S. Korea to ease China over US, N. Korea talks

They also said Mr Kim would allow US-South Korean military exercises to continue in the months before the meeting, which was originally slated for May.

If Trump follows through, it would be the first meeting between a sitting USA president and a North Korean leader.

But Japan’s Asahi Shimbun said that Tokyo was blindsided by Trump’s decision last week to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un due to a lack of prior notice from Washington.

Nevertheless, there is no word from Pyongyang about when the talks that the regime is said to have proposed will take place.

“Nothing’s been agreed and I don’t want to start floating ideas out through the media”, Tillerson said in Abuja alongside Foreign Minister Geoffrey Onyeama.

The area has been the site of countless talks between the two sides following the Korean War (1950-53). Trump has vowed to prevent that, by force if necessary.

Mr Xi was speaking after he met South Korean national security director Chung Eui-yong, who is on a whistle-stop tour of the US, China and Russian Federation to brief leaders on a delegation he led this month to North Korea.

After a meeting with Kim in Pyongyang last week, a delegation of senior South Korean officials headed to Washington to brief the Americans on the visit. Tehran now allows worldwide inspectors to scrutinize sites all across Iran; even when Pyongyang still allowed global inspectors into North Korea, the regime confined them “to living and working at one site, the main nuclear reactor at Yongbyon”, as the New York Times’s David Sanger notes.

Also competing and getting press attention is a man who defected from North Korea and is now a reserve forward on South Korea’s sled hockey team.

The trip is being organized by the U.S. Association of Former Members of Congress.

“The situation on the Korean peninsula has recently undergone very positive changes”.

China is widely regarded as having been caught somewhat by surprise by the announcement of the planned meeting between Mr Trump and Kim.

White House spokesman Raj Shah said no location has been determined for the talks, but it’s unlikely Mr. Trump will go to North Korea.

“As long as all parties can focus on the fundamental goal of denuclearisation, peace and stability, the Korean peninsula will finally usher in the spring, when ice will thaw and flowers will bloom”, Xi said.

Asked in a Fox News interview due to air on Monday evening whether there was a real possibility of North Korea denuclearizing, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence said: “We’ll see, as the president often says”. He referred both to the potential Trump-Kim summit and talks between Moon and Kim scheduled for next month at a truce village inside the Demilitarized Zone that divides their countries.