North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s influential sister slammed the US and South Korea on Tuesday, state media reported, as the new US secretaries of state and defence began a visit to Tokyo and Seoul, writes France24.

The US and South began joint military exercises last week and Pyongyang’s official Rodong Sinmun newspaper carried a statement from Kim Yo Jong offering “a word of advice to the new administration of the United States that is struggling to spread the smell of gunpowder on our land from across the ocean”.

“If you wish to sleep well for the next four years, it would be better not to create work from the start that will make you lose sleep”, - she said.

It is the first explicit reference by the nuclear-armed North to a new president in Washington, more than four months after Joe Biden was elected to replace Donald Trump - although it still did not mention the Democrat by name.