Six In The Morning Friday March 9

Trump and North Korea's Kim Jong-un to hold 'milestone' meeting

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and US President Donald Trump are to meet in person by the end of May, it has been announced, an extraordinary overture after months of mutual hostility.

News of the meeting was delivered by South Korean officials after talks with Mr Trump at the White House.

They passed a verbal message from Mr Kim, saying the North Korean leader was "committed to denuclearisation".

South Korea's President Moon Jae-in said the news "came like a miracle".

"If President Trump and Chairman Kim meet following an inter-Korean summit, complete denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula will be put on the right track in earnest," he said.

Tobacco: a deadly business

How children around the world are exposed to cigarette advertising

Research in more than 22 countries found cigarettes are being sold and promoted near schools by an industry that needs to recruit the young to maintains profits

by Sarah Boseley in London, Dan Collyns in Lima, Kate Lamb in Jakarta and Amrit Dhillon in Delhi

School children around the world are being exposed on a daily basis to cigarette advertising and promotions by a tobacco industry that needs to recruit the young to maintain its vast profits.

A major investigation in more than 22 countries across four continents by campaigners and experts has found cigarettes on sale close to school gates and advertising which normalises smoking. Stalls and shops full of vibrantly colourful branding sell single cigarettes at pocket money prices alongside sweets and candies.

Turkey sentences 25 journalists to prison terms, most on terror charges

An Istanbul court on Thursday sentenced 25 journalists to prison terms of up to seven and a half years over links to the group blamed by Turkey for the 2016 failed coup, in a mass trial of media staff detained after the putsch bid.

Twenty-three of the journalists were convicted of membership of an armed terror group while two more on lesser charges, the Dogan news agency said.

Almost all of those jailed worked for media close to the group of US-based preacher Fethullah Gulen, who Ankara says organised the coup bid. He denies the charges.

Many of those convicted worked for the Zaman newspaper, the most prominent of the media titles close to Gulen, which was taken over by the authorities in March 2016.

Hussain Khanwala: Village scarred by child abuse scandal

Victims of paedophile and pornography ring in Punjab's Kasur wait for justice years after being sexually assaulted.

by Alia Chughtai

The brick lanes of Hussain Khanwala are narrow and dark.

Three years ago, the largest child abuse scandal inPakistan's history shattered this rural Punjabi village, home to a poor farming community.

It is fewer than 20km from where seven-year-old Zainab Ansari was raped and murdered in January.

Little more than a month after the child's lifeless body was found in a rubbish tip, Mohammad Imran Ali - the main suspect also accused of several other sexual assault cases and killings - was sentenced to death.

NYT’s Bari Weiss Falsely Denies Her Years of Attacks on the Academic Freedom of Arab Scholars Who Criticize Israel

Glenn Greenwald
AFTER THE NEW YORK TIMES last April hired Bari Weiss to write for and edit its op-ed page, I wrote a long article detailing her history of pro-Israel activism and, especially, her involvement in numerous campaigns to vilify and ruin the careers of several Arab and Muslim professors due to their criticisms of Israel. I chose to profile Weiss’s history because (a) the simultaneous hiring of Bret Stephens generated so much controversy that Weiss’s hiring was ignored, even though it was clear her hiring would be more influential since she would be not just writing but also commissioning articles for that highly influential op-ed page; (b) the NYT was justifying these hires on the grounds of “diversity,” even though hiring hardcore, pro-Israel activists for that page (which has no Muslim columnists) was the literal opposite of diversity; and, most of all, (c) Weiss was masquerading as an opponent of viewpoint intolerance on college campuses even though her entire career had been built on trying to suppress, stigmatize, and punish academic criticisms of Israel.

'I am profoundly unsettled': inside the hidden world of gay conversion therapy

"Gay conversion" is discredited in Australia yet "fixing" same-sex attraction remains a mission for some groups – often with tragic results.

By Farrah Tomazin

9 MARCH 2018

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It’s been 25 years since I realised I was gay, and for the first time in as long as I can remember, I’m questioning why.

The images flickering across my computer screen have jolted me.

I’m logged into a “support group” run by Living Hope Ministries, one of the most prolific proponents of gay conversion in the world. And, for a moment, they’ve gotten under my skin.

“Tomboy girl, or girlie girl, she needs three things from her parents we call the three A’s,” a woman is explaining on the hour-long gender development video I’ve been sent.