North Korean military medics ramped up the distribution of medicines to fight a growing coronavirus outbreak, state media said on Tuesday, with the number of reported cases of "fever" nearing 1.5 million.Leader Kim Jong-un has ordered nationwide lockdowns to try and slow the spread of the disease through the unvaccinated population, and deployed the military after what he has called a botched response to the outbreak.Hundreds of personnel in camouflage uniforms from the Korean Peopl

North Korea announced its first official cases of COVID-19 on Thursday, saying the highly transmissible Omicron variant had been detected and a national emergency declared.The isolated country has never reported a case of COVID-19 before, and leader Kim Jong-un has ordered nationwide lockdowns in a bid to prevent the spread of the virus.Here's what we know:Is It A Major Outbreak?State media said "persons with fever" at an organisation in the capital Pyongyang had tested positiv

It's all very different from August 2017 when Japan awoke to the sound of air raid sirens. Without warning North Korea had fired an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) over the top of Japan into the Pacific Ocean. It was an audacious act.This time North Korea's missiles have all been short range, and have landed in the sea, well away from the Japanese coast. Kim Jong-un appears to be holding back, for now.

Nearly three years after his failed bromance with Donald Trump, North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un is once again angling for United States (US) attention. North Korea has tested a new, high-tech missile and hinted that it may agree to restart talks with South Korea, where President Moon Jae-in desperately wants to resuscitate his moribund outreach to the North.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un issued a rare apology Friday over what he described as the "unexpected and disgraceful" killing of a South Korean at sea, Seoul's presidential office said.Apologies from the North – let alone attributed to Kim personally – are extremely unusual, and the message comes with inter-Korean ties in a deep freeze, and amid a standoff in nuclear negotiations between Pyongyang and Washington.Analysts said the North was looking to placate its neighbour aft

Like the leading character in a long-running television series, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has kicked off the latest crisis on the Korean Peninsula with familiar theatrics. After cutting off all communications with South Korea earlier this month, the Kim regime bombed the building in which it had previously hosted South Korean diplomats. It has redeployed troops into demilitarised border areas and issued renewed threats of violence against the South.

North Korea criticised Donald Trump in a stinging denunciation of the United States (US) on Friday, the second anniversary of a landmark summit in Singapore where the US president shook hands with leader Kim Jong-un.It was the latest in a series of vitriolic statements from Pyongyang aimed at both Washington and Seoul, and came a day after the North implicitly threatened to disrupt November's election if the US did not stay out of inter-Korean affairs.

North Korea has launched a visceral diatribe against United States (US) Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, calling the former vice-president a "rabid dog" – while also borrowing the terminology of Donald Trump.Pyongyang is renowned for its vitriol, but the verbal deluge was unusually ferocious even by its own standards.Biden "had the temerity to dare slander the dignity of the supreme leadership of the DPRK", the North's official KCNA news agency said late T

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un supervised a "new weapon" test, state media reported Sunday, the latest in a series of launches that United States (US) President Donald Trump has played down as Washington seeks to restart nuclear talks with Pyongyang.The report carried by the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) followed Trump's comments that Kim had expressed a willingness to meet once the US-South Korean exercises are over and apologised for the slew of missile tests.Saturday&#0

North Korea's leader Kim Jong-un says the country's latest missile launches were a warning to Washington and Seoul over their joint war games, state news agency KCNA reported on Wednesday, as tensions rise on the Korean peninsula.The latest launch by the nuclear-armed North came after the South Korean and United States (US) militaries began mainly computer-simulated joint exercises on Monday to test Seoul's ability to take operational control in wartime.Those drills are taking