US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived Saturday in Moscow for talks with the top Kremlin leadership on the North Korean nuclear issue, reported dpa. Rice, arriving from China, was due to meet President Vladimir Putin, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov. She had spent the past several days in Asia, with talks in South Korea, Japan and China about North Korea's first-ever test of a nuclear device on October 9. During talks in China on Friday, a Chinese envoy told Rice that his talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il were "not in vain," in an apparently optimistic summary of China's efforts to persuade Pyongyang to return to talks and halt its nuclear-weapons programme.
