Delegates from six countries resumed talks yesterday on North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, looking at a Chinese proposal on how to verify the secretive regime’s claims about its atomic program.
A dispute over verification has been the latest snag in the long-running negotiations intended to bring an end to the nuclear activities of North Korea, which tested an atomic bomb in 2006.
The regime appeared to accept the verification process in October as part of a broader agreement to disable its nuclear facilities, but has since said it will not let international inspectors take test samples out of the country.
“We want to complete a verification protocol,” said Christopher Hill, the top US envoy to the negotiations, which have offered the North energy aid and diplomatic concessions in exchanging for stopping its atomic program.
“We also want to complete a schedule for energy and a schedule for disablement,” Hill said before yesterday’s talks.
“Our plan is to get all three done,” he said.
Delegates said China had presented a proposal for the verification process at the start of the day’s talks.
China engaged in a series of one-on-one consultations with the other participants to discuss the draft, as the envoys and their teams prepared for “a long day,” diplomatic sources said.
“[Verification] is the issue that the parties are concentrating their discussions on,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao (劉建超) told a regular briefing.
“China is working with the rest of the parties [and is] proposing initiatives. The parties have also had in-depth discussion around these proposals and initiatives,” he said.
The latest round of negotiations began in Beijing on Monday, likely marking a last bid by the outgoing George W. Bush administration to tackle one of the most intractable items on its diplomatic agenda.
The talks, which were launched in 2003, bring together North and South Korea, China, Japan, Russia and the US.
The countries appeared to make a breakthrough last year, under which Pyongyang agreed to disable facilities at its plutonium-producing Yongbyon nuclear complex and reveal its atomic activities.
The deal — which also called for the delivery of 1 million tonnes of fuel oil or energy aid of equivalent value — has hit multiple snags.
But in October, after an apparent agreement on verification procedures, the US said it would drop North Korea from a terrorism blacklist, and the North reversed plans to reactivate its plutonium-producing nuclear plants.
“We need to have intense discussions about verification,” the chief South Korean delegate to the talks, Kim Sook, told reporters before yesterday’s session.
‘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
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
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,
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
RSS