Seoul  - North Korean authorities detained two US journalists at the border with China, news reports said Thursday.

The two women who work for US-based online media were detained this week by North Korean border guards when they filmed footage at the Stalinist state's border with China, the South Korean Yonhap news agency said, quoting diplomat sources.

"Two reporters working for US internet news media, including a Korean American, were detained by North Korean authorities earlier this week, and they remain in custody there," the source said.

Washington, March 19 : New evidence has emerged which determines that even a slight rise in atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, one of the gases that drives global warming, affects the stability of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS).

The massive WAIS covers the continent on the Pacific side of the Transantarctic Mountains. Any substantial melting of the ice sheet would cause a rise in global sea levels.

The evidence was collected by a 56-member team of scientists, which conducted a research on a 1,280-meter (4,100-foot)-long sedimentary rock core taken from beneath the sea floor under Antarctica's Ross Ice Shelf during the first project of the ANDRILL (ANtarctic geological DRILLing) research program.

Washington, March 19 : A popular swimming pool game called `Marco Polo' is guiding scientists as to how to make robots that can independently detect and capture other moving targets.

Engineers from Duke University and the University of New Mexico say that the simple pursuit-evasion game is providing them with useful information, which can be used to create such a system that will not only allow robots to "sense" a moving target but intercept it also.

Washington, Mar. 19: The Chinese intelligence service spends most of its time not only trying to steal secrets from overseas but also on ways to bolster Communist Party rule by repressing religious and political dissent internally, claims a spy who has defected to the United States.

"In some sense you can say that intelligence work between two countries is just like war but without the fire," Li Fengzhi told The Washington Times in an interview aided by an interpreter.

Li worked for years as an Ministry of State Security intelligence officer inside China before defecting to the United States, where is he awaiting a response to his request for political asylum.

Beijing  - China might convert more naval vessels to patrol disputed areas of the South China Sea to counter illegal fishing and "other countries' unfounded territorial claims," state media said Thursday.

China faces new "challenges and complications" in the South China Sea, the official China Daily quoted a senior fisheries official as saying, pointing to recent claims by the Philippines and Malaysia to disputed islands and a standoff with a US naval surveillance ship.