Today's Story Line

The Korean summit is off to a good start, with an exchange of warm greetings and a limousine ride through streets festooned with pink paper flowers. South Koreans responded with high hopes.

Expectations for Syria's leader-in-waiting, Bashar al-Assad, are also soaring. First on the agenda: economic reform.

Borrowing from the US political handbook, Britain's Conservative Party leader is wooing evangelical Christians.

One of the most popular courses in Beijing teaches Chinese how to "talk American".

David Clark Scott World editor

RepoRters on the job..

*MEDIA CANNIBALS: The frustration of the reporters forced to cover the Pyongyang summit from Seoul is turning into desperation. With only 50 South Korean journalists allowed into North Korea, one hotel in Seoul has become an international media ghetto. The Monitor's Ilene Prusher just arrived for her new assignment in East Asia. But she found herself - like other foreign journalists - the subject of repeated requests for interviews by other reporters hungry for commentary on the summit. Footage of her watching the televised coverage of events in Pyongyang made the evening news in Seoul.

PRESS CLIPPING...

*WILL SWIM FOR MARBLES: A British doctor will attempt a long-distance swim between two Aegean Sea islands as part of a campaign for the return of the Elgin marbles from London to Athens, the Associated Press in Athens reports. For decades, Greece has sought the repatriation of 17 marble figures and part of a frieze that once adorned the 2,500-year-old Parthenon, but have been housed in London's British Museum since the early 19th century. Lord Elgin - then Britain's ambassador to the Ottoman Empire -removed them from the Acropolis. On July 1, British pathologist Christopher Stockdale will attempt to swim 26 miles from the island of Delos, an archaeological park, to the resort island of Paros.

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