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US envoy: N Korea comments ‘hostile and unnecessary’

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SEOUL: The top US representative in talks with North Korea on Monday slammed Pyongyang’s demands as hostile and unnecessary as its end-of-year deadline approaches, but held open the door for fresh negotiations. The North has insisted that Washington offer it new concessions by the end of 2019 with the process largely deadlocked since the collapse of a summit in Hanoi in February. Pyongyang has issued a series of increasingly strident declarations in recent weeks, and US special representative Stephen Biegun told reporters in Seoul: “We have heard them all.”


“It is regrettable that the tone of these statements towards the United States, the Republic of Korea, Japan and our friends in Europe have been so hostile and negative and so unnecessary,” he said. “The US does not have a deadline, we have a goal.” Tensions between the US and the nuclear-armed North — whose forces and their allies fought each other to a standstill in the 1950-53 Korean War — reached a peak in 2017, with their leaders Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un trading mutual insults and threats of renewed conflict. — AFP


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