US may soon remove North Korea from blacklist

The United States may soon remove North Korea from a terrorism blacklist to try to salvage nuclear talks with Pyongyang but faces resistance from Japan, a source close to the negotiations said . "It's probably going to happen," the source said when asked whether Washington was weighing the removal of North Korea from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism, which imposes a range of sanctions. An announcement had been expected but U.S. officials said a decision had not been made. They pointed to a need to get "consensus" among the other four nations involved in the talks with Pyongyang.

Japan, in particular, has reservations. Asked whether President George W. Bush had signed off on removing North Korea from the State Department's terrorism list, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said: "No." "We're continuing to work with our six-party partners but I don't expect anything else today on that," Perino added. The Bush administration has been scrambling in its final months to save the aid-for-disarmament agreement with secretive and impoverished North Korea that it hoped to claim as a rare foreign policy success.