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.
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
China’s Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft has delayed its return mission to Earth after the vessel was possibly hit by tiny bits of space debris, the country’s human spaceflight agency said yesterday, an unusual situation that could disrupt the operation of the country’s space station Tiangong. An impact analysis and risk assessment are underway, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement, without providing a new schedule for the return mission, which was originally set to land in northern China yesterday. The delay highlights the danger to space travel posed by increasing amounts of debris, such as discarded launch vehicles or vessel
RUBBER STAMP? The latest legislative session was the most productive in the number of bills passed, but critics attributed it to a lack of dissenting voices On their last day at work, Hong Kong’s lawmakers — the first batch chosen under Beijing’s mantra of “patriots administering Hong Kong” — posed for group pictures, celebrating a job well done after four years of opposition-free politics. However, despite their smiles, about one-third of the Legislative Council will not seek another term in next month’s election, with the self-described non-establishment figure Tik Chi-yuen (狄志遠) being among those bowing out. “It used to be that [the legislature] had the benefit of free expression... Now it is more uniform. There are multiple voices, but they are not diverse enough,” Tik said, comparing it
Prime ministers, presidents and royalty on Saturday descended on Cairo to attend the spectacle-laden inauguration of a sprawling new museum built near the pyramids to house one of the world’s richest collections of antiquities. The inauguration of the Grand Egyptian Museum, or GEM, marks the end of a two-decade construction effort hampered by the Arab Spring uprisings, the COVID-19 pandemic and wars in neighboring countries. “We’ve all dreamed of this project and whether it would really come true,” Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly told a news conference, calling the museum a “gift from Egypt to the whole world from a
RSS