North Korea threatens to end cease-fire: North Korea has threatened to scrap the armistice which ended the 1950-53 Korean War if the South and US continue with an ongoing military drill. “We will completely nullify the Korean armistice,” the North's KCNA news agency said, quoting the Korean People's Army (KPA) Supreme Command spokesman. Pyongyang warned it will cancel the Korean War ceasefire agreement on March 11 if the US and its “puppet South Korea” do not halt their joint drills. “We will be suspending the activities of the KPA representative office at Panmunjom (truce village) that had been tentatively operated by our army as the negotiating body to establish a peace regime on the Korean peninsula,” KCNA quoted the spokesman as saying. The announcement from Pyongyang comes as South Korean and US troops launched their annual joint military drills on Friday. Some 10,000 US troops and 200,000 South Korean soldiers are currently taking part in the exercises. North Korea had previously warned the US commander in South Korea of “miserable destruction” if the US military went ahead with the two-month-long exercise, Yonhap News Agency reported on Friday. The North and South are still technically at war after the civil conflict ended in an armistice rather than a peace treaty. During a visit in Qatar on Tuesday, US Secretary of State John Kerry said he hoped North Korea would take part in negotiations over its nuclear weapons program rather than threaten to end the armistice.
