Iran demands talks with Crystal’s 21 crew
Tanker’s black box found
North Korea and South Korea have agreed to hold working-level talks at the Tongil Pavilion on the North Korean side of the truce village of Panmunjom on Jan. 15, South Korea’s Unification Ministry said in a statement on Saturday.
The delegation led by the unification minister Cho Myung-kyun, will be sent to hold talks on the prospects of North Korea sending its performance art group to the Winter Olympics in South Korea, the ministry said in a statement, Reuters reported.
Inter-korean talks are held alternately at the Peace House, which is on the South Korean side of Panmunjom in the demilitarized zone, and Tongil Pavilion in the North.
The ministry said earlier on Saturday that North Korea had proposed holding talks on Jan. 15 about the matter.
“In addition, the ministry also requested for a quick response for South Korea’s proposal on Jan. 12 to have working-level talks about the North’s participation in Pyongchang winter Olympics,” added the ministry.
Officials from North and South earlier this week said they had agreed to hold negotiations to resolve problems and avert accidental conflict, after their first official dialogue in more than two years amid high tension over the North’s weapons program.
South Korea had also said that it is seeking to form a combined women’s hockey team with the North. The North Korea’s International Olympics Committee (IOC) official said the committee is considering the proposal, while the two sides will also have talks hosted by IOC on Jan. 20.
In a joint statement after 11 hours of talks on Tuesday, North and South Korea said they had agreed to hold military to military talks and that North Korea would send a large delegation to next month’s Winter Olympics.
Washington welcomed as a first step to solving the North Korean nuclear weapons crisis, even though Pyongyang said those were aimed only at the United States and not up for discussion. Rescuers have recovered the bodies of two crew members on an Iranian oil tanker that has been burning since it collided with a freighter last week in the East China Sea, according to Chinese state media.
The four members of the Chinese salvage team wore respirators to board the “Sanchi”, where they found the two bodies on the deck, Xinhua News Agency reported.
They tried to get to the living quarters but were driven back by temperatures on the burning ship of around 89 Celsius (192 Fahrenheit).
The body of a mariner suspected to be from the ship was recovered on Monday and sent to Shanghai for identification, leaving 29 crew members still unaccounted for.
The salvage team recovered the voyage data recorder, or “black box” from the bridge, before leaving the vessel less than half an hour after boarding because the wind had shifted and “thick toxic smoke” had complicated the operation.
Describing sanctions against Judiciary Chief Ayatollah Sadeq Amoli Larijani as a “hostile action,” the ministry said the move “crossed all red lines of conduct in the international community and is a violation of international law and will surely be answered by a serious reaction of the Islamic Republic... and the government of the United States will bear responsibility for all the consequences.”
Under the hard-won 2015 deal with Russia, the US, China, France, Britain, Germany and the EU, Iran agreed to curb its nuclear program in exchange for lifting of a raft of international sanctions.
Iran argues that continued US sanctions on non-nuclear areas have effectively barred Iran from gaining many of the financial benefits expected from the deal.
Zarif has said Trump’s aggressive stance on the deal and Iran generally have also violated the commitment to “refrain from any policy specifically intended to directly and adversely affect the normalization of trade and economic relations with Iran” in the accord.
Iran says it will stick to the accord as long as others respect it. But it has said it would “shred” the deal if the US quit.
AFP, Reuters and Press TV contributed to this story.