US President Donald Trump said Monday he hoped to meet again with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, possibly this year, as he held White House talks with South Korea’s dovish new leader that got off awkwardly.Hours before President Lee Jae Myung arrived for his long-planned first visit to the White House, Trump took to social media to denounce what he said was a “Purge or Revolution” in South Korea, apparently over raids that involved churches.Forty minutes into an Oval Office meeting in which Lee profusely praised Trump, the US leader dismissed his own sharply worded rebuke, saying, “I’m sure it’s a misunderstanding” as “there is a rumor going around.”Trump said he believed he was on the same page on North Korea as Lee, a progressive who supports diplomacy over confrontation.Trump, who met Kim Jong Un three times in his first term, hailed his relationship with the young totalitarian and said he knew him “better than anybody, almost, other than his sister.””Someday I’ll see him. I look forward to seeing him. He was very good with me,” Trump told reporters, saying he hoped the talks would take place this year.Trump once said that he and Kim “fell in love” during their meetings, which reduced tensions but failed to produce a lasting agreement.But Kim has since been emboldened by the war in Ukraine, securing critical support from Russia after sending thousands of North Korean troops to fight.North Korea has dug in and refused any talk of ending its nuclear weapons program.- ‘Trump Tower’ in Pyongyang -Lee, a former labor rights lawyer who has criticized the US military in the past, immediately flattered his host and said Trump has made the United States “not a keeper of peace, but a maker of peace.””I look forward to your meeting with Chairman Kim Jong Un and construction of Trump Tower in North Korea and playing golf” there, Lee told him.He even cited propaganda from North Korea that denounced South Korea by noting that Pyongyang said the relationship with Trump was better.Kim “will be waiting for you,” Lee told him.In a speech after his meeting, Lee warned that North Korea could soon produce 10 to 20 nuclear weapons per year as well as a missile that can hit the United States — despite pressure and sanctions.”The hard fact is that the number of nuclear weapons that North Korea possesses has increased over the past three to four years,” Lee said at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.He highlighted his overtures to the North such as stopping the blaring of anti-Kim messages over loudspeakers on the military frontier.Lee was elected in June after the impeachment of the more hawkish Yoon Suk Yeol, who was removed from office after briefly imposing martial law.The raids denounced by Trump likely referred in part to investigations surrounding Yoon’s conservative allies.- Seeking to buy base -Korean Air announced after the talks that it would buy more than 100 aircraft from US manufacturer Boeing, as Trump presses allies hard for business. Trump, who frequently accuses European allies of freeloading off the United States, made clear he would seek greater compensation by South Korea over the 28,500 US troops in the country.He suggested the United States could seek to take over base land, an idea likely to enrage Lee’s brethren on the South Korean left.”We spent a lot of money building a fort, and there was a contribution made by South Korea, but I would like to see if we could get rid of the lease and get ownership of the land where we have a massive military base,” Trump said.He also spoke bluntly about one of South Korea’s most delicate issues: so-called “comfort women” who were forced into sexual slavery during Japan’s 1910-1945 rule.The South Korean left has historically been outspoken about Japan’s legacy, although Lee visited Tokyo on his way to Washington, a highly symbolic stop praised by Trump.Japan had agreed to compensate comfort women but the deal was criticized by survivors who questioned Tokyo’s sincerity.

Perplexity AI on Monday said it will begin paying out millions of dollars to media outlets as part of a new model for sharing search revenue with publishers.The company’s media partners will soon get paid when their work is used by Perplexity’s browser or AI assistant to satisfy queries or requests, according to the San Francisco-based startup.”We’re compensating publishers in the model that’s right for the AI age,” the Perplexity team said in a blog post.The payouts will be administered via a subscription service to be rolled out in the coming months, dubbed Comet Plus, which the startup described as a program that ensures publishers and journalists benefit from new business models enabled by AI.A $42.5 million pool of money has been set aside to share with publishers and is expected to grow over time, according to Perplexity.”As the web has evolved beyond information to include knowledge, action, and opportunities, excellent content from publishers and journalists matters even more,” the Perplexity team said.The company will charge a $5 monthly subscription for Comet Plus, which will be an added perk for those who already pay for premium versions of Perplexity.Perplexity is one of Silicon Valley’s hottest startups, whose AI-powered search engine is often mentioned as a potential disruptor to Google.But the company has been targeted with lawsuits by media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and Japan’s Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper, claiming the startup unfairly profits from their work.One suit accuses Perplexity of illegally copying and reproducing copyrighted content from the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post to power its AI-driven “answer engine.”A revenue-sharing model by Perplexity would be a peace offering to publishers and bolster its defenses against accusations of free-riding on their work.Unlike ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude, Perplexity’s tool provides up-to-date answers that often include links to source materials, allowing users to verify information.And unlike a classic search engine, Perplexity provides ready-made answers on its webpage, making it unnecessary for users to click through to the source website.Google, meanwhile, has built powerful AI into its search engine and offers AI-generated summaries with query results.After a lawsuit by the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post in October, Perplexity criticized the “adversarial posture” of many media as “shortsighted, unnecessary, and self-defeating.”They “prefer to live in a world where publicly reported facts are owned by corporations, and no one can do anything with those publicly reported facts without paying a toll,” it said at the time.”We should all be working together to offer people amazing new tools and build genuinely pie-expanding businesses.”

