Kim Jong-un’s selected few are ‘100% satisfied’ but find a country steeped in hopelessness under sanctions Gliding down pristine, untouched mountain runs, Olga Shpalok said she was “getting 100% satisfaction”. After a full day of skiing, the Russian designer from Vladivostok wound down with a visit to her hotel’s well-equipped spa and sauna ..read more

Roger Newman Turner says North Korea has the right idea blurring jeans, and calls skinny ones an abomination. John Bailey thinks they probably forgot who made them When it comes to Alan Titchmarsh’s jeans, I’m with North Korea (Alan Titchmarsh’s jeans blurred by North Korean TV censors, 26 March). It’s not so much the US imperialism that they may or may not symbolise, but the abomination of skinny jeans, one of the most impractical and idiotic of men’s fashions. (To say nothing of the torn jeans that Titchmarsh appears to be wearing in your photo of him with Charlie Dimmock in the print editio ..read more

Ukraine’s foreign minister calls veto ‘guilty plea’ amid claims Pyongyang is aiding Moscow’s war against Kyiv Russia has blocked the renewal of a UN panel monitoring sanctions against North Korea, weeks after the body said it was investigating reports of arms transfers between Moscow and Pyongyang. The move was met with a flurry of criticism, including by Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, who took to social media to call the veto “a guilty plea” amid allegations that Pyongyang is aiding Moscow in its war against Kyiv ..read more

His calm demeanour and wholesome vocation have apparently endeared him to one of the most authoritarian regimes in the world. But there is something about Alan Titchmarsh that North Korea’s censors can’t quite forgive – his jeans. The green-fingered broadcaster and author of raunchy novels has been a fixture on state television since 2022, albeit with the addition of a blurred effect from the waist down. By wearing jeans to potter about in Britain’s gardens in his BBC TV series Garden Secrets, Titchmarsh, 74, fell foul of a North Korean ban on the garments, which the regime has forbidden since ..read more

Footage of green-fingered BBC presenter obscured from waist down to hide ‘symbol of US imperialism’ His calm demeanour and wholesome vocation have apparently endeared him to one of the most authoritarian regimes in the world. But there is something about Alan Titchmarsh that North Korea’s censors can’t quite forgive – his jeans. The green-fingered broadcaster and author of raunchy novels has been a fixture on state television since 2022, albeit with the addition of a blurred effect from the waist down ..read more

Last-minute decision on Tuesday’s match leaves football bodies searching for alternative venue North Korea has abruptly cancelled its 2026 World Cup qualifying match with Japan next week, leaving organisers frantically searching for an alternative venue. North Korea reportedly decided it would no longer host the match, which had been scheduled for next Tuesday at the Kim Il-sung Stadium in Pyongyang, a day before the teams met in Tokyo on Thursday in the first of their two Asian qualifying Group B qualifiers ..read more

AFP photographer Pedro Pardo gained access to a remote stretch of frontier in China’s north-east Jilin province. Between rusting factories and peeling housing blocks were glimpses of daily life in North Korea ..read more

Crunch fixture taps into a complicated underlying political history, with 150,000 North Koreans living in Japan A place at the next football World Cup is not all that is at stake when Japan and North Korea meet on Thursday for the first of two qualifying matches, in a resumption of one of the fiercest rivalries in international football. Despite the huge gap between the countries’ economies and the profiles of their domestic leagues, few expect the match at Tokyo’s national stadium to be a walkover for the Japanese, who are 18th in the Fifa rankings, 96 places above their opponents ..read more

The supreme leader of North Korea has been seen in footage aired by the state-run broadcaster KRT showing firing drills by artillery units in the country's western regions. Kim Jong-un is seen walking near a number of rocket launchers, which are later fired. According to the Korean Central News Agency, the state news agency of North Korea, the drills involved 'newly equipped super-large' rocket launchers. A day before the exercise, South Korea and Japan said North Korea had fired a ballistic missile towards the sea to the east of the Korean peninsula ..read more

The Guardian’s picture editors select photographs from around the world ..read more