HANOI, Vietnam (AP) — The nuclear summit between President Donald Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un collapsed Thursday after the two sides failed to reach a deal due to a standoff over U.S. sanctions on the reclusive nation, a dispiriting end to high-stakes meetings meant to disarm a global threat.

Trump, in a news conference after the summit abruptly shut down early, blamed the breakdown on North Korea’s insistence that all punishing sanctions that the U.S. has imposed on Pyongyang be lifted without the country committing to eliminate its nuclear arsenal.

President @realDonaldTrump and @SecPompeo participate in a Press Conference in Hanoi, Vietnam, on February 28, 2019. pic.twitter.com/qgKX4cbuMd

— Department of State (@StateDept) February 28, 2019

“Sometimes you have to walk,” Trump explained, adding that he had a proposed agreement that was “ready to be signed.”

“I’d much rather do it right than do it fast,” the president said. “We’re in position to do something very special.”

Mere hours after both nations seemed hopeful of a deal, Trump’s and Kim’s motorcades roared away from the downtown Hanoi summit site within minutes of each other, the leaders’ lunch canceled and a signing ceremony scuttled. The president’s closing news conference was hurriedly moved up and he departed for Washington more than two hours ahead of schedule.

The disintegration of talks came after Trump and Kim had appeared to be ready to inch toward normalizing relations between their still technically-warring nations and as the American leader tamped down expectations that their negotiations would yield an agreement by North Korea to take concrete steps toward ending its nuclear program.

In something of a role reversal, Trump had deliberately ratcheted down some of the pressure on Pyongyang, abandoning his fiery rhetoric and declaring he wanted the “right deal” over a rushed agreement. For his part, Kim, when asked whether he was ready to denuclearize, said “If I’m not willing to do that I won’t be here right now.”

The breakdown denied Trump a much-needed victory amid growing domestic turmoil back home, including congressional testimony this week by his former personal lawyer Michael Cohen, who called Trump a “racist” and “conman” and claimed prior knowledge of foreign powers’ efforts to help Trump win in 2016.

Trump insisted his relations with Kim remained warm, but did not commit to having a third summit with the North Korean leader, saying a possible next meeting “may not be for a long time.” Though both he and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said significant progress had been made in Hanoi, the two sides appeared to be galaxies apart on an agreement that would live up to the U.S.’ stated goals.

“Basically, they wanted the sanctions lifted in their entirety, and we couldn’t do that,” Trump told reporters. Kim, he explained, appeared willing to close his country’s main nuclear facility, the Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Center, if the sanctions were lifted. But that would leave him with missiles, warheads and weapon systems, Pompeo said. There are also suspected hidden nuclear fuel production sites around the country.

“We couldn’t quite get there today,” Pompeo said, minimizing what seemed to be a chasm between the two sides.

Longstanding U.S. policy has insisted that U.S. sanctions on North Korea would not be lifted until that country committed to, if not concluded, complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization. Trump declined to restate that goal Thursday, insisting he wanted flexibility in talks with Kim. “I don’t want to put myself in that position from the standpoint of negotiation,” he said.

White House aides stressed that Trump stood strong and some observers evoked the 1987 Reykjavík summit between Ronald Reagan and the Soviet Union’s Mikhail Gorbachev, a meeting over nuclear weapons that ended without a deal but laid the groundwork for a future agreement.

But the failure in Hanoi also laid bare a risk in Trump’s negotiating style: Preferring one-on-one meetings with his foreign counterparts, his administration often eschews the staff-level work done in advance to assure a deal and makes summits more of a victory lap than a hardline negotiation.

The collapse was a dramatic turnaround from the optimism that surrounded the talks after the leaders’ dinner Wednesday and that had prompted the White House to list a signing ceremony on Trump’s official schedule for Thursday.

The two leaders had seemed to find a point of agreement when Kim, who fielded questions from American journalists for the first time, was asked if the U.S. may open a liaison office in North Korea. Trump declared it “not a bad idea” and Kim called it “welcomable.” Such an office would mark the first U.S. presence in North Korea.

But questions persisted throughout the summit, including whether Kim was willing to make valuable concessions, what Trump would demand in the face of rising domestic turmoil and whether the meeting could yield far more concrete results than the leaders’ first summit, a meeting in Singapore less than a year ago that was long on dramatic imagery but short on tangible results.

