Placid Singapore braces for Trump, Kim summit

SINGAPORE — Singapore hotel rooms are being snapped up, police are preparing to lock down the city and thousands of journalists are set to jet in for the greatest media circus on Earth – the US-North Korea summit.

Top officials are scrambling to salvage the historic meeting between President Donald Trump and the North's leader Kim Jong Un planned for June 12 in the city-state.

If the summit – already cancelled once by Trump before plans got back on track – does go ahead, then tiny, placid Singapore will be the unlikely ground zero for one of the biggest geopolitical events of recent times.

The delegations of US and North Korean officials, along with their security details, are expected to be huge. But they are likely to pale in comparison to the gigantic media pack set to swarm the tropical city-state.

Some 3,000 people are expected to apply for media accreditation, sources involved in planning the event who spoke on condition of anonymity told AFP.

It should easily eclipse the contingent of journalists at the last comparable event in Singapore, the 2015 meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Taiwan's then-leader MaYingjeou. Hundreds of journalists witnessed that meeting.

There was a foretaste of the coming invasion this week as reporters camped out at the upscale Fullerton hotel to get a glimpse of Kim Chang Son, Kim's de facto chief of staff, who is in Singapore to lay the ground for the meeting.