US President Donald Trump calls for tough, decisive response to North Korea threat

Washington : US President Donald Trump called Tuesday for a tough, decisive response to the dangers posed by North Korea, while at the same time hailing the fact that nations are uniting to deal with the threat after many years of failure.

"After many years of failure, countries are coming together to finally address the dangers posed by North Korea," he wrote on his Twitter account.

The President, currently on vacation at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, posted that message after retweeting a story aired Monday on the Fox News channel about North Korea loading two anti-ship cruise missiles on a patrol boat on its east coast several days ago.

According to the conservative TV channel, which attributes the story to anonymous sources within the US government, this is the first time that such missiles have been deployed in that way since 2014.

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While Trump applied pressure with his tweets, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson did likewise on his Asian tour, where his Chinese, Russian and South Korean counterparts have repeated their support for the UN Security Council's recent sanctions on Pyongyang.

After a month of negotiations, the 15 countries of the organisation unanimously adopted on Saturday a resolution to cut off North Korean exports of coal, iron, lead and seafood, along with other measures against companies and organizations that aid that country's arms programs.

Also Read: UNSC unanimously approves new sanctions on North Korea

In his usual morning salvo of Twitter messages, Trump also said that this Tuesday he will hold a "major briefing" at Bedminster about the opioid crisis, which he called a "major problem" for the country.

Almost 1.3 million Americans required medical care for problems related to opioids in 2014, some 64 per cent more than in 2005, according to a recent study by the governmental Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).

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The government is working to contain what it considers a national epidemic: deaths from overdoses of synthetic opioids, like the powerful fentanyl, increased 79 per cent between 2013 and 2014, from 3,097 to 5,544 victims.