The South Korean Unification Ministry refused to receive a letter from a North Korean propaganda agency addressed to the South Korean presidential office, a ministry official said Thursday.“The (North Korean) agency tried to hand over a note addressed to Cheong Wa Dae to the South in person via the Red Cross in the truce village of Panmunjeom around 3 p.m. Wednesday, but we refused to receive it,”

The government will selectively allow South Korean business professionals to visit North Korea for checks on their past investments there, an official said Wednesday, amid a prolonged suspension of trade with the communist state following its deadly attack on a Southern naval ship last year.For business purposes, these individuals will also be allowed to meet their North Korean counterparts in a t

WASHINGTON (Yonhap News)-- The incoming top American military commander in Korea said Tuesday that the United States and Korea should prepare for the possibility of a regime collapse in North Korea.In his Senate Armed Services Committee confirmation hearing, Gen. James Thurman, the nominee to lead 28,000 U.S. forces in Korea, raised doubts over the North's heir apparent, Kim Jong-un, who is said t

MOSCOW (Yonhap News) -- North Korea and Russia appear to have canceled their plan to hold talks between their leaders later this week, multiple sources here said Tuesday following a series of media reports of the possibility of a trip to Russia by the North's leader, Kim Jong-il."It's my understanding that a summit between Chairman Kim Jong-il and President Dmitry Mevedev was known to be scheduled

North Korean universities are to be closed for the next ten months in order to supply laborers for construction projects.As the next year marks 100th anniversary for the birth of the “eternal leader” Kim Il-sung, the government is striving to restore its economy in order to create a “strong and powerful nation of socialism.”Pyongyang announced that all universities would be closed from June 27, al

North Korean leader Kim Jong-il is expected to visit Russia this week for a summit with President Dmitry Medvedev, Japanese news media reported Tuesday, drawing attention to the much-veiled meeting. The two former ally states are putting final touches to the summit slated for Friday in Vladivostok, Tokyo’s Mainichi Shimbun said, quoting multiple intelligence sources in Moscow.Kyodo news service sa

Red Cross officials of the two Koreas are expected to meet for the first time in nearly four months at an international meeting in China in July, a Seoul official said Tuesday. The two Koreas, who have not been talking since their last round of Red Cross talks in March, will send delegations to the “East Asian regional Red Cross leadership meeting” which will be held in China’s Ordos City from Jul

Kim Jung-un, heir apparent to North Korean leader Kim Jon-il, allegedly had several plastic surgeries before his public debut.The secret was revealed during a conference held by Royal United Services Institute for Defense and Security at London. According to Ha Tae-kyung, representative of Open Radio for North Korea, Kim Jung-un was designated as the successor in 2007, and had about six plastic su

WASHINGTON (Yonhap News) -- Despite North Korea's reported tightening of border security to block the defection of its hunger-stricken people, the communist nation has made no efforts to prevent human trafficking by screening migrants along its porous border with China and Russia, the U.S. said Monday.In its annual Global Trafficking in Persons report, the State Department ranked North Korea once

TOKYO (Yonhap News) -- North Korean leader Kim Jong-il is expected to visit Russia later this week for summit talks with President Dmitry Medvedev, a Japanese newspaper reported Tuesday.The Mainichi Shimbun, a major daily, reported that North Korea and Russia are in final consultations to hold the summit in Vladivostok on Friday. It quoted multiple intelligence sources in Moscow.It would be Kim’s

North Korea may have developed a “super-EMP” weapon capable of emitting more gamma radiation than a 25-megaton nuclear weapon, a former CIA nuclear weapons analyst was quoted as saying by a U.S.-funded radio station Friday. Peter Vincent Pry told the Voice of America that a group of Russian nuclear weapons scientists approached him in 2004 to warn the U.S. that the technology to make the electroma

South Korea said Thursday it is working on establishing a state-run open source-based center to consolidate scattered information on its reclusive northern rival. The purported center, which will be fully open to government officials as well as the general public here, will gather and organize information that has already been made public by the media and international agencies, an official at the