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The prime minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe, said Monday that his country is nearing a major trade agreement with the United States, according to an interview with The Wall Street Journal.

Abe told the Journal that he hopes to come to an understanding with President Barack Obama when he visits Washington at the end of the month as part of a 12-country summit.

"We think that an agreement between Japan and the U.S. is close, but we're hoping that even more progress will be made," Abe said.

The U.S. and Japan are the two most powerful countries involved in the 12-country Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade agreement that's been in negotiations for more than five years.

Negotiators from both countries met in Tokyo on Sunday and Monday in an effort to smooth out key differences before the summit.

Reuters reported that although the two countries make up a sixth of the group, their ability to come to terms will determine whether an agreement is signed:

Access to Japan's farm market and the U.S. car market remain obstacles to a bilateral deal between the two nations, vital to the success of a long-delayed Trans-Pacific Partnership pact. The world's biggest and third-biggest economies account for some 80 percent of the economic output of the 12-member TPP.

The U.S. is asking for Japan to double its rice imports while Japan is asking the United States to eliminate its 2.5 percent tax on auto parts imports.

"Negotiations can't work if one side makes no concessions, but there are various domestic restrictions," Japan Economy Minister Akira Amari told Japan's public broadcaster NHK. "Rice, in particular, is produced across Japan, so we are carefully negotiating while feeling a domestic sense of crisis."

Coming to an agreement as part of the TPP remains an important step for the prime minister as he continues to try to resurrect Japan's economy.

"Deflation continued for 15 years, and I can't say that it's ended for good, but we have created a situation that is no longer deflation," Abe told the Journal.

While in America, the prime minister will also give a speech to a joint session of Congress and visit Boston, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

China is not a part of the TPP, adding value for both Japan and the U.S., as they continue to balance against that country's economic rise.

Shinzo Abe

trade agreement

Economy

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The editor of BuzzFeed, the website that carries headlines ranging from "12 Reasons Everything Is Better When It Rains" to "EU Ministers To Hold Emergency Talks On Migrant Crisis," has acknowledged the deletion of more than 1,000 posts – three of them following complaints from advertisers – since he was hired in January 2012.

Editor in chief Ben Smith's memo to staff Saturday, obtained by the website Gawker, comes after his site was criticized for the recent deletion of two posts – one critical of the board game Monopoly and the other critical of the ad campaign launched by soap brand Dove. Their parent companies, Hasbro and Unilever, respectively, are BuzzFeed advertisers. Gawker first reported both those deletions.

Smith has maintained both those instances were for editorial reasons, but the deletions, and the scrutiny directed at the website, prompted an internal review last week of the practice at BuzzFeed.

The review, which was headed by Annie-Rose Strasser, BuzzFeed News deputy managing editor, found 1,112 posts deleted posts since January 2012. Here's the breakdown, according to Smith's memo: editorial decisions, 100; advertiser complaints, 3; copyright issues, 65; technical error, 263; duplicated already published work, 122; community user deletions, 140; on-edit staff deletions and unidentified bylines, 377.

Of the three posts deleted after complaints from advertisers, one, Smith said, was by Mark Duffy, a blogger and ad critic who wrote for the site under the byline "copyranter." In 2013, he accused an ad for Axe deodorant of advocating "worldwide mass rape." The ad agency complained, via BuzzFeed's chief revenue officer, that the "tone of his item was over the top."

"I agreed that this was way outside even our very loose standards of the time," Smith wrote in his memo to staff.

A second post was deleted after complaints from BuzzFeed's chief revenue officer. This one was by Tanner Ringerud, a former member of BuzzFeed's Creative department, who switched to editorial in 2013. His post that March mocked Microsoft's Internet Explorer. In his previous BuzzFeed job, Ringerud had worked on a Microsoft ad campaign. After the complaint, Smith said, "We agreed that it was inappropriate for Tanner to write about brands whose ad campaigns he'd worked on."

The third complaint, this one in January 2014, came from the head of BuzzFeed's creative division that writer Samir Mezrahi had taken a gif from a Pepsi ad created by BuzzFeed's creative team and turned it into a Vine without credit. Smith said he asked Mezrahi not to use advertising created by BuzzFeed's business side for editorial purposes.

"Four days later, he published a post titled 'These Brands Are Going To Bombard Your Twitter Feed On Super Bowl Sunday,' which was a mix of criticism and praise for a long list of brands on Twitter," Smith wrote in the memo. "I again heard a complaint from our business side about Pepsi, which was the first item in the list, and whose Twitter feed they were making content for during the Super Bowl."

Smith added that BuzzFeed decided that an editor writing about an ad produced by the site's creative team was "inappropriate." That post was deleted.

You can also read/listen to David's Folkenflik – and NPR's — past reporting on BuzzFeed here:

OMG, BuzzFeed Is Investing In Serious News Coverage! Is It FTW?

9 Powerful Moments In The Day Of A Viral Web Editor At BuzzFeed

buzzfeed

The European Union is holding an emergency meeting Monday about the deadly capsizing of a boat crowded with would-be migrants in the Mediterranean Sea. With 28 survivors reported and 24 bodies recovered, only a fraction of the hundreds of people who were reportedly on board are accounted for.

