Seoul Mayor Park Won-soon proposed reviving a Seoul-Pyongyang football exchange program to a senior North Korean sports official on Sunday. [...] "Gyeongseong-Pyongyang Football was quite popular back in the day, and if it comes back to life, I think Seoul residents will welcome it with open arms," Park told Chang. "I hope you'll give it careful consideration."

There are no I  [❤]  North Korea bumper stickers, no shot glasses with North Korean city names. But imagine a reality where the 69-year-old totalitarian state was a free and open country that welcomed tourists to frolic in its streets. This improbable reverie inspired the Swedish design agency Snask to create a ready-to-use nation brand identity kit, complete with a new North Korean flag brandishing a message of love.

Ryomyong St is the third prestige project in as many years in the North Korean capital, and by far the largest, said to have nearly 5,000 apartments, which according to authorities will be distributed free to deserving citizens. Its name translates as “illumination” and the official KCNA news agency described it as “an icon of modern street architecture and a fairyland representing the era of the Workers’ Party”.

On a quiet midweek evening on the streets of the Cambodian capital, the Pyongyang Restaurant is at near capacity. Inside the square room, adorned with dramatic landscape murals, music starts to blast. Waitresses in bright traditional Korean garb drop their trays and pick up their instruments. With great skill they twirl in formation and belt out odes to the homeland. It is patriotic, unapologetic North Korea thousands of miles from the secretive state.

A horde of foreign fun-runners took to the streets of Pyongyang on Sunday for an annual marathon that has become one of the North Korean capital's most popular tourist events. Officially called the Mangyongdae Prize International Marathon, the race became an instant hit with tourists looking to run in possibly the world's most exotic locale when it was opened up to amateur foreign runners in 2014.

How should the Trump administration approach Pyongyang diplomatically? Given a widespread, rigid view among U.S. policymakers that the Kim regime is nothing more than an “evil deceiver” and the tendency of those policymakers to automatically equate talking to North Korea with a reward, setting up a low-profile back channel with North Korean negotiators should be prioritized first. 

Pyongyang began exporting statues to Africa in the late 1960s, when a wave of independence movements created a new market of ideologically friendly leaders in search of grand symbols to bolster national identity and claims of political legitimacy. North Korea, looking to expand its diplomatic ties vis a vis rival Seoul, initially provided the works for free. It only started selling them from about 2000.