There had long been skepticism that Kim would be willing to give away the weapons his nation had spent decades developing and Pyongyang felt ensured its survival. But even after the summit ended, Trump praised Kim’s commitment to continue a moratorium on missile testing.

Trump also said he believed the autocrat’s claim that he had nothing to do with the 2017 death of Otto Warmbier, a American college student who died after being held in a North Korean prison.

“I don’t believe that he would have allowed that to happen,” Trump said. “He felt badly about it.”

The declaration immediately called to mind other moments when Trump chose to believe autocrats over his own intelligence agencies, including siding with the Saudi royal family regarding the death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and supporting Russia’s Vladimir Putin’s denials that he interfered with the 2016 election.

If the first Trump-Kim summit gave the reclusive nation’s leader entree onto the international stage, the second appeared to grant him the legitimacy his family has long desired.

Kim, for the first time, affably parried with the international press without having to account for his government’s long history of oppression. He secured Trump’s support for the opening of a liaison office in Pyongyang, without offering any concessions of his own. Even without an agreement, Trump’s backing for the step toward normalization provided the sort of recognition the international community has long denied Kim’s government.

Experts worried that the darker side of Kim’s leadership was being brushed aside in the rush to address the North’s nuclear weapons program: the charges of massive human rights abuses; the prison camps filled with dissidents; a near complete absence of media, religious and speech freedoms; the famine in the 1990s that killed hundreds of thousands; and the executions of a slew of government and military officials, including his uncle and the alleged assassination order of his half-brother in a Malaysian airport.

Trump also has a history of cutting short foreign trips and walking out of meetings when he feels no progress is being made. That includes a notable episode this year when he walked out of a White House meeting with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer over a government shutdown, calling the negotiation “a total waste of time.”

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Associated Press writers Jill Colvin, Zeke Miller and Darlene Superville in Washington contributed to this report.

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By ROXANA HEGEMAN

WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — The nation’s farmers are struggling to pay back loans after years of low crop prices and export markets hit by President Donald Trump’s tariffs, with a key government program showing the highest default rate in at least nine years.

Many agricultural loans come due around Jan. 1, in part to give producers enough time to sell crops and livestock and to give them more flexibility in timing interest payments for tax filing purposes.

“It is beginning to become a serious situation nationwide at least in the grain crops — those that produce corn, soybeans, wheat,” said Allen Featherstone, head of the Department of Agricultural Economics at Kansas State University.

While the federal government shutdown delayed reporting, January figures show an overall rise in delinquencies for those producers with direct loans from the Agriculture Department’s Farm Service Agency.

Nationwide, 19.4 percent of FSA direct loans were delinquent in January, compared to 16.5 percent for the same month a year ago, said David Schemm, executive director of the Farm Service Agency in Kansas. During the past nine years, the agency’s January delinquency rate hit a high of 18.8 percent in 2011 and fell to a low of 16.1 percent when crop prices were significantly better in 2015.

While those FSA direct loan delinquencies are high, the agency is a lender of last resort for riskier agricultural borrowers who don’t qualify for commercial loans. Its delinquency rates typically drop in subsequent months as more farmers pay off overdue notes and refinance debt.

With today’s low crop prices, it takes high yields to mitigate some of the losses and even a normal harvest or a crop failure could devastate a farm’s bottom line. The high delinquency rates are caused by back-to-back years of low prices, with those producers who are in more financial trouble being ones who also had low yields, Featherstone said.

The situation now is not as bad as the farm credit crisis of the 1980s — a time of high interest rates and falling land prices that was marked by widespread farm foreclosures. At the height of that crisis in 1987, U.S. farmers filed 5,788 Chapter 12 bankruptcies. There were 498 in 2018.

Some fears are also surfacing in reports such as one this month from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, which said the outlook is pessimisticfor the start of this year with respondents predicting a further decline in farm income. About 36 percent of farm lenders who responded said they had a lower rate of loan repayment from a year earlier.

Tom Giessel said he borrowed some operating money from his local bank last year and paid it off. Giessel, who raises wheat and corn on some 2,500 acres in western Kansas, said the only thing that kept the farm economy afloat in his area was that people had pretty good fall crop yields. Giessel, 66, said he had once gotten to the point where he didn’t have to borrow his working capital and had a relatively new set of equipment, but he has had to borrow money for the last three years just to put in a crop.

