North Korea Defends Launch Plan

North Korea on Sunday lashed out at the U.S., South Korea and other countries critical of its plan to launch a rocket next month, saying their belief that it was actually testing a military missile amounted to "gossip" and "loose outbursts."

North Korea, in a statement issued by its state news agency, repeated its initial statement from Friday that the rocket it plans to fire in mid-April will take a satellite into space, something it has said on two of its three other tests of long-range missiles.

North Korea didn't reach space with any previous launch, however, nor does it have any satellites in orbit. Its insistence that it put satellites in space previously, despite the evident failure of those launches, undermines its argument for the new launch, analysts said.

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