NEWS BRIEF

[Anchor Lead]

North Korea’s Korean Central News Agency said today the ruling Workers' Party held a politburo meeting with leader Kim Jong-un presiding the previous day and discussed Korean Peninsula affairs, a range of global issues and response measures regarding the U.S. The report said the politburo ordered the reconsidering of trust-building measures the North had taken on its own initiative and a prompt review to consider restarting all temporarily-suspended activities. This could be hinting at Pyongyang possibly ending a moratorium on nuclear and long-range ballistic missile tests it self-imposed in 2018.
According to the transport ministry, some 29-hundred traffic accident fatalities were reported last year, down 32% from five years ago. But the ministry believes deaths related to commercial vehicles such as buses and cargo trucks are still too high and will step up regulations. This includes monitoring whether truck drivers take a 15 minute rest after a two hour drive and introducing a trial-based warning system on vehicles that transport hazardous materials to prevent drivers from dozing off behind the wheel. Bus and taxi drivers operating under the influence will be subject to a one strike out rule.
Statistics Korea said today that regular government jobs in the public sector numbered 2.37 million last year, up 155-thousand from a year ago. Jobs at public firms grew by 9,000 to over 390-thousand last year. This marks the steepest growths since 2016 when records began to be kept. The percentage of public sector jobs out of total employed people accounted for 10.2% in 2021, up 0.7 percentage points from the previous year.