Nine North Koreans who crossed the tense western sea border on a small engineless vessel over the weekend for apparent defection are being questioned by South Korean officials, the Seoul government said Wednesday. The nine people, including family members, arrived on a frontline South Korean island around 6 a.m. Saturday, and are seeking asylum in the wealthier South, a government source said on...

WASHINGTON, (Yonhap) -- The United States is prepared to talk with North Korea, but a basic principle is to avoid the "mistakes" made in previous negotiations with the communist nation, an outgoing top State Department official said. In an interview published Tuesday, Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg told Foreign Policy, a U.S.-based magazine, that Washington has no surprising new polic...

SHANGHAI (AFP) -- North Korea's carrier said Tuesday it would offer twice-weekly flights between Shanghai and Pyongyang starting next month, in a sign the secretive state is looking to attract more Chinese tourists. Shanghai joins Beijing and Shenyang in the northeast as the third city in China to have regular flights to North Korea, the state-owned Air Koryo said in a statement to AFP. The Sha...

North Korea has leased a pier on its port located near China and Russia to Switzerland, a source said Tuesday, citing an unidentified Chinese government official. North Korea has already leased two other piers on Rajin port to China and Russia, and various consultations are also under way for three other piers, according to the source who has knowledge on the North Korean economy. The port, loc...

WASHINGTON (Yonhap News) -- The United States has "concerns" that a North Korean ship recently intercepted by a U.S. destroyer might have been carrying contraband weapons in breach of U.N. Security Council resolutions, the State Department said Monday. "There was a vessel that was suspected of carrying materials prohibited by the United Nations Security Council resolutions," spokesman Mark Ton...

The United States recently intercepted a North Korean ship suspected of carrying military-related contraband, causing the vessel to eventually sail back home, a U.S. official said Monday. The remarks by Gary Samore, special assistant to U.S. President Barack Obama, came after local media reported that the North Koreans turned back after apparently sensing their cargo would be inspected if they s...

A North Korean vessel suspected of carrying banned items recently sailed back home from international waters after fearing it would be searched if it docked at a foreign port, sources said Sunday. It was not clear where the ship was headed or what it was carrying, but the vessel returned home at the end of last month after drifting in international waters near Southeast Asia, the government sour...

South Korea’s ruling camp will cooperate for the parliamentary endorsement this month of a bill designed to help improve North Korea’s dismal of human rights conditions, officials from the government and the ruling party said Friday. “We agreed that the National Assembly of South Korea should no longer sit idly by on the problem of human rights infringements in North Korea,” Rep. Lee Ju-young, t...

SAN FRANCISCO/WASHINGTON (Yonhap News) -- A group of North Korean taekwondo athletes arrived in the United States Thursday for a rare performance tour abroad. The 17-member team, which left Pyongyang on Saturday, arrived in San Francisco via Beijing. Leaving the San Francisco airport, they refused to answer reporters' questions. It is the second time that North Korean taekwondo athletes have vi...

North Korea on Thursday threatened to disclose voice recordings of a secret meeting with South Korea where it said rejected the South’s proposal to hold a series of summits. “If all (South Korean officials who attended the meeting) refuse to admit the truth, we will have to disclose the full recordings of the contact,” the Korea Central News Agency, the north’s state news agency, reported, quoti...

North Korea threatened Thursday to disclose voice recordings of a secret meeting it had with South Korea last month, during which Seoul allegedly proposed holding a series of inter-Korean summits. In a surprise move earlier this week, North Korea reported that the two Koreas held a secret meeting, during which Seoul negotiators had "begged" for three inter-Korean summits, the first in late June ...

WASHINGTON (Yonhap News) ― The U.S. House of Representatives will consider a bipartisan bill on reinforcing sanctions on North Korea, along with Iran and Syria, for their proliferation activities, a senior congresswoman said Tuesday. The bill, co-drafted by Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Florida), who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and Rep. Brad Sherman (D-California) calls for the exp...

North Korea has trained its special forces to be capable of infiltrating and striking more than 90 percent of targets in South Korea, a report said Tuesday, ringing alarm bells over the threat posed by the North’s elite troops. The report, released by retired one-star Army general Lee Won-seung, was based on a series of drills simulating an infiltration by North Korean special forces that hit ta...