SEOUL, South Korea – The United States and South Korea have successfully concluded a free trade agreement, Steve Norton, a spokesman for the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, said today, wrapping up almost 10 months of contentious negotiations.
Norton said details would be provided in a briefing later.
The deal, which requires legislative approval in both countries, is the biggest for the United States since the North American Free Trade Agreement signed in 1992 and ratified in 1993. It is the biggest ever for South Korea.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Sunday invited Arab leaders, including the king of Saudi Arabia, to a regional peace conference to discuss their ideas for resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict. Olmert said that if King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia were to invite him, moderate Arab leaders and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to a meeting “to present Saudi Arabia’s ideas before us, we will come to hear them and be glad to offer our ideas.”
The Taliban on Sunday executed three men accused of spying for NATO and government forces in southern Afghanistan, a local militant commander and villager said. Separately, a suicide car bomber blew himself up Sunday near an Afghan army convoy in eastern Laghman province, killing five civilians, police said.
A truce brokered by influential clan elders between the government and Islamic insurgents failed Sunday to halt fighting that has left the streets of the capital, Mogadishu, strewn with corpses. Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit sent urgent letters to the United Nations, Arab League and the African Union urging a speedy intervention to end the fighting in Somalia.
The pilots of a passenger jet argued about their speed and wing flap angles moments before the jet crashed last month at an Indonesian airport, killing 21 people, a senior investigator said Sunday. “I worry that this accident came from the absent-mindedness from the cockpit,” chief investigator Tatang Kurniadi said about the Boeing 737-400 crash.
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