Hitler’s birthplace in Austria is set to be a police station Nasa detects water vapour on Jupiter’s moon Europa
Vienna: The house where Adolf Hitler was born will be turned into a police station, Austria’s interior ministry announced Tuesday, after years of legal wrangling as the government looks to prevent the building from becoming a neo-Nazi shrine.
The yellow corner house in the northern town of Braunau on the border with Germany, where Hitler was born on April 20, 1889, was taken into government control in 2016.
But the destiny of the building was subject to a lengthy legal battle with the family of Gerlinde Pommer, which owned the house for nearly a century. That only ended this year when the country’s highest court ruled on the compensation Pommer would receive.
The interior ministry will now invite submissions from architects to have the building house the town’s police force.
“The house’s future usage by the police should set a clear signal that this building will never be a place to commemorate Nazism,” interior minister Wolfgang
Peschorn said in a press release.
The EU-wide architecture competition will be launched this month with a jury of experts, including a representative of the town, expected to make a decision on the best design in the first half of next year.
Austria’s highest court ruled earlier this year that Pommer was entitled to some $9,00,000 in compensation, less than she had sought but still more than she had been originally offered.
Pommer had been renting the 800-square-metre property — which also has several garages and parking spaces located behind the main building — to the interior ministry since the 1970s.
Washington: Scientists at Nasa have detected water vapour for the first time above the surface of Europa, a finding that supports the idea of a liquid water ocean sloshing beneath the miles-thick ice shell of the Jupiter’s moon.
The study in Nature Astronomy, measured the vapour by peering at Europa through Keck Observatory in Hawaii.
Missions to the outer solar system have amassed enough information about Europa to make it a high-priority target of investigation in Nasa’s search for life.
What makes this moon so alluring is the possibility that it may possess all of the ingredients necessary for life, said researchers from Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in the US.
Scientists have evidence that one of these ingredients, liquid water, is present under the icy surface and may sometimes erupt into space in huge geysers.
However, no one is able to confirm the presence of water in these plumes by directly measuring the water molecule itself.