Pompeo: Next Trump-Kim Summit Almost Finalized

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Monday that he and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un made "significant progress" toward an agreement for the North to give up its nuclear weapons. While significant work remains to be done, he said he expected further results after an as-yet unscheduled second summit between Kim and President Trump. "It's a long process," Pompeo told a small group of reporters in the South Korean capital of Seoul where he traveled after meeting with Kim in Pyongyang on Sunday. "We made significant progress. We'll continue to make significant progress and we are further along in making that progress than any administration in an awfully long time," he said, per the AP.

Pompeo would not be specific but said he and Kim had agreed to shortly begin working-level talks on the nuts and bolts of denuclearization, on the placement of international inspectors at one of North Korea's main nuclear facilities, and had come close to finalizing a date and venue for the next Kim-Trump summit. "Sometimes that last inch is hard to close." North Korea's state-run news agency KCNA, meanwhile, said Monday that Kim had "expressed his will and conviction that a great progress would surely be made in solving the issues of utmost concern of the world and in attaining the goal set forth at the last talks with the projected second DPRK-US summit talks as an occasion."

(More North Korea stories.)