This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service.

I'm Jackie Leonard and in the early hours of Thursday,

the 15th of June, these are our main stories,

evidence of acute food shortages and starvation in North Korea,

where some people dying in the streets.

Greece declares three days of national mourning,

after at least 79 migrants died in a shipwreck off its southern coast.

And scientists have engineered polio vaccines

to prevent them mutating into a dangerous form

that can cause outbreaks of the disease.

Also in this podcast in Milan...

Italy says farewell to the former Prime Minister Silvio Badole Sconi

with a state funeral.

North Korea is in a period of unprecedented isolation.

It's been more than three years since it sealed its borders

in response to the COVID pandemic, and it hasn't reopened them.

This has likely created some of the harshest conditions

North Koreans have ever had to live through.

Three people living in North Korea have risked their lives

to tell the BBC what is happening.

We've been secretly communicating with them for months

with the help of an organisation in South Korea called DailyNK.

...