Kim is cheered by concert audience after missile tests

NORTH KOREAN leader Kim Jong Un and his wife have attended a Lunar New Year’s Day concert in Pyongyang where he received cheers from audience members and artists who praised him for heralding a “new era” of national power, state media reported.

The North’s official media has been highlighting Kim’s authoritarian leadership following a spree of missile tests in January, which some experts see as an attempt to pressure Washington over deadlocked nuclear negotiations after two years of pandemic border closures and economic decay.

The Biden administration has called for the UN Security Council to meet on Thursday to discuss North Korea’s most recent test of an intermediate-range missile potentially capable of reaching Guam, a key US military hub in the Pacific. Sunday’s test signalled a resumption of major weapons testing that Mr Kim, inset, had suspended in 2018 while initiating diplomacy with then-US president Donald Trump.

Talks between Washington and Pyongyang have stalled since the collapse of the second KimTrump meeting in 2019, when the Americans rejected North Korea’s demands for a major release of crippling US-led sanctions in exchange for a partial surrender of its nuclear capabilities.

The Korean Central News Agency said Mr Kim and his wife, Ri Sol Ju, were greeted with “stormy cheers” after arriving at Pyongyang’s massive Mansudae Art Theatre for Tuesday’s concert.

KCNA said the audience appreciated that Mr Kim was “ushering in on this land a new world and a new era when the people’s ideals and happiness and desire for building a powerful country are comprehensively translated into reality”.

Artists performed songs and dances that demonstrated the “single-minded unity” of North Korean people and their devotion to build a socialist country “to be envied by the world”, the report said.

North Korean TV showed Mr Kim galloping through a forest on a white horse in a new documentary praising his alleged accomplishments in 2021, including anti-virus campaigns, construction projects and weapons development.

One scene showed Mr Kim – noticeably slimmer than in previous months – walking gingerly at a rainy construction site as a narrator said he showed his “motherly side by entirely devoting his body into realising people’s dreams”.