According to diplomats, United Nations officials and a variety of non-government organizations, NORTH KOREA STANDS YET AGAIN ON THE BRINK OF A MAJOR FOOD SHORTAGE. "The prospect of hunger related deaths in the next few months is approaching certainty," says Marcus Noland, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute and co-author of a just released study raising alarms about the prospect of renewed famine. In fact, one Seoul-based NGO, the Research Institute for North Korean Society, asserts that there have already been a handful of people in small, agricultural villages who have died from starvation.

The emerging shortages demonstrate, again, how vexing it is for the outside world to deal with Kim Jong Il and his regime. Less than two weeks after U.S. intelligence officials in Washington presented evidence that Pyongyang had helped Syria build a nuclear reactor - a site destroyed by the Israeli air force last September - sources tell TIME that a team of U.S. diplomats and officials from the U.S. Agency for International Development is now in Pyongyang, as part of the overall nuclear talks, trying to negotiate an expedited package of food aid. THE U.S. HAS PROPOSED GIVING THE NORTH 500,000 METRIC TONS OF GRAIN, but only if the North agrees to some monitoring of its distribution to ensure that the food is not diverted to the military or to the North Korean political elite.

The carefully choreographed summit between Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda and Chinese President Hu Jintao - the first visit by a Chinese president to Tokyo in a decade - was aimed at bolstering ties between the Asian giants. The two also discussed China's contentious handling of protests in Tibet. Fukuda praised Beijing for agreeing to meet with representatives of the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader. "We see the talks as a first step. We take them seriously," said Hu, adding that it was important for both sides to avoid "separatism, violence and obstructions to the success of the Olympics."

Fukuda also said he hoped for a successful Beijing Olympics, recalling THE 1964 SUMMER GAMES IN TOKYO THAT MARKED JAPAN'S EMERGENCE ON THE WORLD STAGE AFTER ITS DEFEAT IN WORLD WAR II. Fukuda, however, said he had not decided whether to attend the opening ceremony. "The world is watching. We hope the Chinese government and people realize this and that people will be able to watch the games with pleasure," he said.

Fukuda also said the countries were on the verge of a resolution of a thorny dispute over THE EXPLOITATION OF NATURAL GAS FIELDS IN THE EAST CHINA SEA. China is tapping the fields, but Japan says they should be jointly developed. They announced the holding of annual summits, and repeatedly called for a new period of warm, future-oriented relations. "WE AGREE THAT COOPERATING TOWARD LONG-TERM PEACE AND FRIENDSHIP IS OF UTMOST IMPORTANCE," they said in a joint statement released after the summit.

The Pope will text daily messages of inspiration and hope during the six-day Sydney event while digital prayer walls will be erected at event sites and the church will set up a Catholic social networking Web site akin to a Catholic Facebook. The Catholic Church said it decided to use technology to connect to the estimated 225,000 young Catholics expected to attend the World Youth Day (WYD) celebrations that start on July 15.

"We wanted to make WYD08 a unique experience by using new ways to connect with today's tech-savvy youth," Bishop Anthony Fisher said in a statement on Wednesday. Australian telecoms firm Telstra will provide voice, data, mobile, broadband and broadcast services for the event, as well as erect digital prayer walls at event sites. Telstra said it plans to connect 8,000 volunteers, 2,000 clergy, 3,000 media and an anticipated 225,000 pilgrims to more than 700 locations around Sydney.

Australia's Catholic nuns are already praying for good weather for the Pope's visit. The Catholic church is the biggest in Australia with about 5 million members, compared to about 4 million Anglicans among the nation's 21 million people.

THE UNITED STATES IS THE WORLD'S TOP PRODUCER AND EXPORTER OF CORN, which is largely used for animal feed. But with nearly A QUARTER OF THE U.S. CORN CROP GOING TO ETHANOL PRODUCTION, any decline in yields could tighten supplies at a time when the weak dollar has boosted exports, pushing prices even higher and adding to food inflation.

