CHINA: Delegates from North and South Korea, the United States, Japan, Russia and China sit down today in the Chinese capital of Beijing to restart talks aimed at resolving the tense nuclear stand-off on the Korean peninsula.
Talks broke down for 13 acrimonious months, but as the delegates arrived in Beijing over the weekend, they tried to put a positive spin on round four and said they were hopeful of a successful conclusion.
During the period of deadlock, the stakes were raised considerably when the secretive Stalinist state declared in February that it possessed nuclear weapons and repeatedly said it was boosting that arsenal to counter what it calls hostile US policies.
Proliferation experts believe Pyongyang has possibly eight nuclear weapons.
The talks will try to coax the North into abandoning its nuclear ambitions in return for energy aid, security guarantees and other economic sweeteners.
The US and its allies will apply a lot more pressure in this round of talks than in the previous three, fruitless rounds.
North Korea has been stalling during the previous negotiations.Pyongyang insists it needs nuclear weapons to face down the growing threat of invasion from the US, which has repeatedly referred to the country as one of the worst offenders in President George Bush's "axis of evil".
On Sunday Pyongyang accused the US of trying to topple its leadership and urged it to abandon a plan to unseat its leader, Kim Jong-il.
"If the US drops its ambition for a regime change and opts for peaceful co-existence with the DPRK [ Democratic People's Republic of Korea], the talks can make successful progress and settle the issue of the denuclearisation of the peninsula," was how North Korea's official KCNA news agency put it.
The atmosphere ahead of the talks has been more conciliatory than at any time during the last 13 months. South Korea's envoy, deputy foreign minister Song Min-soon, met his North Korean counterpart, the Yonhap news agency said, and was hopeful of progress.
"We shared the view that participants in the talks should produce substantial progress and come up with a framework for the realisation of a nuclear-free Korean peninsula," Mr Song said.
Putting a positive spin on the talks - a tactic it has adopted at every round so far, only to blame Washington for the subsequent collapse of the talks - Pyongyang said it wanted to normalise diplomatic relations and agree a peace treaty with the US to replace the armistice that ended the 1950- 1953 Korean War.
Obviously mindful of these tactics, Washington's man at the talks, Christopher Hill, who is assistant secretary of state for east Asian and Pacific affairs, adopted a more cautious stance and said he hoped the talks would lay the groundwork for another round of talks.
"I wouldn't expect this to be the last set of negotiations. We would like to make some measurable progress, progress we can build on for a subsequent round of negotiations," he said.
Against a background of such widespread mistrust and dislike, getting the six nations around a table was quite a job, following what US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called "intense" diplomacy.
Some of the carrots on offer are substantial, particularly the economic ones. North Korea is effectively bankrupt and has suffered food and energy shortages for many years.
South Korea has promised an annual supply of 2,000 megawatts of electricity if Pyongyang abandons its nuclear weapons plan.
Washington has offered nothing concrete but it has softened its tone on North Korea.
There are other, potentially divisive, issues on the agenda.
Japan has indicated that it will press the issue of North Korea's abductions of Japanese nationals, which, some analysts say, could stymie the talks.
Pyongyang kidnapped 13 Japanese in the 1970s and 1980s to help train spies. Five were repatriated along with their children born in North Korea and Pyongyang says the other eight are dead. The abductions are a big Japanese domestic political issue.