Trump, Kim meeting in Singapore

WASHINGTON (AP) — Envisioning “a very special moment for world peace,” President Donald Trump announced Thursday he will meet North Korea’s Kim Jong Un for highly anticipated summit talks in Singapore on June 12. He set the stage for his announcement by hosting a 3 a.m., madefor-TV welcome home for three Americans held by Kim’s government.

Final details in place, Trump and Kim agreed to the first face-to-face North KoreaU.S. summit since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War. It’s the most consequential and perhaps riskiest foreign policy effort so far in Trump’s presidency as North Korea’s nuclear program approaches a treacherous milestone — the capacity to strike the continental U.S. with a thermonuclear warhead.

Trump says the U.S. is aiming for “denuclearization” of the entire Korean peninsula, but he has yet to fill in just what steps that might include and what the timing would be.

“We’re starting off on a new footing,” Trump said of himself and Kim as he welcomed the detainees in a floodlit ceremony at Joint Base Andrews outside Washington. He hailed their release as a potential breakthrough in relations between the longtime adversary nations.

He and Kim “will both try to make it a very special moment for World Peace!” he said later on Twitter.

Trump said it was a “great honour” to welcome them back three detainees to the U.S. but “the true honour is going to be if we have a victory in getting rid of nuclear weapons.”