A top-secret meeting in North Korea

NORTH KOREA: CIA Director and Secretary of State–designate Mike Pompeo made a top-secret trip to North Korea over Easter weekend to meet with leader Kim Jong Un, the highest-level meeting between the two countries since 2000. Pompeo served as President Donald Trump’s envoy ahead of a planned summit between the two leaders, which Trump said could take place in early June.

SYRIA: Russia threatens to deploy its S-300 missile system near bases in Syria, a move that could make future precision strikes by the United States and its allies difficult to impossible, and could jeopardize Israeli defenses. The move also likely would end potential for a coalition-imposed no-fly zone over Syria—one proposal long put forth to create conditions for ending the seven-year war.

Syrian refugees aren’t wanted anywhere, discovered 36-year-old Hassan Al-Kotar, who’s been stuck in the Kuala Lumpur airport for more than a month with no country willing to take him.

TURKEY: Proceedings on the opening day of trial for Andrew Brunson lasted 13 hours, as the court questioned the 50-year-old American pastor on each point of evidence contained in the prosecutor’s 62-page indictment. “I’ve never done anything against Turkey,” Brunson told the court. “I love Turkey. I’ve been praying for Turkey for 25 years. I want truth to come out.” The court ordered Brunson to remain in jail, where he had been mistreated, awaiting his next court date in three weeks.

PAKISTAN: Militants in a drive-by shooting Sunday killed two Pakistani Christians leaving a Seventh-day Adventist Church and injured three others. Islamic State claimed the attack in Quetta, like it did in an attack that killed four Catholics two weeks ago.

BANGLADESH: Garment manufacturing conditions are improving as a result of fashion industry pressure that followed the Rana Plaza collapse in 2013 that killed more than 1,100 workers. The number of multistory factories and garment worker deaths has dropped, while labor unions have grown. But “fast fashion”—fueled mainly by U.S. chains like H&M, Zara, and Gap—continues as “part of the trend that’s putting pressure toward the race-to-the-bottom working conditions,” said worker organizer Liana Foxvog.

BRITAIN: Prime Minister Theresa May’s Cabinet is in a row over how Britain should tackle immigration in European Union negotiations over Brexit. Recent studies show that even in the short term, migration does not appear to have had a negative impact on the employment outcomes of Brits.

FRANCE “cannot take in all the misery of the world,” said President Emmanuel Macron, as lawmakers appear ready to enact a new immigration law that would expand immigrant detentions and deportations. Applications for asylum are up 17 percent over last year in France, which has been the site of numerous makeshift camps, all symptoms of what the Macron government calls the EU’s “failing immigration policy.”

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