Tokyo voiced its frustration on Friday a year after North Korea said it had started re-investigating the fate of Japanese kidnapped by Pyongyang's spies decades ago, with no new leads in sight.

"It is extremely regrettable that no abduction victims returned home although it's been a year since the investigation started," Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said during a parliamentary session. 

Drought-hit North Korea on Tuesday asked for humanitarian aid from its historic ally Iran, Iranian state media reported.

North Korean Ambassador Kang Sam-hyon delivered a request to the Iranian Red Crescent for urgent humanitarian aid to combat what Pyongyang has termed its worst drought in 100 years, aggravating dire food shortages, state news agency IRNA said.

South Korea imposed financial sanctions Friday on a Syrian research center as well as six Taiwanese individuals and companies for their alleged involvement in arms trading with North Korea.

The South has previously imposed sweeping sanctions against companies based in the North, but this is the first time such measures have been taken against a group or individual outside the Korean peninsula.  

North Korea's showcase new airport terminal, which had to be partly demolished and rebuilt at leader Kim Jong-Un's whim, is to open on July 1, state media said Thursday.

Kim called for a grand opening of the new Terminal 2 at Pyongyang International Airport on a tour accompanied by his wife Ri Sol-Ju and sister Kim Yo-Jong as well as senior party officials, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said.

North Korea issued a call to arms against "gangster U.S. imperialists" in a statement released Thursday to mark the 65th anniversary of the outbreak of the Korean War.

The Stalinist state's powerful National Defense Commission (NDC) made the appeal on the anniversary of the devastating conflict which the North maintains was started by the United States.

President Barack Obama urged Beijing to take "concrete steps" to ease tensions over cyber hacking and its wide-ranging maritime claims, as the United States and China ended three days of candid talks.

American officials have voiced deep concerns about both issues at the annual strategic and economic dialogue aimed at setting guidelines to steer future ties between the world's two leading economies.

The United Nations Tuesday opened a new office in Seoul to monitor North Korea's human rights record, after accusing the isolated regime of abuses "without parallel in the contemporary world" in a report published last year.

The office was formally opened in a ceremony attended by U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein, despite Pyongyang repeatedly threatening "merciless punishment" against South Korea if the mission was launched.

North Korea Tuesday sentenced two South Korean men to hard labor for life on espionage and other charges, state media reported, rejecting repeated calls by Seoul to release them.

The North's Supreme Court handed down life sentences on charges of spying for South Korea's intelligence agency, said Pyongyang's official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).

North Korea must abandon its "fantasy" that it is free to pursue its nuclear program while seeking global help to prop up its economy, a top U.S. official said Thursday.

The stalled six-party talks aimed at reining in Pyongyang's bid to develop a nuclear warhead are likely to be one of the issues raised next week at talks between China and the United States in Washington.

North Korea's food supply faces a gloomy forecast this year due to a damaging drought which has sparked fears of worsening shortages in the impoverished communist country, experts said Wednesday.

Concern grew after Pyongyang's official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported Tuesday that North Korea has been hit by its worst drought in a century.