Paris climate talks: delegates reach agreement on final draft text
After talks again stretched through the night, François Hollande and Ban Ki-moon are to unveil document on limiting climate change for formal adoption
Negotiators in Paris are to present their final draft text on Saturday morning for a deal on limiting climate change after working through Friday night to thrash out remaining details.
The French president, François Hollande, is due to join Ban Ki-moon at the landmark summit at 11.30am local time, when the text is expected to be published. The draft is predicted to be officially adopted in the afternoon.
Sources said the final text was only settled on at 6.45am after negotiators and ministers worked through Wednesday, Thursday and Friday nights at Le Bourget in north-east Paris.
Laurent Fabius – the French foreign minister who has marshalled the text through its final stages as president of the talks – said on Thursday night: “All the conditions are ripe for a universal and ambitious agreement.
Nice one, Banksy. But you shouldn’t have to be Steve Jobs to count as a worthy refugee
The artwork needs a footnote; we owe Syrians more, no matter what they might do for our economies
The figure of Steve Jobs – hunched and harried, but with that familiar piercing glare – now decorates one of the Jungle’s hulking concrete walls. He wears a polo-neck, and carries in one hand an Apple Mac monitor. He has, it almost goes without saying, been painted there by Banksy. The meme is left for the viewer to make out: Jobs is, as a thousand Twitter posts remind, the most famous Syrian “refugee” in history.
There is something in those eyes that holds you. They are avian, the eyes of a predator – in Silicon Valley – transplanted to a place where most camp residents are prey: to border patrols, to barbed wire, to mud and rain and disease. What would once read as the hauteur of a polo-necked digital deity becomes the ferocity of a hunted man, spotted by police (and the bright white-yellow daubs that bring out Jobs’ face seem to put a torch in the viewer’s hand. We have interrupted him, sack slung over his shoulder, on the way to the Channel, perhaps – and are but one heartbeat away from ‘fight or flight’).
Syrian rebels satirise IS group propaganda
Rami Jarah
The video opens with a scene that has become chillingly familiar: shackled prisoners in orange jumpsuits are being lined up by masked combatants. They’re in an isolated area and the soundtrack is haunting religious chants. But wait! Before you shield your eyes, you should know that this video ends differently.
That’s because it wasn’t made by the Islamic State (IS) group – it was made by a group of Syrian rebels. They decided to imitate IS group propaganda videos to prove a point: that you can fight the Syrian regime without committing atrocities.
Al-Jabha al-Shamiya (also known as the Levant Front or the Shamiya Front) is a Syrian rebel group affiliated with the Free Syrian Army (or FSA). For the past few months, the FSA has been engaged in combat with the IS group in the northern part of the province of Aleppo.
On Monday, Al-Jabha al-Shamiya published this video and started sharing it online. The video shows real-life IS group combatants who were captured by the FSA. Everything about the video – from the staging to the special effects to the high-resolution images to the fast pacing – imitates the techniques used in the IS group’s propaganda videos.
China’s few defiant feminists jailed, harassed, watched
December 12, 2015 – 10:43AM
Philip Wen
China correspondent for Fairfax Media
Beijing: Aged just 26 and still fresh from what she playfully describes as a “marriage of political convenience”, Li Tingting is still adjusting to the attention – both welcome and otherwise – that comes with being the face of China’s youthful new wave of feminist activists.
Li arrives for our interview greeting us with mock admonishment. This meeting would doubtlessly invite more harassment from local police, who monitor her mobile phone and WeChat account, she said.
“When police ask me what I’m up to I tell them I’m busy setting up an organic egg farm [at her parents’ village on the outskirts of Beijing].”
It is a mischievously defiant streak often shared by rights activists in mainland China; dark gallows humour amid a particularly torrid year which has seen a sweeping crackdown on lawyers, intellectuals, journalists and rights activists.
Islamic State backers retaliate against Anonymous’s #TrollingDay campaign
Islamic State supporters published what appears to be names and e-mail addresses belonging to US Army personnel in response to Anonymous’s operation to attack the militants on social media.
Islamic State supporters on Friday released what appears to be the personal information belonging to enlisted US military personnel in retaliation for hacker collective Anonymous’s Internet campaign to defame and degrade the terrorist group.
Twitter accounts tied to Islamic State (IS) released names, e-mail addresses, and personal addresses of 160 members of the US Army and Marines and claimed to have obtained information on some 700 armed forces personnel.
The Pentagon would not comment on the lists but independent security experts said the information appears to be real even though it may not be the result of recent hacks into military computers.
“It is very likely that this is an authentic set of information,” said Michael Smith II, chief operating officer of the defense consulting firm Kronos Security. “It does not benefit IS’s interest to publish false information.”
‘Suicide’ gene therapy kills prostate cancer cells
A new gene therapy technique is able to modify prostate cancer cells so that a patient’s body attacks and kills them, US scientists have discovered.
The technique causes the tumour cells in the body to self-destruct, giving it the name ‘suicide gene therapy’.
Their research found a 20% improvement in survival in patients with prostate cancer five years after treatment.
A cancer expert said more research was needed to judge its effectiveness.
Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men in the UK with more than 41,000 diagnosed each year.
The study, led by researchers from Houston Methodist Hospital in Texas, appears to show that this ‘suicide gene therapy’, when combined with radiotherapy, could be a promising treatment for prostate cancer in the future.
The technique involves the cancer cells being genetically modified so that they signal a patient’s immune system to attack them.
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