NORTH KOREA: North Korea fired a surface-to-ship missile in the sea between the Korean peninsula and Japan yesterday in what Seoul said appeared to be part of military exercises by the isolated communist country.
The firing was at least the third such launch this year and took place as a crisis over North Korea's nuclear weapons programmes was being discussed at the summit of Asian-Pacific leaders in Bangkok.
President Bush, adopting a policy shift to re-energise talks with North Korea, called with his South Korean counterpart for a new round of talks with North Korea.
However, a top aide to Mr Bush cautioned that consultations were just beginning and it would take some time to come up with security guarantees to offer North Korea in exchange for it abandoning its nuclear weapons programme.
Mr Bush and South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun called for a fresh round of six-party talks with North Korea on its nuclear programme at an early date and urged the reclusive north to refrain from any action that could exacerbate the crisis.
"We're making good progress on peacefully solving the issue with North Korea," Mr Bush said before news of the latest North Korea missile firing was made public.
"We do not take this as a positive attitude on the part of North Korea," said a Japanese Foreign Ministry spokesman in Bangkok.
Japanese public broadcaster NHK said the missile was likely to have been a version of the Chinese Silkworm anti-ship missiles that North Korea fired in February and March, and which have a range of around 100 km.
In 1998, North Korea shocked the world by firing a Taepodong ballistic missile that flew over Japan's main island of Honshu and landed in the sea off Japan's Pacific coast.