Jun 20 2019

Six In The Morning Thursday 20 June 2019

US confirms Iranian missile has shot down drone

A US military drone has been shot down by an Iranian surface-to-air missile while in international airspace over the Strait of Hormuz, US officials say.

Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) said it shot down the drone over Iranian airspace, near Kuhmobarak in the southern province of Hormozgan.

IRGC commander Maj-Gen Hossein Salami said the incident sent “a clear message to America”, state media said.

It comes at a time of escalating tension between the US and Iran.

On Monday, the US defence department said it was deploying 1,000 extra troops to the region in response to “hostile behaviour” by Iranian forces.

Human cost of Yemen war laid bare as civilian death toll put at 100,000

Report outlines deadly impact of direct targeting of civilians as researchers call for resolution to conflict

As the court of appeal prepares to rule on the legitimacy of the British government’s continued supply of weapons to the Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen, new figures show the conflict’s death toll is fast approaching the 100,000 mark.

The extent of civilian casualties caused by direct targeting as the war with Houthi rebels enters its fifth year has been outlined in a report by the the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project (Acled).

Extending its previous research into fatalities to cover the start of the Yemenconflict in March 2015 through to the present day, the project claims to provide the most comprehensive evaluation of the war to date.

Nearly half of Japanese people who want to get married ‘unable to find suitable partner’

Research comes as Japan’s birth rate hits lowest level since records began

Almost half of single people in Japan who want to get married are unable to find a suitable partner, according to a government survey.

However, 61.4 per cent of those surveyed by the country’s Cabinet Office said they were not doing anything to change their situation.

The research comes amid long-standing concerns over Japan’s birth rate, which has fallen to its lowest level since records began in 1899.

Brewing ConflictProtests in Hong Kong Unlikely to Yield Results

Resistance to a planned extradition law has enlivened the opposition in Hong Kong after several years of placidity. But the danger of confrontation with Beijing is real and neither side seems ready for compromise.

Avery Ng is running late on this Wednesday morning — sweating profusely, breathing heavily and his voice is hoarse by the time he reaches the city center. His journey through Hong Kong today has been a difficult one, with the streets, the tunnels and the subway all clogged because of traffic jams caused by road closures due to the demonstration. Ng could have predicted as much. It is a huge day for him.
When Ng, a tall, lean man, turns onto the pedestrian bridge outside the city’s parliament building, some demonstrators greet him. But he is in such a hurry that he hardly takes any notice of them. When he looks over the railing and sees the sea of people down below, though, he pauses briefly. “One-hundred thousand, maybe 150,000,” he says, nodding in satisfaction. And then he hurries onward.

India’s sixth biggest city is almost entirely out of water

By Jessie Yeung, Helen Regan and Swati Gupta, CNN

Updated 0118 GMT (0918 HKT) June 20, 2019

The floor of the Chembarambakkam reservoir is cracked open, dry and sun-baked. About 25 kilometers (15.5 miles) away, in Chennai, India’s sixth largest city, millions of people are running out of water.

Chembarambakkam and the three other reservoirs that have traditionally supplied Chennai are nearly all dry, leaving the city suffering from an acute water shortage, said Jayaram Venkatesan, an activist in the city.

A.G. Sulzberger Torches Trump ‘Treason’ Claim: It ‘Crosses A Dangerous Line’

The publisher of The New York Times is taking the president to task for ramping up his rhetoric against the newspaper.

A.G. Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times, hit back at President Donald Trump’s increased rhetoric against the newspaper in a blistering opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal.

Last weekend, Trump stepped up his attacks on the Times — which he’d previously called “fake news” and the “enemy of the people” — by blasting its reporting on U.S. cyberattacks on Russia’s power grid. He also accused the newspaper of conducting “a virtual act of Treason”:

In an op-ed that the Rupert Murdoch-owned and often Trump-positive Journal published online Wednesday, Sulzberger wrote that “this new attack crosses a dangerous line in the president’s campaign against a free and independent press.”