US and North Korean envoys held their third one-on-one meeting yesterday amid talks aimed at convincing the North to give up nuclear weapons, after the two sides staked out tough positions with Pyongyang refusing to disarm until Washington normalizes relations.
Meanwhile, a news report said North Korea hasn't assembled a working nuclear bomb but that the country has acquired all the components necessary to build one.
The North claimed to have nuclear weapons in February. However, a diplomatic source close to the arms talks told Russia's Interfax news agency that Pyongyang informed China that the announcement meant the North was able to build a detonator for an atomic bomb.
The source said the detonator was the most sophisticated element in weapons design that the North had been struggling to construct since the 1960s.
Security guarantees
North Korea has avoided spending to build up a nuclear stockpile, but the source told Interfax that the country would begin to do so in the face of unacceptable demands or a lack of security guarantees from the US and its allies.
At the talks, US Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill and North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan met yesterday morning for two hours but no details on what they discussed were immediately available, the US Embassy said.
Inspection proposed
The US proposed an international inspection of North Korea's nuclear facilities in September, Interfax reported, citing a North Korean source.
The source said that the proposal was counter to the North's principle of seeking step-by-step rewards for its pledges and actions, but declined to specify how the country would respond to the offer.
The increased contacts between the US and North Korea are a change from the previous three rounds of nuclear talks, where Washington mostly shunned direct contact with the communist nation.
The last round of the six-nation talks was in June 2004 and the latest began this week after North Korea ended a boycott over what it called "hostile" US policies.
Japan's main delegate, Kenichiro Sasae, said the US-North Korea talks yesterday would determine the course of the following negotiations.
Without progress between those two countries, there will not be an agreement on a joint statement from all sides at the conclusion of the talks, Sasae said.
Under discussion
That document was still under discussion yesterday afternoon and wasn't expected to be issued by the end of the day, said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang.
No schedule has been set for Friday's meetings, he said.
Qin said the US and North Korea were "in the process of finding common ground and measuring their differences."
Also yesterday, China's Foreign Ministry hosted a lunch for envoys from all of the six governments -- China, Japan, Russia, the US and the two Koreas -- in an apparent effort to maintain a cordial tone after the often-strained atmosphere during earlier rounds.
Good political will
The host of the lunch, Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Dai Bingguo, praised the atmosphere of the talks.
"All the delegates come to the talks with a good political will, that is, to make progress in solving the Korean Peninsula nuclear issue," he said, according to China's official Xinhua News Agency.
There were no other meetings planned yesterday for all six delegations together, Chinese state media reported.
Unlike the previous negotiations, which lasted several days, no end date has been set for the current round of arms 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