Six In The Morning Friday August 1

Israel to resume Gaza operation as truce with Hamas crumbles

1 August 2014 Last updated at 08:14

Gaza 72-hour humanitarian truce by Israel and Hamas begins

Israel and Hamas have put into effect an unconditional 72-hour humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza.

However, hours after the truce began, Palestinians said four people had been killed by Israeli fire, apparently in response to a rocket attack.

Israel says it will continue to destroy tunnels built by Hamas into Israel.

Some 1,460 Palestinians, mostly civilians, have died in the conflict, health officials say. Sixty-three Israelis, mostly soldiers, have died.

Israel says it aims to stop rocket attacks by Palestinian militants in Gaza and remove the threat of being attacked from the tunnels.

Hamas wants a blockade of Gaza, maintained by both Israel and Egypt, to be lifted.

Amazon tribe makes first contact with outside world

Indigenous people crossed from Peru into Brazil looking for help to combat illegal loggers and drug traffickers, researchers say

• Agence France-Presse
• theguardian.com, Friday 1 August 2014 07.53 BST

Isolated native people likely to be fleeing attacks in Peru have turned up in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest where they made contact with the outside world, according to a video released by the country’s indigenous authority.

Brazilian experts have said the tribespeople probably crossed the border as they had come under pressure from illegal logging and drug trafficking at home.

The tribe, part of the Pano linguistic group, made contact with the Ashaninka native people of northern Brazil in late June.

The meeting was documented in a video that was released by Brazil’s National Indian Foundation (Funai). In one scene an Ashaninka Indian in shorts gives bananas to two naked tribespeople armed with bows and arrows on the banks of the Envira river in the Brazilian state of Acre on the border with Peru.

Ukraine talks resume as experts return to MH17 crash site

Kiev parliament rejects PM’s resignation and boosts military spending

Daniel McLaughlin

Four-way talks on Ukraine’s conflict have resumed, after international investigators returned to the crash site of Flight MH17 and the nation’s parliament moved to boost military spending, avert a possible default and maintain access to foreign funding.

Representatives of Kiev, Moscow and the 57-state Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) gathered in the Belarussian capital Minsk last night, with envoys for pro-Russian rebels fighting in eastern Ukraine.

“Together with you we will do everything we can for our Ukraine, so as to somehow reduce the escalation, the conflict in eastern Ukraine,” Belarus’s autocratic leaderAlexander Lukashenko told Ukraine’s former president Leonid Kuchma, Kiev’s envoy to the talks.

Cold Paradise: US Struggles with Wave of Underage Immigrants

By Markus Feldenkirchen and Jens Glüsing in McAllen, Texas and La Ceira, Honduras

Fleeing violence back home, tens of thousands of children and youth are fleeing Central America for the United States, many unaccompanied by a parent. The influx has bent US asylum policy to the breaking point.

The trouble with paradise is its diabolic chill. Olga Arzu tries to keep warm by crossing her arms against her chest and rubbing her skin with her hands, but she is shivering nonetheless. Arzu had been excited about arriving here and the start of a new life, one that was supposed to be better than her last one. Instead she's been greeted with a high-powered air-conditioning system. And an equally cold asylum system.

Arzu's son Daylan clings to her leg. He's wearing a hoodie, but he's shivering as well. Back at home in the port city of La Ceiba in Honduras, Arzu's life may have been difficult and dangerous, but at least there wasn't any air-conditioning.

China confirms new generation nuclear-capable ICBM that can target US

August 1, 2014 - 4:52PM

Beijing: China has acknowledged the existence of a new intercontinental ballistic missile said to be capable of carrying multiple nuclear warheads as far as the United States, state-run media reports.

A government environmental monitoring centre in Shaanxi said on its website that a military facility in the province was developing Dongfeng-41 (DF-41) missiles, the Global Timesreported.

The DF-41 is designed to have a range of 12,000 kilometres, according to a report by Jane's Strategic Weapon Systems, putting it among the world's longest-range missiles.

It is "possibly capable of carrying multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles", the US Defence Department said in a report in June, referring to a payload of several nuclear warheads.

Iraqi Kurds, battling Islamist threat, press Washington for arms

By By Missy Ryan10 hours ago

 The semi-autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq is pressing the Obama administration for sophisticated weapons it says Kurdish fighters need to push back Islamist militants threatening their region, Kurdish and U.S. officials said.

A Kurdish official said the request was discussed during a Kurdish delegation's visit to Washington in early July, and U.S. officials said Washington was considering ways to bolster the Kurdish defenses.

The Kurds say U.S. help is critical to enable the Peshmerga, the Kurds' paramilitary force, to repel fighters from the Islamic State, an al Qaeda spinoff that seized a wide swath of Iraqi territory in a stunning advance in the last few months.