North and South Korea have agreed to resume formal high-level talks that had effectively been suspended since February, reports from South Korea say.<\/p>\n
The agreement came during a surprise visit to South Korea by North Korean officials for the closing ceremony of the Asian Games.<\/p>\n
The visit was led by two top-ranking North Korean officials seen as close aides to leader Kim Jong-un.<\/p>\n
Both sides were said to have agreed to meet again within the next few weeks.<\/p>\n
Hwang Pyong-so, seen as the second-most powerful man in North Korea, held talks with Ryoo Kihl-jae, the South’s reunification minister, on Saturday after flying to Incheon to attend the sporting event.<\/p>\n
Mr Hwang is the top political officer at the Korean People’s Army. The other two members of the North’s delegation were Choe Ryong-hae and Kim Yang-gon – key members of the ruling Workers’ Party.<\/p>\n
It is not known what was discussed at the meeting and neither party has commented publicly on the talks.<\/p>\n
A change of tack<\/strong><\/p>\n The BBC’s Stephen Evans in Seoul says the talks are something of a breakthrough given the level of insult thrown at the South by the North in recent years.<\/p>\n Relations between the two have been practically non-existent for four years, but the North’s economic troubles seem to have forced a change of tack, our correspondent adds.<\/p>\n The two Koreas remain technically at war because the 1950-53 conflict was ended with a truce.<\/p>\n The surprise meeting comes amid ongoing speculation about the health of the North’s leader.<\/p>\n Mr Kim has not been seen in public since 3 September. A recent official documentary showed him limping.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, North Korea’s ambassador to the UN, So Se Pyong, said on Friday that the country was ready to resume talks on its nuclear programme.<\/p>\n In an interview with Reuters news agency, Mr So also said the North was not planning any missile or nuclear tests.<\/p>\n North Korea pledged to abandon its nuclear programme in 2005, but it has been conducting missile and nuclear tests since the negotiations broke down in 2008.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Source: BBC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" North and South Korea have agreed to resume formal high-level talks that had effectively been suspended since February, reports from South Korea say. The agreement came during a surprise visit to South Korea by North Korean officials for the closing ceremony of the Asian Games. The visit was led by two top-ranking North Korean officials […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":53495,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[14],"class_list":["post-53494","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-papa-owusu-ankomah"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53494","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=53494"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53494\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/53495"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=53494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=53494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=53494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}