As Kim elevates sister, U.S. braces for N. Korea tests

TOKYO — Kim Jong Un has taken another key step to consolidate his family’s control over North Korea, elevating his younger sister to the powerful political bureau of the ruling Workers’ Party and moving her closer to the center of the leadership.

Kim announced that his 30-year-old sister, Kim Yo Jong, had been promoted during a weekend of festivities celebrating the Kim family’s grip on the totalitarian state and amid expectations of a new salvo of missiles.

North Korea will on Tuesday celebrate the 72nd anniversary of the founding of the Workers’ Party, through which the Kim family controls the country.

A top Korea analyst at the CIA last week said that the U.S. government should be ready for another North Korean missile test this week — not least because the Oct. 10 anniversary overlaps with Columbus Day in the United States. This would provide North Korea with the opportunity to celebrate an important day on its calendar and interfere with an American holiday weekend.

“Stand by your phones,” Yong Suk Lee, deputy assistant director of the CIA’s Korea Mission Center, said he’d told his staff.

President Donald Trump sent his own warning signal Saturday, saying in a tweet that years of diplomatic negotiations and agreements with North Korea had come to nothing and that “only one thing will work.” He did not say what that “one thing” was.

But in Pyongyang on Saturday, Kim told his officials that North Korea’s nuclear weapons were a “powerful deterrent” and that the Workers’ Party of Korea would “victoriously conclude the standoff with the U.S.”

North Korea’s nuclear weapons are necessary “for defending the destiny and sovereignty of the country from the protracted nuclear threats of the U.S. imperialists,” Kim told the meeting of the party’s central committee, according to a state media reports published Sunday.