Rice to push North Korea on verifying mechanism

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will push North Korea's foreign minister hard in their first ever meeting on Wednesday to prove the North's disarmament efforts are serious, U.S. officials said. Rice is to join foreign ministers from China, Russia, Japan, and the two Koreas at Wednesday's meeting -- the first such encounter since "six party" talks began in 2003 and at a time when Washington wants better ties with the North. In the highest-level meeting between the two nations in four years, Rice will press Pak Ui-chun for details about a mechanism being worked out to check claims Pyongyang made about its weapons-grade plutonium stockpile in a long-delayed accounting delivered last month. "It will give some indication of the amount of effort the North Koreans have put into the completing this... [read full story]