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PYONGYANG (Reuters) - With no long-range missiles on display, North Korea staged a military parade on Sunday focused on conventional arms, peace and economic development, to mark the 70th anniversary of the country’s founding. Line upon line of goose-stepping soldiers and columns of tanks shook the ground before giving way to chanting crowds waving flags and flowers as they passed a review stand where North Korean leader Kim Jong Un sat with a special envoy from China, as well as other visiting foreigners. Kim told the envoy, Chinese parliament chief Li Zhanshu, that North Korea was focusing on economic development...

SEOUL/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - North Korea’s Kim Jong Un has given his first time line for denuclearization, aiming for the end of U.S. President Donald Trump’s first term, Seoul officials said on Thursday, prompting thanks from Trump who said they would “get it done together”. Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in will also meet in Pyongyang on Sept. 18-20 for a third summit and discuss “practical measures” toward denuclearization, Moon’s national security adviser, Chung Eui-yong, said a day after meeting Kim. The summit could provide renewed momentum to talks over denuclearization between North Korea and the United States, after Trump...

Works of fiction that purport to be collections of documents—let’s call them “assemblage novels”—are hard to pull off. The Scottish writer Graeme Macrae Burnet succeeded in 2015—and ended up on the Booker Prize shortlist—with His Bloody Project, a novel that was supposedly a collection of documents relating to a 19th-century murder. Max Brooks’s Zombie Survival Guide, a clever fake manual for enduring the zombie apocalypse, is another recent entry in the genre. Now comes Jeffrey Lewis, an arms control expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies and a prolific tweeter (he’s @armscontrolwonk), and his 2020 Commission Report on the...

Days after cancelling a planned visit to North Korea by his top diplomat citing insufficient progress in denuclearisation talks, US President Donald Trump hailed his personal relationship North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on Wednesday and said there was no reason to resume war games with South Korea. Trump's statement came a day after his defence secretary hinted that the drills, which North Korea denounces as rehearsals for invasion, could resume. Trump tweeted a White House statement in which he once again questioned China's role in helping to resolve the crisis over North Korea's development of nuclear weapons that threaten...

South Korean President Moon Jae-in says he and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will take a "bold step" in their upcoming summit to formally ending the six-decade old war that split the two sides. President Moon made the declaration Wednesday during a ceremony in Seoul marking the 73rd anniversary of the liberation of the Korean peninsula from Japanese colonial rule. The two Koreas announced earlier this week that Moon and Kim will meet in Pyongyang sometime next month. The two leaders have already met twice this year, both times in Panmunjom, the truce village in the border zone that...

US talks with North Korea on denuclearisation are making progress "in the right direction," State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said on Tuesday (Aug 14). Nauert said behind-the-scenes discussions with Pyongyang have normalised in the wake of President Donald Trump's June summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and subsequent meetings between US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other top Pyongyang officials. "We consider meetings, negotiations, conversations as we move forward behind the scenes with those negotiations to be moving in the right direction," Nauert said in a press briefing. "Conversations with the government of North Korea are becoming...

Is the US-North Korea War inevitable despite the Singapore summit? While the US-North Korea Summit earlier this year marked a historic event in the making of global denuclearisation, Kim-Jong-un has turned down all proposals of denuclearisation made by the Trump Administration. Pyongyang has blatantly refused to give up on its nuclear arsenal out of goodwill as it finds the US proposals ‘gangster like.’ North Korea Will Not Denuclearise As reported by Sputnik News, North Korea has taken a complete dislike to the proposal made by Washington for denuclearisation. The North Korean government reportedly highlighted its efforts made in good faith....

North Korea believes there is a "strong possibility" of a second summit between the country's leader Kim Jong Un and US President Donald Trump, according to an official with close knowledge of Pyongyang's position on the matter. The official pointed to a recent exchange of letters between Trump and Kim as a positive sign, adding that although the date and location of the summit have yet to be determined, it would take place "sometime later this year." The news came as doubts mounted over whether Trump's historic summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in June would deliver its...

<p>North Korea has not stopped its nuclear and missile programmes in violation of United Nations sanctions, according to a confidential UN report seen by Reuters on Friday (Aug 3).</p> <p>The six-month report by independent experts monitoring the implementation of UN sanctions was submitted to the Security Council North Korea sanctions committee late on Friday.</p>

If there’s one thing we know about Donald Trump, it’s that he’s a people person. On Monday he said he’d “certainly meet” with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani if the Iranian leader was interested. With that meeting, we will have run out of “Axis of Evil” heads of state with whom President Trump can press the flesh. The president declared that he’d meet with the Iranian “anytime they want to.” “I’ll meet with anybody,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with meeting.” For his willingness to enter into a confab with just about anybody, President Trump has taken fire from critics from...

