N KOREA SLAMS USSOUTH KOREA MILITARY EXERCISES

SEOUL: North Korea warned on Sunday that the US will be “pouring gasoline on fire” by conducting an annual war game in the South next week amid heightened tensions between Pyongyang and Washington.

Combative rhetoric between the nations spiked after Pyongyang tested two intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) last month that appeared to bring much of the US within range, sparking an intense warning by President Donald Trump that Washington could rain “fire and fury” on the North.

Pyongyang then threatened to fire a salvo of missiles towards the US territory of Guam--a plan that leader Kim Jong-Un last week delayed.

Amid the fiery volley of threats, Seoul and Washington will begin Monday the “Ulchi Freedom Gu ar dian” (UFG) joint military exercises that Pyongyang views as a highly provocative rehearsal for invasion.

“The joint exercise is the most explicit expression of hostility against us, and no one can guarantee that the exercise won’t evolve into actual fighting,” said an editorial carried by the North’s official Rodong Sinmun newspaper.

“The Ulchi Freedom Guardian joint military exercises will be like pouring gasoline on fire and worsen the state of the peninsula,” the paper said.

› If the United States is lost in a fantasy that war on the peninsula is at somebody else’s doorstep far away from them across the Pacific, it is far more mistaken than ever. RODONG SINMUN, North Korea’s official newspaper, in an editorial