Secretary of State Rex Tillerson disclosed that the US government is in direct contact with North Korea in an effort to jump start talks on their nuclear program. Reuters: The disclosure by U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson during a trip to China represented the first time he has spoken to such an extent about U.S. outreach to North Korea over its pursuit of a nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile. “We are probing so stay tuned,” Tillerson told a group of reporters in Beijing. “We ask: ‘Would you like to talk?’ We have lines of communications to Pyongyang. We’re not in a dark situation, a blackout.” He said that communication was happening directly and cited two or three U.S. channels open to Pyongyang. “We can talk to them. We do talk to them,” he said, without elaborating about which Americans were involved in those contacts or how frequent or substantive they were. The goal of any initial...(Read Full Post)