North Korean leader Kim Jong-il is so eager for dialogue with the US that his negotiators to six-party talks on Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions will talk until they are hoarse, Japan's Kyodo news agency said yesterday.
The reclusive leader of one of the world's last hardline communist states made the remarks on the so far inconclusive talks on curbing the North's nuclear arms programs in a rare recent meeting with visiting Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi.
"We want to talk with the United States until our throats are dry," Kyodo quoted Kim as telling Koizumi in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, last month.
"We want other countries concerned to play music so that we can dance well," he was quoted as saying.
Kim was speaking at a summit with Koizumi last month when the Japanese prime minister stressed the importance of resolving the crisis over North Korea's nuclear arms programs through the six-party talks, Kyodo said.
The six parties to the talks are the two Koreas, the US, China, Russia and Japan.
A third round of six-party talks is expected to start on June 23 in Beijing, although analysts hold out little hope of progress.
The negotiators have met in Beijing twice without reaching any agreement on dismantling the North's covert nuclear weapons programs.
The nuclear crisis erupted in October 2002 when US officials said North Korea had disclosed it was working on a secret program to enrich uranium for weapons, in violation of an international agreement.
North Korea, which denied the disclosure, then pulled out of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, expelled UN inspectors and took its plutonium plant out of mothballs. The US wants North Korea to abandon completely both a program to make weapons-grade plutonium and the uranium enrichment program.
North Korea wants compensation, including heavy fuel oil, from the other five and a non-aggression treaty with the US as a precondition for scrapping its nuclear program.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the