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SEOUL, South Korea — A South Korean activist said Thursday he launched a million propaganda leaflets by balloon into North Korea this week, in his first such campaign while standing trial for past leafleting under a contentious new law that criminalizes such actions. The law that took effect in March 2021 and punishes anti-Pyongyang leafleters with up to three years in prison has been hotly debated in South Korea, with critics saying Seoul’s liberal government was sacrificing freedom of speech to improve ties with rival North Korea. Download the  NBC News app  for breaking news and politics  Park Sang-hak, a North Korean defector-turned-activist, said he resumed his leafleting campaign this week after halting such activities for a year during a police investigation and court trial for sending balloons across the border in April last year. The trial is continuing and no verdict has been issued. On Monday and Tuesday, his group floated 20 huge balloons carrying le...

In 2018, when the power company Hope Energy entered Japan’s new retail electricity market, it thought it had a surefire strategy. Wholesale energy was becoming ever cheaper as liquefied natural gas flooded global markets. Hope Energy would sell competitively priced electricity contracts to local governments and public facilities, undercutting Japan’s old-line power companies, which had long prioritized stable supplies over cost. But then came the pandemic and the  Ukraine  war, which caused LNG prices to soar. Hope Energy could not honor its price pledges, and it, along with more than 30 other electricity retailers in Japan, went out of business. Customers scrambled for new providers. Now, the world’s third-largest economy is again confronting the fragility of its energy system. That has forced a reconsideration of how the resource-poor country can maintain a reliable and affordable power supply in an era of growing geopolitical uncertainty, reflected most immediately in risin...

  North Korean leader Kim Jong Un appears to have lowered his threshold for a nuclear strike, raising the risks for a miscalculation as he rolls out new weapons whose uses range from nearby tactical strikes to threatening the U.S. homeland from afar. Kim signaled a looser policy toward his possible use of atomic weapons at a military parade in Pyongyang aired on state television late Tuesday. While North Korea's nuclear force was primarily meant to "deter wars," it had a "second mission," and "cannot be bound to only one mission, if there's an outbreak of an unwanted situation on this land," he told tens of thousands of adoring citizens Monday night. The North Korean leader has backed his words with tests of weapons designed to evade American missile defenses in Asia and deliver warheads to the U.S. mainland. Satellite imagery indicates North Korea is preparing a key site for the country's first nuclear test since 2017, after pledging to develo...