North Korea has come out fighting following fresh UN Security Council sanctions on Pyongyang and after the United States and South Korea celebrated the punishing measures. 
 
 North Korea on Monday condemned the sanctions imposed in response to its weapons programmes, saying it would not negotiate over nuclear arms while threatened by the US. 
 
 The sanctions passed at the weekend were a "violent violation of our sovereignty", Pyongyang said in a statement carried by its official Korean Central News Agency, adding it would take "righteous action" in return. 
 
 The sanctions passed at the weekend were a "violent violation of our sovereignty", Pyongyang said in a statement carried by its official Korean Central News Agency, adding it would take "righteous action" in return. 
 
 "We will not put our self-defensive nuclear deterrent on the negotiating table" while it faced threats from Washington, it said, "and will never take a single step back from strengthening our nuclear might". 
 
 The UN Security Council unanimously adopted on Saturday a US-led resolution, which bans mineral and seafood exports from North Korea worth more than $1bn. 
 
 China, a close ally of North Korea, also voted in favour of the sanctions. 
 
 The US and its regional allies, South Korea and Japan, have been alarmed in the wake of the test-launch of two Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) last month, which are believed to be capable of striking anywhere in the mainland US. 
 
 Top diplomats meet in Manila 
 
 Meanwhile, several Asian foreign ministers, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, are currently gathered in the Philippine capital, Manila, for an ASEAN regional summit. 
 
 There, North Korea on Sunday dismissed offers of talks from South Korea during a rare exchange between the two rivals' foreign ministers, according to Seoul's state-funded Yonhap news agency. 
 
 South Korea's Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-Wha shook hands with her Northern counterpart, Ri Yong-Ho, before a forum dinner. 
 
 In the brief encounter, Kang urged Ri to accept Seoul's offers of military talks to lower tensions on the divided peninsula, and for discussions on a new round of reunions for divided families. 
 
 "Given the current situation in which the South collaborates with the US to heap pressure on the North, such proposals lacked sincerity," an unnamed South Korean foreign ministry official has quoted Ri as saying in response. 
 
 RELATED: Three things to know about North Korea's missile tests 
 
 Kang reiterated "the South's sincerity" and repeated a call for Pyongyang to come forward for talks, the official told Yonhap. 
 
 Al Jazeera's Kathy Novak, reporting from Seoul, said: "South Korea wants to say with the recent moves that the dialogue offer is on the table, but they won't be bullied and will impose more sanctions on North Korea in case of ballistic missile tests." 
 
 China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi supported South Korea's initiative, calling it a step in the right direction. 
 
 Al Jazeera’s Jamela Alindogan, reporting from Manila, said that the cooperation of China to put pressure on North Korea might signal a shift in approach and policy of Pyongyang. 
 
 "However, it remains to be seen whether the latest developments will produce concrete results or not," she said. 
 
 Moon and Trump discuss crisis 
 
 News of the brief encounter between the Koreas came as Moon Jae-In, South Korea's president, and his US counterpart, Donald Trump, agreed to apply maximum pressure on North Korea. 
 
 During a phone call Moon told Trump that South Korea "cannot let another war to break out" on the peninsula after the 1950-53 Korean War that sealed the division of two Koreas, the presidential Blue House said in a statement. 
 
 Even a conventional conflict on the peninsula could cost a million dead or wounded within months, estimates say. 
 
 The encounter of the foreign ministers was the first time cabinet-level officials from the two Koreas had met since Moon, who urges engagement with North Korea as well as sanctions to bring it to the negotiating table, took power in May. 
 
 Moon's policy that is open to engagement with North Korea is different from his two conservative predecessors, who tended to reject anything less than strict enforcement of sanctions and punishment of Pyongyang. 
 
 Meanwhile, the US, Japan and South Korea have welcomed the tough new UN sanctions, as China cautiously approved of them but reiterated a call for dialogue. 
 
 North Korea has been conducting nuclear and ballistic missile tests despite warnings issued and sanctions imposed by the international community. ||||| MANILA—The United Nations Security Council passed the toughest-ever economic sanctions against North Korea over the weekend. Now comes the hard part: making them stick, and fast. 
 
 U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson met here Sunday with counterparts from China, Russia, and a host of Asian countries as he sought to build momentum to isolate North Korea. He described the sanctions as “a good outcome.” 
 
 Chinese... ||||| MANILA/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson held a door open for dialogue with North Korea on Monday, saying Washington was willing to talk to Pyongyang if it halted a series of recent missile test launches. 
 
 Tillerson’s comments at a regional security forum in Manila were the latest U.S. attempt to rein in Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programs after months of tough talk from U.S. President Donald Trump. 
 
 The U.N. Security Council on Saturday imposed its toughest round of sanctions yet against Pyongyang over its two intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) tests in July. 
 
 But Tillerson appeared more conciliatory on Monday. 
 
 “The best signal that North Korea can give us that they are prepared to talk would be to stop these missile launches,” said Tillerson, adding that “other means of communications” were open to Pyongyang. He also said any dialogue would deal with how North Korea can “feel secure and prosper economically.” 
 
