Trump and Kim pledge to meet and talk

NORTH KOREA: President Donald Trump has accepted an invitation to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un “by May”—a historic first-ever meeting between North Korea and U.S. leaders and an unexpected development following months of high-stakes jabs traded by Trump and Kim. Normally diplomatic groundwork and a crafted agenda is laid before such summits. With Trump and Kim it could turn out to be more theatrics, so there are good reasons to be cautious but also good reasons for pursuing the open door.

Says Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief Gerard Baker: “A critical question in any high-level discussions will be what North Korea and the U.S. mean when they talk about denuclearization. The North might define it as a long-term goal that would be achieved only after the U.S. withdraws troops from the South and effectively ends the U.S.–South Korean military alliance.”

KENYA: President Uhuru Kenyatta met with opposition leader Raila Odinga for the first formal talks since a divisive election last year sparked unrest and led to an Odinga boycott. The two pledged a new initiative toward ethnic reconciliation.

IRAN: A Tehran prosecutor has sentenced the woman behind the headscarf protests to two years in jail for “encouraging moral corruption.” Vida Movahed, a 31-year-old mother with a 19-month-old baby, sparked the quiet protests last month.

CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC: A Baptist elder from Bangui, the capital, was among six aid workers with UNICEF killed during an ambush on their way north to train teachers. Attacks on aid workers in the country, at war since 2013, have become prevalent, with 10 Red Cross workers massacred last August.

SOUTH SUDAN: Famine looms, and the youngest country in the world has the dubious distinction of becoming the latest failed state.

ENGLAND: He was a mischievous man with a chapter of his autobiography entitled “Pure Fun,” plus nine other things you maybe didn’t know about English pastor Charles Spurgeon.

NOTE: There will be no Globe Trot next week. It will return Monday, March 19.

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