North Korea stages first party congress since 1980
North Korea is holding its most important political gathering in a generation, where Kim Jong-un will consolidate his control of the country.
The first full congress of the ruling party in 36 years is being closely watched for any shift in policies or changes in political leadership.
Mr Kim is expected to reassert his nuclear ambitions, amid speculation he will soon conduct a fifth nuclear test.
Foreign media have been invited but are not been allowed inside the venue.
The capital was spruced up ahead of the event and citizens layed flowers in central squares as it got under way.
From war to sweatshop for Syria's child refugees
Vast numbers of young Syrians in Turkey and beyond are having to work instead of going to school
Hamza sits at a sewing machine in a gloomy warehouse in southernTurkey, where he works 12 hours a day, six days a week. The Syrian can perform most of the roles on the assembly line: he knows how to mould leather into the shape of a shoe, or attach its sole with glue. Today Hamza threads its different parts together with the machine, and his boss looks on approvingly.
“He can make 400 shoes a day,” says the factory manager. “He’s a real man.”
Only he’s not. Aged just 13, Hamza is in fact a child. And so are more than a third of the workers in this sweatshop.
This is no anomaly. According to Unicef, more than half of Turkey’s 2.7 million registered Syrian refugees are children – and nearly 80% of them are not in school. Across the wider region, Unicef estimates that half of school-age Syrians – 2.8 million children – have no means of accessing education.
Hillary Clinton has openly courted the US Jewish vote - but the consequences could be severe
Whilst Clinton has been decidedly pro-Israeli and anti-boycott throughout her campaign, Sanders has paid a price for saying that US policy in the Middle East should be even-handed
First to Israel, which – unlike the sea-to-shining-sea hinterland of the American media – really can be a “land of the free” for its journalists. Gideon Levy, the deeply inspiring, admired and much hated columnist on Haaretz newspaper, has written an outraged attack on the 83 US senators who urged Obama in this glorious election year to increase yet again Washington’s military aid to Israel – by more than the present $3bn a year. “Ignoramuses,” Levy calls them and adds that their letter to the American president is “a disgrace”.
And when you realise that Gideon Levy is verbally assaulted by the pro-Israel lobby in the US almost as much as he is threatened by Israelis themselves, you know you’re talking about a man whose words will be treated with as much scorn by the present Obama administration as they will be by the next Clinton administration. “Your money, senators, is largely being spent on maintaining a brutal, illegal occupation that your country claims to oppose – but finances,” Levy has told the most powerful forum on the globe.
Brazil court suspends key Rousseff rival Cunha
Latest update : 2016-05-06Brazil’s Supreme Court Thursday suspended a powerful lawmaker at the center of efforts to impeach President Dilma Rousseff, on grounds he tried to obstruct a probe into his alleged corruption.
Eduardo Cunha, the speaker of Brazil’s lower house of Congress, is the architect of the impeachment drive that is expected to force Rousseff to step aside from office on Wednesday.
He said his suspension, the latest in a whirlpool of corruption scandals, was retaliation for his campaign against Rousseff.
Her supporters argued it was grounds for the impeachment drive now to be dropped, though it was not expected to spare her now that her case is in the hands of the Senate.
Trump v Clinton will be the dirtiest campaign in American political history
May 6, 2016 - 3:28PMPaul McGeough
Chief foreign correspondent
Washington: Hillary needs to get into the gutter – and there's a body of compelling evidence that it's her natural milieu. But as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, she needs to move fast.
The lesson from the fate of 16 would-be Republican nominees run over by the Donald Trump juggernaut is that it's never too soon to fight dirty.
Hillary Clinton and her surrogates have to throw dirt – throw lots of it, throw it first and throw it fast.
Welcome to USA 2016 – citadel for democracy in a troubled world. Welcome to what is expected to be the dirtiest campaign in American political history. See the candidates, the most unpopular to be run by either of the main parties, strut their stuff all the way to the vote on November 8.
But wait – having learnt almost nothing from their obsessive coverage of the parties' primary contests, the stars of the American news media are rushing ahead of themselves, producing sexy maps of a likely distribution of electoral college votes, based on current opinion polling.
'We are the Mau Mau': Kenyans share stories of torture
Kenyans who were arrested, beaten and tortured by the British during the fight for independence share their stories.
It's December 1952. Naomi Nziula Kimweli, her husband Kimweli Mbithuka Kilatya, and their three children are on a bus, returning to their home town to celebrate Christmas in what today is central Kenya. Life is good: Kimweli works at the Department of Public Works and Naomi is five months pregnant with their fourth child.
But then soldiers stop the coach and force everybody off. Kenya was then a colony of the United Kingdom, and the soldiers were commanded by a British officer. Naomi and Kimweli refer to him as Luvai, which in their Kamba language means "ruthless person".
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