Six In The Morning Monday March 7

Migrant crisis: EU seeks to close Balkan route at summit

Turkish and EU leaders have gathered in Brussels for an emergency summit on tackling Europe's worst refugee crisis since World War Two.

The EU aims to stem the flow of migrants and plans to declare the route north through the Balkans closed.

It will press Turkey to take back economic migrants and has pledged to give Ankara €3bn (£2.3bn; $3.3bn).

Last year, more than a million people entered the EU illegally by boat, mainly going from Turkey to Greece.

Some 13,000 are stranded on Greece's border with Macedonia.

Islamic leaders talk Palestinian violence in Jakarta

Indonesian President Joko Widodo urged Israel to end the "colonization" of the Palestinian territories, speaking to Muslim leaders in Jakarta. Representatives from almost 50 nations attended the Islamic world summit.

International patience for Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories had "long run out," Widodo said in his Monday speech.

"As part of the international community, Israel must immediately stop its illegal activities and policies in occupied territories," he said while opening a special summit of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) in Jakarta.

Indonesia and the Islamic world were "ready to take concrete steps to push Israel to end its colonization of Palestine and its arbitrary actions" in Jerusalem, according to Widodo, the leader of the world's most populous Muslim nation.

Delegates from 49 out of 57 OIC countries traveled to Jakarta to attend the extraordinary conference, which was organized at the request of the Palestinian National Authority.

Two teenage girls on jihadist flight alert return home

Two French teenagers suspected of trying to travel to the Islamic State (IS) group-controlled areas as Syria and Iraq returned home Sunday night, two days after they went missing, according to French officials.

The two girls, identified as Israe, 15, and 16-year-old Louisa, disappeared from their school in Haute-Savoie in the French Alps on Friday, prompting the police to launch a search for the pair.

The teenage girls were spotted leaving the Carillons de Seynod High School, located on the outskirts of the town of Annecy, at 1pm on Friday, March 4, according to public prosecutors.

The girls’ classmates began to worry about their whereabouts and made an attempt to intercept them at the Chambéry train station. When that failed, they alerted authorities at around 7.30pm.

Public prosecutors said they had reason to suspect the girls wanted to leave for Syria and had plans to get on a Paris-bound train from Chambéry.

Women cocoa farmers struggle with less pay, land and training compared with men

March 7, 2016 - 5:45PM

Esther Han

Consumer Affairs Editor

Women in the cocoa supply chains of the world's biggest chocolate makers are struggling every day with less pay, lack of land and tools, and exclusion from decision-making roles, an advocacy group says.

A year since concluding Mars' action plan to tackle gender inequality "fell short", Nestle's revised plan was "more solid", and Mondelez' plan was "moving in the right direction", Oxfam says they can do a whole lot more.

There is a continual struggle between male heirs and women who want to have a piece of land to own and grow 

Agathe Vanie

In Pakistan, HIV is still a taboo that leads to discrimination

ALMEN TAHIR 

LAHORE: Nazir Masih, 58, an HIV/AIDS patient, became an outcast when he socially disclosed he was suffering from the deadly disease.

But he did not give up. Masih launched an organisation to help AIDS patients and spread awareness about the disease in the country.

“I was forced to drop out of school at the age of 11 as a breadwinner for my family. I tried working as a motor mechanic but earnings were low against long hours. I left the job and tried my luck working in Abu Dhabi. Things worked out and I went to the place where I worked as a domestic worker for a rich Arab family and earned enough money to send home,” says Nazir Masih, founder and CEO of New Life Aids Control Society.

Past haunts China’s media reforms as party propaganda goes digital

By Pu Huangyu, Initium Media

Since the end of 2013, a great deal of online media combining popular fads with communist ideology has appeared on China’s Internet.

All this reflects a behind-the-scenes push to roll the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) propaganda machine into the digital age. With the onset of online technology, the party’s traditional propaganda methods have lost mass appeal and are no longer viewed as an efficient tool for molding public opinion.

That’s why the Publicity Department of the CCP in recent years has been seeking innovative ways to harness the Internet for propaganda purposes. Some young party supporters welcome the move. But opponents say it’s merely an innovation in the way propaganda is delivered rather than a substantive change in content.

Groundbreaking party music video

On Feb. 2, the official news agency Xinhua posted an unprecedented animated music video called “Divine Song: Four Comprehensives” on Sina Weibo, China’s largest online social network.