Six In The Morning Friday August 28

Migrant crisis: Austria lorry held more than 70 bodies

Europe

Austrian officials now say the bodies of more than 70 people, thought to be migrants, were in an abandoned lorry found on a motorway on Thursday.

They originally estimated that between 20 to 50 people died in the vehicle, found near the Hungarian border.

Police sent to investigate the dumped lorry on the A4 road towards Vienna discovered the decomposing bodies.

The local police chief said it appeared those in the vehicle had been dead for one-and-a-half to two days.

The victims were probably already dead when the vehicle crossed into Austria from Hungary, authorities said. It is unclear how they died.

Modern-day Monuments Men take on Isis by 3D-mapping ancient sites militants are seeking to destroy

Digital record would enable local teams to rebuild antiquities using 3D printers if they were destroyed

IAN JOHNSTON

 

 

Friday 28 August 2015

A team of modern-day "Monuments Men" is being assembled to try to preserve a record of ancient buildings, sculptures and artefacts being destroyed by Isis in the Middle East.

However, unlike George Clooney’s film, in which a team of experts were sent in to Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II in a tale loosely based on real-life, experts plan to flood parts of the Middle East with 3D cameras, The Times reported.

These will be used mainly by local people to create a digital record of the antiquities, enabling them to be rebuilt using 3D printers if they are destroyed.

The £2m project was developed by the Institute for Digital Archaeology (IDA) in Oxford in response to the destruction of ancient sites by the extreme Islamist movement.

Why neither India nor Pakistan won the 1965 war

Both India and Pakistan say they won the 1965 war they fought against each other. The truth of the matter is, however, both sides actually lost the war, writes Shivam Vij.

India will celebrate the 50th anniversary of its 1965 war with Pakistan from August 28 to September 22. (Pictured above: Indian soldiers patrol the Line of Control). A lot of nationalism will be on display, including a “carnival.” India and Pakistan both claim to have won that war. for its part, Pakistan celebrates September 6 as Defense of Pakistan Day.

Here is what happened in 1965. Pakistan launched a secret mission to send 30,000 armed men into Indian-administered Kashmir so as to incite an insurgency and liberate Kashmir from India. This was known as Operation Gibraltar. By the time Indian forces realized this had happened, the fighters had reached the outskirts of Srinagar, the capital of Kashmir.

Courts crackdown in China's unsettled Xinjiang region

August 28, 2015 - 4:06PM

Chris Buckley

Hong Kong: Courts across Xinjiang, the volatile region of western China that is home to Muslim Uighurs, have sentenced 45 people to prison in recent days after convicting them of supporting organisations accused of terror attacks or of helping others flee abroad, the main state news agency reported on Thursday.

The Xinhua report did not describe the ethnicity of the defendants, but their names indicated that they were Uighurs, the Turkic minority in Xinjiang that has become increasingly estranged from Chinese government policies, especially following restrictions on their culture and Muslim religion.

The government held up the convictions as proof that it would not tolerate violent opposition in Xinjiang, which in recent years has suffered a spate of violent attacks by Uighurs, in many instances using knives or rudimentary explosives. The government describes the attacks as terrorism, frequently masterminded from abroad, but human rights groups and advocates of Uighur self-determination have said that the violence is often primitive and locally inspired, and driven by Uighur despair.

The Middle East is running out of water. Can they adapt?

The world’s demand for water is likely to surge in the next few decades, severely threatening national water security and economic growth in some parts of the world, experts say. 

By Beatrice Gitau, Staff

Rising global population and decreasing usable water supplies will cause the world’s demand for water to surge in the next few decades and intensify conflict in many countries, experts warn.

In the rankings by the World Resources Institute (WRI), fourteen of the 33 countries most likely to be water stressed in 2040 are in the Middle East, including nine considered extremely highly stressed – Bahrain, Kuwait, Palestine, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Oman, and Lebanon.

According to the researchers, the Middle East is already the least water-secure region in the world, because it draws heavily upon groundwater and desalinated sea water and faces "exceptional water-related challenges for the foreseeable future," they say.

Expert: We're 'locked-in' to 3 feet sea level rise

By Brandon Miller, CNN Meteorologist

Updated 2203 GMT (0503 HKT)

It was less than two years ago that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its all-encompassing assessment on the current state of climate change research and made projections for the future climate of our planet.

According to the latest from NASA, however, the projections the panel made for a rise in global sea levels of 1 to 3 feet may already be outdated.

According to Steven Nerem of the University of Colorado, we are "locked into at least 3 feet of sea level rise, and probably more."