GENEVA (Reuters) ? U.S. and North Korean officials completed a two-day round of talks after a delay of several hours on Tuesday with the goal of getting wider nuclear disarmament negotiations back on track and improving their strained relationship.
There was no immediate comment from either side on the results but the delegations scheduled separate press events later in the afternoon.
The talks -- which had been scheduled to start at 0800 GMT -- were pushed back at the request of North Korea, the U.S. diplomatic mission in Geneva said in a brief statement that declined to elaborate.
Ambassador Stephen Bosworth, U.S. special representative for North Korea policy, arrived at 1030 GMT at the diplomatic mission of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) for a working lunch and an afternoon session, both sides said.
The talks finished shortly before 1300 GMT and Bosworth was scheduled to make a statement later on Tuesday.
Bosworth, speaking to reporters in Geneva late on Monday after a first day of meetings and joint dinner, gave an upbeat assessment saying that the talks were "moving in the right direction," but that differences needed to be narrowed further.
"I am neither optimistic nor pessimistic, but as I said we have made some progress, but we have issues still to resolve and we will work hard to do that," he said, giving no details.
The United States and North Korea held bilateral talks in New York in late July, the first since six-party talks over Pyongyang's nuclear weapons program collapsed in 2009.
Bosworth was accompanied by Glyn Davies, the outgoing U.S. ambassador to the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency who has been named his successor, in the Geneva talks with North Korean First Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye-gwan.
North Korean officials in Geneva declined to say why the two-hour morning session had been abruptly canceled.
"After lunch the talks will proceed," a North Korean official told Reuters.
URANIUM ENRICHMENT KEY QUESTION
North Korean leader Kim Jong-il told Chinese Vice Premier Li Keqiang that a moribund 2005 deal should be the basis for new talks about Pyongyang's nuclear activity, Chinese state media said on Tuesday, leaving unanswered a key question on uranium enrichment, a possible pathway to atom bombs.
The United States and South Korea insist that the North immediately halt its uranium enrichment work, which it unveiled last year, as a precursor to restarting regional talks that offer economic aid in return for denuclearization by Pyongyang.
In his meeting with Li, Kim repeated that North Korea was willing to revive six-party talks -- also involving Russia and Japan -- that it abandoned after the United Nations imposed new sanctions for a long-range North Korean missile test. The following month, Pyongyang conducted a second nuclear test.
"Kim said the DPRK hopes the six-party talks should be restarted as soon as possible," said the Xinhua news agency report on Tuesday of the meeting between Kim and Li in North Korea on Monday night.
The North's uranium enrichment program, which opens a second route to developing an atom bomb along with its plutonium program, is not specifically referred to in the 2005 pact.
The North says that it is enriching uranium only for power generation and argues that the 2005 agreement respects its right to peaceful uses of nuclear energy.
(Additional reporting by Chris Buckley and Ben Blanchard in Beijing and Jeremy Laurence in Seoul; Editing by Mark Heinrich)
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