N. Korea’s Kim in Beijing

From combined dispatches

SEOUL — North Korean leader Kim Jong-il arrived in Beijing by train today for a summit to discuss the North’s nuclear-weapons program with the Chinese president, South Korean media reported.

Mr. Kim’s special train passed into China late yesterday amid heavy secrecy and traveled overnight to Beijing, YTN cable-television news reported.

During his four-day visit, the North Korean leader will meet President Hu Jintao and other senior Chinese leaders to discuss Pyongyang’s nuclear-weapons programs and other issues of mutual concern, state broadcaster KBS added.

China has hosted two sessions of talks aimed at persuading North Korea to give up its nuclear-weapons efforts. The two rounds — also involving the United States, Russia, Japan and the two Koreas — ended with little progress.

The Yonhap news agency, also quoting Chinese sources, said Mr. Kim planned to stop in northeast China to study the government’s economic-reform efforts.

Mr. Kim’s visit follows a trip last week to Japan, China and South Korea by Vice President Dick Cheney, who appealed to the three countries to help speed up efforts to end North Korea’s nuclear programs.

Hours after Mr. Kim’s reported departure from Pyongyang, North Korea’s Foreign Ministry called Mr. Cheney “a mentally deranged person steeped in the inveterate enmity” toward the country’s communist system.

In a statement published by the North Korean news agency KCNA, the ministry dismissed Mr. Cheney’s disarmament appeal, saying Pyongyang “has no idea of dealing with the U.S. any longer if the latter insists on the disgusting CVID.”

CVID is shorthand for the often-repeated U.S. goal of a “complete, verifiable, irreversible dismantlement” of North Korea’s atomic-arms programs.

Mr. Cheney came to the region armed with new intelligence from Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani scientist believed to have sold nuclear technology to North Korea as well as to Libya and Iran.

U.S. intelligence experts estimate North Korea produced enough plutonium for several bombs in the early 1990s, before a U.S.-negotiated 1994 freeze of its program, which Pyongyang repudiated last year.