North Korea is pressing on with the 100th anniversary of its founder’s birth, with top-level meetings and a rocket launch scheduled in coming days to bolster his grandson’s credentials

North Korea is pressing on with the 100th anniversary of its founder's birth, with top-level meetings and a rocket launch scheduled in coming days to bolster his grandson's credentials.
  
The North invited foreign journalists on Sunday to its rocket launch site. Nevertheless, the United States and other nations said the satellite launch will be a pretext for a ballistic missile test.
  
A South Korean official was quoted by AFP as saying that the North appeared to be preparing to follow up the launch, which is scheduled for sometime between April 12 and 16, with a third nuclear weapons test.
  
But Jang Myong-Jin, head of North Korea's Tongchang-ri space centre in the far northwest, said it was "really nonsense" to call the upcoming launch a disguised missile test. "This launch was planned long ago, on the occasion of the 100th birthday of (founding) president Kim Il-Sung. We are not doing it for provocative purposes," he told journalists Sunday.
  
The rocket, painted white with sky-blue lettering, is 30 metres (99 feet) high with a diameter of 2.5 metres. Reporters also saw the satellite: a 100-kilogram (220 pound) box with five antennae, covered by solar panels to supply it with electricity. The Kwangmyongsong-3 (Shining Star) satellite will collect data on forests and natural resources in North Korea, officials said.

China's Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi, in a meeting with his South Korean and Japanese counterparts on Sunday, said Beijing was "worried" by the rocket launch, according to a foreign ministry statement. The North says it can destroy the rocket remotely if it veers off course.