Even as the world changed around him, North Korean leader Kim Jong Il remained firmly in control, ruling absolutely at home and keeping the rest of the world on edge through a nuclear weapons programme.

I had very mixed feelings as the Shinkansen pulled into Hiroshima station. This was a city I had always wanted to visit. My father was in the Fleet Air Arm and was flying off HMS Implacable in the Coral Sea during the Second World War. On the morning of 6 August 1945, there was a notice posted on the aircraft carrier forbidding all aircraft from flying in the Hiroshima sector until further notice. Obviously they had no idea that this was the day America dropped the first atomic bomb on that city. Young as they were, a notice like this was like a red rag to a bull.

Republican presidential candidates pounced on front-runner Newt Gingrich yesterday to try to blunt his surge at the last debate before Iowa launches the 2012 US election season.

US Vice President Joe Biden has called on Turkey to impose new sanctions against Iran, while praising Ankara for its role in pressuring Syria to stop its bloody crackdown on protesters.

Twenty-one North Koreans were found in a boat that floated into South Korean waters earlier this week in the Yellow Sea, the largest such arrival in nine months.

There's a sense in which Lee Blessing's A Walk in the Woods is the ultimate park bench play – the customary two casual strangers replaced by a pair of nuclear arms negotiators (one from the US, the other from the Soviet Union) who meet for regular private conversations away from the official Geneva talks. The political climate has changed dramatically since the piece – inspired by an actual "walk in the woods" in the early 1980s when negotiators drafted their own breakthrough plan, soon to be rejected by both governments – was first seen in 1987. It's no longer a superpower stand-off that causes dread but our failure to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons in small unstable regimes and, potentially, sub-national groups. Does this mean that the play is now looking dated?

The UN nuclear agency has said it is "increasingly concerned" about intelligence suggesting that Iran continues to secretly work on developing a nuclear payload for a missile and other components of a nuclear weapons programme.

The Ukraine has opened the world's only nuke museum to celebrate its independence day.

Paper lanterns float on the Motoyasu River near Hiroshima's Atomic Bomb Dome yesterday, the 66th anniversary of the nuclear bomb that killed some 140,000 people in the city in 1945.

Prime Minister Naoto Kan today took his campaign against nuclear energy in Japan to Hiroshima which 66 years ago became the world's first victim of an atomic bomb.

On 6 August 1945, the US dropped the first atomic bomb on the Japanese town of Hiroshima.

Saturday marks the 66th anniversary since the US dropped the first atomic bomb in the Japanese town of Hiroshima.

The skids are under the nuclear industry. The big recycling plant at Sellafield is to shut down because its only customers, Japanese nuclear power stations, are closing following the Fukushima accident. Good riddance? Not so fast. Ask this: should we fear nuclear power more than climate change?