North Korea >>

Prime minister warns of an ‘environmental disaster’ if tanker leaves rebel-held port of Es Sider with oil cargo ...

Mike Lee: Republicans cannot ‘expect to win elections by default’Opening speaker Ted Cruz laid out party’s midterm election agenda Jim Newell ...

North Korea's state television broadcasts footage of its leader Kim Jong-un watching an artillery unit conduct a shooting contest ...

Project fired into airspace just before Chinese plane carrying 202 people flew through, says Seoul defence ministry ...

s official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. He said he was told that he faced 15 years in prison for distributing religious pamphlets at a Buddhist temple and on a train. "I confessed that I had knowingly broken the law in what I believed is my God-directed duty and as I do in every place and country I visit," Short said. The Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said North Korea decided...

s response markedly softer than usual South Korea has reported that North Korea fired seven suspected artillery shells into the ocean on Tuesday, in what Seoul called a provocation apparently directed against its ongoing military drills with the US. North Korea has already launched six Scud missiles into the sea since the annual exercises began about a week ago. Pynongyang has claimed the exercises...

spreading North's ideology' According to the court that sentenced him to 12 years in prison, Lee Seok-ki is a dangerous subversive, guilty of plotting an armed rebellion in support of his country's sworn enemy across the border that separates the Korean peninsula. It sounds like the rumblings of a typical North Korean purge. Only Lee is an elected representative in the democratic, economically powerful...

s protest against the drills it calls a preparation for an attack, and a test of its own weapons systems. They followed South Korea's announcement that Pyongyang fired four short-range Scud missiles with a range of more than 125 miles (200km) into North Korea's eastern waters last Thursday. North Korea routinely test-fires short-range missiles, Analysts did not expect the launches to raise tensions,...

Australian officials meet the 75-year-old, who was arrested for trying to spread Christianity ...

John Short, the Australian man jailed in North Korea for attempting to spread Christianity, reads a statement confessing and apologising to the country. He has now been expelled from North Korea after being held in custody for nearly a month. The state's official KCNA news agency reported that North Korea had decided to expel Short in consideration of his age ...

John Short, 75, who was arrested for trying to convert citizens in the communist country, escapes jail term partly due to his age Helen Davidson ...

State news agency says Short admitted violating North Korean law and will be sent out of the country ...

s intelligence agency. At a news conference in Pyongyang, Kim Jeong-wook, wearing a dark suit and in apparent good health, read a statement which detailed a number of anti-government activities. No questions were taken at the event, footage of which was broadcast on South Korean television. Foreigners arrested in North Korea are often required to make a public "confession", which can expedite their...

Staffan Thorsell entered North Korea on a tourist visa. He found a desperately poor country in thrall to its dictator, Kim Jong-un Phil Maynard ...

s words into English: "The departed supreme leader's love will fill our hearts for eternity …" The voice just keeps going, and in a glass cage in the middle of the room lies the embalmed body of Kim Jong-il. The weeper is here to preach the everlasting omnipotence of North Korea's second leader and to express the grief of a nation more than two years after his death. Everyone in the mausoleum bows...

s first meeting with his 62-year-old son was bittersweet. The 92-year-old was delighted to make contact with the child born after he had fled North Korea to make his home in the South more than 60 years ago. But he knows they are unlikely to meet again. Any hope Kang had of finding out more about his son's life in one of the most secretive countries in the world were dashed when organisers kept tight...

s east coast, South Korea defence ministry says North Korea has test-fired four short-range missiles into the sea, Seoul's defence ministry said, in an apparent show of force to coincide with the South...

Pyongyang warns South that it will be conducting live fire drills in a contested area off its west coast North Korea declared disputed areas off its west coast a no-go area for shipping and has notified the South that it will conduct firing drills, a South Korean government official said. The area is near the so-called "northern limit line", drawn up at the end of the 1950-53 Korean War,...

s exercises come as families separated by Korean war enjoy first reunion for three years South Korea has kicked off its annual joint military exercises with the US despite vocal opposition from North Korea . The drills will test a recent improvement in cross-border ties. The start of this year's military exercises overlaps with the first reunion for more than three years of families divided by the...

Foreign ministry says report that accused it of crimes as bad as the Nazis was ‘deliberately cooked up by hostile forces and riff-raffs’ ...