eight years ago it was the scene of an artillery jewel that killed four people and wounded nineteen others the most serious clash since the korean war today the same waterfront is that peace following a year of diplomatic engagements between the leaders of north and south korea. for many of the two thousand people who live and work here things have never looked so good you know until the good things should improve for better or one wants that sort of. given that must feel free conciliation things will improve but the fractious history of into korean relations makes others more cautious talking. with their track record and it's possible that they might change in an unpredictable way so i don't have complete trust. today the only sound of gunfire comes from the firing ranges of the marines who are based

here. the shelters that people are taught to run to when the event of an attack are chained and locked. one of the houses destroyed in the attack has been preserved as a memorial the disputed maritime border has long been a flashpoint between north and south korea in addition to the shelling of twenty ten there have been deadly clashes between naval vessels near here but the remarkable improvement in into korean relations in the past year is having a remarkable impact on the heavily fortified border separating the north and the south. guard posts along the demilitarized zone have been dismantled and the numbers of weapons facing off against each other reduced. assuming the process continues the fortifications of young and could eventually become part of a bygone era rob mcbride al-jazeera young people island south korea. the

u.s. has deployed eight hundred military stars to gab on after a disputed presidential election in nearby democratic republic of congo president donald trump says the troops will support the security of u.s. citizens in case of violent demonstrations vote counting is still underway there but the three main candidates have all declared they won the vote catholic bishops fielded the largest group of election observers they say there is a clear winner and are demanding that accurate results be declared the u.n. security council met behind closed doors to discuss the vote since its independence in one nine hundred sixty there's never been a peaceful transfer of power in d.r. congo. police in sweden have fired tear gas to disperse and police in sudan have fired tear gas to disperse anti-government demonstrators who gathered after friday prayers protesters want president bashir to step down they're angry over rising

food prices and government corruption at least nineteen people have died since the on unrest started last month hiper morgan has moved from khartoum. once again we've seen people coming out and protesting against president i'm going to sure is twenty nine year rule they said they want him to step down and that they want an end to his rule now president bashir has been facing this for three weeks now but he said he's not going to step down and give in to the demands of the demonstrators he says that they've been infiltrated by foreign forces and that rebel groups from darfur are also part of a big plot to try to topple his regime and his rule and his government as well but obviously this has not been going on this is not started to randomly it started with hiked red prices and high inflation one of the highest in the world at seventy percent but that's quickly escalated to people demanding that president bashir step down they said it's because of his policies that the go to that the country is now facing an economic crisis opposition groups have also come out and said that they believe that these protesters have legitimate reasons to be protesting and demanding that president on the ship step down now at the moment there is no step

there's no middle ground for the two sides the demonstrators are saying that they want president i want you to step down and that is the only compromise they will that they will be able to accept from him but the president said he is going to continue he's going to try to improve the economy he offered to increase salaries of civil servants but that obviously fell in deaf ears as people continue to protest with more protests and demonstrations being planned in the coming days as well so it's not clear how this would end when it would end with two sides having different demands and new middle ground there are concerns that more lives would be lost amnesty international says at least thirty seven people have been killed as of last week but the opposition groups are saying that more than forty have been killed and over nine hundred have been imprisoned so they are concerned that as people continue to demonstrate demanding that the president step down more lives would be lost and more people would be injured as no sight comes to an end five teenage girls in northern poland have died after a fire broke out in a room where they were playing an escape game the girls all aged fifteen were celebrating

a birthday police don't get know what started the blaze the government has ordered nationwide checks in places where skate games or hell. the private data of hundreds of german politicians including chancellor angela merkel has been published online it includes home addresses phone numbers and credit card details it's not clear whether they were targeted by a hack or a victims of an internal leak the only political party not affected was the right wing a.f.p. dominic cain has more from berlin. we know that more than nine hundred politicians from almost every party in germany have been affected many of them from merkel's christian democrats or from have a very interesting social union allies but it's not just politicians who've been affected here one interesting line it's being reported by several different agencies is that the form that the attack took was rather like the advent calendar

