| Oh, is it Saturday already? |
North Korea told a visiting U.S. congressional delegation that it would return to six-nation talks on its nuclear weapons program and become a "friend" of the United States, hinting at a possible reversal of a decades-old policy of calling America its "sworn enemy." The overture on Friday — while requiring that Washington does not vilify totalitarian leader Kim Jong Il — was highly unusual. Pyongyang's anti-American propaganda has been whipped into a near-religious fervor, with banners in villages everywhere exhorting North Koreans to prepare for an inevitable war with the "U.S. imperialists.""The DPRK side expressed its stand that the DPRK would not stand against the U.S. but respect and treat it as a friend unless the latter slanders the former's system and interferes in its internal affairs," said the North's official news agency, KCNA, using the country's official name, Democratic People's Republic of Korea.