US talks with North Korea on nuclear programme set to go ahead

A US DELEGATION left Washington for Beijing yesterday and expects to meet North Korean officials in the Chinese capital this week as scheduled, a State Department official said.

The talks with the North Koreans, the first at this level since last October, had been in doubt after Pyongyang appeared to say it had started reprocessing spent nuclear fuel rods.

A later translation suggested North Korea was on the verge of reprocessing the fuel rods but had not necessarily started.