principle in other words on the first of december a particular twitter handle was putting at information sensitive information about people in the public eye and that every day that went by there would come a new revelation as it were of details about specific individuals then from the twentieth of december it's reported that the attack took the form of attacking politicians releasing politicians' details then from the twenty eighth of december this particular source on twitter went cold went dark as it were it's now being reported that the specific twitter account has been closed the question will be who is behind this there's a lot of speculation in germany this morning as to who might be or might not be responsible for it but people are very impressed by the way this is being done and there are as i say lots of questions asked not that many facts and certainly the twitter account concerned seventeen thousand followers not anything at all since

the twenty eighth of december closed this morning that element closed but certainly the investigation is very much open and although as you say angle americal confidential details have not been late very many details of very many of her colleagues have been and so as i say great deal of questions being asked by federal sources right now. britain's foreign secretary has voiced concern for a former u.s. marine charged with spying in russia for women who holds u.s. u.k. canadian and irish passports was detained in moscow a week ago he's been charged with espionage but the details of not been released will as family says he was visiting russia for a wedding we extrude me worried about paul whelan. we have offered consular assistance the u.s. are leading on this because he's a british and american citizen but our position is very very clear which is a very straightforward point that individuals should not be used as pawns of

diplomatic leverage in the southwest of colombia community leaders and human rights who him and rights advocates are being killed at a rate of one every three days they are being targeted by armed groups fighting for control of land to cultivate drugs but the rate of killings has risen since the government signed a peace deal with fark rebels two years ago alexander i'm getting reports from calcutta. hundreds of dinners indigenous people attend the funeral of. a young community leader he's the late is the founder of human rights shot dead in the kouka region of colombia his brother says it's only soon we're speaking out he made a strong statement against armed actors at a community meeting and sentenced himself to death as they say they were there the do but who knows which ones they were they could be any of seven different criminal

groups dissident rebels paramilitaries and other armed gangs fighting to control this land for the lucrative cultivation of coca crops the plaintiff used to make o'kane. and illegal gold mining. at the thousand and sixteen peace deal with fire rebels ended the decades long war against the government but left the power vacuum that the state as failed to feel. indigenous leader and senator. has received death threats for denouncing the criminal groups activities. he was given an armored car but no body guards. we don't know who will be next it could be me a family member or a companion we are living in constant fear of what can happen in any given day the norden cow can degenerates association has compiled a list of the death threats received by its members but says the government needs to recognize the systematic pattern of the attacks. at the port of the there's

a killing every day indigenous social leaders human rights defenders we are denouncing the government's lack of attention. to. the overall number of killings yes fallen since the signing of the peace deal but the same is not true when it comes to community leaders and human rights defenders four hundred have been killed since two thousand and sixteen one hundred sixty four in two thousand and eighteen alone but under pressure the government invited the special reportorial from the united nations on a fact finding mission he met with hundreds of community leaders and victims of attacks i mean you can only admit that some somehow it's a systematic against the founders want to blame this government but. really. the government of president says many of the problems date back to the previous administration but unless more is done people will

continue to pay the ultimate price for speaking out. the. new president. is sending troops to the northeastern states of. to crack down on violent gangs fighting crime was one of his key campaign pledges after the robbery at gunpoint of forty tourists on a hiking trail in rio de janeiro roar burton manley has. it is brazil's most iconic landmark christ the redeemer towers over rio de janeiro seen by many as a symbol of peace but the trail leading up to it on coke about a mountain has become known for violent crimes dozens have been ambushed held hostage and dropped at gunpoint prompting tourists to think twice about visiting young was a man called the wild but i mean no they've advised us that tourists were robbed yesterday so we didn't hike up we have our camera so we didn't go i didn't want to

go because the people there day rob forty people and it's a little bit scary as a tourist you want to be safe you want to go you don't want to miss your cell phone your wallet your camera. it's not the first incident last year the area was closed after a polish man was stabbed the trail runs close to a fan a city slum that is home to some of the poorest in the city. many fear that it's a run by drug gangs and criminal organizations rising violence and read the janeiro has impacted the number of visitors in two thousand and seventeen there was a reported loss of more than two hundred million dollars in tours in revenue. both scenarios swept to power on a promise to crack down on crime and corruption to fulfill his promise he sending three hundred soldiers to the northeastern state of seattle to contain violence by criminal gangs. the national force has already been contacted the mobilization plan

