from today's SLATE news summary, by Eric Umansky:>The New York Times leads with "senior administration officials and Asian diplomats" saying the White House is considering offering North Korea a grand bargain including a possible peace treaty. ...
Citing "aides," the NYT says President Bush "is very likely to
approve" the new approach to Pyongyang. The president has long argued that he wouldn't deal with Pyongyang until North Korea tossed its nukes program (and now nukes themselves). He later softened a bit and suggested vague offers of carrots if Pyongyang made moves too. But dangling a peace treaty—and allowing talks to start straight away without preconditions—would be a big switch for an administration that has tended to turn up its nose at negotiating with bad-boy regimes.
One "senior Asian official" told the Times the administration's
friendly gesture is being prompted by concerns about Iran: "There is a sense that they can't leave Korea out there as a model for what the Iranians hope to become—a nuclear state that can say no to outside pressure."
Finally, there's this tidbit buried in the NYT's piece:
> A classified National Intelligence Estimate on North Korea, which was circulated among senior officials earlier this year, concluded that the North had probably fabricated the fuel for more than a half-dozen nuclear weapons since the beginning of Mr. Bush's administration and was continuing to produce roughly a bomb's worth of new plutonium each year. < Other news, from the same source: >The Los Angeles Times leads with the [stock] market's dive on evidence of across-the-board inflation. One fear is that the Feds will ratchet up interest rates again. The Dow dropped 214 points, its biggest dip in three years. It's still up a few percent on the year. USA Today leads with a big unfunded liability to cover local and state worker retirees—"it could exceed $1 trillion." By comparison, Medicare's liability is an estimated $33 trillion.< -- Jim Devine / "the world still seems stuck in greed-lock, ruled by fossilized fools fueled by fossil fuels." -- Swami Beyondananda
