US Navy helps another North Korean ship avert a pirate attack

It must be true: I read it at Fox News.

Interestingly, the North Korean side apparently denied getting US help, so I'm in a conundrum about which fair-and-balanced news source to believe:

The U.S. Navy says it overtook a suspected Somali pirate skiff that tried to attack a commercial ship in the Gulf of Aden.

A Navy statement issued Sunday says a security team aboard the merchant vessel Napht Al Yemen 1 repelled the Jan. 20 pirate attack without U.S. help.

The USS Porter stopped and boarded the pirate skiff later that day.

The commercial ship is Yemeni owned but sails under a North Korean flag.

The incident marked a rare example of the U.S. military aiding North Korea, a reclusive rogue nation.

I find it interesting, from a sociological-journalistic perspective, that these stories get the play they do in the English-language media. On the one hand, they are indeed newsworthy. But on the other hand, it seems to represent a deliberate attempt to re-humanize an enemy: While North Korean refugees are certainly seen as the human face of suffering, the leadership is depicted as wholly (and perhaps immutably) evil. Are the crews of North Korean ships part of the DPRK economic and political machinery, or are they North Korean citizens just trying to scrape out an existence?