US basketball star Rodman plays crucial role in Trump-Kim meet

SINGAPORE, June 06 (Agencies): Singapore's foreign minister will make a two-day trip to Pyongyang this week, its government said Wednesday, as preparations for a summit in the city-state between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un accelerate.

Vivian Balakrishnan will pay an official visit to the North Korean capital on Thursday and Friday at the invitation of the North's Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho.

Singapore's foreign ministry said this in a statement.

Meanwhile, right now analysts will believe anything about the summit where Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un are set to meet.

The New York Post reported that basketball star Dennis Rodman may also turn up.

Basketball diplomacy might just work with North Korea, explains Michael Madden.

Dennis Rodman has the strange distinction of being the first American to have met both Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un.

He has twice been a contestant on Mr Trump's reality television show Celebrity Apprentice and has travelled to North Korea five times.

He even claims to have given Mr Kim a copy of The Art of the Deal, the Trump guide to hustle and deal-making in big business.

Rodman's also offered his wisdom on the two leaders.

Last August, he said the exchange of fiery rhetoric and brinkmanship filled with nuclear threats was "more like two big kids deciding who's the toughest".

It's far from confirmed if he'll even be in Singapore on 12 June.

The basketball player nicknamed The Worm trying to make his mark in one of the most broken geo-political relationships in the world today.

Dennis Rodman and Kim Jong-un's meeting was not the first contact between basketball and North Korea.

In 2000 then US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright presented Kim Jong-un's father, Kim Jong-il, with a basketball autographed by Michael Jordan.

It's currently kept in North Korea's International Friendship Exhibition.

It was a very smart gift and obviously an ironic one. It's one of the most potent symbols of American soft power.

So when Vice Media made the trip in 2013, a fruitful correspondence was almost inevitable.

Dennis Rodman touched down in North Korea with the Harlem Globetrotters, who then played a North Korean selection while Rodman and Mr Kim sat in the gallery watching.

Rodman has since been several times to North Korea in what has been referred to as "basketball diplomacy" and has said his aim was to "connect two countries".

Rodman is easily a kind of goodwill ambassador. If the sides come to an agreement about a kind of cultural exchange, Rodman could be a key part of that somehow.