Kim-Trump Summit

Kim Jong Un became the first leader of North Korea to travel to Vietnam since his grandfather, Kim Il Sung, visited in 1964. The North Korean leader arrived in Vietnam on Tuesday for a summit with U.S. President Donald Trump, where they will try to reach an agreement on a North Korean pledge to give up its nuclear weapons program. Trump is due to arrive in Hanoi later on Tuesday. Their talks come eight months after their historic summit in Singapore, the first between a sitting U.S. president and a North Korean leader.

It had been dubbed a brilliant move in a grand game of diplomatic chess: North Korea's Kim Jong Un had booked the same hotel being used by the White House press corps during his meeting with President Trump in Vietnam this week. South Korean media and experts hailed it as a “heroic” and “deliberate strategy” for Kim to reveal more of himself to the American press. But minutes after Kim Jong Un arrived, the Vietnamese foreign ministry announced the Melia Hanoi Hotel, where North Korean leader is staying, would no longer host the press center for hundreds of visiting American journalists assigned to cover his second summit with Trump.

U.S. lawmakers called Kim Jong Un the “leader of perhaps the world’s most repressive regime” on Sunday, but analysts say that as in the leaders’ first summit, human rights are unlikely to be addressed in their second. About half of 451 North Korean defectors questioned in a survey endured physical violence at the hands of North Korean authorities, a rights group said, as leader Kim Jong Un prepared to meet President Donald Trump for a summit.

Top News

U.S. television network Univision said Venezuela was deporting a news team led by anchor Jorge Ramos after they were briefly detained at the presidential palace because their line of questioning upset President Nicolas Maduro.

White House adviser Jared Kushner is visiting U.S.-allied Gulf Arab states to seek support for a long-awaited peace proposal for the Middle East that he said would require concessions from both Israelis and Palestinians.

The U.S. House of Representatives is set to vote on a resolution to terminate President Donald Trump’s declaration of a national emergency to build a wall on the border with Mexico.

World

For two decades, George Pell was the dominant figure in the Catholic Church in Australia - a boy from a gold mining town whose ambition, intellect and knack for befriending influential people propelled him to become the third-most senior official in the Vatican. Dozens of Australian reporters and editors may face jail sentences for their coverage of Vatican Treasurer George Pell’s child sex abuse trial after being issued with legal notices asking why they should not be charged with contempt of court.

Indian jets conducted air strikes against a militant camp in Pakistani territory on Tuesday, India’s foreign secretary said, and an Indian government source said 300 militants had been killed, but Pakistan denied there had been any casualties.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, the urbane, U.S.-educated architect of its 2015 nuclear deal with world powers, unexpectedly announced his resignation on Monday on Instagram. “There were closed-door meetings every week, where top officials were bombarding him with questions about the deal and what will happen next and so on,” an ally told Reuters on condition of anonymity.

Britain’s opposition Labour Party said it would back calls for a second referendum on Brexit if parliament rejects its alternative plan for leaving the European Union.

Two @Reuters journalists have been imprisoned in Myanmar for 442 days. See full coverage: https://reut.rs/2Ec0WeX

3:19 AM - 26 Feb 2019