Seoul  - The proportion of female drunken drivers is on the rise in South Korea, where an average of 144 people a day were killed or injured alcohol-related accidents, national police said Tuesday.

According to the drunk driving status report of 2006-08, annual arrests increased from about 350,000 to more than 400,000 this year.

The report said women drunken drivers were the fastest-growing group, although men drivers are the overwhelming majority of offenders.

The data showed the number of women arrested for driving under the influence rose from 31,501 in 2006 to 46,677 through November 2008.

Seoul  - North Korea's urgent need to trigger economic growth and an Egyptian telecommunications firm's desire to establish a new outpost were key factors in opening restricted mobile telecom service in the secretive communist nation, analysts said Tuesday.

The Cairo-based Orascom Telecom Holding SAE signed a 25-year contract with the North Korean government in Pyongyang Monday, setting the stage for the establishment of a limited mobile service.

In a country where most of the population of 23 million are denied online and mobile access, the deal was remarkable.

Tokyo, Dec. 16 : More than six years after it experimented with mobile phones, the North Korean Government has launched a mobile phone service.

Described as one of the world''s most secretive and tightly controlled states, the launch is seen as striking in a country where the tuning of television sets and radios is limited to state channels and internet access is restricted to senior government and military officials.

Officials concluded a deal with the Egyptian telecommunications group Orascom to launch a third-generation mobile network, but the service is likely to be available to only a few of North Korea''s 23 million inhabitants, the Guardian reports.

Washington  - Heavy fuel oil shipments to North Korea have been cut off because Pyongyang has refused to sign onto a process for ensuring that it is complying with an agreement to dismantle its nuclear weapons programme, the US State Department said Friday.

"This is an action-for-action process, and certainly the United States - and I think this is the understanding of other parties - is that future fuel shipments aren't going to move forward absent a verification regime," spokesman Sean McCormack said.

New York - UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Friday called for efforts to continue to verify the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula, despite another impasse reached this week in negotiations.

The six-party talks in Beijing ended on Thursday with North Korea apparently rejecting a compromise proposal on procedures to verify disablement of its disputed nuclear programme.

The parties involved in the talks are China, the United States, Russia, Japan and the two Koreas.

Seoul - South Korea's top diplomat said Friday that despite North Korea's backsliding at the international negotiations over giving up its nuclear weapons, the six-party talks still remain valid.

"It is still premature for us to say all of our efforts at the six-way talks ended up a failure," said Foreign Minister Yoo Myung-Hwan in a forum with lawmakers. "So it's premature for us to doubt the validity of the six-way talks."

The collapse of the latest round of talks, involving China, Japan, Russia, the United States and the two Koreas, which ended Thursday in Beijing, denies a diplomatic trophy to the lame-duck administration of outgoing US President George W Bush.