IN AN unusual move, North Korea’s parliament wrote to the US Congress yesterday in protest at new sanctions.

The Supreme People’s Assembly’s recently reconstituted foreign affairs committee called Congress’s North Korea Interdiction and Modernisation of Sanctions Act a “most heinous act against humanity.”

The US House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly on May 4 to impose the new sanctions, which target North Korea’s shipping industry and use of “slave labour” — a reference to workers Pyonyang posts abroad who often work in forced-labour conditions and whose wages are paid to the state.