is in action and is about to leave scenes like this and not unusual in brazil's northeastern state there's been a wave of attacks in the previous few months that's included armed robberies. and the targeting of public buildings and banks brazil has one of the highest murder rates in the world with tens of thousands killed every year both in arm has vowed to take action but arming civilians experts say this will only fuel further violence. manmeet al jazeera. and as always there's lots more on our website and to zero dot com get the latest on the top stories that we're covering for you i just did a talk. this is al-jazeera it's going to round up of our top stories now president donald trump says the partial u.s.

government shutdown could last more than a year if he doesn't get funding for a wall along the u.s. border with mexico he's threatening to use emergency powers to build it if congress doesn't meet his demands the southern border is a dangerous horrible disaster we've done a great job but you can't really do the kind of job we have to do on less you have a major powerful barrier and that's what we're going to have to have but we could call a national emergency and build it very quickly and some other way of doing it but if we can do it through a negotiated process we're giving that a shot a us sec to state my point perry heads to the middle east for an eight country tour next week the murder of journalists is expected to be high on the agenda when he meets saudi leaders who also be looking to reassure allies after president trance decision to pull u.s. troops from syria the un's human rights office says

a trial in saudi arabia of suspects in the murder of her ashaji is not sufficient it wants an independent and international investigation saudi prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for five of the eleven defendants. counting centers in the democratic republic of congo's capital kinshasa have started compiling the results of sunday's elections the three main candidates have all declared they won the vote catholic bishops feel that the largest group of election observers they say there is a clear winner and they are demanding accurate results published hundreds of police have been deployed in melbourne australia where far right groups are rallying against crime they believe they blame on people of african descent they are meeting at the popular st kilda beach for what they call a discussion of melbourne's youth crime problem account of demonstrations being held by a group supporting multiculturalism the private data of hundreds of german politicians

including chancellor angela merkel has been published online it includes home addresses phone numbers and credit card details it's not clear whether hacking or leaks were to blame those are the headlines science in a golden age of next. cultural history some scribe layer upon layer at times erase others rejuvenating and reinvented. through the transformative power of public art an unlikely collision of hip hop culture and indigenous tradition forms a community building project led by the godfather of graffiti. on a zero. understanding the universe and the fast space is at the forefront of physics and astronomy research today everything from white dwarfs and bread giants to neutron stars and

black holes but imagine trying to make sense of the cosmos before telescopes for even invented. well between the ninth and fourteen centuries scholars from the islam world consolidated and refined the astronomy of civilizations and came up with ideas that have deeply influenced the story of me right through to the present day. me a british professor of physics but born in baghdad and i'll be taking a look at modern day astronomy an avocation and exploring the contribution made to these fields by the scientists of the golden age.

why would the scholars of the stomach worlds. so interested in astronomy. one reason is for navigation. people have been using the sun and the stars to find their way around for thousands of years. i'm heading into the desert outside of doha and i'm using the sat nav to help me. so in a sense i'm still looking to the sky to navigate. well now it's getting late and i think i'm really lost going to call someone to help me. is a businessman in bed with with a deep knowledge of the desert in the bed of which way of life. has always been

a crucial skill for the bedouin. so as a bedouin how do you find your way around the desert accurately. during the day. we know by the sun this side or the side if it's in the middle sometime we get lost during the night we'll go by stops. you're familiar with. which is in the north yes it's always there and we have. a lot of names like. george. and we know the direction by and by that of the stars. bad when by by the way they have a very unusual sense of direction it's in their d.n.a. one i'm driving. i know if you just. said ali was not it was

this not immediately. thank you. this one is navigation astronomy was also important for the measurements of time. for example the islamic calendar is a lunar calendar where the months are determined by the phases of the moon. during the golden age astronomers study the movements of the moon to predict the calendar more accurately the twelve months making up the islamic year in the earth's orbit of the sun. months and religious observances like ramadan move from year to year. calendar as a short thought by eleven days and every thirty or thirty years about. that will cycle for example. yes for example or try to start for

