Vienna - Members of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) issued a resolution Saturday stressing that the nuclear organization should play a key role in North Korea.

The resolution adopted at the IAEA general conference in Vienna said the agency should have an "essential verification role" in North Korea, a notion opposed by Pyongyang, according to Western diplomats.

Seoul - Chief US negotiator Christopher Hill Friday ended last-ditch talks with North Korea to save an imperiled nuclear disarmament deal and returned to South Korea, officials in Seoul said.

Hill had travelled to Pyongyang on Wednesday to persuade North Korea to abide by a nuclear disarmament deal threatened by failure as North Korea announced it is planning to restart its plutonium reprocessing activities.

An official in the Foreign Ministry in Seoul said Hill would now first brief his South Korean counterpart Kim Sook about the outcome of his negotiations.

Seoul - Chief US negotiator Christopher Hill Friday ended last-ditch talks with North Korea to save an imperiled nuclear disarmament deal and returned to South Korea, officials in Seoul said.

Hill had travelled to Pyongyang on Wednesday to persuade North Korea to abide by a nuclear disarmament deal threatened by failure as North Korea announced it is planning to restart its plutonium reprocessing activities.

An official in the Foreign Ministry in Seoul said Hill would now first brief his South Korean counterpart Kim Sook about the outcome of his negotiations.

Washington, Oct 3: CIA Director Michael Hayden has said that The fragile state of North Korea and the booming, oil-rich trio of Iran, Venezuela and Russia have grown increasingly aggressive and pose some of the greatest security challenges for the next US President.

Hayden told FOX News that weakness and poverty have made North Korea more aggressive as it threatens to restart work on its nuclear weapons programme.

“This is a country in very, very desperate straits. But out of this weakness, out of this very fragility, there’s this danger of great chaos; they seem to have a knack for using that very fragility to the best of their ability to affect the nations around them - ourselves included,” he said.

Seoul - US envoy Christopher Hill has extended his stay in North Korea for at least a day, leading to speculation Thursday that there may be progress in his efforts to save a disarmament deal.

South Korea was informed by the US that Hill, who traveled overland Wednesday to Pyongyang, would not return to Seoul on Thursday and had extended his stay until at least Friday, according to a Foreign Ministry official cited by Yonhap News Agency.

Seoul - The first military talks between North and South Korea in eight months ended shortly after they began Thursday with no concrete progress and North Korea accusing the South of spreading propoganda in its territory.

Pak Rim Su, the leader of the North's delegation, accused the South Korean side of not being prepared to solve problems at the talks in Panmunjom, a village inside the demilitarized zone dividing the two Koreas, South Korea's Yonhap News Agency reported.