North Korea has expressed distrust over overtures by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice seeking to bring the communist state back into six-way nuclear talks.
A North Korean foreign ministry spokesman said late Saturday Rice's recent comments calling Pyongyang a sovereign state -- which was seen by Seoul as a conciliatory gesture by Washington -- were just a "ruse."
Citing a "hostile" US policy among others, the North has boycotted the six-way nuclear talks -- which also include the US, China, Russia, South Korea and Japan -- for 11 months.
The spokesman told the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) that Rice appeared on CNN on Thursday to accuse Pyongyang of violating a 1994 nuclear safeguard deal and call it a "terrible regime."
"Rice's reckless remarks self-exposed that her loudmouthed recognition of the `sovereign state' and the like were nothing but a ruse to conceal the US attempt at `bringing down the regime' of the DPRK [North Korea] and mislead the public opinion," the spokesman said.
He called Rice a "brazen-faced liar" while repeating the call by Pyongyang that the 1994 deal collapsed due to Washington "inventing the rumor about the nonexistent `enriched uranium program' of the DPRK."
Since her Asian tour in March, Rice has publicly acknowledged the North's status as a sovereign country while urging Pyongyang to return to the talks.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS