Chinese envoy in NKorea; 2 Koreas meet at border
by Hyung-Jin Kim

The Associated Press    Translate This Article
8 February 2010

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - A senior Chinese envoy was in North Korea on Monday on a mission to persuade the reclusive state to rejoin nuclear disarmament talks, reports said, while officials from the two Koreas met in the North to discuss restarting joint tour programs.

Wang Jiarui, a top Communist Party official, will likely meet Monday with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il to discuss the stalled six-party nuclear talks, the South Korean cable network YTN reported, without citing its source.

The visit from North Korea's chief ally and benefactor comes amid an international push to get North Korea back to negotiations on dismantling the regime's nuclear program. U.N. political chief B. Lynn Pascoe also was due in Pyongyang this week.

A South Korean delegation, meanwhile, traveled to a North Korean border town to discuss restarting tours to the North's famed Diamond Mountain resort and ancient sights in downtown Kaesong. The tours, which offered South Koreans and others a rare chance to visit North Korea, were suspended in 2008 amid inter-Korean tensions.

Reclusive North Korea has been reaching out to the international community recently after months of tensions over its nuclear and missile programs.

Pyongyang on Saturday released an American missionary who had been detained for more than 40 days after deliberately going into North Korea illegally to call attention to rights abuses there.

On Sunday, Wang and North Korean Workers' Party officials met in Pyongyang to discuss strengthening ties and other 'matters of mutual concern,' the official Korean Central News Agency said.

YTN said the trip is Wang's fifth since 2004, and that he has met with leader Kim on all previous visits. A year ago, Kim assured Wang that North Korea remains 'dedicated to the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula' and wanted to move international talks forward, according to Beijing's Xinhua News Agency.

North Korea walked away from the disarmament talks last year in anger over international condemnation of a long-range rocket launch. The country later conducted a nuclear test, test-launched a series of ballistic missiles and restarted its plutonium-producing facility, inviting widespread condemnation and tighter U.N. sanctions.

North Korea wants sanctions eased, better relations with the United States and a peace treaty to formally end the 1950-53 Korean War before returning to the talks.

Washington has said Pyongyang must come back to the talks first before any talk about political and economic concessions.

On Sunday, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said the Obama administration would continue to try to get North Korea to return to the table.

'Engagement has brought us a lot in the last year,' Clinton said in an interview with CNN's 'State of the Union.'

Copyright © 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Every day Global Good News documents the rise of a better quality of life dawning in the world from good news reported by the press; and highlights the need for introducing Natural Law based-Total Knowledge based-programmes to bring the support of Nature to every individual, raise the quality of life of every society, and create a lasting state of world peace.



Translation software is not perfect; however if you would like to try it, you can translate this page using:

(Google) Select a language English to Afrikaans English to Albanian English to Arabic English to Belarusian English to Bulgarian English to Catalan English to Chinese (Simplified) English to Chinese (Traditional) English to Croatian English to Czech English to Danish English to Dutch English to Estonian English to Filipino English to Finnish English to French English to Galician English to German English to Greek English to Hebrew English to Hindi English to Hungarian English to Icelandic English to Indonesian English to Irish English to Italian English to Japanese English to Korean English to Latvian English to Lithuanian English to Macedonian English to Malay English to Maltese English to Norwegian English to Persian English to Polish English to Portuguese English to Romanian English to Russian English to Serbian English to Slovak English to Slovenian English to Spanish English to Swahili English to Swedish English to Thai English to Turkish English to Ukrainian English to Vietnamese English to Welsh English to Yiddish

(Altavista babelfish) Select a languageEnglish to Chinese-simpEnglish to Chinese-tradEnglish to DutchEnglish to PortugueseEnglish to FrenchEnglish to GermanEnglish to GreekEnglish to ItalianEnglish to JapaneseEnglish to KoreanEnglish to RussianEnglish to Spanish

Send Good News to Global Good News.

Your comments.