Guangzhou

Aid agencies and African states called for more help on Tuesday to fight malaria, a disease that kills more than a million people each year, 90% of them in sub-Saharan Africa. A dire shortage of money, infrastructure and medical personnel continues to make drugs inaccessible to people who most need them — children and pregnant women, the two groups most vulnerable to the disease.

After days of frenzied speculation, a television station claimed on Friday to have captured proof of reclusive North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il living it up at a luxury hotel in China. The grainy footage broadcast by Japan’s Nippon Television station in Tokyo showed a bespectacled man with Kim’s trademark bouffant hairstyle surrounded by men in black as he got out of a limousine.

Hong Kong’s pro-democracy lawmakers on Monday sought more talks with Beijing on political reform in the city after a historic first meeting with a senior Communist Party official ended in acrimony. They said tense opening talks with Zhang Dejiang, party chief of the southern economic powerhouse province of Guangdong, should be just the beginning and they should be allowed to continue pressing their case.