Backstory

At the end of the second night of living in the same ritzy Singapore hotel as North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, a member of his security staff sat beside a Reuters reporter in the lobby and smiled.

HONG KONG - Shrouded in Chinese military secrecy and hidden from the eyes of journalists, Beijing’s build-up of man-made islands on reefs deep in the maritime heart of Southeast Asia is a vexing story to report.

LONDON - At Reuters, planning for the marriage of Britain’s Prince Harry to American actress Meghan Markle last Saturday in Windsor, England, began back in November when the royal engagement was announced.

NEW YORK - As she reported on sexual harassment issues at big companies, Jennifer Saba, a Breakingviews columnist, looked for a concrete way to quantify the gender gap in the technology sector.

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I met her with Reuters colleague Manny Mogato in May 2016 in a slum in Davao City, just after its long-time mayor, Rodrigo Duterte - also known as "The Punisher" - was elected president of the Philippines. Four of Alia's sons were killed in Davao in a brutal anti-drug campaign that Duterte had vowed to take nationwide.

Reuters covers dozens of high-profile Congressional hearings each year, but few draw the intensity and urgency of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s visit to Capitol Hill this week.

The Kremlin says Russia’s elections are free and fair. The Kremlin’s opponents say fraud and ballot-rigging are widespread.

New York - At Colorado’s Columbine High School, where 15 people were killed in 1999, about 250 students walked out of class for 17 minutes at 10 a.m. local time on March 14.

RIYDAH - The global renown of billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal made his involuntary detention in early November at Riyadh's Ritz-Carlton hotel one of the biggest single shocks of Saudi Arabia’s anti-corruption crackdown.

Davos is the conference everyone loves to hate.

"EMERGENCY ALERT BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL," read the alert from Hawaii Emergency Management Agency shortly after 8 a.m. on Jan. 14.

The two Reuters reporters covering the U.S. Supreme Court spend many days buried in a sea of paper. A wall of shelves in the Reuters section of the press room at the Supreme Court is overflowing with thousands of thick legal briefs (a misnomer of the highest order), documenting cases working their way up through the U.S. court system.

In April, Reuters photographer Zohra Bensemra was sent to cover the drought in Somalia. Once there, she looked for ways to humanize the plight of more than 2 million people trying to survive the famine amid fields of withered crops and the brittle skeletons of livestock.