starts now in general which is in the middle of their wonder yes after thirty three years it will come back again in general. i think these days even someone like me can pretend to be as knowledgeable about the night sky because i want to show you this i have in my tablet you see it shows. the night sky. and let me see if i can see that you have the star you saw you know that's nor. have. i thought they call it they're not the star that's another name for it but it's its. i don't need to know that's north i can hold. and fine no the north star is there then we know you know the direction that i don't i should know my directions.

this. allows me to scan the night sky and identify the stars and planets is the modern day equivalent of the ancient start known in arabic as is each now in the early ninth century the. moon the ruler of the powerful islamic empire was a man obsessed with scholarship and learning and he commissioned a group of astronomers to produce an muzi age now they already had the astronomical tables of the ancient greeks but they were tasked with improving on them correcting errors and making more accurate measurements they produced a new star chart they became known as. the verified tables.

i'm standing on the very edge. but i can look across asia on the other thought of the bosphorus. from the seventh century. when its people spread out of a arabia to asia in the east all the way to spain. but the call costs so much land they had to be great navigators. throughout antiquity maps. drawn by hand and relied on travelers accounts for example before the golden age the greek astronomer ptolemy had compiled lists of over eight thousand coordinates detailing the positions of oceans landmarks and

cities in the ninth century the ruling khelifa of baghdad a. commission to group of his scholars to make a new map of the world and to improve on ptolemy's data. at istanbul's museum of the history of science and technology in islam dr ben left quinn turn is a scholar of ancient geography together we're looking at moon's map this map dates back to the reign of mahmoud in the first third of the ninth century the floor of period of a replica islamic science in baghdad i guess what was different about is that they wanted to improve on on the greeks maps absolutely they measured the long. after and of course the but that didn't even exist in the time. they had to i guess add all these new cities medicare as well as well absolutely so there were a lot of more precise caught in the moment movement was from the very early years

of the road age here we have an example of a map several centuries later the culmination of of geography and make empire it's a map of the world but it's not one that i recognise i don't see any countries that look perfect they should all it maps asshole thwarts orient every cuz always on the top of the top so in fact so this is upside down it is upside down turn it recognize it. that's better. ok so now i see arabia and the mediterranean so what was new or different about this man you can see the shape of the mediterranean shore of. and became more precise even north of the shape of the sea and it was this map that then of course led on to advances in europe absolutely mental that was only a sort of an obvious. so how did the map makers of the golden age determine

such detail measurement that used a versatile scientific instruments record an astronaut. i've come to the museum of islamic art in our town where among their many artifacts they have a wonderful collection of astrally it's standing back almost a thousand years and i'm hoping that one of their curators dr nor can is going to tell me what's special about a couple of them. the lovely thing about astral legs nor is that before the invention of the telescope these devices were incredibly important how far back the astral apes go when were they first well adapted the story in say they go back to three hundred b.c. in greece and the word comes from the arabic a lot of love exactly originally from the greek to grasp the stars because actually what you have here is a handheld model of the sky. astral apes offered only

a few functions but during the golden age astronomers developed more sophisticated astral apes this one is very very elaborate and it's multi-functional that's true it's in many ways with the the computers of the day and they basically served a number of purposes you can use it to find the time of day or night you could decide prayer times you could navigate you could measure the heights of buildings or distances there are all sorts you can see all that exists with this disk because of course these are all moving parts is it possible to to to take it apart yes and seeing if and when we can a single map of the stars would only be. corrects for one location on the earth but these sophisticated astral aids were designed to work in many places a later astrid such as the seventeenth century astrid had a number of different plates engraved on both sides and each one could be used for

a different city to tell the time to plot the motions of the stars or whatever it is that you needed your astraweb to do so wherever you were in the world you'd use the would have of the scarred city with all its intricate markings in measurements to use an asteroid you already needed a good working knowledge of astronomy so here we have five plates inside you then adjust this. so you put the right plates in position yes you take a measurement of a particular star. and then you and then you adjust the reach over the correct plate and that gives you a map of the sky where you are. asked . for astronomers in the golden age modern astronomers have access to

