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South Korea's military says several North Korean soldiers crossed the border into the South this week, apparently to pursue a defecting soldier. Military spokesman Park Sung-woo said Thursday the North Korean soldiers crossed the border about an hour after a fellow soldier fled to the South on Tuesday. He says they retreated after South Korean soldiers fired warning shots. Park says North Korean soldiers did not return fire. He says the defector is being questioned. More than 18,000 North Koreans have defected to South Korea since the 1950-53 Korean War. They rarely cross the heavily armed border and instead defect...

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A North Korean officer fled across the heavily armed border with the South, the first officer to defect to the capitalist neighbor in about 10 years, a South Korean military official said on Monday. A Joint Chiefs of Staff official said the defection took place on Sunday. Yonhap news agency quoted a government official as saying it was near the Panmunjom truce village set up in the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) that has divided the peninsula for more than 50 years. "We cannot comment on the rank or route the person used, because the officer is still under interrogation," the official...

SEOUL, South Korea — One can spot the North Koreans by their stunted stature, the result of growing up on inadequate diets. They often seem befuddled in banks and restaurants, and they speak Korean with a noticeable accent. They risked their lives to get here, but even when they're assimilated they earn half of what their South Korean brethren do — for drudge work. There are 11,000 of them in South Korea, trickling in at the rate of only 2,000 a year, but increasingly they're the unwanted relatives at the doorstep. The South Korean government, which fears that any crisis...

SEOUL, South Korea - North Korea has started building a fence along parts of its border with China in an apparent move to prevent people from fleeing the impoverished communist country, a news report said Sunday The North has put posts on a six-mile stretch along a narrow tributary of the Yalu River, which marks the border between North Korea and China. It has also built a road to guard the area, Yonhap news agency reported. The North has yet to string barbed wire fencing between the posts, the report said. The Chinese Foreign Ministry had no immediate comment on...

North Korean defects ― three times July 07, 2007 Cigarettes, a used bicycle and cash. Those were some of the things a North Korean defector used to bribe border guards as he went back and forth three times between his homeland and South Korea, the National Intelligence Service said yesterday. The last time, the man brought North Korean neighbors with him. They couldn’t keep their story straight, and that led to him getting caught, the agency said. The 30-year-old North Korean defector, who was not identified, was arrested yesterday on charges of having the secret visits, which violated the National...

N. Korean defectors testify before British opposition party leader By Sohn Suk-joo SEOUL, June 20 (Yonhap) -- Two North Korean defectors Tuesday testified before the British parliament about the life in North Korean gulags, Christian group officials said Wednesday. Having spoken at a meeting of the All-Party British-North Korea Parliamentary Group in the Moses Room of the Houses of Parliament in London, Ahn Myeong-Cheol and Shin Dong-Hyok, both now settled in South Korea, also met with David Cameron, leader of Britain's opposition Conservative Party, they said. The meeting came after Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW), the organizer of the event, issued...

North Korea has increased its public executions against cell phone users and those who circulate outside information in the communist country, a South Korean government think tank said Thursday. The phenomenon of executions of those who "circulate South Korean leaflets and sell videos and use cell phones are on the rise," the South's government-affiliated Korea Institute for National Unification think tank said in a white paper on the North's human rights conditions. No exact figures were given. North Koreans are officially banned from communicating with the outside world but some of them listen to foreign news and use cell phones...

BANGKOK, Aug. 23 (Yonhap) -- Thai police raided a church home and rounded up 175 North Korean defectors being sheltered there while seeking asylum in another country, sources here said Wednesday. Officials indicated that they would charged but allowed to leave Thailand. The defectors, mostly women, have been turned over to immigration authorities. They also include pregnant women, handicapped persons and those suffering heart ailments needing urgent medical care, according to the sources. At least 16 of them had travel documents issued by the U.N. High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) and were planning to board a night flight Tuesday to...

First Group of N.Korean Refugees ‘Headed for U.S.’ Some five or six North Korean defectors are reportedly preparing to enter the U.S. under the protection of its embassy in a Southeast Asian country as Washington prepares to make good on a pledge to grant asylum to more refugees from the Stalinist country. Sources in the U.S. government and Congress said Thursday as soon as procedural matters with the Asian country are resolved, the North Koreans will make their way to the U.S. Another official said the defectors are staying at a safe house in the U.S. legation in a Southeast...

