NEW YORK — A top aide to Kim Jong Un will make a rare visit to Washington Friday to hand a letter from the North Korean leader to President Donald Trump, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said after reporting “good progress” in talks between the two sides to revive an on-again, off-again nuclear summit.
“I am confident we are moving in the right direction,” Pompeo told reporters at a news conference in New York after meeting Thursday with former North Korean military intelligence chief Kim Yong Chol. “Our two countries face a pivotal moment in our relationship, and it would be nothing short of tragic to let this opportunity go to waste.”
He would not say that the summit is a definite go for Singapore on June 12 and could not say if that decision would be made after Trump reads Kim Jong Un’s letter.
However, his comments were the most positive from any U.S. official since Trump abruptly canceled the meeting last week after belligerent statements from the North.
The two countries, eying the first summit between the U.S. and the North after six decades of hostility, have also been holding negotiations in Singapore and the demilitarized zone between the two Koreas.
Early Thursday, Trump told reporters “we are doing very well” with North Korea. He added there may even need to be a second or third summit meeting to reach a deal on North Korean denuclearization but still hedged, saying “maybe we’ll have none.”
MILAN — Italy advanced swiftly toward a populist government on a second try Thursday, after the leaders of the anti-establishment 5-Star Movement and the right-wing League announced a compromise deal aimed at overcoming the president’s objections.
With developments moving quickly, the premier-designate tapped at the beginning of the week to head an interim government of technocrats stepped aside, while President Sergio Mattarella called a meeting with the populist’s pick: a law professor whose attempt to form a government failed four days ago.
Political neophyte Giuseppe Conte, who skipped teaching a class at the University of Florence to return to Rome, was summoned to meet Mattarella at the presidential palace Thursday night.
After months of stalemate followed an inconclusive parliamentary election in March, the Italian political landscape has shifted into overdrive.
Earlier in the day, the leader of the 5-Star Movement, Luigi Di Maio, and League leader Matteo Salvini canceled other engagements to meet at the parliament. They issued a statement in the afternoon stating they had achieved “the conditions for a political government.”
KIEV, Ukraine — To mimic gore, they used makeup and pig’s blood. They shot bullet holes in one of his sweatshirts. And to top off Arkady Babchenko’s staged murder, they even took him to the morgue.
The journalist revealed Thursday how Ukrainian security services faked his murder to thwart a contract hit allegedly arranged by Babchenko’s native Russia.
Police said Tuesday night that Babchenko had been shot and killed in his apartment building.
The next day, he showed up alive in front of journalists and authorities revealed that it all had been a ruse and said that the organizer of the planned assassination had been arrested.
At a news conference, Babchenko himself wasn’t clear on why the security services thought the elaborate deception was necessary.
“They probably had their reasons. Maybe they wanted to collect proof that would be 100 percent solid,” he told reporters.
NEW YORK — Comedian Samantha Bee apologized to Ivanka Trump and viewers on Thursday for using an obscenity to describe the president’s daughter, an incident that quickly thrust her into the middle of the nation’s political divide.
Her network, TBS, also said it was “our mistake, too,” in allowing the language on Bee’s show, “Full Frontal,” on Wednesday. Her show is taped and not aired live.
Bee called Ivanka Trump a “feckless c–-” toward the end of a segment about President Trump’s immigration policies.
She used the slur in urging Ivanka Trump to speak to her father about policies that separate children from their parents.
“Put on something tight and low-cut and tell your father to f–-ing stop it,” she said.
Bee, a former correspondent on “The Daily Show” with Jon Stewart whose own show has been one of TBS’ big successes since it started in 2016, said that her language was “inappropriate and inexcusable.
ST. PAUL, Minn. — The Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis announced a $210 million settlement Thursday with 450 victims of clergy sexual abuse as part of its plan for bankruptcy reorganization, making this the second-largest payout in the scandal that rocked the nation’s Roman Catholic Church.
Victims’ attorney Jeff Anderson said the money, a total of $210,290,724, will go into a pot to pay survivors, with the amount for each survivor to be determined.
Anderson said a formal reorganization plan will now be submitted to a bankruptcy judge for approval, and then it will be sent to the victims for a vote. Anderson expected they will readily approve it.
“We changed the playing field,” said Jim Keenan, who was sexually abused as a child in the 1980s by a Twin Cities-area priest. “They have to listen to victims now, and that is huge.”
Marie Mielke, who was sexually abused from 1997 to 2000 by a St. Paul seminarian who later became a priest, urged fellow survivors to have the courage to stand up.
From Associated Press