Choe Sang-Hun

An American who has been held in North Korea since October was sentenced to 10 years of hard labor Friday for spying and other offenses, Chinese and Japanese news agencies reported.

South Korea has determined that North Korea is capable of mounting a nuclear warhead on its medium-range Rodong ballistic missile, which could reach all of the South and most of Japan, a senior government official said.

The United Nations Security Council voted unanimously on Wednesday to adopt tougher sanctions against North Korea, reflecting closer cooperation between the United States and China on a longstanding dispute.

An American student detained in North Korea appeared in a government-arranged news conference in Pyongyang on Monday, apologizing for what the country called an “anti-state” crime.

North Korea said Thursday that it would freeze all South Korean assets at a joint industrial complex the South shut down to retaliate for a recent nuclear test and a rocket launch by the North.

The rocket blasted off from Tongchang-ri, the North’s main satellite launch site near its northwestern border with China, a spokesman for the South Korean Defense Ministry said.

The White House said Wednesday that initial data from its monitoring stations in Asia were “not consistent” with North Korea’s claim that the nuclear test it carried out earlier in the day was its first test of a hydrogen bomb.

More than 70 years after the end of World War II, South Korea and Japan reached a landmark agreement on Monday to resolve their dispute over Korean women who were forced to serve as sex slaves for Japan’s Imperial Army.

Kim Jong Un gave his first public speech in three years to stress his readiness to “fight any form of war” with the United States.