Six In The Morning Friday July 17

Chattanooga shootings: House searched after marines killed

• 17 July 2015
 
• From the sectionUS & Canada

US police have been searching the house of a 24-year-old man who was killed after shooting dead four Marines in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

The attacks at two US Navy sites on Thursday morning were being investigated as an "act of domestic terrorism", said a district lawyer.

The FBI has said it has no indication of what Mohammad Youssuf Abdulazeez's motive was at this stage.

A female sailor remains in a serious condition in hospital.

Two others were also injured.

Police have sealed off the area around the house in which the gunman lived as they attempt to piece together what led to the attacks.

Eye-witnesses said two women were led away from the house in the Hixson suburb of Chattanooga in handcuffs.

Japan scraps Zaha Hadid's Tokyo Olympic stadium design

Prime minister Shinzo Abe says $2bn stadium will be rethought and new plan will ‘start from zero’

Staff and agencies

Friday 17 July 2015 08.48 BST

Japan’s prime minister has announced that controversial plans for the main stadium for the 2020 Olympics – designed by Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid – will be redone because of spiralling costs.

Shinzo Abe said the stadium won’t be completed in time for the 2019 Rugby World Cup, as planned.

“We have decided to go back to the start on the Tokyo Olympics-Paralympics stadium plan, and start over from zero,” Abe told reporters after a meeting at his office with Yoshiro Mori, chairman of the Tokyo 2020 organising committee.

The government has come under growing criticism as the estimated cost for the new National Stadium rose to 252bn yen (£1.3bn, $2bn).

'I'm Not a Butcher': An Interview with Islamic State's Architect of Death

By Christoph Reuter

For one and a half years, Abu Abdullah was responsible for organizing Islamic State's suicide bombings in Baghdad. He is one of the organization's rare leading figures to be captured alive. SPIEGEL met with him in a high-security prison in Baghdad.

The heavy gate slowly opened, but only after the guards had called in to headquarters to confirm the identity of the SPIEGEL team and its 10 p.m. appointment. Inside was an obstacle course of four-meter-high (13 feet) concrete walls with Humvees, equipped with mounted machine guns, parked at two different corners. Only then did the actual prison gate appear.

The high-security facility is in Baghdad, but its name and exact location cannot be revealed. These were the conditions for an interview with its most prominent inmate: a gaunt man in his late 30s known by his nom de guerre, Abu Abdullah. For one and a half years, he was the head logistician for suicide attacks carried out by Islamic State in Baghdad. Abu Abdullah is one of the few Islamic State leaders to have been taken into custody alive. Most either blow themselves up or swallow the capsules of poison many of them carry so as to avoid capture. Or they die in a firefight. Being captured alive is not part of the terror group's plan.

Hundreds of Johannesburg families evicted by 'Red Ants'

“They were chanting, waving crow bars; their goal was clearly to intimidate”

Nigel Branken is a community activist who lives in Hillbrow, a neighbourhood adjacent to Berea. He is one of the few white South Africans living in this impoverished area. He and his family moved there from the much wealthier suburbs to help shine a light on the many difficulties faced by local residents. 

The night before, I heard word that this mass eviction was going to take place in the morning. I quickly conferred with several other community activists and we decided to bring out as many cameras as possible in order to document it.

Though they were supposed to be given 48 hours’ notice, The Ridge residents said they didn’t get word of the eviction until about 3am – and it was scheduled for 10am! We went there at dawn, waiting for the Red Ants. I had encountered them during another eviction a few weeks ago in another part of the city, and I saw some of them stealing belongings from the people they had just thrown out onto the street.

At The Ridge, many residents had already taking their furniture out onto the sidewalk. This was not an easy endeavour, since the buildings are 14-storeys high and the elevators don’t work. Some of the families had lived there for 15 years, and had a lot of belongings to take out. 

MH17 still divides the West and Russia, one year on

Moscow rejects calls for international court to examine fatal Malaysia Airlines flight

Daniel McLaughlin in Kiev

One year ago, 298 people boarded an aircraft at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam for a midday flight to Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia.

Once the 15 crew-members were on board, the passengers filed through gate G3 onto the waiting Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 and settled in for a 12-hour flight.

Most were Dutch tourists, but there were also dozens of Malaysians and Australians heading home, and delegates travelling to an international Aids conference in Melbourne. In all, passengers from 10 countries were on the aircraft, 80 of them children.

Just over three hours into the journey, with flight MH17 cruising at about 500 knots (926 km/h) at an altitude of 10,060m, air traffic control in Dnipropetrovsk, eastern Ukraine, sought to hand over monitoring of the plane to colleagues in Rostov, southwestern Russia.

Sea warming leads to ban on Arctic fishing

July 17, 2015 - 3:53PM

Steven Lee Myers

The United States and four other nations that border the Arctic Ocean have pledged to ban commercial fishing in the international waters of the Arctic until more scientific research can be done on how warming seas and melting ice are affecting fish stocks.

The agreement came as an annual report on the world's climate - released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the American Meteorological Society - said temperatures on the ocean surface reached the highest levels in 135 years of record keeping.

The ocean's rising temperature, which was particularly acute in the Northern Pacific last year, has drawn fish stocks farther north. That development, along with the shrinking levels of ice, has raised the prospect of industrial-scale fishing in the once-inaccessible Arctic.

"Climate change is affecting the migration patterns of fish stocks," said Norway's foreign minister, Borge Brende.