SEOUL, South Korea -- Washington's top nuclear negotiator drove to the capital of North Korea yesterday with a possibly face-saving proposal to persuade the Stalinist regime to honor a nuclear disarmament deal.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack stressed that envoy Christopher Hill would not offer substantive changes but would propose alterations in "choreography" that could give North Korea a way out of the current impasse.

Talks to disarm the North have stalled since the communist state abandoned a deal struck in February 2007, accusing the U.S. of refusing to fulfill a promise to remove it from a terrorism watchlist. The U.S. maintains the deal required the North to submit to a thorough verification of its nuclear accounting -- a demand the isolated regime has balked at.

Mr. McCormack said that Mr. Hill would not offer North Korea a new way of verifying its atomic list, but suggest ways to adjust the sequencing of steps the parties have agreed to take.

MEXICO CITY -- Mexicans living in the U.S. sent home 12 percent less money in August, the largest drop on record since the Bank of Mexico began tracking remittances, it said yesterday.

In Mexico, Mexicans began sending less money home this year, economically stranding many small towns and neighborhoods that live off the stipends. The Bank of Mexico said remittances will likely continue to fall in the coming months because of the "difficult problems the U.S. economy faces."

The bank said remittances in August dropped 12 percent to US$1.9 billion. That compares to US$2.2 billion in August 2007.

MADRID, Spain -- Western intelligence agencies have long suspected that elements of Pakistan's spy service have aided the Taliban in Afghanistan, but a Spanish government report leaked to the media appears to be the first published assessment that spells out such cooperation.

The August 2005 report says Pakistan's shadowy Inter-Services Intelligence agency helped the Taliban procure roadside bombs and may even have provided training and intelligence to the Taliban in camps set up on Pakistani soil.

The Pakistani agency, known as the ISI, planned to have the Taliban use the explosives "to assassinate high-ranking officials" in Afghanistan, the report said.

STRELNA, Russia -- Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said today that he sees no ideological grounds for a war with the United States -- cold or hot -- despite strained relations with Washington and the NATO alliance.

Russia's relations with the U.S. were already at a post-Cold War low when they were further damaged by Russia's war with U.S. ally Georgia in August. Russia has complained vehemently about what it says is a growing U.S. military presence near its borders.

BERLIN -- The Allied firebombing of the eastern German city of Dresden in 1945 killed no more than 25,000 people -- far fewer than scholars' previous estimates running as high as 135,000 -- a special commission has found.

The team of a dozen experts, including university professors, archivists and military historians, said yesterday that four years of research so far has confirmed 18,000 deaths and showed that police and city administrators at the time believed there were about 25,000 victims of the bombing.

Since the end of World War II, scholars have varied in their tally of people killed by waves of British and U.S. bombers on Feb. 13-14, 1945. Some estimates have run to 135,000 or more. In his 2005 book on the bombing, British historian Frederick Taylor argued the real toll was between 25,000 and 40,000.