SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea rushed to the defense of American civil liberties on Tuesday, saying revelations of mass surveillance operations showed the United States was the "kingpin" of rights abuse. Rights groups and defectors have long accused the North, one of the world's most closed societies, of totalitarian practices. These include brutal suppression of dissent, the operation of a prison camp network holding some 200,000 inmates and a "military-first" policy that has led to periodic famines.

SEOUL, June 18 (Yonhap) -- South Korean workers are likely to work shorter hours than their counterparts in 34 mostly developed countries in eight years as Koreans' yearly working hours are being cut at a rapid pace, a report said Tuesday. South Koreans worked 2,090 hours in 2011, compared with 2,512 hours in 2000. It represents an annual average reduction of 38 hours, or 1.65 percent, Byun Yang-gyu, a research fellow of the Korea Economic Research Institute, said in the report.

The United States will only engage in "real" talks with North Korea and will judge actions, not Pyongyang's "nice words" about wanting high-level negotiations, a senior US official said Sunday. Any talks "have to be based on them living up to their obligations" on proliferation, nuclear weapons, smuggling and other issues, White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough told CBS News's "Face the Nation."

SEOUL, June 5 (Yonhap) -- North Korea claimed Wednesday that South Korea had abducted the nine defectors who were caught in Laos and accused Seoul and Washington of a smear campaign against Pyongyang. "It was disclosed recently that the south Korean puppet group attempted to tempt and abduct many youngsters of the DPRK to take them to south Korea," an unidentified spokesman for the North's Red Cross said in a statement carried by the country's Korean Central News Agency (KCNA). DPRK stands for North Korea's official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.