“A lot of people are in denial about what is going on, but reality is going to set in or has set in already,” Giessel said.

The February survey of rural bankers in parts of 10 Plains and Western states showed that nearly two-thirds of banks in the region raised loan collateral requirements on fears of a weakening farm income. The Rural Mainstreet survey showed nearly one-third of banks reported they rejected more farm loan applications for that reason.

Grain prices are down because farmers around the world have had above-average production for several years. But some nations’ economies are not doing as well, decreasing demand for those crops, Featherstone said. Grain prices peaked in 2012 and prices have roughly fallen 36 percent since then for soybeans, 50 percent for corn and 48 percent for wheat.

When Trump imposed tariffs, China retaliated by stopping soybean purchases, closing the biggest U.S. market. While trade negotiations with Chinacontinue, many farmers fear it will take years for markets to recover — as it did when President Jimmy Carter imposed a grain embargo on the then-Soviet Union in 1980.

“The tariffs Trump is messing around with are not helpful at all — I don’t think anybody knows the true effect,” said Steve Morris, who farms near Hugoton in southwest Kansas.

Morris, who has been cutting back acreage in an effort to avoid borrowing money, said drought conditions last year in his area devastated his wheat yields. Trump has offered farmers subsidies to compensate for the tariffs but they are based on harvested bushels. Morris, 73, received a subsidy payment last year for his wheat crop of only $268.

Many farmers are now scrambling to borrow money as spring planting nears.

Matt Ubel, a 36-year-old Kansas farmer who bought out his parents’ farm in December 2016, said they have not been delinquent on their FSA loans, but acknowledged the payment was “a challenge to make last year.”

“We have had trouble for several years getting operating loans,” he said. “This year doesn’t look any better.”

A key factor in whether farmers receive loans is the value of their land.

Farmland values in parts of the Midwest and Plains regionslargely held steady at the end of last year, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. But slightly higher interest rates and an uptick in the pace of farmland sales in states with higher concentrations of crop production could drive those land values down, it said.

“The big key in terms of whether or not we enter a financial crisis would be what would happen to land values,” Featherstone said. “So far land values have gradually declined, so that has kind of prevented us from maybe entering a situation like we did in the 1980s.”

KANSAS CITY (AP) — The University of Missouri system is suing a pharmacy professor at its Kansas City campus over allegations he stole and sold a student’s research, claiming that the school is the rightful owner of the work it believes could be used to make a billion-dollar drug.

The university filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday alleging that Ashim Mitra improperly made $1.5 million from selling former graduate student Kishore Cholkar’s research, the Kansas City Star reported. Mitra could earn $10 million more in royalties over the next five years, according to the lawsuit.

The university called Cholkar’s work using nanotechnology to deliver drugs to the eye “ground-breaking,” claiming that Mitra defrauded the school out of millions of dollars from the sale. The lawsuit argues that the money belongs to the university because Cholkar developed his research while employed as a graduate research assistant at the Kansas City campus.

Mitra’s wife, Ranjana, is also accused in the lawsuit of being involved in the alleged conspiracy.

Mitra, who announced his resignation from the university last month, denies the accusations.

“All of the alleged wrongdoing on the part of myself and my wife can be proven to be false,” he said.

Cholkar didn’t respond for comment on the lawsuit.

According to the lawsuit, Mitra sold Cholkar’s research to Auven Therapeutics Management, a pharmaceutical development company based in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Auven then resold the work for $40 million, plus ongoing royalties, to Sun Pharmaceutical Industries, a company based in India.

Sun Pharmaceutical received approval from the Food and Drug Administration in August to market the patented formulation in a dry-eye drug called Cequa.

The university accused Auven and Sun Pharmaceutical of avoiding contact in order to dodge having to share profits.

Mitra also faced allegations last year that he had coerced graduate students from India into performing personal favors, such as cleaning his basement, walking his dog and watering his plants. Some of the doctoral students told the newspaper that they feared they could lose their visas should Mitra force them out of the university.

Cholkar was among the students interviewed by the Kansas City Star at the time. He said he witnessed the behavior but he wasn’t involved.

He said he felt abused by Mitra in other ways, including not getting recognition for his work on a research project when it went to market.

“That was my product, I worked day and night and yet my name was not included,” Cholkar said last year. “I was the only student who worked on that product. I put all my efforts into that product. I was cheated.”

