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.

Paris - North Korean strongman Kim Jong-il suffered a stroke last summer but was now on the mend, a French doctor who treated him told the daily Le Figaro.

"Kim Jong-il was the victim of a stroke, but he did not undergo surgery," Francois-Xavier Roux, head of neurosurgery at Sainte-Anne Hospital in Paris, told the newspaper on Thursday.

"Today, he is doing better. The photographs that have just been published seem genuine to me," Roux said.