World in brief: N. Korea envoy walks out of talks

North Korea’s chief envoy stormed out of economic talks with South Korea on Thursday after the South urged its neighbor to honor its nuclear disarmament pledge.

South Korea had wanted to use this week’s meetings in Pyongyang to press the communist country to implement a Feb. 13 agreement to start dismantling its atomic weapons programs, possibly using rice aid as leverage.

The North failed to meet a Saturday deadline under the pact to shut down its sole operating nuclear reactor, saying it wanted to make sure a separate financial dispute was resolved first.

South Korea’s chief delegate, Chin Dong-soo, urged North Korea to quickly implement the nuclear deal, saying it would be “a shortcut to draw firm support from the international community on inter-Korean economic cooperation,” South Korean spokesman Kim Jung-tae said, according to pool reports.

The North’s chief delegate, Ju Dong Chan, made unspecified angry comments to South Korean officials and walked out, the reports said.

STOCKHOLM, Sweden

BBC newsman alive, Abbas says

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said Thursday his intelligence services have confirmed that a British journalist kidnapped in Gaza is alive and he knows which group is holding him.

Alan Johnston, 44, a BBC correspondent, was abducted by gunmen on March 12 and has not been seen or heard from since then.

Abbas said he knew which group was holding Johnston, but he would not say whether any contact had been established with the captors.

On Sunday, a previously unknown group, the Brigades of Tawheed and Jihad, said it had killed Johnston to support demands for the release of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. There has been no confirmation of the claim.

LUXEMBOURG

EU reaches accord on genocide denial

European Union nations agreed Thursday on new rules to combat racism and hate crimes across the 27-nation bloc, including setting jail sentences against those who deny or trivialize the Holocaust.

A compromise deal on the rules was reached by EU justice and interior ministers after nearly six years of negotiations, officials said.

The proposed rules, which still have to be vetted by national parliaments, calls for up to three-year prison sentences for those convicted of denying massacres defined as genocide by the International Criminal Court, including the Holocaust and the mass killings in Rwanda in the 1990s.

EU justice and interior ministers said the rules call for criminalizing “incitement to hatred and violence and publicly condoning, denying or grossly trivializing crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.”

The rules were significantly watered down from an original proposal drafted in 2001. Member states can opt out of criminalizing massacres not defined as genocide by the international court.

TOKYO

Strong quakes strike near island

Three strong earthquakes rattled islands in southwestern Japan today, but there were no immediate reports of injury or damage.

Japan’s Meteorological Agency at one point warned that a small tsunami was possible, but later said no such waves had developed.

The strongest quake, with a preliminary magnitude of 6.7, struck at 10:46 a.m. Two other quakes, each with preliminary magnitudes of 6.2, struck shortly before and then after the larger temblor, the agency said.

All the quakes struck near the island of Miyakojima, 1,130 miles southwest of Tokyo, part of the Ryukyu islands chain that stretches southwest toward Taiwan.