Talks begin in Seoul on Wednesday

SEOUL: (AP):

The two Koreas will hold their highest-level talks in years tomorrow, in an effort to restore scrapped joint economic projects and ease animosity marked by recent threats of nuclear war. That in itself is progress, though there are already hints that disputes in their bloody history could thwart efforts to better ties.

Still, just setting up the two-day meeting in Seoul, through a 17-hour negotiating session that ended early yesterday, required the kind of diplomatic resolve that has long been absent in inter-Korean relations, and analysts say it could be a tentative new start.