Accepting Tokyo's request, the UN Security Council approved holding of a crisis session in New York shortly. The Japanese broadcaster NHK said the multi-stage rocket flew over Japan and landed in Pacific Ocean.
Expressing its "regret and disappointment" over the North's action, the South Korean Presidential office said that Pyongyang has caused "a serious threat" to peace on the Korean Peninsula. President Lee Myung-bak instructed the military to bolster its vigilance against emergency situations.
At the State Department in Washington, spokesman Fred Lash also called the North Korean rocket launch a "provocative act."
The US would "certainly" take "appropriate steps to let North Korea know that it can't threaten the safety and security of other countries with impunity and acts like these," he said.
Image: Anti-North Korea protesters burn a mock North Korean missile and portraits of North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il at a protest to denounce North Korea's rocket launch, near the US embassy in Seoul.
Photograph: Lee Jae-Won/Reuters
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