"North Korea Cuts Phone Link With South, Slamming 'Traitors' " by Jon Herskovitz and Sangmi Cha for Bloomberg

ONN Regional Issues Manager and Senior Analyst Rachel Minyoung Lee commented on DPRK's failure to respond to regularly held calls on an inter-Korean liaison communications channel.

" 'The question then becomes whether this is a temporary protest and it restores communications after a certain time, as it has done in the past, or whether this is the first step toward a bigger policy change,' said Rachel Minyoung Lee, regional issues manager at the Vienna-based Open Nuclear Network. 'North Korea in recent weeks has issued two highly authoritative articles on the situation on the Korean Peninsula, which suggests they are at a major decision point with regard to foreign policy,' said Lee, who worked as an analyst for the CIA's Open Source Enterprise for almost two decades."