U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice held talks with Asian officials Wednesday before meeting North Korea's top diplomat in what will be Washington's highest-level contact with it in four years. Amid promising developments in the international effort to get Pyongyang to abandon nuclear weapons, Rice is hoping to gauge North Korea's commitment to the process when she sees Foreign Minister Pak Ui Chun on the sidelines of an Asian security forum in Singapore. Pyongyang has been given a four-page draft document detailing what the United States says it must do to prove it has told the truth about its past atomic programs, a key element in the six-nation denuclearization initiative, the Associated Press reported. Diplomats expect Pak to provide at least an initial response to the proposal at the meeting with Rice and the foreign ministers of the other four nations involved: China, Japan, South Korea and Russia. Rice was seeing the ministers separately before the group meeting. Hill said the goal is to reach a formal agreement on the document by mid-August after negotiations on the fine points, some of which the North Koreans have already objected to.
