Japan targets boosting birth rate to increase growth

Nursery school children wash their hands before eating lunch at Hinagiku nursery in MoriyamaJapan plans to include steps to raise the birth rate, such easier access to childcare and tax incentives, in a package of reforms due this month to tackle the biggest bottleneck to economic growth. Japan&;s population began declining four years ago after several years of warnings that the birth rate was too low, prompting some economists to applaud Prime Minister Shinzo Abe&039;s decision to put the issue on the agenda. "I want to confront the demographic problem head on and place particular emphasis on policies that will contribute to raising the birth rate," Abe said on Thursday after a cabinet meeting.

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German spy agency snooped on its own diplomat: radio

The report by the Berlin-based rbb Inforadio is the latest twist in a growing scandal over the activities of Germany’s BND stemming from revelations in 2013 by U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden. Without identifying its sources, rbb said the BND had monitored German Hansjoerg Haber, from 2008-2011 head of the EU’s observer mission in Georgia and subsequently a senior diplomat in Brussels.
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Italy’s painstaking bid to identify shipwrecked migrants

An Italian pathologist prepares instruments to perform autopsies on bodies of migrants who drowned in an April shipwreck while trying to cross the MediterraneanThe shy children from a dog-eared photograph found in the pocket of a migrant drowned off Italy may never know what happened to the man who might have been their father. Putting names to those who die while crossing the Mediterranean to Europe is a huge challenge for forensic scientists, with clues sometimes limited to no more than a scar or a solitary tatoo. Cristina Cattaneo and her team pull on sanitary gloves, robes and masks and transfer from refrigerated lorry to autopsy table the latest bodies to be recovered from an April shipwreck in which 800 people are believed to have died.

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