Six In The Morning Thursday June 11

Is this the end of al-Qaeda? Bin Laden's network is being destroyed by Isis, loyalists admit

Isis has dominated the war for territory, money, recruits and international jihadist allies since splitting from al-Qaeda

LIZZIE DEARDEN

 

 

Thursday 11 June 2015

Al-Qaeda has “collapsed” under the weight of Isis’ growing power sapping its fighters, money and territory, according to its own members.

Two of the most senior associates of Osama Bin Laden’s terror network claim it is being ripped apart by the continuing power struggle within global jihad.

Abu Qatada, the radical Jordanian preacher deported from the UK in 2013, and jihadi scholar Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi admitted to the Guardian that the younger group has been winning the ground and propaganda war since it split.

Isis grew out of the Islamic State of Iraq, led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, now the “caliph” of the so-called Islamic State.

Four 'left-behind' children in China died of poisoning after being abandoned

Children reportedly drank pesticide in a tragedy that exposes hardships faced by many impoverished families in Guizhou province

Tom Phillips in Beijing

Thursday 11 June 2015 08.32 BST

Police in China are investigating the death of four impoverished siblings who reportedly drank pesticide after being abandoned by their parents, a tragedy exposing the hardships facing millions of so-called “left-behind” children.

The children – one boy and three girls aged between five and 13 – were found on Tuesday night in Bijie, a city in the south-western province of Guizhou, according to Xinhua, China’s official news agency.

Both parents were migrant workers who had abandoned one of the country’s poorest regions to seek employment, it reported.

Peacekeepers commonly barter goods for sex, says UN study

A draft UN study on "transactional sex" in Haiti has shown that it is "quite common" for peacekeepers to offer goods for sex. Children were involved in at least one-third of the reported cases.

A draft study by the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) found that some UN peacekeepers regularly bartered for sex with hundreds of Haitian women, despite a ban on such activities.

The study showed that UN peacekeepers commonly offered cash, cell phones, jewelry, and perfume in exchange for sex.

'Triggering need'

"Evidence from two peacekeeping mission countries demonstrates that transactional sex is quite common but underreported in peacekeeping missions," the OIOS draft stated, according to Reuters news agency, which obtained a copy of the draft.

Brazil's top court strikes down censoring biography law

June 11, 2015 - 5:10PM

Jenny Barchfield

Brazil's Supreme Court voted unanimously on Wednesday to strike down a sweeping 2003 law that empowered the subjects of unauthorised biographies to quash works they disapproved of.

Under the wide-ranging and controversial law, Brazilians were able to block publication of or have removed from store shelves any book about their lives that was created without their consent. It has mainly been used by celebrities.

The law cast a pall over Brazil's publishing industry, with many publishers simply declining to put out a book without the subject's explicit endorsement.

Critics called it possibly the most extreme law regulating privacy and intellectual property in any democratic nation, with many equating the measure with outright censorship akin to that experience under military rule.

How Would You Feel If China Flew Spy Planes a Dozen Miles From the California Coast?

Hugh White Become a fan 

Professor of Strategic Studies, National University of Australia; author “The China Choice: Why We Should Share Power.”

CANBERRA -- What exactly is America's gripe with China in the South China Sea? The question becomes more and more important as the future of the world's most vital bilateral relationship becomes more and more dependent on what happens in this much-contested waterway. And the answer is not very clear.

The South China Sea has been a point of friction between Washington and Beijing for many years, but over the past few weeks it seems Washington has quite deliberately turned up the volume of its criticisms of Chinese actions there. We have seen an apparently well-orchestrated campaign of official U.S. statements and well-sourced media stories culminating in the much-publicized U.S. Navy P-8 surveillance missionclose to China's construction work on Fiery Cross Reef, and Defense Secretary Ashton Carter's forthright speech in Singapore at the end of last month.

Found: Preserved dinosaur cells -- but sadly scientists still can't build 'Jurassic World'

By Gareth Dyke | Video Source: CNN

The science behind the "Jurassic Park" films always seemed far-fetched, even before the latest installment, "Jurassic World," introduced the idea ofgenetically engineered super-dinosaurs.

For one thing, finding mosquitoes that had drunk the blood of dinosaurs and then been preserved in amber for hundreds of millions of years is incredibly unlikely. But there's another more important reason: organic molecules such as proteins and DNA degrade fast after a creature's death. They are almost never found preserved in bones older than a few thousand years. This has been the dogma for many years.

The idea of molecular-level preservation within fossils has always been controversial. No DNA has ever been extracted, for example, from a dinosaur bone precisely because this complex molecule degrades away over relatively short periods of geological time.