Six In The Morning Sunday August 23

UK

British embassy in Tehran reopens four years after closure

The British embassy in Iran has reopened, nearly four years after it was closed.

Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond is in Tehran with a delegation of business leaders for a ceremony to mark the reopening. Iran is simultaneously reopening its embassy in London.

The UK embassy was closed in 2011 after it was stormed by protesters during a demonstration against sanctions.

Mr Hammond is the first UK foreign secretary to visit Iran since 2003.

The visit comes weeks after Iran reached a deal with six world powers aimed at curbing its nuclear programme.

'Important milestones'

On arriving in Tehran, Mr Hammond tweeted: "First British Ministerial visit since 2003. Historic moment in UK-Iran relations."

Earlier, he said the the nuclear deal and the election of Hassan Rouhani as president in June 2013 - who has pledged greater engagement with the Western World - had been "important milestones" in the improved relations between the two countries.

Cairo citizens caught between Isis violence and Abdel Fatah al-Sisi’s draconian security crackdowns

With journalists and activists jailed and a new terrorism law in effect, a culture of fear is growing in Egypt

Jared Malsin in Cairo

Sunday 23 August 2015 00.05 BST

The blast shook buildings for miles around. Sleeping residents awoke, called each other, then stared at glowing screens, seeking an explanation for the explosion and the sirens wailing in the distance.

Last Thursday a massive car bomb had detonated outside a security building in Shubra Al-Khaima, a working-class district on Cairo’s northern edge. Chunks of concrete had been blasted off the building, shards of glass were sprinkled across the pavement. The windows of the neighbouring apartment building had been blown out, the private spaces of the families within flung open to the street.

Such incidents have become almost routine in Cairo. The Egyptian state is locked in battle with an accelerating insurgency. In June, Egypt’s chief prosecutor,Hisham Barakat, was assassinated in a bombing in an elite Cairo neighbourhood. Days later, insurgents staged a brazen attack on the military’s positions in north Sinai. Last week, Islamic State militants claimed to have beheaded a Croatian man who was abducted from a desert highway outside Cairo.

North Korea meets South Korea for talks – but neither side is willing to back down

Artillery exchanges and propaganda barrages have raised border tension

DONALD KIRK

 

SEOUL

 

Sunday 23 August 2015

North Korea sent its highest-ranking general to conduct top-level talks with the South on Saturday, as both sides initially appeared eager to prevent bloodshed days after they traded artillery shells near the demilitarised zone.

Hwang Pyong-so, political director of the North Korean armed forces, was sent to talk with Kim Kwan-jin, the national security adviser to South Korea’s President Park Geun-hye, at the “truce” village of Panmunjom, an abandoned settlement on the de facto border between North and South Korea.

General Hwang arrived in formal military uniform, sparkling with medals, while Mr Kim wore a dark suit. With Hwang was Kim Yong-gon, the ranking North Korean in charge of inter-Korean affairs, who faced the Unification Minister of South Korea, Hong Yong-pyo.

Deliberate Deception: Washington Gave Answer Long Ago in NSA Case

By Matthias Gebauer, René Pfister and Holger Stark

For months, the German government sought to create the impression it was still waiting for an answer from the US on whether it could share NSA target lists for spying with a parliamentary investigation. The response came months ago.

The order from Washington was unambiguous. The United States Embassy in Berlin didn't want to waste any time and moved to deliver the diplomatic cable without delay. It was May 10, 2015, a Sunday -- and even diplomats aren't crazy about working weekends. On this day, though, they had no other choice. James Melville, the embassy's second-in-command, hand delivered the mail from the White House to Angela Merkel's Chancellery at 9 p.m.

The letter that Melville handed over to Merkel's staff contained the long-awaited answer to how the German federal government could proceed with highly classified lists of NSA spying targets. The so-called "selector" lists had become notorious in Germany and the subject of considerable grief for Merkel because her foreign intelligence agency, the BND, may have helped the NSA to spy on German firms as a result of them. Theselector lists, which were fed into the BND's monitoring systems on behalf of the NSA, are reported to have included both German and European targets that were spied on by the Americans.

Two dozen skeletons found in Malaysian mass grave

A mass grave holding 24 "trafficking victims" found on the Thai-Malaysia border during ongoing police operation.

23 Aug 2015 08:31 GMT

Malaysian police have found 24 human skeletons - all believed to be victims of human trafficking - in newly discovered graves along the Thai border in the northern Malaysian state of Perlis.

"Following on from the operation in which we found ... bodies of illegal immigrants, 24 more bodies have been found and dug up," police said in a statement on Sunday, adding that the remains had been handed over to medical experts.

The heavily forested Thai-Malaysia border has been a transfer point for smugglers transporting people to Southeast Asia by boat from Myanmar and Bangladesh.

The individuals are often held for ransom in squalid conditions and, according to some witness accounts, are subjected to torture and starvation.

Thousands protest against Lebanese govt over uncollected rubbish

Latest update : 2015-08-23

Lebanese police fired tear gas and water cannon and shot in the air to try to disperse thousands of protesters in Beirut calling on the government to step down for mishandling a dispute which left rubbish uncollected in the streets for weeks.

Police and security forces cordoned off the centre of the capital, around the parliament and government buildings, to thwart the biggest protest in recent months against authorities.

Police said 35 people, including protesters and police, were injured.

“The people want the overthrow of the regime,” said protesters using the famous chants made by Arab protesters during the height of popular protests that swept the region after 2011 and toppled several longstanding rulers.

Last month the country was left with mounting piles of rubbish after politicians, divided by regional and local conflict, were unable to agree where to dump the capital’s refuse.