Pres. Park calls N. Korea`s submarine ballistic missile `serious challenge`

South Korean President Park Geun-hye heaved a deep sigh at a Cabinet meeting on Thursday, before discussing the controversial reform of the pension funds for government employees. Some of the Cabinet members laughed, taking her sigh as a joke. However, the president looked at them without a smile on her face.

After a short pause, she said that the political circles should do what they are supposed to do before discussing whether to increase taxes. "It would be a shameless thing to do for politicians to attempt to levy more taxes on the public while not making efforts to reduce (government) debts," she said. Her remarks were an open criticism of a recent agreement between the ruling and opposition parties to link the government employees` pension funds to increasing the income replacement ratio of the national pension funds -- a plan that her administration says would incur increased fiscal spending than reducing it.

After the Cabinet meeting, she chaired a meeting of top security officials to discuss North Korea`s recent test-firing of a submarine-launched ballistic missile. Calling the missile development a "serious challenge" that undermines stability on the Korean Peninsula and in the rest of East Asia, she instructed the officials to "sternly retaliate" in the event of North Korean provocations.

egija@donga.com