “self-defensive measure for inhibiting war and defending the security” of North Korea.

It said that “hostile forces are getting ever more reckless in their confrontational hysteria”, and that it had sent a message to the US military to explain its fortification activity to prevent any misjudgment and potential accidental clashes.

Tensions on the Korean Peninsula are at their highest point in years, with Pyongyang conducting a series of weapons tests. North Korea tested a long-range artillery system on Tuesday, KCNA reported.

The announcement came as Pyongyang maintained its silence on an expected revision of the constitution that will see the country scrap the goal of peaceful reunification and formally designate South Korea as an enemy state.

The Supreme People’s Assembly had been expected to make the constitutional changes during a two-day meeting this week, obeying orders from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un issued in January, which had raised concerns that all-out war could return to the Korean Peninsula.

But while KCNA reported that the country had appointed a new defence minister – No Kwang Chol, who accompanied Kim to talks with then-US President Donald Trump in 2018 and 2019 – it made no mention of the constitutional amendments.

Editor’s Note: Featuring the good, the bad and the ugly, ‘Look of the Week’ is a regular series dedicated to unpacking the most talked about outfit of the last seven days.

CNN
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Bringing the second day of this year’s Coachella to a close, K-Pop girl group Blackpink made history Saturday night when they became the first Asian act to ever headline the festival. To a crowd of, reportedly, over 125,000 people, Jennie, Jisoo, Lisa and Rosé used the ground-breaking moment to pay homage to Korean heritage by arriving onstage in hanboks: a traditional type of dress.

While the garments were shrugged off a few seconds into their opening track, “Pink Venom,” revealing each member’s custom black and pink Dolce and Gabbana outfit, fans across the world had already received the message. Screenshots of the moment quickly spread among Blackpink superfans, otherwise known as Blinks. “The way they stepped onto the biggest western stage in hanboks … literally proved their place at the top of the industry,” tweeted one Blink. “Blackpink really are in a league of their own.”

Another called the group “Korea’s cultural delegation” on Instagram, in reference to not only the hanboks but other visual cues incorporated into their show, such as one of the stage backdrops featuring an angular tiled roof reminiscent of traditional Korean architecture.

In recent years, Blackpink have enjoyed a meteoric rise to global fame. According to Guinness World Records, they are currently the most streamed female group on Spotify, and have the most-viewed music YouTube channel. Last year, they were the first female K-Pop group to reach number 1 in the UK and US album charts, and in 2020 their track “How You Like That” became the most viewed video on YouTube in 24 hours. (The group also wore modernized hanboks, designed by Kim Danha, in one of the music video’s scenes.) Their landmark set over the weekend was in fact a follow-up to another milestone: In 2019, they became the first female K-Pop group to ever play at Coachella or any other US festival.

From the iconic Jean Paul Gaultier cone bra worn by Madonna for her 1990 Blond Ambition tour to Geri “Ginger Spice” Halliwell’s Union Jack mini dress, the right stage costume can live on forever in public memory. Particularly when worn at a career-defining moment. During another watershed Coachella performance — Beyonce’s 2018 headline set — the singer’s custom Balmain collegiate-style yellow hoodie was a joyful nod to Black culture, specifically historically Black colleagues and universities.

The group’s four black hanboks were custom created by South Korean pattern design brand OUWR and traditional Korean dressmakers Kumdanje. Inspired by the Cheol-lik silhouette, each garment was hand-embroidered with metallic traditional Korean motifs, including dan-cheong patterns and peonies (a symbol of royalty in Korea). “It was our pleasure and such an honor to be able to show the beautiful values of Korea and Hanbok together,” the designers wrote in a combined Instagram post. “Blackpink showed the beauty of Korea and dazzled the world.”

In Korea, hanboks are still worn for special occasions and often seen on TV dramas. Many designers in the country have also created contemporary takes that are incorporated into everyday wear. At Seoul Fashion Week, JULYCOLUMN’s Fall-Winter 2023 collection drew on the hanbok’s voluminous silhouette to create shirts and structured jackets. Last September, Korean label BlueTamburin brought the garment to a Western audience by exclusively using traditional hanbok fabric to create its Spring-Summer 2023 collection at Milan Fashion Week.

Whether you’re a devoted Blink or not, the looks marked a moment of Asian visibility, recognition of traditional craftsmanship and a powerful example of feeling seen through fashion — representing Korean culture and symbolically embracing both its past and future.

At the end of their performance, and having addressed the audience between numbers in English throughout their two-hour-long performance, Blackpink finished their set in Korean: “Until now, it has been Jennie, Jisoo, Lisa, and Rosé Blackpink. Thank you.”

Top image: Blackpink performing at the first weekend of Coachella 2023, shortly after removing their hanboks.