NORTH KOREA is teetering on the edge of "a major humanitarian crisis" and needs outside help within weeks, a senior United Nations official said yesterday.
Mr Peter McDermott, UNICEF's deputy director of emergency programmes, said all the signs of a crisis were in place. Only the scale of the potential disaster remained unclear.
Mr McDermott said North Korea was now at its lowest ebb. The government is distributing 100 grammes - a handful - of rice to its citizens each day, but even that paltry ration will run out on June 20th as food and fuel dry up, he said.
Fresh aid could be hard to drum up, with the international community divided over helping a hard line communist country that craves isolation and is still technically at war with South Korea.
North and South Korean patrol boats exchanged fire near the unmarked interKorean sea boundary yesterday, but there were no casualties in the brief skirmish, military authorities in Seoul said.
. South Korean prosecutors yesterday indicted President Kim YoungSam's son for corruption and tax evasion, saying his slush money may include funds left over from his father's 1992 presidential campaign. Mr Kim HyunChul had amassed £8.9 million in 1993, senior prosecutor Mr Shim JaeRyun said.
Also yesterday, South Korea's militant proPyongyang campus body handed over to the authorities four students from the illegal Hanchongryon group who it said witnessed the fatal beating of a man suspected of being a police informer.