Wednesday, November 04, 2009 SEOUL: The United States and North Korea have agreed to hold two rounds of bilateral meetings before the North returns to multilateral nuclear disarmament talks, a US news report said. The agreement was reached at last month's meetings in New York and San Diego between officials from the two sides, Foreign Policy magazine said on its website, in a report seen Wednesday. The communist state, putting further pressure on the United States to start direct talks, announced Tuesday it has completed reprocessing spent fuel rods to produce more plutonium for its atomic weapons programme. The US State Department responded that the plutonium production "runs counter" to the North's disarmament commitments and violates UN Security Council resolutions. It said it has not decided when and where to hold bilateral talks involving the US special envoy to North Korea, Stephen Bosworth. Foreign Policy, quoting an administration official, said "substantial progress" was made in talks between Sung Kim, the State Department's special envoy to six-party talks, and visiting North Korean official Ri Gun. The North has said it is ready to return to the six-party nuclear disarmament talks which it abandoned in April, but only if it first has bilateral discussions with Washington to improve relations.
Friday, August 14, 2009 MUMBAI: A 26-year-old woman died Thursday of H1N1 swine flu in the southern city of Bangalore, raising India's death toll from the virus to 20, authorities said.The death was the first reported in India's information technology capital, the Press Trust of India reported.Meanwhile in Pune, the worst-affected in India, two more victims of the virus died Thursday, raising the death toll in that western city near Mumbai to 12, the report said. The victims were an 11-month-old boy and a 75-year-old old woman.US media reported movie halls, schools and colleges were ordered closed Thursday for three days to a week in Mumbai, the commercial and financial capital of the country, as fear of the pandemic spread.Prajakata Lavangare, a spokeswoman for the government of Maharashtra state of which Mumbai is the capital, said similar orders were issued in Pune, which is also located in the state.The woman who died in Bangalore was identified only as Roopa, a teacher in
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