South Korea said Monday it had no plans to propose a fresh dialogue with North Korea after rare high-level talks over the weekend fizzled out with no agreement.

The deputy ministerial-level talks on ways to improve ties -- the first of their kind for nearly two years -- ended Saturday night after two days of marathon negotiations, with no agreement and no commitment to meet again.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un has hinted that his nuclear-armed state has developed a hydrogen bomb, a move that would signal a major step forward in its nuclear weapons capabilities.

During a recent inspection tour of a historical military site, Kim mentioned that North Korea was already a "powerful nuclear weapons state ready to detonate self-reliant A-bomb and H-bomb to reliably defend its sovereignty", the North's official KCNA news agency said Thursday.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un's uncle has described how fear of the deadly power politics in Pyongyang drove him and his wife to defect to the United States nearly 20 years ago.

In a telephone interview with South Korea's Yonhap news agency, Ri Kang said the couple had been deeply concerned what might become of them in any power struggle that followed the eventual death of Kim's father Kim Jong-Il.

The U.S.-based aunt of North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un filed a defamation suit in South Korea on Wednesday against three defectors from her reclusive homeland.

Ko Yong-Suk, who looked after Kim for years when he was at school in Switzerland, said the three defectors, who escaped the North and settled in South Korea in the 1990s, were guilty of repeatedly "spreading false information" about her and her family.

The two Koreas agreed Thursday to hold a rare high-level dialogue next month, in line with an accord struck in August aimed at easing cross-border tensions, the Unification Ministry in Seoul announced.

A ministry official said the two sides would meet at the deputy minister level on December 11 in the Kaesong joint industrial zone, just inside North Korea.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un has sent one of his top aides to a farm for "re-education" to punish him for the sloppy construction of a power plant, South Korea's spy agency said Tuesday.

Choe Ryong-Hae, a member of the ruling party's politburo standing committee, was purged earlier this month, Seoul lawmakers told reporters after the National Intelligence Service (NIS) briefed them in a closed session.

North Korea on Tuesday bitterly criticized the South for staging a live-fire drill near their disputed sea border, hinting it may respond to Seoul's "confrontation" just days before the rivals were due to hold talks designed to improved relations.

A spokesman for the North's powerful National Defense Commission (NDC) described the exercise conducted Monday as the "most vicious military provocation aimed at confrontation" and "reckless saber-rattling", according to the state-run Korean Central News Agency.

North Korea warned Sunday of "merciless" attacks on South Korean border islands if Seoul stages live-fire drills Monday near the maritime border on the anniversary of Pyongyang's deadly shelling attack five years ago.

The bombing of Yeonpyeong island off the west coast on November 23, 2010, killed four South Koreans, including two civilians, and sparked a brief fear of a full-scale conflict.

North and South Korea agreed Friday to hold rare talks next week, aimed at setting up a high-level dialogue that might provide the foundation for a sustainable improvement in cross-border ties.

The talks, to be held on November 26 in the border truce village of Panmunjom, will be the first inter-governmental interaction since officials met there in August to defuse a crisis that had pushed both sides to the brink of an armed conflict.

U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon will visit North Korea this week for a likely meeting with the nuclear-armed state's diplomatically reclusive leader, Kim Jong-Un, South Korea's Yonhap news agency reported Monday.

If the trip goes ahead, Ban would be the first U.N. secretary general to set foot in the North for more than 20 years, and the first international leader to meet Kim since he formally assumed power nearly four years ago.