Six In The Morning Saturday March 21

China, Japan and South Korea hold renewed talks

21 March 2015

The foreign ministers of China, Japan and South Korea are meeting for their first talks in three years.

The meeting in Seoul is likely to focus on ways to ease regional tensions over territorial and diplomatic disputes.

The three states have strong economic ties but relations still suffer from unresolved issues dating back to Japan's actions in World War Two.

A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman said he hoped the ministers would be able to "look forward into the future".

South Korea's Yun Byung-se welcomed Japan's Fumio Kishida and China's Wang Yi to South Korea's capital on Saturday.

Foreign ministers from the three countries last met in April 2012, for their sixth annual trilateral meeting.

Gold seizure highlights dilemma of diplomacy with North Korea

A UN report details a web of illegal TRADE networks, often facilitated by DPRK diplomats. What does this mean for how the world engages with the secret state?

Matthew Cottee

Last week a North Korean diplomat was caught smuggling gold estimated to be worth £1m from Singapore to Bangladesh. The route of travel and amount of gold seized suggests that North Korea was probably in the process of paying for something, but for what remains unclear.

Whilst some might question the outdated payment method, a recent UN security council report suggests that this a common tactic employed by the country to evade sanctions.

The report, chaired by a UN panel of experts on North Korea, focuses on the procurement networks established by Pyongyang, which have allowed it to continue TRADING illegally with international partners.

Boko Haram: Soldiers find at least 70 bodies in Nigerian town

Mass grave discovered under bridge after soldiers liberate Damasak

Soldiers from Niger and Chad who liberated the Nigerian town of Damasak from BokoHaram militants have discovered the bodies of at least 70 people scattered under a bridge, a witness said.

In what appeared to be an execution site for the Islamist group, the bodies were strewn beneath the concrete bridge on one of the main roads leading out of the town. At least one was decapitated.

The bodies were partially mummified by the dry desert air, while grass has began to grow around the corpses, suggesting that the killings had taken place some time ago.

Boko Haram has killed thousands of people in a six-year insurgency aimed at establishing an Islamic caliphate in northeast Nigeria. Damasak was seized by the group in November but recaptured by troops from Niger and Chad on Saturday as part of a multinational effort to wipe out the militants.

Sarajevo's struggles to contain jihadism

Bosnia-Herzegovina is often under suspicion of providing a particularly high number of recruits for terrorist group "Islamic State" (IS). However, its Muslim population rejects extremists.

It's a provocation: again and again, banners of the so-called "Islamic State" surface in Gornja Maoca, a small village in northeastern Bosnia-Herzegovina. They are seen on one wall, then another.

Locals take pictures of those banners and send them to the press. The result is always the same: a unit of the Bosnian anti-terror force SIPA (State Investigation and Protection Agency), is deployed from Sarajevo. But by the time the force arrives in Gornja Maoca, the banners have usually disappeared.

Bosnia-Herzegovina's security forces do not enjoy a very good reputation among the country's population. But when it comes to radical islamists SIPA cannot be accused of inactivity. In 2011, Bosnian Muslim Mevlid Jasarevic carried out a machine gun attack on the US embassy in Sarajevo in broad daylight. Since then, the country has been on the alert.

At Sadhana Forest, trees spring from once-barren land

The nonprofit group shows local people in India, Haiti, and Kenya how to plant trees in dry regions – and improve their lives.

By Gregory M. Lamb, Staff writer

Aviram Rozin was excited. He had just returned from Haiti where the 80,000 Maya nut trees that volunteers with Sadhana Forest had planted there during the past five years had started to flower. Before long each tree would be producing huge quantities of nuts high in protein and other nutrients. One tree could supply enough yearly protein for a family of five.

The nonprofit Sadhana Forest, cofounded by Mr. Rozin and his wife, Yorit, follows three simple strategies:

• Plant indigenous trees in arid regions that once had been forested but have become barren, useless land.

An unknown 24-year-old artist painted what may be the most reproduced painting in history

By Armin Rosen

Liu Chunhua, who was born in eastern China in 1944, does not even have an English-language Wikipedia page — but he did produce an image that was printed a staggering 900 million times.

The painting that re-wrote history, typified one of modern China's turning points, and came to epitomize one of the towering figures of the 20th century.

Liu was a government propagandist who belonged to a paramilitary "Red Guard" unit. He painted "Mao Zedong Goes To Anyuan"when he was 24, just a couple years after Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, a disastrous, decade-long attempt to head off possible challenges to Communist rule by reshaping Chinese society according to hardcore collectivist principles.