North Korea to change time zone

Seoul : North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said he would move the country’s clocks 30 minutes forward to unify with the South’s time zone as a conciliatory gesture after Friday’s inter-Korean summit, Seoul said yesterday.

The two countries on the divided peninsula have had different time zones since 2015 when the North suddenly changed its standard time to 30 minutes behind the South.

Pyongyang cited a nationalistic rationale, saying it would return the North to the time zone used before Japan’s 1910-45 colonial rule of the peninsula to mark the 70th anniversary of its liberation from Tokyo.