Six In The Morning Friday June 6

6 June 2014 Last updated at 08:05

D-Day 70th anniversary: World leaders gather for ceremony

World leaders are joining hundreds of veterans in Normandy to mark the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings.

Heads of state will meet at Ouistreham, one of the five beaches where Allied troops landed on 6 June 1944.

French President Francois Hollande will give a speech followed by US President Barack Obama. The Queen and Russian President Vladimir Putin will also go.

There will be a re-enactment of the landings, which were the start of the invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe.

By the end of D-Day, the Allies had established a foothold in France - an event that would eventually help bring the war to an end.

Egypt criminalises sexual harassment for first time

Campaigners welcome the move but remain concerned about whether the law will be enforced by police

• Patrick Kingsley in Cairo
• theguardian.com, Friday 6 June 2014 08.38 BST

Egypt has criminalised sexual harassment for the first time, in a move that campaigners say is just the first step towards ending an endemic problem.

Egypt's outgoing president, Adly Mansour, issued a decree that categorised sexual harassment as a crime punishable by a minimum six-month jail term and a fine worth 3,000 Egyptian pounds – with increased penalties for employers and repeat offenders.

Sexual harassers have been prosecuted on rare occasions in the past in Egypt – but only on vaguer charges of physical assault, and even then the defendants have often been found innocent.

Gezi Park protests anniversary confirms Turkish resistance to Erdogan oppression

Heavy-handed suppression of current protests fuels defiance

Stephen Starr

Mesut Sener recalls the attempted bulldozing of Gezi Park 12 months ago as if it was yesterday.

“The construction machines arrived in the morning; they began cutting six, seven trees. We tried to defend them by linking arms around the trees,” said the 46-year-old civil engineer. “By the first night, lots of people started coming to the park – two, three thousand. We won the park,” he said.

But their victory was short-lived.

The protestors were swiftly tear-gassed, their tents burned down and many were arrested. The police crackdown drew hundreds of thousands of Turks to Gezi Park in the days and weeks that followed in what became the biggest outpouring of anti-government sentiment witnessed in Turkey for more than a decade.

China bulldozes mountains to create land for cities

June 6, 2014 - 5:08PM

Melanie Kembrey

Journalist

For years, China has been moving mountains for its people - literally.

The country has been bulldozing hundreds of mountains to make way for new cities but scientists are not happy, saying the consequences of the policy ‘‘have not been thought through’’.

In the past decade, mountains stretching over hundreds of kilometres have been demolished and the soil shovelled into valleys to create flat land, in a practise that has become commonplace in China.

The city of Lanzhou, in Gansu province, is in the process of bulldozing more than 700 mountains in what’s been dubbed the largest ‘‘mountain-moving project’’ in Chinese history.

Getting to Boko Haram's roots might have surprising implications (+video)

Is the militant group a self-styled Islamic insurgency, or part of a protracted civil war? The answer to that question matters.

By Jim Sanders, Guest blogger 

There is much to think about Boko Haram and Nigeria during the current crisis.

One thought that occurred to me recently is that as long as Boko Haram is viewed as an insurgency or terrorist group, the policy implications that flow from this will tend to cluster around counter-terrorism operations. 

However, if Boko Haram is seen or regarded as an element in a civil war that is raging in northeast Nigeria, and which threatens to spread more widely, a different approach to treating with the group might be needed.

The latter viewpoint would mean an initiative more in line with President Barack Obama’s commencement address at West Point on May 28 is required.

Beastie Boys Win $1.7M in Copyright Case vs. Monster Beverage

NEW YORK — Beastie Boys' fight for their right to not let Monster Beverage Corp use the hip-hop group's music without their permission resulted in a verdict of $1.7 million on Thursday.

A federal jury in Manhattan issued the verdict on the eighth day of trial in a copyright dispute between members of the Brooklyn-born band and the energy drink maker over songs the band says Monster used in a 2012 promotional video without a license.