Maurice Tempelsman, a renowned diamond merchant and long-time companion of former US first lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, died in New York, his family said. He was 95.His death at a Manhattan hospital on Saturday was caused by complications from a fall, his son Leon told US media.Tempelsman was as well known for his late-in-life friendship with Jackie O, as tabloids called her, as he was for his entanglements with authoritarian African leaders over the diamond trade. Tempelsman handled Onassis’s finances after the death of her second husband, Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, from whom she inherited $26 million. The two were often seen together in New York’s Central Park. Tempelsman, who was with Jackie Onassis from the early 1980s until she died in 1994, and lawyer Alexander Forger were co-executors of her will.In it, she left Belgium-born Tempelsman “my Greek alabaster head of a woman.”In 1984 he acquired New York-based diamond jewelers Lazare Kaplan, propelling him onto New York’s business and social scene, and quickly becoming one of the world’s premier diamond merchants.But it was his entanglements with various African autocrats, including Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko, that led to him becoming something of a back-channel intermediary between the US and the continent, the Washington Post reported.Lazare Kaplan had stakes in various mines in Africa as well as investments in major diamond operations on the continent, the paper said.Tempelsman had opened a diamond-trading office in Kinshasa, the capital of then-Zaire and now-Democratic Republic of Congo, as early as 1960 and became an “intimate friend” of dictator Mobutu, according to author Crawford Young.Tempelsman sued the author of a book and its publisher for claiming that he was “close to the CIA,” AFP archives show, with the French judge ruling in 1984 that the allegation was not itself defamatory.The French court ruling reported by AFP said he was awarded a symbolic one franc, the country’s currency at the time, for invasion of privacy.In later life, Tempelsman supported various charitable causes including the Elton John AIDS Foundation.

US President Donald Trump on Monday suggested many Americans would like a dictator as he signed orders to tighten his federal clampdown on the capital Washington and to prosecute flag-burners.During a rambling 80-minute event in the Oval Office, Trump lambasted critics and the media as he complained that he was not getting credit for his National Guard-backed crackdown on crime and immigration.”They say ‘we don’t need him. Freedom, freedom. He’s a dictator. He’s a dictator.’ A lot of people are saying: ‘Maybe we like a dictator,'” Trump told reporters.”I don’t like a dictator. I’m not a dictator. I’m a man with great common sense and a smart person.”Trump — who attempted to overturn the results of his 2020 election defeat by Joe Biden at the end of his first term — said before winning a second term in November that he would be a “dictator on day one.”Republican Trump deployed the National Guard to Washington earlier this month to counter what he alleged was an out-of-control crime problem, also taking federal control of the city’s police department. – ‘Sick’ -Trump said he was also considering sending the military into the cities of Chicago and Baltimore as he targets a series of Democratic strongholds. He sent the National Guard to Los Angeles — against the mayor’s and California governor’s wishes — in June.The president was particularly disparaging of Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, a vocal opponent who has strongly rejected any move to send troops to Chicago.”You send them, and instead of being praised, they’re saying, ‘you’re trying to take over the Republic,'” said Trump. “These people are sick.”Pritzker, a billionaire businessman like Trump, launched his own broadside at the president in a Monday press conference, calling him “a wannabe dictator” who “wants to use the military to occupy a US city, punish his dissidents, and score political points.” Trump further tightened his clampdown Monday by signing an executive order to investigate and prosecute people who burn the American flag — despite a 1989 ruling by the US Supreme Court saying that the act is protected by freedom of speech laws.”If you burn a flag you get one year in jail — no early exits, no nothing,” Trump said. Trump also announced new measures tightening his grip on security in Washington, ordering Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to set up a specialized unit within Washington’s National Guard for public order, and ending cashless bail.He also said he would soon be changing the name of Hegseth’s department to the Department of War, its name from 1789 to 1947.”Defense is too defensive,” Trump told reporters.- ‘Violent’ fish -Democrats have repeatedly accused Trump of pushing presidential power way past its constitutional limits, most recently by deploying troops in the US capital.He has also clamped down on everything from the federal bureaucracy and “woke” policies to his political opponents.But the 79-year-old rejected all criticism in his angry and wide-ranging Oval Office diatribe, speaking for more than 45 minutes before taking reporters’ questions.Trump dismissed opponents who have called him racist by proclaiming “I love Black People” — before describing a Salvadoran man who is set to be deported to Uganda in an immigration row as an “animal.” He went on a long detour about what he called a lack of gratitude from Pritzker about measures to tackle a “pretty violent” invasive fish species in the Great Lakes.Trump also called his Democratic predecessor Biden a “moron” and dismissed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s brutal 2022 invasion of Ukraine as being the result of “big personality conflicts.”The US president later repeatedly expressed his admiration for another strongman leader — North Korea’s Kim Jong Un — during a meeting with South Korea’s president in the Oval Office.”I’d like to have a meeting. I get along great with him,” Trump said of Kim, whom he met three times in his first term.

