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Koreas meet in border village after tensions marked by nuclear threats, factory closure
• SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- Government delegates from North and South Korea began preparatory talks Sunday at a "truce village" on their heavily armed border aimed at setting ground rules for a higher-level discussion on easing animosity and restoring stalled rapprochement projects.
• The meeting at Panmunjom, where the truce ending the 1950-53 Korean War was signed, is the first of its kind on the Korean Peninsula in more than two years. Success will be judged on whether the delegates can pave the way for a summit between the ministers of each country's department for cross-border affairs, which South Korea has proposed for Wednesday in Seoul. Such ministerial talks haven't happened since 2007.
• The intense media interest in what's essentially a meeting of bureaucrats to iron out technical details is an indication of how bad ties between the Koreas have been.
• Any dialogue is an improvement on the belligerence that has marked the relationship over recent years, which have seen North Korean nuclear tests and long-range rocket launches, attacks in 2010 blamed on the North that killed 50 South Koreans, and a steady stream in recent months of invective and threats from Pyongyang and counter-vows from Seoul.
• "Today's working-level talks will be a chance to take care of administrative and technical issues in order to successfully host the ministers' talks," one of the South Korean delegates, Unification Policy Officer Chun Hae-sung, said in Seoul before the group's departure for Panmunjom.
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White House says Obama pushed China's leader to do more against cybersecurity, with examples
• RANCHO MIRAGE, Calif. (AP) -- President Barack Obama used an unusually lengthy and informal desert summit to present Chinese President Xi Jinping with detailed evidence of intellectual property theft emanating from his country, as a top U.S. official declared Saturday that cybersecurity is now at the "center of the relationship" between the world's largest economies.
• While there were few clear policy breakthroughs on cybersecurity, U.S. officials said Obama and Xi were in broad agreement over the need for North Korea to be (Continued on page 18)
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