The boat was about 120 miles south of the Italian island of Lampedusa when it capsized this weekend; it was roughly 60 miles from Libya. Estimates of the number of people who were on the 65-foot craft range from 700 to 950. The boat reportedly capsized after many of its passengers rushed to the same side.

From Rome, NPR's Sylvia Poggioli reports:

"One survivor says there were 950 people on board, many locked in the hold by the human traffickers before departure. But Italian authorities say they cannot confirm the numbers on board.

"Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, who has long been seeking more help and resources from Italy's European partners, has called for an emergency meeting of EU government leaders."

Today's EU meeting in Luxembourg comes as some 1,500 migrants are believed to have drowned in the Mediterranean so far this year; more than 10,000 have been rescued. The foreign ministers' discussions are sure to center on who will bear responsibility for patrolling immigration routes and helping those in danger. The EU has run one such program since last fall, when Italy discontinued its larger operation.

This weekend's disaster stands to eclipse a similar event late in 2013, when 500 migrants had crammed onto a boat that caught fire and sank near Sicily. Officials estimated that up to 300 people died.

"We've had one and a half years now to talk about that and discuss that – and plan for that," says the UN High Commission for Human Rights' Laurens Jolles. "And only now we hear the EU and governments are all starting to discuss that and say, 'It's unacceptable, we have to do something.'"

Many of the smuggling boats have launched from Libya, fueled by a combination of upheaval and a lack of border controls. The passengers are often from a range of North African countries.

"The disaster comes only a week after 400 others were reported dead in a similar capsize near Lampedusa," as Scott wrote for The Two-Way Sunday.

For a sign of the state of things in Libya, consider that a newspaper headline on Sunday touted the pending return of roadway traffic lights in Benghazi.

"We have what is possibly becoming a failed state at our doorstep. We have criminal gangs having a heyday organizing these trips in rickety boats," Maltese Prime Minister Joseph Muscat tells the BBC. "We need to get the Libyan factions together to form some sort of government of almost national unity."

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Martin O'Malley, former governor of Maryland, says he'll decide by late May if he's running for president. Running would put him — even he seems to acknowledge — in an uphill battle against Hillary Clinton, currently the only Democrat who's declared.

O'Malley is positioning himself to Clinton's left, and even President Obama's left.

It's All Politics

O'Malley, Possible Clinton Rival, Says A President Can't Let Polls Lead

He's for a much higher minimum wage, and against a major trade deal — the Trans-Pacific Partnership. In an interview with NPR's Steve Inskeep, O'Malley also said he wants to increase Social Security benefits, even though some people would pay more taxes.

Surveys put O'Malley far behind Clinton. But, he's hoping his travels across the country can change that. Last month, he addressed a crowd in Iowa while standing on a chair. Last week, he gave a speech at Harvard. And this week, he's in the early primary state of South Carolina.

"I've been an executive and a progressive executive with a record of accomplishments," the former Baltimore mayor said of the difference between him and Clinton. "I think contrasts will become apparent."

(A full transcript of the discussion is available here.)

Interview Highlights

On Republican and Democrats' competing economic theories

I think what's going on right now, Steve, is you have a competition between two theories of how our economy actually works and how we generate economic growth that lifts us all. The Republican Party is doubling down on this trickle-down theory that says thou shalt concentrate wealth at the very top of our society. Thou shalt remove regulation from wherever you find it, even on Wall Street. And thou shalt keep wages low for American workers so that we can be more competitive. We have a different theory. Our theory as Democrats and as the longer arc of our story as Americans is that we believe that a stronger middle class is actually the cause of economic growth. What ails our economy right now is 12 years of stagnant or declining wages, and we need to fix this.

On Republican candidates' focus on economic opportunity

I mean, look, talk is cheap. And so there are two ways to go forward from here, and history shows this. One path is a sensible rebalancing that calls us back to our tried and true success story as the land of opportunity. The other is pitchforks.

There's, history affords no other paths. We're either going to sensibly rebalance and do the things that allow our middle class to grow, that expands opportunities and allows workers to earn more when they're working harder. Or, we're going to go down a very, very bad path.

On whether large corporations are able to deal with regulation better than small businesses

Oh, certainly. I mean, our tax code's been turned into Swiss cheese. And certainly the concentrated wealth and accumulated power and the systematic deregulation of Wall Street has led to this situation where the economy isn't working for most of us. All of that is true. But it is not true that regulation holds poor people down or regulation keeps middle class from advancing. That's kind of patently bull——.

On the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal

Yeah, I do oppose it. What's wrong with it is first and foremost that we're not allowed to read it before our representatives vote on it. What's wrong with it is that right now what we should be doing are things that make our economy stronger here at home. And it's my concern that the Trans-Pacific Partnership, this deal is a race to the bottom, a chasing of lower wages abroad, and I believe that that does nothing to help us build a stronger economy here at home.