World News North Korea rejects U.S. offer of aid

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North Korea rejected as "pie in the sky" U.S. offers of talks and possible aid in exchange for abandoning its nuclear ambitions, accusing Washington of staging a "deceptive drama" to mislead world opinion.

Keeping up a stream of anti-American invective even as it agreed to more high-level meetings with South Korea, Pyongyang on Jan. 15 declared it would accept no U.S. offer of dialogue with conditions attached.

Washington's "loudmouthed supply of energy and food aid are like a pie in the sky, as they are possible only after the DPRK (the Democratic People's Republic of Korea) is totally disarmed," a North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman said in a report by the country's foreign news outlet, KCNA.

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said the United States had not heard any official word from Pyongyang. He called the North's reported dismissal of a possible aid deal "unfortunate."

U.S., British and French officials meeting in London, meanwhile, decided that the International Atomic Energy Agency's IAEA board of governors should meet as a next step in the dispute with North Korea.

Two IAEA inspectors were expelled from North Korea last month, leaving the world without an eye into the secretive nation's nuclear program.

Tensions on the Korean Peninsula have been rising since North Korea admitted in October to having a secret nuclear program. The communist regime withdrew Jan. 17 from a global treaty aimed at limiting the spread of nuclear weapons, and threatened to resume missile tests.

北朝鮮、米の人道的援助を拒否

北朝鮮外務省スポークスマンは「米国が最近、我々との対話説を流布させながら、世論を誤導しようとしている」と述べ、米国の対話表明は「欺まん劇にすぎない」と非難した。

Shukan ST: Jan. 24, 2003

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