US President George W. Bush (R) pats Han-Mi Kim of North Korea on the knee at the White House in Washington. Bush called North Korean leader Kim Jong Il's regime "heartless," after an emotional meeting with families of Japanese nationals kidnapped by North Korean agents(AFP/Mandel Ngan)

Today President Bush held a brief Press conference to speak about the economy in the Rose Garden of the White House, he also met with President Aliyev of Azerbaijan in the Oval Office at the White House, as well as, with North Korean Defectors and Family Members of Japanese Abducted by North Korea. Later in the day he met with Darfur Advocates in the Roosevelt Room

Defector lured by 'shockingly beautiful' Western music Friday, March 31, 2006 SEOUL — Pianist Kim Cheol-Weong said he decided to defect to South Korea after hearing decadent Western music in a coffee shop in Moscow. “I listened to Richard Clayderman’s music such as ‘A Comme Amour’ and ‘Love Story,’” he told an interviewer. Returning to North Korea, he said he was forced to write a 10-page apology when a security official heard him playing a Clayderman piece while alone. It was then, he said, that “I decided to defect to South Korea.” Kim, who teaches piano here, rebelled against the...

ince inaugurating the "Today in Despotism" series earlier this year, TNR Online has chronicled the activities of a number of strongmen. Some are old, some are young; some are religious, some are atheist; some are called "Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya"; others are called "Supreme Commander of the Korean People's Army, General Secretary of the Workers' Party of Korea, and Chairman of the National Defense Commission of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea." But while countries around the world may have differences, the hopes and dreams of their despotic rulers...

/begin my translationN. Korea: Nine N. Korean Defectors to U.S. Since '97 [Yonhap News 2005-10-07 23:48] (Seoul, Yonhap News) Kim Nam-kwon = It is now revealed that there are 9 N. Korean defectors in total, who escaped N. Korea and took political asylum in U.S..  Assemblyman Kwon Young-seh, a lawmaker of (opposition) Hannara Party, citing documents submitted to National Assembly by National Intelligence Service(NIS: S. Korean intelligence agency) during a closed-door session of (annual) congressional audit , disclosed, "From '97 up to this year, 27 N. Koreans applied for a political asylum, of whom 18 had their application rejected, and only...

Tens of thousands of fans of all ages gathered over the weekend for the annual three-day Rock the Desert Christian music festival screamed for hit bands like Mercy Me and Pillar and kicked Hacky Sacks by a creek renamed the Jordan River and a small pond called the Dead Sea. Between the Prayer Tent and an abstinence-promotion booth, however, worshipful revelers also stumbled into a more sobering pavilion, the North Korea Genocide Exhibit. Inside, Kang Chol Hwan, a North Korean defector recently summoned to meet President Bush, signed copies of his memoir of 10 years in a prison camp. Drawings...

By Anna Fifield in Seoul Published: July 20 2005 03:00 | Last updated: July 20 2005 03:00 A North Korean parliament-arian who defected to the South says Kim Jong-il's regime has made a one-tonne nuclear bomb and is working on lighter weapons that could be fired more reliably, according to a South Korean magazine. ADVERTISEMENT The defector, who was a deputy in the Supreme People's Assembly, claimed to have visited Taiwan to tout North Korean missiles. The report in the Monthly Chosun supports assumptions North Korea is not bluffing over its claim to be a nuclear state and is taking...

A North Korean couple who fled to China in search of a better life have told how they spent two years hiding in a burrow dug in snowbound mountains to avoid being captured and sent home. Sung Kyung-il and his wife, Chu Myung-hee, survived bitterly cold winters and the threat of starvation after digging a cave in the side of Dokgol Mountain, in the rugged terrain of northeast China. Like many other North Koreans, the couple escaped the dictatorial Stalinist regime and a near constant famine under the mistaken impression that China would offer a better standard of living and...

/begin my summary3 N. Koreans, presumed to be a family, defected at Baek-ryong island[Yonhap News, 2005/06/26] Around 9:55 am on June 26, 2.9 miles away to the North East of Baek-ryong Island, a N. Korean barge indicated the willingness to defect. It was towed to Yong-ki-po Harbor at Baek-ryong Island at 11:40 am, according to the (S. Korean) Joint Chief of Staffs. Inside the boat were Mr. Hong(male, age:42), Mr. Moon(female, age:39), a 15-year-old boy. They are presumed to be a family. They reportedly left Yong-hyun, Ku-mi-po District, N. Korea.around 5:30 am, June 25. The barge is an 1.7-ton boat...

SEOUL (Reuters) - A North Korean civilian couple crossed into South Korea and expressed wish to defect, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said on Saturday. The couple, identified by the husband's surname "Choi," was spotted sailing in a boat near the border between the two Koreas in the Yellow Sea early on Friday, the JCS said in a statement. Choi had been determined to leave the communist state since his mother and younger brother were executed in 2004 for experiments on human bodies, the Inchon Metropolitan Police Agency said in a separate statement. The JCS also said that a...