Kim Jong-un will become the first North Korean leader to set foot in South Korea since the 1950s when he crosses the military demarcation line between the Koreas at 8:30pm ET tonight (9:30am Friday local).
What to watch: Parts of the third-ever inter-Korean summit, with South Korea's Moon Jae-in, will be broadcast live.
Hours after Mike Pompeo was confirmed as the 70th secretary of state, Press Secretary Sarah Sanders sent out a congratulatory tweet with new photos of him shaking hands with Kim Jong-un from their Easter weekend meeting.
Timing: The photos were released ahead of an anticipated summit between the president and the North Korean leader, who Trump said has been "very open" and "very honorable" to potential talks.
Weeks before Trump is expected to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, Otto Warmbier’s parents are suing North Korea for "brutally" torturing and murdering him, The Washington Post reports.
What they're saying: “This lawsuit is another step in holding North Korea accountable for its barbaric treatment of Otto and our family,” Fred Warmbier, Otto’s father, said in a statement.
Mike Pompeo, who was confirmed as Secretary of State today, will visit Israel on Sunday as part of his first trip in this new role, Israeli officials told me and a senior State Department official has confirmed.
Why it matters: Pompeo's decision to include Israel in his first trip abroad as Secretary of State is important because his predecessor Rex Tillerson visited Israel only once when he accompanied President Trump in his May 2017 visit. Tillerson never came to Israel on his own and had a very minor role in the U.S.-Israel relations during his year in office.
With North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and South Korea’s Moon Jae-in sitting down for talks, and a summit between Kim and President Trump looming, denuclearization is at the top of mind in Washington — but it's not the only issue on the table.
Why it matters: Trump and Kim will have to balance a number of competing interests if they want to reach any sort of lasting accord.
If he is confirmed as Secretary of State tomorrow, Mike Pompeo will embark on his first foreign trip as secretary to Brussels for the NATO Summit, Axios has learned. Bloomberg first reported the contingency planning for the potential trip.
The details: “The acting secretary John Sullivan is ready to go to the NATO summit in Brussels Thursday,” a senior administration official told Axios. “The secretary-designate Mike Pompeo, if confirmed, is prepared to travel to the meeting of foreign ministers to reaffirm our commitment to NATO and coordinate the alliance’s response to Russian aggression.”
Editor's note: This story has been updated to reflect the latest developments.
Israel has approached Russia several times in the last few weeks to demand that they meet their obligations under a cease fire deal signed with the U.S. last November by preventing pro-Iranian militias from entering a buffer zone on the Syrian-Israeli border.
Why it matters: The protests show Israel's growing nervousness over the Iranian buildup in Syria. Recent flashpoints between Israel and Russia in Syria are also making it harder for the countries to maintain close coordination.
At yesterday's Oval Office press conference with French President Emmanuel Macron, President Trump said of Syria, "We'll be coming home, but we want to leave a strong and lasting footprint."
Yet it's doubtful the U.S. could maintain a strong or lasting footprint without committing to stabilization, which would involve a larger U.S. troop presence or support for a Turkish security zone in northern Syria.
The big picture: Little has changed since the coalition airstrikes on April 13, a response to President Bashar al-Assad's latest chemical weapons attack, and the White House continues to send mixed messages about the U.S. presence in Syria.
For all China's vaunted reams of data and outsized R&D spending, its development of artificial intelligence is only half as good as the United States', according to a side-by-side assessment by an Oxford University researcher.
Quick take: "I think some of the rhetoric about China's AI advances has been overblown," says Jeffrey Ding at Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute. He tells Axios, "The U.S. still has significant advantages in talent and hardware, and it should continue to ensure that talented researchers and scientists want to work and stay in the U.S."
“Operation GhostSecret,” a global data theft and reconnaissance campaign with suspected links to North Korean hackers, is targeting critical infrastructure, finance, healthcare firms and entertainment industries in 17 countries, McAfee Advanced Threat Research reports.
The takeaway: The new report suggests North Korea is moving beyond its typical focus on trying to steal cash or military secrets, and is now targeting a much broader swath of society.
A new report details how North Korean elites use the internet — through a combination of internet cloaking devices and a strategic move from Western social media sites to permissible Chinese ones (avoiding a growing crackdown,) primarily in order to watch videos.
Why it matters: The elite class' internet usage is behind two veils — it is hard to get any detail from North Korea in the first place, let alone about illicit activity. The Recorded Future report fills in some detail about how the "0.1%" live in the hermit nation.
Iran's President Hassan Rouhani is questioning the West's "right" to renegotiate the terms of the Iran nuclear deal after President Emmanuel Macron laid out the framework for a "new deal" in a press conference with President Trump, per the BBC.
The big picture: Macron said the new deal would extend the duration of the 2015 agreement, restrict missile tests and contain Iran's regional influence. He and other European leaders are trying to reach a solution that would keep Trump from pulling the U.S. out of the nuclear deal. Rouhani hit back by saying the U.S. and France can't change a seven-party agreement alone, and that Trump doesn't have "any background" in politics, law or international treaties.
The health and air-quality benefits of Chinese efforts to slash carbon emissions will largely or even fully offset the costs of the climate initiatives, a new paper in Nature Climate Change by MIT scholars shows.
Why it matters: China, the world's largest greenhouse gas emitter, has pledged to have its carbon emissions peak by 2030 and ideally sooner.
