A senior North Korean foreign ministry official will make a rare trip to the US soon, becoming the highest-ranking figure from Pyongyang to visit since US President George W. Bush took office.
News of the planned US visit by Ri Gun, deputy head of US affairs at North Korea's foreign ministry, came as the State Department's point man on the crisis over North Korea's nuclear programs headed to Beijing for talks.
The US embassy declined to comment on Ri's expected trip, which would follow on the heels of a visit to Washington by Pyongyang's UN ambassador -- the first allowed by the Bush administration.
"He is going to Washington, I believe, quite soon," a South Korean diplomat said yesterday, referring to Ri.
"He is going ... to attend some seminar," the diplomat said.
A Chinese expert on North Korea said Ri, a key negotiator at six-party talks on the crisis, would visit the US soon, though the dates were not clear.
A diplomatic source in Tokyo said Ri would also visit New York for about a week and attend a gathering of scholars, experts and officials on Aug. 10.
Ri was also likely to meet US officials and to discuss the nuclear issue, said the source who declined to be identified.
The US State Department's North Korea negotiator, Joseph DeTrani, was due in Beijing shortly, an embassy official said yesterday.
Ri's visit to Washington would follow last week's visit to the US capital by the North Korean envoy to the UN, Pak Gil-yon.
His presence there possibly reflected progress at recent talks to end North Korea's nuclear-weapons programs.
North Korea's UN ambassador must obtain State Department permission to travel outside a 40km radius around New York city.
Ri was chief negotiator at three-party talks between North Korea, the US and host China in April of last year, and has been in the delegation at later rounds of six-way talks that included South Korea, Japan and Russia.
Meanwhile, China is proposing that six-party "working level" talks on North Korea's nuclear programs be held from Aug. 11 to Aug. 14, Japanese public broadcaster NHK television reported yesterday.
Quoting unidentified Chinese government officials in Beijing, NHK said China was stressing that the working-level talks should be held in the middle of next month so that senior-level six-way talks could take place by the end of September.
Japan's top government spo-kesman, Hiroyuki Hosoda, said yesterday that no dates for working-level talks had been set.
POLITICAL PATRIARCHS: Recent clashes between Thailand and Cambodia are driven by an escalating feud between rival political families, analysts say The dispute over Thailand and Cambodia’s contested border, which dates back more than a century to disagreements over colonial-era maps, has broken into conflict before. However, the most recent clashes, which erupted on Thursday, have been fueled by another factor: a bitter feud between two powerful political patriarchs. Cambodian Senate President and former prime minister Hun Sen, 72, and former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, 76, were once such close friends that they reportedly called one another brothers. Hun Sen has, over the years, supported Thaksin’s family during their long-running power struggle with Thailand’s military. Thaksin and his sister Yingluck stayed
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
FOREST SITE: A rescue helicopter spotted the burning fuselage of the plane in a forested area, with rescue personnel saying they saw no evidence of survivors A passenger plane carrying nearly 50 people crashed yesterday in a remote spot in Russia’s far eastern region of Amur, with no immediate signs of survivors, authorities said. The aircraft, a twin-propeller Antonov-24 operated by Angara Airlines, was headed to the town of Tynda from the city of Blagoveshchensk when it disappeared from radar at about 1pm. A rescue helicopter later spotted the burning fuselage of the plane on a forested mountain slope about 16km from Tynda. Videos published by Russian investigators showed what appeared to be columns of smoke billowing from the wreckage of the plane in a dense, forested area. Rescuers in
‘ARBITRARY’ CASE: Former DR Congo president Joseph Kabila has maintained his innocence and called the country’s courts an instrument of oppression Former Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo) president Joseph Kabila went on trial in absentia on Friday on charges including treason over alleged support for Rwanda-backed militants, an AFP reporter at the court said. Kabila, who has lived outside the DR Congo for two years, stands accused at a military court of plotting to overthrow the government of Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi — a charge that could yield a death sentence. He also faces charges including homicide, torture and rape linked to the anti-government force M23, the charge sheet said. Other charges include “taking part in an insurrection movement,” “crime against the
RSS