World in brief: N. Korea talks halt briefly over funds
Negotiations aimed at dismantling North Korea’s nuclear weapons program broke off temporarily on Thursday over a mystery concerning the $25 million in Pyongyang funds that have been held in a Macau bank over charges of money laundering and counterfeiting.
North Korea’s chief negotiator, Kim Kye Gwan, left Beijing after boycotting the talks because the money has not yet been returned to his government. The meetings are at a key juncture as negotiators attempt to push forward a Feb. 13 agreement designed to denuclearize the Korean peninsula.
The setback casts doubt on the next deadline in the process, the shutdown by international inspectors of North Korea’s Yongbyon nuclear reactor and reprocessing facility by April 14.
China issued a statement saying talks would recess but did not give a restart date, while State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters in Washington that another meeting could take place within the next week or two.
LONDON
Three men linked to attacks arrested
Counter-terrorist police arrested three men Thursday in the 2005 suicide attacks on the London transit system, the first major development in the investigation in months. Two of the suspects were detained as they prepared to board a flight to Pakistan.
The third man was arrested in Leeds – the northern city that was home to three of the four bombers. Police also raided five properties in the city – at least one on the same street where one of the bombers lived.
No one has ever been charged in connection with the bombings. The four bombers and 52 commuters died in blasts on three subway trains and a double-decker bus, and more than 700 people were injured.
PARIS
France uploads UFO case files
France’s space agency opened 1,600 UFO case files spanning the last half century to the public for the first time Thursday.
The voluntary decision by France’s National Center for Space Studies to dump more than 100,000 pages of witness testimony, photographs, film footage and audio tapes from its secret UFO archives onto its Internet site, www.cnes.fr, is an unprecedented move among Western countries. Most of them, the United States included, consider such records classified matters of national security.
Within three hours of posting the first cases Thursday morning, the French space agency’s Web server crashed, overwhelmed by the flood of viewers seeking the first glimpses of official government evidence on a subject long a target of both fascination and ridicule.
The material dates as far back as 1954. Over the next several months, the space agency will post it to enhance scientific research seeking to explain what the French government calls “unexplained aerospace phenomena.”