The White House demanded on Wednesday that North Korea pardon and release Otto Warmbier, the 21-year-old American student who was sentenced Wednesday to 15 years of hard labor for apparently trying to steal a propaganda poster from a Pyongyang hotel earlier this year. Accusing North Korea’s government of exploiting U.S. citizens as “pawns to pursue a political agenda,” White House spokesperson Josh Earnest said at a press briefing that the U.S.