North Korea is dragging its feet over restarting six-nation talks on its nuclear weapons program, despite other participating countries' willingness to move ahead as soon as possible, South Korea's top nuclear negotiator said yesterday.
Deputy Foreign Minister Lee Soo-hyuck, South Korea's chief delegate to the talks, gave the assessment before meeting his Japanese counterpart, Mitoji Yabunaka, in Seoul yesterday to discuss resuming the nuclear negotiations.
A second round of talks -- which involved the US, the two Koreas, Japan, China and Russia -- ended in Beijing last month without a major breakthrough.
The participants are trying to form a so-called "working group" next month to nail down details before a full third round, which they'd agreed to convene by June.
"All the countries, except North Korea, think that the working group should meet as soon as possible," Lee said. "Once again, the question of when the talks will resume seems to depend on North Korea's attitude."
Lee hoped that Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing (
Li would be the first Chinese foreign minister to visit the North in five years.
China, one of communist North Korea's last remaining ideological allies, is a key mediator in the nuclear dispute.
The US insists that the North dismantle its nuclear weapons programs completely and verifiably. Pyongyang says it will do so only if the US provides economic aid and security guarantees.
North Korea threatened on Friday to boost its nuclear arsenal in "quality and quantity," blaming the US for the lack of progress in the nuclear meetings.
It also claimed that joint US-South Korean military exercises, which began on Sunday, were heightening tensions on the Korean peninsula.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema