The United States is sending a senior envoy to North Korea to seek the release of an ailing Korean-American sentenced to 15 years hard labor, the State Department said Tuesday.

Kenneth Bae was tried at a time of high tension between the United States and North Korea over the reclusive nation's nuclear program, on charges that he was trying to topple the regime of young leader Kim Jong-Un.

The head of a U.N. inquiry into human rights in North Korea appealed on Tuesday for access to the country, even as Pyongyang condemned his commission's work as slanderous and provocative.

The three-member Commission of Inquiry chaired by retired Australian judge Michael Kirby has just wrapped up hearing five days of often harrowing testimony in the South Korean capital -- mostly from North Korean defectors.

North Korea tried to export gas masks to Syria but they were seized in Turkey along with arms and ammunition, a Japanese daily said Tuesday, as the U.S. threatened action over an alleged chemical weapons attack.

A Libyan-registered vessel, identified as Al En Ti Sar, left North Korea for Syria earlier this year with the consignment, the Sankei Shimbun said, quoting unnamed sources from the US military, Japanese and South Korean intelligence.

The head of a U.N. inquiry into human rights in North Korea challenged Pyongyang on Monday to back its allegation that testimony gathered by his commission in Seoul amounted to "slander"

The three-member Commission of Inquiry chaired by retired Australian judge Michael Kirby has just wrapped up hearing five days of often harrowing testimony in the South Korean capital -- mostly from North Korean defectors.

North Korea's top military official said Pyongyang did not want war and valued peace above all, as the two Koreas forge ahead with plans for their first family reunions in three years.

Friday's agreement to hold the reunion event next month has deepened signs of rapprochement after months of tension, with Pyongyang also offering to revive a joint industrial project with Seoul.

North and South Korea agreed Friday to go ahead with the first reunions in three years for families separated for decades by the 1950-53 Korean War, Seoul said, the latest sign of warming ties between the rivals.

The reunion program was suspended after the North's shelling of a South Korean border island in November 2010, and its resumption marks a symbolic but important step.

Red Cross officials from the two Koreas will hold talks as planned Friday in resuming cross-border family reunions after the North finally agreed to the South's choice of venue.

In a message Thursday, Pyongyang dropped its request for the meeting to be held at its Mount Kumgang resort and agreed to the South's choice of the border truce village of Panmunjom, where the ceasefire ending hostilities in the 1950-53 Korean War was signed.

South Korea's pointman on North Korea on Wednesday played down expectations of any imminent turnaround in inter-Korean relations following a recent flurry of movement on cross-border projects.

"There is no quick solution to a lot of pending issues. We will have to solve them gradually, step by step," Unification Minister Ryoo Kihl-Jae told a press briefing.

North Korea on Tuesday accused South Korean President Park Geun-Hye of provocative war-mongering a day after Seoul launched an annual military drill with the United States.

Rather than criticizing the joint exercise itself -- as it has often done in the past -- the North focused its anger on comments Park made at a meeting of her National Security Council that coincided with the start of the drill Monday.

South Korea launched a military drill Monday with the United States against a simulated North Korean invasion, even as a recent easing of tensions between Seoul and Pyongyang gathered momentum.

Although the annual Ulchi Freedom Guardian drill is largely played out on computers, it involves more than 80,000 South Korean and U.S. troops and has repeatedly been condemned by Pyongyang as a provocative war rehearsal.