"There is so much going on you can't afford to lose any corn acres, and if you look at the last three years we haven't been above 151 bushels per acre and there is nothing this year to indicate anything different," said analyst Randy Mittelstaedt of Chicago trade house R.J. O'Brien. PRICES ARE UP ROUGHLY 60 PERCENT FOR THE YEAR AND A HUGE 170 PERCENT OVER THE PAST TWO YEARS. The effects are being felt by consumers through higher prices for food items like cooking oil and corn flakes.

Meat companies are also feeling the pain. The largest U.S. chicken producer, Pilgrim's Pride Corp, said on Monday its FEED COSTS WILL RISE BY MORE THAN $800 MILLION IN FISCAL 2008 ending in September. The rise in food prices has triggered criticism over the use of corn to produce ethanol.

Chaiten erupted last Friday, sending a towering plume of ash, some 20 miles (30 kilometers) into the sky, that has since coated the surrounding area of southern Chile and reached into neighboring Argentina. No lava flow has yet been detected down Chaiten's sides, but Chile's National Emergency Office said the volcano was spitting bits of molten rock and that remaining civilians and troops were being evacuated across a fjord. "The situation has changed suddenly," national emergency official Rodrigo Rojas said in an interview. "Today the volcano is erupting with pyroclastic material on a different scale."

The government ordered the evacuation of a 30-mile (50 km) radius around the volcano - which lies some 760 miles (1,220 km) south of the capital, Santiago - including two dozen people who had refused to leave their homes and animals. It appealed to anyone still on remote farms in the area to leave.

The ash is more than 6 inches (15 cm) thick in some places near Chaiten, contaminating water supplies and coating houses, vehicles and trees. Thousands of head of cattle are being moved out of the area. Chile has the world's second most active string of volcanoes behind Indonesia. It is home to 2,000 volcanoes, 500 of which experts say are potentially active. Around 60 have erupted over the past 450 years.

Hand, foot and mouth is a common childhood illness, but the current outbreak has led to 28 fatalities in China, mostly when linked with enterovirus 71 (EV71), which can cause a severe form of the disease, characterized by high fever, paralysis and meningitis. China's official Xinhua news agency put the number of cases of hand, foot and mouth disease at 15,799, up from about 12,000 cases reported on Tuesday, though it was not clear whether the jump was due to the disease's spread or more thorough reporting.

"The situation is completely different from SARS," Zhong Nanshan, a Chinese expert on respiratory diseases, said in an article posted on the government Web site of southern Guangdong province, where SARS was discovered in 2002. "At present, the disease has already been diagnosed and there is proper prevention, so it will not evolve into a SARS-like epidemic."

Hand, foot and mouth disease is also making the rounds of other parts of Asia, with Singapore reporting a 75 percent surge in hand, food and mouth cases to 10,490 this year compared with last year, while Vietnam's health ministry said the country had about 3,000 cases in the first four months of the year, more than the total number of reported cases for 2007.

ASEAN secretary-general Surin Pitsuwan said COASTAL DEVELOPMENTS HAD RESULTED IN MANGROVES, WHICH ACT AS A NATURAL DEFENCE AGAINST STORMS, being lost. A study of the 2004 Asian tsunami found that areas near healthy mangroves suffered less damage and fewer deaths. Mr Surin, speaking at a high-level meeting of the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Singapore, said the combination of more people living in coastal areas and the loss of mangroves had exacerbated the tragedy. "Encroachment into MANGROVE FORESTS, WHICH USED TO SERVE AS A BUFFER BETWEEN THE RISING TIDE, BETWEEN BIG WAVES AND STORMS AND RESIDENTIAL AREAS; all those lands have been destroyed," the AFP news agency reported him as saying. "HUMAN BEINGS ARE NOW DIRECT VICTIMS OF SUCH NATURAL FORCES."

