U.S. envoy arrives in N. Korea
Effort aims to revive stalled 6-party nuke negotiations
SEOUL, South Korea — U.S. envoy Stephen Bosworth arrived Tuesday in Pyongyang, North Korea, for three days of high-level meetings that officials hope will draw an isolationist and nuclear-armed North Korea back to stalled six-party disarmament talks.
The meetings will be the first direct U.S. diplomatic overture to North Korea since President Barack Obama took office this year on a campaign pledge to try to persuade the Stalinist regime to abandon its growing atomic arsenal.
For its part, analysts here say, North Korea will express its displeasure over what it calls a hostile U.S. policy that includes strict economic sanctions.
North Korea also will push for continued one-on-one nuclear talks with the U.S., rather than a return to the bargaining table with the other six-party members: Japan, South Korea, China and Russia.
But even before Bosworth’s departure for Pyongyang, U.S. officials said there would be no new incentives for North Korea to return to the nuclear talks.
In 2005, North Korea pledged to surrender its nuclear weapons in exchange for aid and security guarantees, but it later reneged and walked away from the six-party talks. Earlier this year, the regime conducted an underground nuclear test.
“We don’t intend to reward North Korea simply for going back to something that it previously committed to do,” said U.S. State Department spokesman Ian Kelly.
In a brief statement, Bosworth indicated that his decision to travel to Pyongyang by way of Seoul demonstrated that the allies were drawing up a joint strategy.
Surf is way, way up
HONOLULU — Kelly Slater competes Tuesday in a one-day surfing contest held only in extreme conditions, thanks to the massive waves pounding Oahu’s famed North Shore. The contest — popularly known as “The Eddie” in honor of Eddie Aikau, a legendary surfer who died in 1978 — is held only when waves top 20 feet in Waimea Bay. This is only the eighth time the conditions have been right since the event was founded in 1984.
WORLD
Talks on relocating U.S. base break down
TOKYO– Talks on the relocation of a major American military base have been suspended, deepening a deadlock between the United States and Japan, officials said Tuesday.
Many on the southern Japanese island of Okinawa want the U.S. base closed and its functions moved off the island altogether.
Japan and the United States agreed in 2006 to move Marine Corps Air Station Futenma to a site farther north. But Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama has put the deal on hold and indicated the relocation site could be changed.
Fire officials suspended
MOSCOW — The fire chief of a Russian city where a nightclub blaze killed 119 revelers was suspended along with five subordinates Tuesday, and authorities said inspection records for the club in Perm appear to have been falsified.
A top Emergencies Ministry official said paperwork showing the club’s fire-safety measures had been approved in 2003 by a man who had left his post as a fire inspector the previous year.
NATION
Webster to probe FBI actions prior to rampage
WASHINGTON — The FBI on Tuesday tapped former FBI and CIA Director William Webster to lead an independent review of the bureau’s “policies, practices and actions” before last month’s shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas.
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The decision was made by FBI Director Robert Mueller, who said Webster, who was also a federal judge, “is uniquely qualified to undertake this task and look at the procedures and actions involved in this matter.”
The FBI has conducted its own internal investigation into the Nov. 5 shootings, which killed 13 and injured dozens more, and recently sent those findings to the White House, several FBI officials confirmed. Bureau officials, congressional lawmakers and other sources familiar with the probe said that it uncovered gaps in the way the bureau investigates potential terrorist threats and shares that information with other agencies.
$3 billion tribe proposal
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Tuesday proposed spending more than $3 billion to settle claims going back more than a century that American Indian tribes were swindled out of royalties for oil, gas, grazing and other leases.
Under an agreement announced Tuesday, the Interior Department would distribute $1.4 billion to more than 300,000 Indian tribe members to compensate them for historical accounting claims, and to resolve future claims. The government also would spend $2 billion to buy back and consolidate tribal land broken up in previous generations.
If cleared by Congress and a federal judge, the settlement would be the largest Indian claim ever approved against the U.S. government — exceeding the combined total of all previous settlements of Indian claims.
First 1-drug execution
LUCASVILLE, Ohio — An Ohio killer was put to death in 10 minutes Tuesday in the first U.S. execution to use a single drug injection instead of the standard three-chemical combination that has come under legal attack because it can cause excruciating pain.
Kenneth Biros, 51, was pronounced dead shortly after one dose of sodium thiopental began flowing into his veins at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility.
THE NUMBER: $36,935 buys bottle of cognac from 1788
A bottle of Vieux Cognac dating to 1788 — the year before the French Revolution — sold at a Paris auction of wine and spirits for $36,935.
Paris’ landmark Tour d’Argent restaurant put 18,000 bottles up for auction, leaving the establishment to get by with about 432,000 bottles remaining in its cavernous cellar. The two-day sale netted more than $2.2 million, the Piasa auction house said. The Left Bank restaurant, which dates to 1582, donated proceeds from the bottle of 1788 cognac to the Association Petits Princes, a French charity that grants the wishes of ailing children.