Newly obtained evidence, including satellite photos taken in recent weeks, indicates that work is underway on at least one and possibly two liquid-fueled ICBMs at a large research facility in Sanumdong, on the outskirts of Pyongyang, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe classified intelligence. The findings are the latest to show ongoing activity inside North Korea’s nuclear and missile facilities at a time when the country’s leaders are engaged in arms talks with the United States. The new intelligence does not suggest an expansion of North Korea’s capabilities but shows that work on...

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said the country should feed its soldiers better, according to state media KCNA on Wednesday, after a defected North Korean soldier's health last year highlighted nutrition problems in the isolated state. On a visit to a military rations factory, Kim said it should produce tasty and nutritious food to "substantially contribute to improving the diet of the servicepersons", according to KCNA. Kim said "officials and employees of the factory should always overfulfill the production plan on all indices, bearing in mind the noble intention of leader Kim Jong Il (his late father) who spared...

North Korea leader Kim Jong Un launched -- not a missile -- but an unusual public attack on his own officials during inspections of several ongoing projects in the Hermit Kingdom, visits he said that left him “appalled” and “speechless” due to a lack of progress and attention to detail. Kim’s statements, released by the state-run Korean Central News Agency on Tuesday, were made during his “field guidance” visits at construction sites in the country. The despot’s disappointment was reportedly visible during a visit to the Orangchon Power Station construction site in the northeast. After officials briefed him about the...

After a 19-gun salute wreathed the parade ground at Camp Humphreys in white smoke on June 29, South Korea’s Minister of National Defense, Song Young-moo, and United States Forces Korea (USFK) Commander, General Vincent Brooks, cut the ribbon at the United Nations Command and USFK’s new headquarters. The massive $10.8 billion garrison in Pyeongtaek—America’s largest overseas military base—is in the final stage of a more than decade-long expansion project. About 45 miles south of the joint command’s former headquarters in metropolitan Seoul, it is expected to house nearly 45,000 troops, contractors, and family members by 2022, following the largest peacetime...

Nix the nuclear warheads, cue the doves. The North Korean government is erasing much of its anti-U.S. propaganda following dictator Kim Jong-un’s forays onto the world stage. Gone are the posters depicting the U.S. as a “rotten, diseased, pirate nation” and promising “merciless revenge” on American forces for an imagined attack on the totalitarian country. In their place are cheery messages touting praising the prospects for Korean reunification and the declaration Kim signed in April with South Korean President Moon Jae-in promising “lasting peace,” according to reports.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The missile engine test site that President Donald Trump said North Korean leader Kim Jong Un had committed to destroy is a major facility in the western part of the country that has been used for testing engines for long-range missiles, according to a U.S. official. Trump told reporters after their June 12 summit that Kim had pledged to dismantle one of his missile installations, which would be North Korea’s most concrete concession at the landmark meeting in Singapore. However, the president at the time did not name the site. A U.S. official identified it on Wednesday...

After the Singapore summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, denuclearization and a peace process is accelerating at a dizzying pace on the Korean Peninsula. But the public has mixed feelings. While welcoming a North Korea without nuclear weapons and the possibility of peace in a divided land, they cannot calm their anxieties over the stunning developments. First of all, our concerns involve Trump’s remarks about stopping joint military exercises between the two allies. After Trump defined them as “provocative,” the Moon Jae-in administration nearly accepted the suspension of the annual drills. But discontinuing those...

By any reasonable account, the historic meeting between President Trump and Kim Jong-un, resulting in an agreement pledging to work toward a stable and enduring peace (over six decades after the Korean armistice was signed at Panmunjom) was an incredible achievement. In fact, had Obama or Clinton achieved as much, we would expect a ticker-tape parade down Fifth Avenue. North Korea has agreed to completely denuclearize and has begun the process, according to reports of satellite imagery , and has agreed to return the remains of U.S. military who perished in North Korea. China, long rightfully considered the muscle behind...

President Trump received a lot of criticism for his historic meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, who is known for his human rights abuses. The only thing new that Trump is doing is establishing friendly relations with a new country. (video)

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un have communicated several times over the past few months and are seeking to schedule a meeting between the two later this year, a new report says. One option on the table is for Abe to travel to Pyongyang in August, but another possibility is for Abe and Kim to meet during the Eastern Economic Forum in September if Kim decided to attend, according to the Yomiuri newspaper. The report comes after a Tuesday summit between the U.S. and North Korea, where President Trump and Kim signed a joint...