Singapore ? Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice held talks with Asian officials today before meeting North Korea’s top diplomat in what will be the Bush administration’s highest-level contact with the Stalinist state in four years.

Amid promising developments in the international effort to get the North to abandon nuclear weapons, Rice is hoping to gauge the North’s commitment to the process when she sees North Korean Foreign Minister Pak Ui Chun on the sidelines of an Asian security forum in Singapore.

Pyongyang has been given a four-page draft document detailing what the United States says it must do to prove it has told the truth about its past atomic programs, a key element in the six-nation denuclearization initiative.