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Article snippet: MANILA — A Southeast Asian diplomatic meeting quietly turned Monday into the first real multiparty bargaining session in eight years to tackle North Korea’s nuclear program as the country’s top diplomat — who rarely speaks with anyone — held a round of talks with his counterparts from China, South Korea and Russia. Indeed, the only members of the original six-party dialogue that ended in 2009 that did not speak with the diplomat, Ri Yong-ho, the foreign minister of North Korea, this week were the United States and Japan. But Rex W. Tillerson, the American secretary of state, kept the door open for joining, saying at a news conference on Monday that he had no specific preconditions for negotiating with North Korea. “Well, the best signal that North Korea could give us that they are prepared to talk would be to stop these missile launches,” Mr. Tillerson said. But when asked how long such a pause would have to last before talks could go forward, Mr. Tillerson demurred. “We’ll know it when we see it,” he said, echoing Justice Potter Stewart’s famous line about defining pornography. “We are not going to give someone a specific number of days or weeks. This is really about the spirit of these talks.” North Korea, which on Monday threatened to retaliate “thousands fold” against the United States for new United Nations sanctions, recently stopped its missile tests for nearly four months, but since Febuary has conducted monthly launchings. With talks about North Korea’s ... Link to the full article to read more