His comments follow a news conference by Burma's minister for relief and resettlement, Maung Maung Swe, who said more deaths were caused by the cyclone's storm surge rather than the winds which reached 190km/h (120mph). "The wave was up to 12ft (3.5m) high and it swept away and inundated half the houses in low-lying villages," the minister said. "They did not have anywhere to flee."

Mangroves have been long considered as "bio-guards" for coastal settlements. A study published in December 2005 said healthy mangrove forests helped save Sri Lankan villagers during the Asian tsunami disaster, which claimed the lives of more than 200,000 people. While TWO PEOPLE DIED IN THE SETTLEMENT WITH DENSE MANGROVE and scrub forest, UP TO 6,000 PEOPLE LOST THEIR LIVES IN A NEARBY VILLAGE WITHOUT SIMILAR VEGETATION.

Archbishop Rowan Williams told Vatican Radio before his encounter with the Pope today that he was expecting "a fairly informal and low-key meeting." Williams added: "I hope to bring him up to date on our plans about the Lambeth conference, perhaps to discuss with him a little what's going to be happening at the [Christian-Muslim] conference this week at Palazzola and just touch base with him about China, the initiatives we're involved in with regard to the churches in China."

The Anglican leader is in Rome this week for the 7th Building Bridges seminar with Christian and Muslim scholars, scheduled for Tuesday through Thursday. Vatican Radio noted that some people consider the current relationship between the Holy See and the Anglican Communion to be in its most difficult moment since the Second Vatican Council.

"It depends where you're looking from," Williams responded. "I think that in terms of the conflicts within the Anglican Communion then yes, it's an unprecedentedly difficult time, no two ways about that." The Anglican Communion is facing a fracture because parts of the group, notably the Episcopal Church in the United States, have approved the ordination of women and homosexuals as bishops.

However, Williams noted that partially through the work of the Anglican Center in Rome, "tremendously deep foundations have been laid" in the Anglican-Catholic relationship. The Anglican Center was founded in 1966 on the wave of ecumenical enthusiasm engendered by Vatican II and the birth of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission.

Retail gas prices edged lower, but appear poised to rise to new records of their own in coming weeks. A new Goldman Sachs prediction that oil prices could rise to $150 to $200 within two years seemed to motivate much of Tuesday's buying, although a falling dollar and increasing concerns about declining crude production in Mexico and Russia contributed, analysts say.

The Energy Department raised its oil and gasoline price forecasts, but also predicted that high prices will cut demand more than previously thought. Oil prices have nearly doubled from about $62 a barrel a year ago, which Goldman sees as a sign that the world is in the midst of a "super spike" in oil prices. Analyst Arjun Murti said in a research note released Monday that prices would ultimately force demand to fall sharply.

Not everyone shares Goldman's view. Tim Evans, an analyst at Citigroup Inc., countered Goldman's analysis with a note predicting that crude prices could as easily fall to $40 a barrel as rise to $200 over the next two years because supplies are, as Evans put it, comfortable.

Separately, in comments certain to fan rising tension between Moscow and Tbilisi, the "foreign minister" of the breakaway Black Sea region was quoted as saying it was ready to hand over military control to Russia.
"We literally have to avert war," Temur Iakobashvili, a Georgian State Minister, told reporters in Brussels.

Asked how close to such a war the situation was, he replied: "Very close, because we know Russians very well. We know what the signals are when you see propaganda waged against Georgia. We see Russian troops entering our territories on the basis of false information," he said.

Georgia, a vital energy transit route in the Caucasus region, has angered Russia, its former Soviet master with which it shares a land border, by seeking NATO membership.

The French president is understood to have changed his mind after meeting German Chancellor Angela Merkel. It is thought he feels EU opposition to the former UK prime minister is too strong because he backed the Iraq war.

The role, to be created under the new EU reform treaty, would replace the six-month rotating presidencies. Sources also indicated that Mr Sarkozy felt Mr Blair was not right for the role because Britain has failed to adopt the European single currency and the Schengen zone of passport-free travel.

