Rice to press North Korean envoy on nukes at highest-level talks in years

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice hopes to judge North Korea's seriousness about abandoning nuclear weapons when she holds the Bush administration's highest-level talks in four years with the Stalinist state this week. The North has been given a four-page draft document laying out what the United States wants from it to prove it has told the truth about its past atomic programs. Rice expects Pyongyang's foreign minister to provide at least an initial response to the proposal at Wednesday's meeting. "It will give some indication of the amount of effort the North Koreans have put into the completing this verification protocol," chief U.S. negotiator Christopher Hill said Tuesday. The draft calls for intrusive inspections of North Korean nuclear facilities, soil sampling and interviews with key scientists. It was... [read full story]