a vast array of instruments such as this the level radio telescope bank in the u.k. . during the golden age astronomers would come together from across the world to cooperate and that way of working is still imbedded in astronomy today stratham is working with this telescope often collaborate with other telescopes and astronomers internationally unlike a conventional telescope it doesn't capture light through a lens but rather uses a massive kick that collects very weak radio signals from deep in space allowing us to map the universe in ever greater detail. now tim because the level telescope is a radio telescope it theming the sky in a way that we can't see in every sees the invisible universe i've got a picture here of what the little telescope sees if we could see radio waves this

is the way the sky would appear that's our milky way galaxy what we see in the picture is not the stars that we see with our eyes it's the stuff between the stars one of the really interesting things i think is look at planets around of the stars there's a picture here of young star in our galaxy. the stars at the center and then around it there is a disk of gas and dust but the interesting thing here of the dark circles we think that they're formed by planets that of that have formed inside the disk and as those planets circle around they sweep the gas of the dust and they leave behind these empty gaps it's amazing isn't it that we're not talking about planets going around our own sun system these are planets going around distant stars hundreds of light years away and many many thousands of these parts or maybe billions in fact in our old milky way galaxy and you mentioned that image was taken by another telescope this is part of a larger collaboration to get these sort of sharp views we have to combine signals

from many telescopes spread across the country and even across the planet itself so this shows us all the locations of the various radio telescopes across europe out into china down into south africa and we even with these telescopes with a russian spacecraft that's all but in the earth so weak so we end up making telescopes the size of the planet or even larger the point is they're all contributing their own data so a single task will give you a poor view by working together with these telescopes you know in these other countries we all joined forces to make this planet sized telescope shows the detail this idea of scientists working collaboratively together particularly in astronomy is something that goes back a thousand years to the golden age it was in baghdad around the ninth century. when we first start to see astronomers working in groups to solve big problems in astronomy something that the greeks didn't do something that only really emerged in the golden age and has survived so successfully to this day.

one of the most important observatories of the golden age was called the observatory built in twelve fifty nine in persia for the greatest. when the mongols invaded they captured the mountain full of alan moved well to see worked not only did he convince the mongol general hoar larkhall or helluva car to spare his life he convinced him to build him a new observatory in return promise to provide the general with his astrological chart so that he'd know what day to go to battle the rather observatory became the most important of its day and a great hub for international find to fit collaboration. of course what's great about the morale in the storm is that work there isn't the observations they made they didn't have telescopes but it's the mathematical tricks

they developed that will be influential in astronomy for centuries to come and i want to show you something here so this is a diagram from two cs work people like to see when they're looking at trying to explain how the stars and planets move they were trying to develop the math to make it sensible you know they were using the greek model yeah which it got incredibly complicated of course the greeks believed that the earth was the central source system. model fit the observations of the way in which the planets appeared to move on the sky for all these ridiculously complicated features into it to the model it got very very messy circles within circles going around other circles and that's that's where. his genius comes in because this diagram that to see couple simplified a lot of that show you what's supposed to happen you see this small circle going around the big one if you trace a point on the perimeter it's moving up and down in

a straight line and that's turned out to be a very useful trick that simplified a lot of that complicated math. but what's really fascinating compare this text written in arabic with this one is an identical one but written in latin and what's fascinating is the letters labeling the points follow the arabic alphabet not the latin alphabet so if g.m. dar a b g d clearly whoever drew this knew about two c's work and that was a couple where the man who drew this was copernicus so this is copernicus who came up with the idea that rather than the earth being the center of the source for stuff it was the sun exists senator and all the planets including the earth revolved around it revolved around it and that's the picture that we have today copernicus was and is regarded as the father of modern science because of this great revolution and yet what's so fascinating is that this was built on two she's ideas yes so it shows the continuity of science copernicus owes this debt to

these medieval astronomers from the golden age was incredible. islam itself was a significant reason.