Det Ch Insp Mick Neville said the system was an "utter fiasco" - with only 3% of London's street robberies being solved using security cameras. Although Britain had more cameras than any other European country, he said "no thought" had gone into how to use them.

Det Ch Insp Neville heads a unit which is piloting a new database to track offenders using CCTV. Speaking at the Security Document World Conference in London, Det Ch Insp Neville, the head of the Met's Visual Images, Identifications and Detections Office (Viido), said one of the problems was that criminals were not afraid of cameras.

One study suggests there may be more than 4.2 million CCTV cameras in the UK - the majority on private property - but until Viido was set up in September 2006 there had been no dedicated police unit to deal with the collection and dissemination of CCTV evidence. If Viido, based at Southwark Police Station, is judged to be a success it could lead to the development of specialist CCTV units across the country.

Despite still being a legal currency, many shopkeepers have been refusing to accept the worn out old notes, saying wholesale traders were also refusing to take them. The Somali shilling is valued at roughly 34,000 to the dollar - more than double what it is was a year ago - and many blame the fall in value on counterfeiters.

With an interim government focused on containing islamist insurgency, there is no one to control rampant counterfeiting of currency which is often exchanged for real dollars that are then taken out of the country. The problem has been compounded by sharply rising world food prices, leaving many in the lawless Horn of Africa nation of 10 million short of money to buy food, triggering several protests or riots in the past six months.

On Monday, thousands were on the streets of the bombed-out capital, clutching tattered old notes while shouting "Down with traders" and "We want to buy food".

Some 41,000 people were also missing, three days after Cyclone Nargis hit the country on Saturday, state radio said. The announcement came as international aid agencies pushed to launch a massive operation in the worst-affected areas of the country. Hundreds of thousands of people are said to be without clean water and shelter, with some areas still cut off. Burma's military leaders have said they will accept external help, in a move that correspondents say could reflect the scale of the disaster.

Pictures on state TV showed security services working to clear roads to allow help through, but in Rangoon and elsewhere there were complaints that the response to the disaster was weak. "Where are the soldiers and police? They were very quick and aggressive when there were protests in the streets last year," a retired government worker complained to Reuters news agency. He was referring to protests led by Buddhist monks last year that were quickly put down.

"WALL STREET IS GOING TO GO WHERE THE MONEY IS AND NOT WORRY ABOUT CONSEQUENCES," Buffett said during a news conference yesterday, a day after his Berkshire Hathaway Inc.'s annual meeting. "YOU'VE GOT A LOT OF LEEWAY IN RUNNING A BANK TO NOT TELL THE TRUTH FOR QUITE A WHILE."

Buffett and investing partner Charlie Munger also lambasted credit raters, bond insurers and policymakers for two days as a record 31,000 attended the annual affair in Omaha, Nebraska. In between scoldings, Buffett told investors MORE DAMAGE LAY AHEAD and dropped hints about where Berkshire is looking for purchases abroad as the dollar falls. "THERE'S GOING TO BE MORE PAIN," said Buffett, who repeated that the U.S. is in a recession. Even after the Federal Reserve arranged JPMorgan Chase & Co.'s $2.4 billion rescue of Bear Stearns in March, "THAT DOESN'T MEAN THE LOSSES ARE OVER BY A LONG SHOT."

The world's biggest banks and securities firms ABSORBED AT LEAST $312 BILLION IN ASSET WRITEDOWNS AND CREDIT LOSSES IN THE PAST 16 MONTHS after the collapse of the subprime mortgage market, comprised of loans to people with weak credit. Buffett, 77, and Munger, 84, built Omaha-based Berkshire into a $200 billion investment and holding company, buying companies whose management they trusted and whose business models they deemed superior. Buffett owns about a third of the shares, making him the world's richest man, according to Forbes magazine.