North Korea said during rare talks with the South on Tuesday it will send a delegation of high-ranking officials, athletes and a cheering squad to the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics in South Korea next month, according to a senior South Korean official.

China said on Thursday there had been no U.N. sanction-breaking oil sales by Chinese ships to North Korea, after a South Korea newspaper said Chinese and North Korean vessels had been illicitly linking up at sea to get oil to North Korea.

China’s proposal of a “freeze for freeze”—a halt in North Korean nuclear and missile tests in return for suspension of provocative U.S.-led military exercises—remains the best one on the table for reducing tensions on the Korean peninsula. Second, keeping nuclear weapons from getting into the wrong hands should be an international responsibility, not a U.S.-China project.

North Korea announced that it has mastered nuclear strike capability and become a full-fledged nuclear state. Like previous US presidents, Donald Trump has said that this state of affairs is intolerable. So now what?

The Korean nuclear issue has now entered a dangerous stage like a fast train in a dark tunnel. The window for peaceful settlement isn’t completely closed and the current crisis should be turned to an opportunity.

China-US Focus contributor Franz-Stefan Gady posed the following question in his recent article: "Will North Korea's Recent Missile Test Increase Chance of Talks?" It appears that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson thought so.

It’s commonly acknowledged that North Korea won’t give up its nuclear weapon program anytime soon, so there’s no use being unhappy about it. It is also unhelpful to regret past opportunities to stop the program

The White House has denied that US policy towards North Korea has changed after Rex Tillerson, secretary of state, on Tuesday suggested that Washington was ready to talk to Pyongyang “without preconditions” in what appeared to be a new overture.

Tillerson disclosed the United States had been talking to China about how to secure North Korea’s nuclear weapons in the event of a collapse of the government in Pyongyang.

Rex Tillerson, US secretary of state, and HR McMaster, national security adviser, on Tuesday said the Trump administration wanted China to go beyond existing UN sanctions by cutting off supplies of crude oil to North Korea. The move would impose significant economic pain on the hermit regime.