Six In The Morning Sunday April 20

20 April 2014 Last updated at 06:27

Angry South Korea families protest over slow ferry rescue

Families of passengers on a sunken South Korean ferry have protested angrily over the rescue operation.

Police stopped up to 100 people trying to leave Jindo island intending to march to the country's capital, Seoul.

After more than three days, divers have now finally entered the ferry, retrieving 22 bodies and bringing the death toll to 54.

However, another 248 people are still missing from the Sewol ferry, which sank on Wednesday.

Some 174 passengers were rescued.

'Lying'

Since the capsize, many of the relatives of those on board have been on Jindo, in the south-west of the country.

Christian pilgrims in Jerusalem find their path to the Via Dolorosa is an ever harder road

Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank say police restrictions on access to the Old City to stop overcrowding are destroying their traditional freedom of worship in Holy Week

• Peter Beaumont in Jerusalem
• The Observer, Sunday 20 April 2014

The limestone stairs of the Nuns' Ascent are glassy-slick from the countless feet that have polished them. Descending steeply, they emerge by the Chapel Sanctuaries of the Flagellation and Condemnation on the Via Dolorosa, the start of the route which – tradition says – Christ took to his crucifixion.

On Good Friday, the stairs were packed with foreign pilgrims walking the Stations of the Cross. Among them is a large party from Serbia carrying crosses, who begin their jostling descent to join the milling crowds below. They slow down to pass an Israeli border police barrier on the stairs, one of a number along the route. It lets them pass without remark.

The crowd on the steps thins momentarily. As it does, an elderly Palestinian man in a white headscarf descends stiffly. Alone among all the foreign pilgrims he is stopped, checked by the police and sent down another street. It is not clear if he is a resident of the Old City or even a Christian.

Wheat rust: The fungal disease that threatens to destroy the world crop

Experts in Europe and Africa are racing to develop resistant grain varieties as university researchers predict the likely spread across continents of the air-borne spores of the fungus

CHRISTY CHAMY

 

 

Sunday 20 April 2014

Scientists are warning that wheat is facing a serious threat from a fungal disease that could wipe out the world’s crop if not quickly contained. Wheat rust, a devastating disease known as the “polio of agriculture”, has spread from Africa to South and Central Asia, the Middle East and Europe, with calamitous losses for the world’s second most important grain crop, after rice. There is mounting concern at the dangers posed to global food security.

Experts have been aware of the threat since a major epidemic swept across North America’s wheat belt in the 1950s, destroying up to 40 per cent of the crop. Since then, tens of millions of pounds have been invested in developing rust-resistant varieties of the grain. However, an outbreak in Uganda in 1999 was discovered to have been caused by a virulent mutation of the fungus. There has been alarm at the speed at which further mutations have subsequently developed and spread across continents.

Who Are Boko Haram? Extremists Escalate Nigeria Terror Campaign

BY ALEXANDER SMITH

A recent bomb blast that ripped apart a bus station in Nigeria's capital was a sign that a bloody al Qaeda-linked insurgency is intensifying, analysts say.

Boko Haram, an Islamic sect whose name roughly translates to "Western education is a sin," is widely believed to be behind Monday's attack that left 71 people dead and more than 120 others injured. It was the group's first major attack on Abuja in about two years.

In a further display of strength, the group kidnapped more than 100 girls from a school in the country's northeast just hours later. The militants duped the students into thinking they were soldiers before driving them away into a forest.

Early this year, Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan described the the group's insurgency as a "temporary challenge," adding: "We will surely overcome Boko Haram."

Japan sets up military post on western island

By Nobuhiro Kubo
NATIONAL APR. 20, 2014 - 02:48PM JST

YONAGUNI —

Japan began its first military expansion at the western end of its island chain in more than 40 years on Saturday, breaking ground on a radar station on a tropical island off Taiwan.

The move risks angering China, locked in a dispute with Japan over nearby islands which they both claim.

Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera, who attended a ceremony on Yonaguni island to mark the start of construction, suggested the military presence could be enlarged to other islands in the seas southwest of Japan’s main islands.

“This is the first deployment since the U.S. returned Okinawa (1972) and calls for us to be more on guard are growing,” Onodera told reporters. “I want to build an operation able to properly defend islands that are part of Japan’s territory.”

A prehistoric step: 9-year-old trods on 10,000-year-old mastodon tooth

By Lorenzo Ferrigno, CNN

(CNN) -- Mastodons -- elephant-like beasts that lumbered across North America more than 10,000 years ago -- are long extinct, but apparently it wasn't tooth decay that did them in.

A 9-year-old Michigan boy stumbled across something -- literally -- that, it turns out, is a mastodon tooth.

"I was walking down at the creek last summer. I felt something that I stepped on so I picked it up and everybody in the neighborhood thought it was pretty cool," Philip Stoll told CNN on Friday.

Affectionately called "Huckleberry Phil" in his neighborhood near Lansing because of his penchant for exploring outside, Philip took the lump home and washed it off in the kitchen sink, and checked to see if it was magnetic, his mother, Heidi Stoll said. It wasn't.