U.S. President Donald Trump pledged Monday to support Japan’s effort to repatriate citizens kidnapped by North Korean agents in the 1970s and 1980s as he met with a group of the abductees’ kin in Tokyo. Monday marked the second time for Trump to sit down with family members of the abductees. The families have “suffered the unthinkable heartbreak of having their loved ones abducted by North Korea,” Trump told a joint news conference with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at the State Guesthouse at Akasaka Palace in Tokyo.

South Korea's Defense Minister Jeong Kyeong-doo on Saturday fended off calls to step up pressure on North Korea after it test-fired missiles last month.

Hundreds of rare animal species take shelter in the 155-mile no man's land between North and South Korea

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) is a totalitarian state without parallel. In 2014, a United Nations commission, upon a yearlong investigation of North Korea’s crimes against humanity, determined that the “gravity, scale and nature” of its atrocities “reveal a State that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world.”

A South Korean violinist and a North Korean singer on Sunday held a rare joint performance they hope would help bring the divided Koreas closer together via music — especially at a time of emerging tensions amid deadlocked nuclear diplomacy. Violinist Won Hyung Joon and his North Korean soprano partner, Kim Song Mi, performed together at Shanghai Oriental Art Center with a Chinese orchestra. Their concert came three days after South Korea said North Korea fired two suspected short-range missiles toward the sea in the second such weapons test in five days.

North Korea said Wednesday it is suffering its worst drought in nearly four decades amid reports of severe food shortages. The official Korean Central News Agency said an average of 54.4 millimeters (2.1 inches) of rain fell throughout the country in the first five months of this year. It said that is the lowest level since 1982, when North Korea received 51.2 millimeters (2 inches) of rain on average during the same period.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un ordered the execution by firing squad of four foreign ministry officials after the failure of his Hanoi summit with Donald Trump, a report has claimed. The officials were reportedly executed after the February talks between North Korea and the US came to an end without any deal being made. Pyongyang had accused the four officials of selling information to Washington before the Hanoi summit, according to a Japanese news agency.

The parent company of Mercedes-Benz has said it has no idea how the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, got hold of armoured limousines manufactured by the German company and said it had no business dealings with the UN-sanctioned country. Kim has raised eyebrows by using stretch limousines manufactured by Stuttgart-based Daimler AG at high-profile summits, including his meeting this week with Vladimir Putin and both of his earlier summits with Donald Trump.

Weeks after the Trump-Kim summit, factories are still producing intercontinental ballistic missiles and enriched uranium.

Seoul, South Korea (CNN)North Korea said it would close a key missile test facility in the presence of "international experts" and potentially destroy its primary nuclear complex if the United States agrees to corresponding measures, South Korean President Moon Jae-in announced in a joint press conference with Kim Jong Un Wednesday. The two leaders made the announcement on the second day of a three-day summit, their third this year, as part of efforts with the United States to contain the threat of war on the Korean Peninsula.

A North Korean hacking group focused on financial gain for the rogue state has penetrated banks around the world with a series of ongoing attacks, and has tried to steal at least US$1.1 billion over the last four years, according to a new tally by cybersecurity firm FireEye Inc.

Notorious North Korean hacker group Lazarus has stolen more than $571 million in cryptocurrency, a new report from rearch firm Group IB has revealed.

Remember when Donald Trump said he and Kim Jong-un fell in love? Well now it seems they just don't talk anymore. Instead, the US and North Korea appear to be staring one another down, waiting for the other to blink or make a move. And neither appears willing to give way. Discussions aimed at setting up a second summit between the two leaders didn't happen as planned this week.

This has been a banner year for summitry on the Korean peninsula with the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics as the precursor. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un held multiple meetings with South Korean president Moon Jae-in and Chinese President Xi Jinping, while Donald Trump met Kim briefly in Singapore, a first for a sitting US president. Now it’s all about maintaining the momentum. If Trump’s remarks reflect policy, we have gone from “fire and fury” to “love” and the present policy of contradiction. Denuclearisation is on hold, hostage to sanctions and human rights concerns. Can we find a way out of the cul-de-sac in 2019?

A server outage at Tribune Publishing on Saturday that prevented the distribution of many leading U.S. newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and Baltimore Sun was actually nothing of the sort. Instead, it appears to have been a cyber-attack involving what is thought to have been a version of the highly successful Ryuk ransomware family. Interestingly, Ryuk is often attributed to the Lazarus Group which is thought to operate out of China but in the hands of North Korean threat actors.