 Last week, Tillerson said North Korea needed to cease both its missile launches and nuclear weapons tests for talks to begin. It was not clear why he urged Pyongyang on Monday to halt only missile launches and the State Department did not respond to a request for clarification. 
 
 But a senior official familiar with negotiations between the United States and China said “it was not an accident or a mistake that Tillerson did not mention nuclear testing.” 
 
 Washington is leaving it to China to restate world powers’ opposition to new nuclear bomb tests while the United States urges a halt in missile launches “which obviously is a much lower rhetorical barrier to resuming talks,” the official said. 
 
 There was no direct reaction from North Korea to Tillerson’s remarks but in a statement after the U.S. secretary of state made his comments, Pyongyang responded robustly to the new sanctions by saying it was ready to teach the United States a “severe lesson” if it attacked. 
 
 TOUGH SANCTIONS 
 
 The U.N. Security Council unanimously imposed sanctions on North Korea aimed at pressuring Pyongyang to end its nuclear program. The sanctions could further choke North Korea’s struggling economy by slashing its $3 billion annual export revenue by a third. 
 
 The United States has remained technically at war with North Korea since the 1950-53 Korean conflict ended in an armistice rather than a peace treaty. The past six decades have been punctuated by periodic rises in antagonism and rhetoric that have always stopped short of a resumption of active hostilities. 
 
 U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson answers questions during a news conference in Manila, Philippines August 7, 2017. REUTERS/Karen Lema 
 
 The Trump administration’s attempts to pressure North Korea into abandoning its nuclear and missile ambitions have so far gained little traction, and Pyongyang has only stepped up its tests, launching two ICBM tests last month. 
 
 Tillerson’s remarks might be an attempt to try another tack by the United States, which also has tried to get Pyongyang’s ally China to use its influence to prevent North Korean leader Kim Jong Un from building a nuclear arsenal. 
 
 Tillerson said Washington would not “specify a specific number of days or weeks” before deciding that North Korea had indeed stopped its tests. 
 
 In a statement to the Manila forum on Monday, Pyongyang said it would never place its nuclear program on the negotiating table as long as the United States maintained a hostile policy against the North. 
 
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 North Korea says its ICBMs are a legitimate means of defense. It has long accused the United States and South Korea of escalating tensions by conducting military drills. 
 
 Suzanne DiMaggio of the New America Foundation think tank in Washington said there may be some room for dialogue. 
 
 “The North Koreans contend that they cannot relinquish their nuclear program until the U.S. ends its hostile policies,” she said. “This indicates conditionality to some extent and it should be fully pursued. How do they define these ‘hostile policies?’ How can they be addressed? Can we get to the point where the North Koreans do not see the necessity of having nuclear weapons?” 
 
 Joel Wit, director of 38 North, a Washington-based North Korea monitoring project, said he did not think North Korea would agree to a suspension of missile tests unilaterally as a precondition to talks without, for example, a suspension of large-scale military exercises held regularly by the United States and South Korea, which it has denounced as a prelude for invasion. 
 
 The latest U.N. resolution bans North Korean exports of coal, iron, iron ore, lead, lead ore and seafood. It also prohibits countries from increasing the numbers of North Korean laborers currently working abroad, bans new joint ventures with North Korea and any new investment in current joint ventures. 
 
 Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi urged “the North Korean side to calmly handle the resolutions”. He said in Manila on Sunday that Pyongyang should “not do anything unbeneficial towards the international community such as a nuclear test.” 
 
 In a phone call, South Korea’s Moon and Trump said they would continue cooperating to rein in North Korea, particularly ahead of a regular joint military drill set for late August, South Korean presidential office spokesman Park Su-hyun said. 
 
 The White House said the two leaders “affirmed that North Korea poses a grave and growing direct threat” to most countries around the world.
– North Korea has responded to tough new United Nations Security Council sanctions with typical defiance, calling the measures a "violent violation" of its sovereignty and promising "righteous action" in return. In statements carried by the official Korea Central News Agency on Sunday, Pyongyang rejected calls for it to return to the negotiating table over its nuclear weapons program, vowing that its nuclear deterrent would not be affected by threats from Washington, Al Jazeera reports. We "will never take a single step back from strengthening our nuclear might," Pyongyang's statement said. The sanctions are expected to slash North Korea's annual $3 billion export revenue by a third. Analysts, however, warn that even if the tough new sanctions, the eighth round passed since 2006, can be made to stick, it may not be enough to prevent North Korea from creating a nuclear missile capable of withstanding re-entry. "The problem with sanctions alone is that we don't have that kind of time," Leon Sigal, director of the New York-based Northeast Asia Cooperative Security Project, tells the Wall Street Journal. "They're very close to an ICBM." Reuters reports that South Korean President Moon Jae-in spoke to President Trump on Monday and promised to apply maximum pressure to the North. (China has told Pyongyang to "be smart" and stop missile tests.)