Six-party talks on the crisis over North Korea's nuclear ambitions will take place in Beijing from Wednesday to Saturday next week, the official Xinhua news agency said yesterday, citing unidentified sources.
The discussions would be preceded by two days of working-level talks, Xinhua said in a dispatch from Seoul. It gave no further details.
The two Koreas, the US, Japan, Russia and China have met in Beijing twice without making progress on an agreement on dismantling the North's covert nuclear weapons program.
At the last round in Beijing in February, the parties agreed to meet again before the end of this month. South Korea's Foreign Ministry was set to officially announce the dates at a news conference at 7am today.
Earlier yesterday, a spokesman with the US embassy in Beijing said plans to hold talks during the week of June 21 were "agreeable" to Washington, who has demanded a "complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantling" of North Korea's nuclear weapons facilities.
South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun yesterday said his country would provide huge infusions of economic assistance to North Korea if the dispute was resolved peacefully.
"Inter-Korean cooperation will be accelerated if the North Korean nuclear issue is resolved, and we are preparing comprehensive and concrete plans for that," Roh said in a speech marking the anniversary of the 2000 summit that launched a process of reconciliation.
South Korea's Yonhap news agency quoted Roh as saying South Korea would cooperate closely with the North to help it "build infrastructure and enhance industrial production capacity, which will develop North Korea's economy in an epochal manner.
"We will also cooperate with neighboring countries to help the international community enhance economic cooperation with North Korea,'' he said.
However, the reconciliation process remains vulnerable to tension over the nuclear standoff, which some politicians and other experts in Washington view as a challenge to global security on par -- or even greater than -- the conflict in Iraq.
Meanwhile, North and South Korea marked the fourth anniversary of an inter-Korean summit on Monday by halting propaganda broadcasts over loudspeakers along their border.
Military generals on both sides agreed to the halt during talks earlier this month. They also said they would dismantle large propaganda billboards by mid-August.
The crisis over Pyongyang's nuclear arms program 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.
An endangered baby pygmy hippopotamus that shot to social media stardom in Thailand has become a lucrative source of income for her home zoo, quadrupling its ticket sales, the institution said Thursday. Moo Deng, whose name in Thai means “bouncy pork,” has drawn tens of thousands of visitors to Khao Kheow Open Zoo this month. The two-month-old pygmy hippo went viral on TikTok and Instagram for her cheeky antics, inspiring merchandise, memes and even craft tutorials on how to make crocheted or cake-based Moo Dengs at home. A zoo spokesperson said that ticket sales from the start of September to Wednesday reached almost
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
INSTABILITY: If Hezbollah do not respond to Israel’s killing of their leader then it must be assumed that they simply can not, an Middle Eastern analyst said Israel’s killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah leaves the group under huge pressure to deliver a resounding response to silence suspicions that the once seemingly invincible movement is a spent force, analysts said. Widely seen as the most powerful man in Lebanon before his death on Friday, Nasrallah was the face of Hezbollah and Israel’s arch-nemesis for more than 30 years. His group had gained an aura of invincibility for its part in forcing Israel to withdraw troops from southern Lebanon in 2000, waging a devastating 33-day-long war in 2006 against Israel and opening a “support front” in solidarity with Gaza since
RSS