Asia, North Korea | featured news

The 17-year-old grandson of late North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il granted a TV interview providing a rare look at a member of the secretive ruling dynasty. "I've always dreamed that one day I would go back and make things better and make it easier for the people there," Kim Han Sol said in the interview posted on YouTube.

Impoverished North Korea threatened on Friday to open fire on South Korea if it allows activists to go ahead with plans to drop anti-North leaflets on its territory, its most strident warning against its long-time foe in months.

A North Korean soldier killed two of his officers Saturday and defected to South Korea across the countries' heavily armed border in a rare crossing that prompted South Korean troops to immediately beef up their border patrol, officials said....

Russia and North Korea have signed a deal to write off nearly all of the isolated Asian country's $11 billion Soviet-era debt.

U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Monday that U.S. and Japanese officials have agreed to put a second missile defense system in Japan... While officials insisted the radar system would not be aimed at China, the decision was sure to raise the ire of Beijing.

North Korea said on Monday that it was ready to discuss humanitarian aid from the South to alleviate damage caused by flooding and typhoons.

North Korea says a typhoon that hit the peninsula last week killed 48 people and left 21,000 homeless. The update from the official Korean Central News Agency said Monday that Typhoon Bolaven also left more than 50 people injured or missing, damaged 50,000 hectares (123,550 acres) of farmland and destroyed or inundated 6,700 houses.

North Korea has made significant progress in the construction of a light water atomic reactor over the past year, a U.N. watchdog report said, a facility that may extend Pyongyang's capacity to produce material for nuclear weapons.

To become a tunnel-hunter in South Korea, you need a pump, a generator and a bit of imagination. Lee Chang-gun and his band of investigators have all three. They spend their free time searching for North Korean infiltration tunnels here in the mountains near their country's northern frontier.

More heavy rain has pounded North Korea, flooding buildings and farmland and forcing people and their livestock to take shelter on rooftops.