BEIJING (Reuters) - North Korea is willing to resolve the dispute over its nuclear program peacefully through talks, including returning to stalled six-party talks process, China's Foreign Ministry cited a senior North Korean diplomat as saying on Wednesday. The ministry carried the remarks of First Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye-gwan, who has represented North Korea at previous international talks to get it to halt its nuclear program, after his meeting with Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Zhang Yesui in Beijing.

U.S. President Barack Obama will deliver a speech on Wednesday outlining plans to reduce stockpiles of U.S. strategic nuclear weapons by up to one-third, a senior White House official said. In the speech to be delivered at the historic Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, Obama will state that the United States is ready to reduce the number of deployed strategic nuclear warheads from the 1,550 allowed the United States and Russia under their New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty to roughly 1,000.

An armed gang has raided a northern Nigerian village and killed 48 people in an apparent reprisal attack targeting a local vigilante group, a state official said Wednesday. "There was an attack by armed bandits early Tuesday on Kizara village where 48 residents were killed in apparent targeted killings by cattle rustlers that have been terrorising the state for some time now," said Ibrahim Birnin-Magaji, commissioner for information in Zamfara state, where the village is located. Dozens of gunmen arrived in the village before dawn on motorbikes, he told AFP.

Spain's biting recession may end soon but the outlook is tough and Madrid must do more to battle the unacceptably high unemployment rate, the IMF warned Wednesday. Spain's economy, still reeling from a 2008 property market crash, fell into a double-dip recession in 2011 and the unemployment rate has soared to more than 27 percent. Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy's government says it believes the recession is close to bottoming out.