After a freeze of more than three years, the leaders of South Korea and Japan resumed formal talks focusing on North Korea’s pursuit of nuclear bombs, and a long-running dispute over Japan’s wartime atrocities.

A Japanese soldier who hid in the Philippine jungle for three decades, refusing to believe the Second World War was over until his former commander returned and ordered him to surrender, has died in Tokyo aged 91.

Japan’s government apologised today for an accident in which three people in Southern China inhaled poison gas from decaying chemical weapons abandoned by Japan’s former Imperial army.