North Korean leader Kim Jong-il is so eager for dialogue with the US that his negotiators to six-party talks on Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions will talk until they are hoarse, Japan's Kyodo news agency said yesterday.
The reclusive leader of one of the world's last hardline communist states made the remarks on the so far inconclusive talks on curbing the North's nuclear arms programs in a rare recent meeting with visiting Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi.
"We want to talk with the United States until our throats are dry," Kyodo quoted Kim as telling Koizumi in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, last month.
"We want other countries concerned to play music so that we can dance well," he was quoted as saying.
Kim was speaking at a summit with Koizumi last month when the Japanese prime minister stressed the importance of resolving the crisis over North Korea's nuclear arms programs through the six-party talks, Kyodo said.
The six parties to the talks are the two Koreas, the US, China, Russia and Japan.
A third round of six-party talks is expected to start on June 23 in Beijing, although analysts hold out little hope of progress.
The negotiators have met in Beijing twice without reaching any agreement on dismantling the North's covert nuclear weapons programs.
The nuclear crisis erupted in October 2002 when US officials said North Korea had disclosed it was working on a secret program to enrich uranium for weapons, in violation of an international agreement.
North Korea, which denied the disclosure, then pulled out of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, expelled UN inspectors and took its plutonium plant out of mothballs. The US wants North Korea to abandon completely both a program to make weapons-grade plutonium and the uranium enrichment program.
North Korea wants compensation, including heavy fuel oil, from the other five and a non-aggression treaty with the US as a precondition for scrapping its nuclear program.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
RSS