You'd better watch out, you'd better cry. You'd better pout, I'm telling you why: North Korea's punishing insincere mourners, according to the Daily NK. [caption id="attachment_31802" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="North Korea To Punish Mourners Who Were Insincere"][/caption] An anonymous source tells the Daily NK, a South Korea-based publication in opposition of the North Korean regime, that "authorities are handing down at least six months in a labor-training camp to anybody who didn't participate in the organized gatherings" to mourn the death of Supreme ...

SKorea, US start annual drills amid NKorean threat South Korea -- South Korean and U.S. troops started yearly army drills Monday that North Korea slammed being a rehearsal for an invasion that can set off a nuclear war around the divided peninsula. Regardless of North Korea's risk to retaliate, South Korea and the United states went ahead using the drills, which are the allies' very first key combined military workouts given that the North shelled a front-line South Korean island in ...

North and South Korea Restore Aviation Hotline North and South Korea reopened one of the three severed hot lines between them on Monday in response to a request from the North, its first apparent outreach since the youngest son of the leader, Kim Jong-il, was unveiled as his successor. The reopened hot line connects the principal international airports — Pyongyang in the North and Incheon in the South — and a test call was conducted late Monday morning, the Unification Ministry said ...

The Rev. Franklin Graham has arrived in North Korea bearing a gift for North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, the country's official news agency reported Wednesday. Graham handed the present, which was not identified, to a high-ranking official Wednesday to give to Kim, the Korean Central News Agency reported. Graham, the son of the Rev. Billy Graham and the president of Samaritan's Purse, arrived Tuesday in North Korea's capital, Pyongyang, KCNA said. On its Web site, Samaritan's Purse said Franklin ...

Shortly after former President Bill Clinton finished having dinner with Kim Jong Il on August 4 in Pyongyang, the North Korean state run news agency issued a release saying that the two men had met, and that Clinton had brought a message to the North Korean leader from President Barack Obama. In a flash, the White House issued its own statement: No, he hadn't. And with that, the questions about the former President's visit to Pyongyang — and ...

In the four-and-a-half months that two American journalists, Euna Lee and Laura Ling, have been held captive in North Korea, there has been one constant amidst the rumors swirling around the case: the North Koreans wanted a high-powered emissary to come from the U.S. to try to win the release of the prisoners — and, no doubt, listen to whatever else it was that Pyongyang had to say about the current, dismal state of relations between the two countries. ...

North Korea is great at scaring its neighbors. The isolated dictatorship carries a real nuclear threat, and tested its latest device this May in an underground bunker. Tensions in East Asia heightened this week after Pyongyang threatened "a fire shower of nuclear retaliation" if the U.S. or its allies in the region attempted any provocative action when trying to curb North Korea's missile program. Even those with historically warmer ties to the pariah state, such as Russia and China, ...

After more than 15 years of largely fruitless diplomacy, the U.S. and its allies are preparing a high-seas quarantine to try to ensure that North Korea's nuclear knowledge doesn't leach beyond its borders. While the details remain to be worked out, President Obama — after meeting with South Korea president Lee Myung-bak in Washington on Tuesday — indicated the battle to contain North Korea's atomic aresenal is headed offshore. "This is not simply a U.S. policy — this is ...

If North Korea has in the past made a habit of annoying China, its only ostensible ally in the world, what must Beijing be thinking now? For most of the past six years, China has been the host and chief promoter of the so-called six-party talks. Their explicit goal: to get North Korea to give up its nuclear-weapons program. When the North launched another long-range ballistic missile in early April, China helped promote the fig leaf at the U.N. ...

In his memoir recounting the days he spent as Kim Jong Il's personal chef in Pyongyang, Kenji Fujimoto calls Kim Jong Un, the third son of the North Korea dictator, the "Prince." "When Jong Un shook hands with me," Fujimoto writes, "he stared at me with a vicious look. I cannot forget the look in the Prince's eyes: it's as if he was thinking, 'This guy is a despicable Japanese.'" Jong Un, Fujimoto also writes, is "a chip off ...