Seoul - Men unknowingly annoy women by proposing or professing their love in a way that they mean to be romantic but that ends up disappointing their partners.

A survey conducted by a South Korean wedding agency and released ahead of Valentine's Day, the prime season for proposals and grand romantic gestures, found that the first rule is never to assume.

The poll by the firm Duo of 89 men and 107 women found that a majority of the women chose diamond rings as the most favorable gift while a majority of the men falsely assumed that women want simply sweet words or a song of love.

The survey found, however, that none of the 107 female respondents wanted a song.

The second rule is not to be stingy.

Seoul - The family of a Japanese woman abducted to North Korea is to meet with a former North Korean spy in the hope that she can shed light on the fate of the kidnap victim, officials said Wednesday.

The meeting would take place soon, South Korean Foreign Minister Yu Myung Hwan said after a meeting with his Japanese counterpart Hirofumi Nakasone in Seoul.

Former North Korean agent Kim Hyeon Hee, who now lives in South Korea, said she wanted to meet with the family of Yaeko Taguchi, more than 30 years after the Japanese woman was abducted by agents from the Stalinist state.

Kim was handed a death sentence in Seoul after the bombing of a South Korean passenger plane in 1987, but later pardoned. In the bombing, 115 people were killed.

Seoul  - The foreign ministers of South Korea and Japan, Yu Myung Hwan and Hirofumi Nakasone, Wednesday urged communist North Korea to stop its belligerent posturing to defuse international tensions.

The latest in Pyongyang's series of sharply worded threats had created new tension and was not helpful, the South Korean Foreign Ministry said in a statement after a meeting between Yu and Nakasone in Seoul.

Hanoi  - Police in Ho Chi Minh City have broken up an illegal marriage brokerage that matched Vietnamese women and South Korean men, Vietnamese press reported Wednesday.

Police Monday raided a house where a marriage broker was parading 31 Vietnamese women before two South Korean men and arrested three people, Huynh Van Khai, Nguyen Van Hoa and Do Thi Kim Van, on charges of organizing the presentation.

When the police appeared, the 31 women were jammed into a tiny 20-square-metre house that served as an office for the illegal marriage agency.

Seoul - South Korea's economy, Asia's fourth-largest, will shrink 2 per cent this year on falling exports and dwindling domestic demand, the government forecast Tuesday, reversing its earlier predictions of growth.

About 200,000 people were expected to lose their jobs because of the effects of the global economic downturn on South Korea's economy, Finance Minister Yoon Jeung Hyun added.

Only in December, the government had predicted growth of 3 per cent.

Seoul  - South Korean President Lee Myung Bak's nominee for national police chief withdrew his nomination Tuesday because of criticism over a deadly police raid in January.

Kim Seok Ki also resigned from his present post as Seoul's police chief, saying he held himself "morally responsible" for the January 20 operation in the capital in which six people died.