Rapper Lil Nas X was charged Monday with four felonies after allegedly charging at police who went to pick him up during a naked stroll through Los Angeles last week.The “Old Town Road” artist was arrested after stripping off on a major thoroughfare in the city.Video that emerged last week initially showed the hitmaker wearing cowboy boots and some modesty-covering white underwear as he strutted through the Studio City area.But new footage obtained by entertainment outlet TMZ showed the performer — whose real name is Montero Hill — completely in the buff.That tallies with what police told AFP last week, when a spokesman said: “There was a nude man walking in the street.””Upon arrival the suspect charged at officers. He was taken into custody and taken to a local hospital for a possible overdose and placed under arrest for battery on a police officer.”Hill appeared in court Monday to plead not guilty to three felony counts of battery against a police officer and a single count of resisting arrest.His bail was set at $75,000 and he was ordered to return to court on September 15.Last week’s footage sparked an internet storm as web users flocked to watch the flamboyant performer flirting with the camera.”Don’t be late to the party tonight,” he told a passerby. It was not clear which party he was talking about, or when “tonight” might be in footage filmed just before dawn.At one point he asked the person filming — who was apparently sitting in a car — to hand over the phone so he could throw it away.”I wanna throw it far away so you never see it again. I don’t like phones.””Didn’t I tell you to put the phone down? Uh-oh, somebody’s gonna have to pay for that,” he said as he theatrically wagged his finger.

SpaceX is gearing up for the next test flight of its Starship megarocket on Monday after a technical issue on the launchpad forced a 24-hour delay.The tenth trial comes at a time of heightened scrutiny for the world’s most powerful launch vehicle — central to founder Elon Musk’s dream of colonizing Mars and NASA’s plan to return astronauts to the Moon — following a string of explosive failures that have begun raising doubts about its viability.Standing 403 feet (123 meters) tall, the stainless-steel behemoth is scheduled to lift off from the company’s Starbase in southern Texas at 6:30 pm local time (2330 GMT).Sunday’s attempt was scrubbed because of a ground-system leak, a relatively routine issue in spaceflight and not generally cause for concern.The mission aims to put the upper stage — eventually intended to carry crew and cargo — through structural stress testing as it flies halfway around the world before splashing down in the Indian Ocean.SpaceX will also try out new heat-shield materials and attempt to deploy mock Starlink satellites as cargo. Unlike recent attempts, the “Super Heavy” booster will not be caught by the launch tower’s giant “chopstick” arms but instead aim for a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.The company’s aggressive “fail fast, learn fast” approach has been credited with giving it a commanding lead in space launches through its Falcon rocket family.Its Dragon capsules are the only American spacecraft ferrying astronauts to the International Space Station, while Starlink has become a geopolitical asset.But concern is mounting over whether these successes will translate to Starship, a rocket unlike any before it. Its upper stage — also called Starship — has exploded in all three 2025 test flights.Two scattered debris over Caribbean islands, while the third broke apart after reaching space. In June, another upper stage blew up during a ground “static fire” test.”I think there is a lot of pressure on this mission,” Dallas Kasaboski, a space analyst for consulting firm Analysys Mason, told AFP. “We’ve had so many tests and it hasn’t proven itself reliable — the successes have not exceeded the failures.”Even if the tenth flight succeeds, formidable challenges remain, including proving Starships can be refueled with super-cooled propellant in orbit — an unprecedented feat but a prerequisite for deep-space missions.Delays could ripple through NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to return US astronauts to the Moon by mid-2027 using a modified version of Starship as the landing vehicle.