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Trump, Xi meet again

PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) — North Korea’s nuclear ambitions and the U.S-China trade imbalance as well as other points of tension between President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping are being overshadowed by the U.S. missile strikes on Syria.

Nonetheless, the two leaders are meeting for a second day at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate as planned Friday. Their first-night summit dinner wrapped up shortly before the U.S. announced the missile barrage on an air base in Syria in retaliation against Syrian President Bashar Assad for a chemical weapons attack against civilians caught up in his country’s long civil war.

Before Thursday’s night’s dinner with their wives, Trump said he and Xi already had had a long discussion and had “developed a friendship,” and then joked, “I have gotten nothing, absolutely nothing.”

Xi apparently got something out of dinner, though. Chinese state media reported late Thursday that Trump has accepted Xi’s invitation to visit China this year. The official Xinhua News Agency reported that Trump will travel to China at an “early date” in 2017, but gave no details.

The White House downplayed expectations for a breakthrough on issues like trade and tariffs, insisting that the 24-hour summit is mostly an introductory meeting for the two leaders. Within Trump’s administration, divisions remain over how to approach China.

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