North Korea has agreed to restore a cross-border military hotline with South Korea, in another sign of easing tensions between the rivals in recent weeks, the South Korean government has said. On Thursday, the two Koreas agreed at a meeting in Kaesong to restart the hotline starting Friday, Seoul's Unification Ministry said. North Korea in March shut down the telephone and fax lines used to coordinate cross-border travel to a joint industrial park in Kaesong that has since been shuttered.

North and South Korea have agreed reunions of families separated by the Korean War in 1950-53 will resume next month, officials in Seoul have said. They said 100 people from each side would meet on 25-30 September at the North's Mount Kumgang resort. It would be the first time such meetings have taken place for three years. The two sides remain technically at war because the conflict ended in an armistice and not a peace deal.

If you’re a film buff, you may have heard of a Korean-made summer blockbuster that, strangely, hasn’t reached American shores quite yet. Starring a line-up of famous Western actors, some critics say Snowpiercer — Korea’s most expensive film ever — represents a potential cultural landmark. Based on a French comic book, it covers a dystopia of post-apocalyptic survivors who, living on a train that travels around the world, rebel against their repressive overlords.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is taking a new approach to defectors who have fled his impoverished and repressive state, promising they will not be harmed if they come home, and even offering cash rewards, according to some in the exile community. For some who return from South Korea there's even the chance of a stage-managed performance on state television, although what happens to them after their prime time appearances is not known in a state where 200,000 people are imprisoned in gulags and where punishment extends to three generations of a family.

Dan Matthews is a rapper. He was adopted from Korea when he was 8 months old and grew up in Southern California as an American kid. But he was curious about his birth parents. So after many years of being on the fence about finding them…he wrote a letter to his adoption agency. He just never thought he’d get this response: "Dear Dan Matthews. I’m writing to share the information of your birth family. As you may be aware your birth parents were married and are still married. they have one son and a daughter.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today welcomed the agreement between the two Koreas on the re-opening of the Kaesong Industrial Complex, adding that he hopes this will lead to other constructive steps to promote trust and improve relations between the East Asian neighbours...The complex is located in the border town of Kaesong just across the Demilitarized Zone. It employs more than 53,000 citizens of the DPRK at 123 companies of the Republic of Korea (ROK), according to media reports.

Planting K-Pop on US soil, SM Entertainment announced its plans to create the SMTOWN Museum in Los Angeles. On August 7, SM Entertainment revealed that it will be building a place for US residents to experience hallyu in Los Angeles. The new SMTOWN Museum (tentative name) will be located at 6th and Oxford in Koreatown. “We’ve been planning for a long time to create a place where residents in Hollywood could experience hallyu, but we decided that it was more meaningful to bring US residents and tourists who were interested in hallyu to LA’s Koreatown,” said the agency.

It was only a matter of time. In the span of a decade, Korean pop music has gone from relative obscurity to sweep the entire Asian continent. Now, with a little help from Psy, K-pop has cast its eye on the potentially lucrative markets in the Americas and Europe. First came the United States, then Mexico. MBLAQ, a popular Korean boy band, arrived in Mexico this week for their first concert in Central and South America.