There are some encouraging signs coming out of North Korea.

After signing an agreement with South Korea, North Korea changed its time zone to align South Korea’s. At 11.30 pm on Friday night, clocks in North Korea were adjusted to midnight to synchronize with clocks in South Korea. 

North Korea and South Korea were using the same time zone for years before North Korea created “Pyongyang Time" in 2015. This allowed North Korea to be half an hour behind Japan and South Korea. The time system was created when tensions grew between North Korea and the United States over the nuclear weapon program.

Recently, the alliance between North and South Korea has become more positive. Kim Jong-un and Moon Jae-in considered at their summit to get rid of nuclear weapons in their region. A news source states that aligning the North and South Korean time was a sensible move since the summit. This action is the first step in the re-integration of North and South Korea.

This is not the first time that time zones have been changed back and forth. In 2007, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez changed his country's clock by half hour to distance his country from the U.S. In 2016, the clocks were changed back under the next leadership.