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Kansas legislators are moving ahead with a bill aimed at making sure they and the governor are notified whenever foster children run away or go missing.

The Senate approved the measureWednesday, 40-0, sending it to the House.

The vote came two days after new Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly promised more opennessabout missing foster children. The state Department for Children and Families launched a new websitewith statistics about missing foster children to be updated daily.

The bill would require contractors providing services for abused and neglected children in foster care to notify DCF within 24 hours when a child goes missing. DCF would then have 48 hours to notify the governor and lawmakers.

DCF initially had concerns about missing children’s names becoming public, but senators revised the bill.

SHAWNEE COUNTY — Law enforcement authorities are investigating an alleged abduction and have made an arrest.

On Wednesday, the US Marshals Fugitive Apprehension Task Force arrested Jeffrey Gilseth 32, and Maria Gilseth, 32. The couple was wanted in Killeen, TX on charges of Interference with Child Custody and Unlawful Restraint, according to United States Marshal Ronald Miller.

On February 21, arrest warrants were issued in Texas for the married couple after they took their three children unlawfully and fled a supervised visitation with the children.

The children were previously ordered removed from the couple’s custody and were court-ordered to reside with other adult relatives. The USMS adopted the case and began a fugitive investigation.

The couple’s vehicle was spotted in Riley County, Kansas by the Fugitive Task Force and officers surveilled and followed the vehicle until it arrived at a safe place to coordinate the arrest.

Shortly before 1:00p.m, the vehicle was blocked in by officers at the I-70 East Turnpike Toll Gate in Topeka and both subjects were taken into custody without incident.

The three minor children case were also recovered safely.

Jeffrey Gilseth and Maria Gilseth were booked into the Shawnee County Jail awaiting extradition back to Texas. The children were taken to a Juvenile Intake and Assessment Center for processing.

The Riley County Police Department, Shawnee County Sheriff’s Office and the Kansas Highway Patrol assisted with the arrests.

SEDGWICK COUNTY – Law enforcement authorities are investigating a suspect who allegedly attacked a police officer.

Just before 2a.m. Wednesday police on patrol observed a vehicle parked at Pawnee Park in the 10,000 Block of West Pawnee, according to officer Charley Davidson. During their investigation, police contacted 33-year-old Austin Hinojos.

They determined he was wanted on multiple warrants and attempted to take him into custody. Hinojos was non-compliant and resisted arrest. One officer was injured during the arrest, according to Davidson. Hinojos was found to be in possession of several knives, drugs and metal knuckles.

Austin Hinojos, 33, on requested charges that include aggravated battery of a law enforcement officer, battery of a law enforcement officer, illegal weapons violations, aggravated weapons violations, resist arrest, unlawful possession of meth, remain in park after hours and outstanding warrants.

Hinojos previous convictions that include DUI, driving while suspected and forgery, according to the Kansas Department of Corrections.

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — A bill that would allow Kansas landowners to resell their permits to hunt white-tail deer to non-Kansas residents has barely passed the state House.

The vote Wednesday was 63-60 and sent the measure to the Senate.

Some rural legislators see the bill as an economic-development measure. Republican Rep. Ken Corbet of Topeka has said it could bring 4,500 tourists a year to Kansas to hunt.

Republican Rep. Joe Seiwert of Pretty Prairie said the additional hunting would decrease the number of vehicle crashes involving deer.

But some state officials have worried the bill would increase poaching by trophy hunters while limiting access to Kansas residents. The Department of Wildlife, Parks and Tourism opposed the measure.

A similar program two decades ago was suspended after poaching and violations of permit-transfer rules.

LEAWOOD, Kan. (AP) — The pastor of the largest Methodist congregation in the U.S. says he is deeply disappointed by a vote of the church’s delegates that rejected easing the faith’s ban on same-sex marriage and ordination of LGBT clergy.

Senior Pastor Adam Hamilton with the United Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, Kansas, called Tuesday’s vote hurtful of gay and lesbian people and their families.

Hamilton said in a video made at the United Methodist Church conference in St. Louis that the Leawood church would continue to welcome everyone, regardless of sexual orientation.

Delegates at the convention defeated a proposal that would have allowed regional and local church bodies to decide their own gay-friendly policies. They instead approved a Traditional Plan, which strengthened discipline for those who defy the current same-sex policies.