NEW YORK

North Korea: No more six-party talks

North Korea’s deputy U.N. ambassador said there would be “no more” six-nation talks on the country’s nuclear program and maintained the real issue is whether the United States intends to attack the reclusive communist nation.

Han Song Ryol made clear his country’s announcement Thursday that it is a nuclear power and that it would indefinitely suspend its participation in six-party negotiations was the result of Pyongyang’s belief that the United States is bent on invading North Korea to topple Kim Jong Il’s authoritarian regime.

Han went further in an interview Friday with Associated Press Television News when asked what it would take to get North Korea to come back to the talks. “Six-party talks is old story. No more,” the North Korean envoy replied in English.

The United States, South Korea, China, Japan and Russia have struggled to arrange a fourth round of talks aimed at persuading Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear weapons programs. The last round was held in June.

North Korea’s claim that it has nuclear weapons could not be independently verified.

 

Head of oil-for-food program blocked audit

The U.N. oil-for-food program chief under scrutiny for alleged corruption and mismanagement blocked a proposed audit of his office around the same time he is accused of soliciting lucrative oil deals from Iraq, according to investigators.

A U.N. auditing team, which was severely understaffed, said running the $64 billion oil-for-food program was “a high risk activity” and a priority for review. But Benon Sevan denied the internal auditors’ request to hire a consultant to examine his office in May 2001 — an act top investigators of the program are now calling into question.

“I think the auditors thought they were steered away from some areas,” Paul Volcker, who’s leading the independent probe, told The Associated Press. “Our judgment is that the main office should have been audited. And that leaves the inference that perhaps the auditors were not encouraged to do the work. I think we draw the inference that it was at least suspicious.”

 

BAGHDAD, Iraq

U.S. soldier killed fighting in Iraq

A U.S. soldier was killed in fighting north of Baghdad and gunmen assassinated an Iraqi general and two companions in a Shiite neighborhood of the capital Sunday. Election officials said a Shiite alliance won the most votes in the Jan. 30 elections but will have to form a coalition government.

Three other U.S. soldiers were killed when their vehicle rolled into a canal Sunday, the military said. The men from Task Force Danger were on a combat patrol near the town of Balad, 50 miles north of Baghdad, the U.S. command said in a statement.

A fourth Task Force Danger soldier was killed and one was wounded in fighting near Samarra, a flashpoint of the insurgency 60 miles north of Baghdad, the military said. In the southern Iraqi city of Nasiriyah, an Iraqi translator for Italian troops and his son were shot to death Sunday, a spokesman for Italy’s military said.

 

DRESDEN, Germany

German far-right protests Dresden anniversary

Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder yesterday warned Germans against forgetting history, as far-right supporters rallied in Dresden to protest a devastating Allied bombing in World War II that killed an estimated 35,000 residents 60 years ago.

The rally — and fears of street clashes — cast a shadow over a day of remembrance and reflection on the U.S.-British air raids, which set off firestorms and destroyed the centuries-old city center.

Schroeder vowed to fight attempts by neo-Nazis to blur the historical context of the Feb. 13-14, 1945, attack — part of a war started by Nazi Germany during which Adolf Hitler’s regime killed 6 million European Jews in the Holocaust.

“Today we grieve for the victims of war and the Nazi reign of terror in Dresden, in Germany and in Europe,” he said in a statement issued in Berlin.

 

-Compiled from Daily Wire Reports