Seoul - North Korea said Tuesday it had stopped disabling its nuclear facilities in protest of the United States' failure to remove the country from its terrorist blacklist.

The foreign ministry in Pyongyang accused Washington of not having kept its side of a deal struck to end North Korea's nuclear weapons programme.

North Korea therefore decided to halt disabling its nuclear facilities, a ministry spokesman was quoted as saying by the official Central News Agency.

Seoul  - An acute food shortage in North Korea has led the World Food Programme to appeal to Seoul to send food aid to the impoverished communist country, officials said Thursday.

The UN agency asked South Korea for a 60-million-dollar donation to its new emergency relief programme to provide sustenance for 6.2 million hungry children, women and elderly in North Korea, a South Korean Unification Ministry spokesman said.

"The government will decide whether to accept the appeal or not based on public opinion," the spokesman said.

"We don't link humanitarian aid to political issues, such as the nuclear issue," he said in reference to North Korea's nuclear weapons programme.

Tokyo  - US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Monday the United States would postpone removal of North Korea from a list of state sponsors of terrorism, Japanese media reports said Monday.

Rice apparently confirmed with Japanese Foreign Minister Masahiko Komura on the phone that North Korea remains on the list as of Monday.

"I asked if it is correct to understand that the delisting will not take place today because not only has the verification process (of North Korea's nuclear activities) not begun, but the regime and details on how to implement have not been set, and she said yes that would be correct," Komura was quoted as saying.

"It was as we expected," Komura added.

Seoul - North Korea said it will expel all "unnecessary" South Koreans from a mountain resort on the east coast of the communist country, the official North Korean news agency reported Saturday.

"The measure of expelling personnel of the South side unnecessary in the tourist area of Mount Kumgang shall take effect from August 10," the North's official KCNA news agency cited a military official as saying.

Seoul - A 71-year-old woman from Germany travelled to Pyongyang to meet her North Korean husband, 47 years after they were separated, South Korean news reports said Tuesday.

Renate Hong arrived with her two sons, aged 47 and 48, in the North Korean capital on July 25, the paper Joongang Ilbo said, quoting diplomats and sources close to Hong's family.

If, when and where she met her husband and father of her children, Hong Ok Geun, three years her senior, could not be confirmed, one of the story's authors said in Seoul.

North Korea's Communist rulers allowed a non-South Korean foreigner to enter the country for a family reunification for the first time, the paper said.

Bush Administration hardliners reportedly spun intelligence that triggered a nuclear crisis with North Korea and led to Pyongyang testing a bomb, says a new book to be released this week.

The Australian quotes from a book by former senior CNN journalist Mike Chinoy as saying that intelligence on a North Korea effort to acquire components for uranium enrichment was politicised to depict the hardline communist state running a full-fledged production facility capable of developing a nuclear bomb.