Japan preparing for any contingency

JAPAN is stepping up monitoring of North Korea amid growing speculation that the communist nation could carry out a nuclear weapons test as early as this weekend.

Meanwhile, the United Nations Security Council reached an agreement on an official statement urging North Korea to cancel its planned nuclear test and return immediately to talks on scrapping its nuclear weapons programme, Russia’s UN ambassador said.

With tensions rising, communist leader Kim Jong Il met hundreds of his top military commanders and urged them to bolster the nation’s defences, North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency reported. Officers greeted him with cheers of “Fight at the cost of our lives”.