President Trump said Friday that a high-stakes summit
between him and Kim Jong Un is back on for June 12, following a lengthy meeting
with a top North Korean official in the Oval Office.
“We'll be meeting on June 12 in Singapore," the
president told reporters after the North Korean emissary left the White House.
He called Friday's meeting with North Korea's Kim
Yong Chol a "great start." Trump confirmed that the visiting official
gave him a personal letter from dictator Kim Jong Un, though he hadn't yet read
it.
"We're going to deal," Trump said.
Trump spoke to reporters after an extraordinary scene
played out on White House grounds, with Trump hosting the North Korean official
for over an hour in the Oval Office -- the latest gesture in an effort by both
sides to get talks back on track after North Korea's belligerent rhetoric
prompted Trump to nix the summit last week.
Trump said the meeting was supposed to just be about
"the delivery of a letter" but ended up being a lengthy conversation
with the "second most powerful man in North Korea."
“We talked about a lot of things," Trump said.
"We really did. But the big deal will be on June 12.”
After the meeting, Trump and Secretary of State Pompeo
were seen taking photos with the visitors.
Kim Yong Chol is the most senior North Korean visitor to
the United States since Vice Marshal Jo Myong Rok visited Washington in 2000 to
meet President Bill Clinton. He is North Korea's former military intelligence
chief and is one of the North Korean leader's closest aides.
Trump said they also discussed ending the Korean War
between North and South Korea.
“Can you believe that we're talking about the ending of
the Korean War?” Trump told reporters. “We're talking about 70 years.”
The official's arrival in Washington came a day after
Pompeo declared that he was confident negotiations with Pyongyang over holding
a nuclear summit were "moving in the right direction."
"Our two countries face a pivotal moment in our
relationship, and it would be nothing short of tragic to let this opportunity
go to waste," Pompeo said in New York after meeting with Kim.
The two countries, eyeing the first summit between the
U.S. and the North after six decades of hostility, have also been holding
negotiations in Singapore and the demilitarized zone between the two Koreas.
Kim Yong Chol left his hotel in New York City early
Friday for the trip to Washington in a convoy of SUVs. Pompeo, the former CIA
chief who has traveled to North Korea and met with Kim Jong Un twice in the
past two months, said he believed the country's leaders are "contemplating
a path forward where they can make a strategic shift, one that their country
has not been prepared to make before."
Fox News’ John Roberts and Serafin Gomez and
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Alex Pappas
is a politics reporter at FoxNews.com. Follow him on Twitter at @AlexPappas.
________________________________________
IN
OTHER NEWS
Facebook Gave Device Makers Deep Access to
Data on Users and Friends
Mark
Zuckerberg, Chief Executive Officer of Facebook
The company formed data-sharing partnerships with Apple, Samsung and
dozens of other device makers, raising new concerns about its privacy
protections.
As Facebook sought to become the world’s dominant social
media service, it struck agreements allowing phone and other device makers
access to vast amounts of its users’ personal information.
Facebook has reached data-sharing
partnerships with at least 60 device makers — including Apple,
Amazon, BlackBerry, Microsoft and Samsung — over the last decade, starting
before Facebook apps were widely available on smartphones, company officials
said.
The deals allowed Facebook to expand its reach and let device makers
offer customers popular features of the social network, such as messaging,
“like” buttons and address books.
But the partnerships, whose scope has not previously been
reported, raise concerns about the company’s privacy protections and compliance
with a 2011 consent decree with the Federal Trade Commission.
Facebook
allowed the device companies access to the data of users’ friends without
their explicit consent, even after declaring that it would no longer share such
information with outsiders. Some device makers could retrieve personal
information even from users’ friends who believed they had barred any sharing,
The New York Times found.
Most of the partnerships remain in effect, though
Facebook began winding them down in April. The company came under intensifying
scrutiny by lawmakers and regulators after news reports in March that a
political consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica, misused
the private information of tens of millions of Facebook users.
In the furor that followed, Facebook’s
leaders said that the kind of access exploited by Cambridge in 2014 was cut off
by the next year, when Facebook prohibited developers from collecting
information from users’ friends. But the company officials
did not disclose that Facebook had exempted the makers of cellphones,
tablets and other hardware from such restrictions.
“You might think that Facebook or the device manufacturer
is trustworthy,” said Serge Egelman, a privacy researcher at the University of
California, Berkeley, who studies the
security of mobile apps.
“But the problem is that as more and more data
is collected on the device — and if it can be accessed by apps on the device —
it creates serious privacy and security risks.”
In interviews, Facebook officials defended the data
sharing as consistent with its privacy policies, the F.T.C. agreement and
pledges to users. They said its partnerships were governed by contracts that
strictly limited use of the data, including any stored on partners’ servers.
The officials added that they knew of no cases where the information had been
misused.
The company views its device partners as
extensions of Facebook, serving its more than two billion users, the officials
said.
“These partnerships work very differently from the way in
which app developers use our platform,” said Ime Archibong, a Facebook vice
president. Unlike developers that provide games and services to Facebook users,
the device partners can use Facebook data only to provide versions of “the
Facebook experience,” the officials said.
Some device partners can retrieve Facebook
users’ relationship status, religion, political leaning and upcoming events,
among other data. Tests by The Times showed that the partners requested and
received data in the same way other third parties did.
Facebook’s view that the device makers are
not outsiders lets the partners go even further, The
Times found: They can obtain data about a user’s Facebook friends, even
those who have denied Facebook permission to share information with any third
parties.
In interviews, several former Facebook software
engineers and security experts said they were surprised at the ability to
override sharing restrictions.
“It’s like having door locks installed, only to find
out that the locksmith also gave keys to all of his friends so they can come in
and rifle through your stuff without having to ask you for permission,”
said Ashkan Soltani, a research and privacy consultant who formerly served as
the F.T.C.’s chief technologist.