We talked with another advocate of the organization Liberty in North Korea, Geum Hyok Kim. Geum is a defector from the ruling class of North Korea who didn’t realize the nature of the regime until he left. He tells his beautiful, reflective story of growth, understanding freedom, and realizing what’s important.

The North Korean leader is said to have met with Xi Jinping.

As President Trump headed home dealless from Vietnam following his aborted summit with Kim Jong Un, North Korean officials held an impromptu middle-of-the-night news conference at a Hanoi hotel, offering an account about the failed talks that differed from Trump's. "What we proposed was not the removal of all sanctions but the partial removal," Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho said through an interpreter in Hanoi.

North Korean hackers who have targeted American and European businesses for 18 months kept up their attacks last week even as President Trump was meeting with North Korea’s leader in Hanoi. The attacks, which include efforts to hack into banks, utilities and oil and gas companies, began in 2017, according to researchers at the cybersecurity company McAfee, a time when tensions between North Korea and the United States were flaring.

New satellite images of North Korea suggest it is restoring a rocket launch site it had pledged to dismantle, say analysts. The images were taken two days after talks between the leaders of the US and North Korea ended without them reaching a deal on denuclearisation. The Tongchang-ri site has been used for satellite launches and engine testing, never for ballistic missile launches.

North Korean decryption computers may have been stolen from its embassy in Spain in last month’s raid by as-yet unidentified assailants, a high-profile North Korean defector claimed Sunday. Thae Yong-ho, a former deputy North Korean ambassador to UK said on his blog that the group of men who allegedly infiltrated the North Korean Embassy in Madrid may have stolen computers used to communicate with Pyongyang, which would be a harsh blow to the communist regime.

China sent home more than half of the North Koreans working in the country in 2018, according to an unpublished report sent by Beijing to the United Nations Security Council. The one-page document, seen by Reuters on Tuesday, was submitted to the council’s North Korea sanctions committee in compliance with a 2017 resolution that demanded the repatriation of all North Korean workers by the end of this year to stop them earning foreign currency for leader Kim Jong-un’s government.

Andrei Rogatchevski reviews Forræderens Guide til Nord-Korea by Morten Traavik.

Award-winning photographer David Guttenfelder’s best shots.

An important lesson on what sorts of sanctions work against Pyongyang.

So as it turns out, growing and smoking cannabis is completely legal in North Korea. Encouraged, even. Here's the story of how I found out... and then ended up indulging in the 'special plant' with an officer from North Korea's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

North Korea is using political prisoners held in its extensive gulag network as subjects for chemical weapons tests, according to a report in the U.S.

Over a decade ago, a former North Korean military officer fled south after being accused of negligence and threatened with death. Now he coordinates the escapes of fellow North Koreans. But the price of freedom is often the lives of loved ones left behind.

North Korea opened a shiny new water park in east Pyongyang this week, to characteristically over-the-top fanfare. The official unveiling ceremony included the chiefs of the armed forces and top government officials. There was, of course, a full military parade. North Korean state media released several photos of the unveiling, which are posted below.

Photographs of two Air Koryo cargo planes landing at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport have confirmed that North Korea repainted civilian jets with temporary camouflage coloring for a high-profile “Victory Day” celebration in July.

Swedish journalist Johan Nylander was invited as the only Western journalist to cover an international bike race from China into North Korea in September. Here he details his travails working with North Korean authorities.

Some free-to-use computer games may secretly be North Korean plants, South Korea's national police agency warned Tuesday, according to South Korean media. The seemingly innocent games, designed to appeal to as many users as possible and thus to spread widely on computer networks, could carry malware code controlled from Pyongyang.

UN investigators leading an inquiry into human rights abuses in North Korea are consulting international lawyers over the possibility of summoning senior regime figures to appear before the international criminal court.

Forget the Swiss Alps, Kim Jong Un wants you to ski the sunny slopes of Masik Pass, North Korea's new multimillion-dollar ski resort. The result of 10 months of labor and scheduled to open sometime in October, the resort will offer ski runs, resort chalets, and even sleigh rides, providing fun for the country's estimated 5,500 skiers (about 0.02 percent of the population) and, increasingly, tourists.

A few months ago the ever-growing community of those interested in the DPRK learned that there is now something like a local version of the iPad—the Samjiyon tablet computer (p’anhyŏng k’omp’yut’ŏ samjiyŏn). After having had a chance to test it briefly during a visit in May 2013, I could not resist buying a Samjiyon in a shop in Pyongyang in September 2013.