Six-party talks on North Korea’s nuclear program stalled after the North rejected a Chinese proposal outlining how monitors could verify its past atomic activities.
Category: North Korea
US nuclear envoy Christopher Hill this week is making what may be the final effort of his search for a lasting deal on North Korea’s nuclear program in the latest round of six-party talks in Beijing.No one, including Mr. Hill, predicts success as he attempts to get North Korea to agree in writing to what North Korean diplomats have said they will never do: permit inspectors to take material from the North’s nuclear site at Yongbyon for scrutiny outside the country.
Representatives from five regional powers converged in Beijing on Sunday to join the Bush administration’s last efforts to revive a nuclear disarmament deal with North Korea, while the Communist North vowed to ignore Japan at the talks, says the New York Times.
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Trains between Koreas stop running
A cargo train between North and South Korea and tours from the South to the communist state stopped on Friday under a border clampdown called for by Pyongyang in anger at the conservative government in Seoul.
But a large number of South Koreans who work at a joint industrial enclave in the North Korean border city of Kaesong were being allowed to keep permits to enter the factory park there, despite an earlier vow by Pyongyang to expel many of them by December 1, officials said.
North Korea’s Kim Jong Il paid visits to machinery and soap-making factories, state media reported, the latest in a series of dispatches in recent weeks about public appearances by a leader believed to be recovering from a stroke.
from the nytimes:
North Korea said this week it would be expelling South Korean officials and some business managers from the park in Kaesong, just north of the border, on December 1 in anger at South Korean President Lee Myung-bak’s policy to get tough on Pyongyang.
“On the afternoon of November 28, they will cross the Military Demarcation Line and pull out to the South,” Unification Ministry spokesman Kim Ho-nyeon told a news briefing, referring to government workers stationed at the industrial park.
Audiences at the 11th Pyongyang International Film Festival clearly enjoyed themselves this fall during screenings of Western dramas and comedies, occasionally even erupting into riotous laughter.
The festival, which ran from Sept. 17 to 26 and screened more than 100 films from at least 45 nations, including China, Russia, France and Italy (though not the United States, Japan or South Korea), offered a rare chance for ordinary North Koreans to get a glimpse of the outside world.
Those looking to get away from the global economic crisis for awhile should head to North Korea.
“We know many countries are struggling due to the financial crisis … we have no problem here,” said a North Korean guide working with a visiting aid group from the South, whose economy has been among the hardest hit as financial markets tumble around the world.
North Korea’s centrally planned economy, built around the state ideology of self-reliance, has little time for capitalism and has only in recent years grudgingly allowed even street markets to emerge.
North Korea’s state-run media outlets have released a flurry of reports of public appearances by the North’s reclusive leader, Kim Jong-il, in what analysts on Thursday described as an effort to demonstrate to his people and the outside world that he is firmly in control, despite widespread rumors of ill health.
Analysts said the timing of recent reports about Mr. Kim was linked to the American presidential election.“Kim Jong-il wants to show that he is in control and that he has no problem being a partner of dialogue with the United States,” said Kim Yong-yun, a North Korea expert at Dongguk University.
He suggested that the North Korean leader might soon stage a “foolproof” demonstration of his health, for example by releasing a video of his public activities or paying a courtesy call to the Chinese Embassy in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang. China is North Korea’s main ally.
North Korea’s bar on international inspectors taking soil and waste samples from its reactor undermines efforts to check the communist state’s nuclear program, South Korea’s foreign minister said.
The U.S. removed North Korea from a list of state sponsors of terrorism in October after the communist state agreed to inspections of its Yongbyon nuclear plant and other locations suspected of being part of the regime’s atomic program.