Six In The Morning Tuesday June 24

24 June 2014 Last updated at 08:28

Iraq crisis: Kerry in Irbil for talks as crisis rages

The US secretary of state has arrived in the northern Iraqi city of Irbil to hold talks with Kurdish leaders as Sunni rebels continue their offensive.

John Kerry's trip comes a day after he visited Baghdad and pledged US support for Iraqi security forces.

Mr Kerry said Iraq faced a moment of great urgency as its very existence was under threat.

The Sunni rebels say they have fully captured the country's main oil refinery at Baiji, north of Baghdad.

Mr Kerry's meetings with Kurdish leaders come as Iraqi Kurdish President Massoud Barzani strongly suggested that his region would seek formal independence from the rest of Iraq.

US police departments are increasingly militarised, finds report

• ACLU cites soaring use of war zone equipment and tactics
• Swat teams increasingly deployed in local police raids
• Seven civilians killed and 46 injured in incidents since 2010

• Ed Pilkington in New York
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• theguardian.com, Tuesday 24 June 2014 05.01 BST

At 3am on 28 May, Alecia Phonesavanh was asleep in the room she was temporarily occupying together with her husband and four children in the small town of Cornelia, Georgia. Her baby, 18-month-old Bou Bou, was sleeping peacefully in his cot.

Suddenly there was a loud bang and several strangers dressed in black burst into the room. A blinding flash burst out with a deafening roar from the direction of the cot. Amid the confusion, Phonesavanh could see her husband pinned down and handcuffed under one of the men in black, and while her son was being held by another. Everyone was yelling, screaming, crying. “I kept asking the officers to let me have my baby, but they said shut up and sit down,” she said.

As the pandemonium died down, it became clear that the strangers in black were a Swat team of police officers from the local Habersham County force – they had raided the house on the incorrect assumption that occupants were involved in drugs. It also became clear to Phonesavanh that something had happened to Bou Bou and that the officers had taken him away.

Robert Fisk on the jailing of Al-Jazeera journalists: A proxy in the war between Qatar and Saudi Arabia

Just as rape is a vile tool of war, so jail must be a routine method of shutting up journalists

As if the risk of being killed is not enough. Must journalists endure the threat of imprisonment as well as the threat of death or serious injury? It is not just the outrageous, unfair, trumped-up crudity of the charges against the three Al Jazeera journalists sentenced to years of imprisonment in Cairo – we are used to this treatment from Third World pseudo-revolutionary countries, although why Egypt should wish to be among their number is a political mystery in itself.

No, it is the bald fact that prison for journalists in one of the world’s most populous, historic countries must now be regarded as a normal part of the risks we take in covering the world. Just as rape is a vile tool of war, so jail must be a routine method of shutting us up. And in an awful sense, our Western leaders go along with this. Mohamed Fahmy, Baher Mohamed and Australian Peter Greste expected to be freed on Monday, although they must have known Egypt and “justice” do not have a lot in common.

Amsterdam gallery owner faces trial for selling ‘Mein Kampf’

Adolf Hitler's autobiographical manifesto was banned in the Netherlands in 1974

Peter Cluskey

Almost 90 years after it was first published, an Amsterdam antiques shop owner faces up to six months in jail for selling Adolf Hitler’s autobiographical manifesto, Mein Kampf (German for My Struggle) – which has been banned in the Netherlands since 1974.

A complaint against the Totalitarian Art Gallery was lodged by the Dutch Jewish Federation last October, and the public prosecutor’s office has taken the unusual step of confirming that its owner, Michiel van Eyck, has been subpoenaed to attend a pre-trial hearing on August 26th.

“The defendant said he knew there were statements in the book which insult Jews and incite hatred, discrimination and violence against them,” the prosecutor’s statement said. “Despite this, he had the book in stock with the aim of selling it.”

Five maths researchers win new $3m Breakthrough Prize

June 24, 2014 - 6:00PM

KENNETH CHANG

New York: Mathematicians, who are excluded from the Nobel awards, have finally got a lucrative prize of their very own. 

The inaugural Breakthrough Prize in mathematics (which incidentally, nets the winner a whopping $US3 million, compared to the $US1.2 million Nobel) was awarded on Monday to five maths researchers.The prize is funded by Silicon Valley luminaries Yuri Milner and Mark Zuckerberg.

Mr Milner, a Russian who dropped out of graduate studies in physics and became a successful investor in internet companies such as Facebook, hopes to make science lucrative and cool in a society that much more often celebrates athletes, entertainers, politicians and business tycoons.

Bangladesh woos China in snub to West

India likely to be watching closely as Sheikh Hasina bolsters ties with Beijing to repair dented legitimacy. Syed Tashfin Chowdhury

Dhaka, Bangladesh - Strenuous efforts by Bangladesh to court China are being seen as a snub to the West after vocal criticism of elections that brought Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina into office earlier this year.

Analysts say a high-profile visit to Beijing by Hasina, in which she pledged to be an "active partner" in a "China-led" century, was aimed to reinforce an already-cosy relationship.

The latest diplomatic manoeuvres will not go unnoticed in neighbouring India under its new Hindu nationalist leader Narendra Modi, who has blasted what he calls China's "expansionist" motives.