North Korea nuclear talks to restart
Updated
China has confirmed that six-nation talks will resume on North Korea's nuclear program this week.
The talks involve Beijing, the US, Russia, Japan, and North and South Korea.
While there have been bilateral discussions this year, this week's six-party talks are the first in nine months
US Assistant Secretary of State and Washington's chief nuclear envoy, Christopher Hill, says the main goal for this week's discussions will be to agree on a procedure for verifying North Korea's nuclear assets.
"Verification is the most important thing," Mr Hill said.
"We want to speed up the rate of disablement.
"Obviously the cooling tower is done, but we need to discharge the reactor.
"We hope we can pick up the pace to do that, and there's some other elements of disablement that we'd like to move more quickly on," he said.
