North Korea: The United States will restart talks with North Korea on Thursday that were broken off last October when North Korea admitted secretly developing a uranium-enrichment programme for nuclear weapons.
The two days of talks in Beijing will focus mostly on procedural matters and at best will set the stage for more of the tortuous negotiations the two sides have undertaken on and off for over a decade.
US Assistant Secretary of State Mr James Kelly, who confronted the North in Pyongyang last year with damning evidence, flew out yesterday to lead the American delegation after going to Seoul and Tokyo to consult allies.
In Texas, President Bush was upbeat, saying that with the US working with China, South Korea and Japan, there is a "good chance" the North can be convinced to "abandon her ambitions to develop nuclear arsenals."
He praised the role played by China. "The key thing on the North Korea agenda is that China is assuming a very important responsibility," the president said, adding there was broad support for a nuclear-free peninsula.
China shifted its position in January after its new leader Mr Hu Jintao became alarmed that hawks in Washington might launch a pre-emptive strike against the North, and that a major war on China's doorstep could seriously damage its trade and investment plans.
In Washington, the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Richard Lugar, urged Mr Bush to consider military strikes on North Korea if it proceeds to develop nuclear weapons.
"And if they tell us at those meetings they intend to build weapons, we've got to indicate upfront that is totally unsatisfying," Mr Lugar said on NBC's Meet the Press.
Oblivious to these threats, North Korea is sticking to its usual practice of diplomatic brinkmanship mixed with blood-curdling threats, and confusing statements, all of which makes the diplomacy harder than ever. "If enemies invade our inviolable sky, land and seas even an inch, destroy the aggressors with merciless annihilating blows," suggested the KCNA, the country's news agency.
On Friday, it seemed the talks might be off when the North Korean government said it was "successfully reprocessing more than 8,000 spent fuel rods at the final phase". Yesterday, the statement was reinterpreted to mean the North was ready to reprocess the spent fuel rods but had yet to begin doing so.
Pyongyang, after first cancelling Cabinet-level talks with the South, is now ready to resume them on April 27th.
The Bush administration has failed to get a tough resolution condemning Pyongyang passed by the UN Security Council and has relented on its wish to have multilateral talks which included Japan and South Korea.
Washington policymakers seem split on whether the talks, whatever form they take, can possibly go anywhere. Analysts say Pyongyang's Kim Jong-il nurtures unrealistic hopes that the US is preparing to offer it diplomatic recognition and large quantities of food, fuel and loans.
North Korea is already believed to have generated enough plutonium to assemble several bombs from its Yongbyon nuclear reactor and to have enough spent fuel rods to create four or five others.