Anthony Kuhn

President Biden hosts the leaders of Japan, Australia and India at the White House on Friday. The four key democracies are teaming up to counter China, which is also a major trading partner.

President Biden will meet on Friday with the leaders of Japan, Australia and India. Their agenda includes the pandemic and climate change. But analysts say the Quad group is mainly about China.

Election season is in full swing to pick the next leader of Japan. Taro Kono is considered a maverick — a surprising change for a country that's been ruled by the same party for decades.

North Korea has fired two ballistic missiles into waters off its eastern coast. That happened two days after claiming to have tested a missile that's newly developed.

Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga's exit raises the specter of a return to a "revolving door" succession of Japanese leaders.

Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga announced he will not run for reelection — effectively ending his tenure this month. He told reporters he wanted to focus his efforts on handling the pandemic.

The United Nation's atomic watchdog describes a new development in North Korea as "deeply troubling." The agency says the North has restarted its main nuclear reactor.

The Biden administration must decide by month's end whether to keep or scrap a 2017 ban on travel to North Korea. The ban prevents Korean Americans who have families in the North from visiting them.

North Korea has threatened a "security crisis" if Seoul and Washington proceed with planned military drills next week. If it chooses military provocation, Pyongyang has plenty of new weapons to test.

As the Tokyo Olympics wind to a close, people in Japan are counting the financial, political and public health costs of holding the games.

The number of hospitalized COVID-19 patients has doubled over the past month, and experts estimate that the current fifth wave of infections still has a week or two to go before reaching its peak.

North Korea is trying to purge foreign cultural influences, including South Korean variations on the language that the two countries share. Experts say controlling language is an uphill battle.

North and South Korea have reopened a hotline that was closed for nearly 14 months. "We hope that inter-Korean communications are never again suspended," a South Korean official said.

Driven by perceptions of an increasing threat from China, Japanese politicians have publicly and unprecedentedly said that if China attacks Taiwan, Japan should defend the island with the U.S.

Companies that spent big to back the Tokyo Olympics are scaling back their associations with the Games, which are unpopular among many Japanese people.

On Friday, South Korea registered more than 1,300 coronavirus cases — breaking records for a second day in a row. Residents of the capital region are driving the surge.

Growing alarm about the Tokyo Games resulting in a surge of coronavirus cases has pushed Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga to announce a new round of emergency measures.

The Olympics aim to set an example for environmentally-friendly mass events. Environmental NGOs and scholars say the reality falls well short of the rhetoric, including at this summer's Tokyo games.

A fresh wave of COVID-19 infections looms over the Olympics less than three weeks before the start of the delayed summer games in Tokyo.

The North Korean leader didn't say exactly what the incident was, nor did he contradict the country's official line, which is that it has not had a single COVID-19 infection so far.