BEIJING, Dec 19: The United States and North Korea held `lengthy and substantive’ talks on Tuesday, offering a glimmer of hope that six-party negotiations aimed at dismantling the North’s nuclear programmes may yield progress.

North Korea opened the talks by presenting sweeping demands in return for scrapping its nuclear weapons, starting with the lifting of US financial curbs and UN sanctions.

But chief US negotiator Christopher Hill said that real discussions had just begun. “Today was a much more substantive discussion,” he told reporters of the one-on-one meetings between the two delegations.—Reuters