Glued to bright pink boats in the middle of the road. Drenched in blood-red paint. Dragged into vans by police. That flair for the dramatic has helped propel climate activist group Extinction Rebellion (XR) into the spotlight in 2019, both in the U.K. and abroad.

But in the weeks before Britain’s Dec. 12 general election, the rebellion has begun a shift to a more conventional kind of activism: the ballot box.

Last week, invited by a local XR group, around a hundred residents of the south London neighborhood of Battersea filed into a Victorian church for a hustings — the British version of a stump event — to hear five candidates for the local parliamentary seat argue over policy and trade barbs in a highly traditional act of party politics. But, for perhaps the first time, the topic was exclusively the climate.

From the pews, dozens of children and adults stretched their arms high in the air for a chance to interrogate the candidates about their parties’ climate plans. “I’ve never ..

Chinese scientist He Jiankui shocked the world by claiming he had helped make the first gene-edited babies. One year later, mystery surrounds his fate as well as theirs. He has not been seen publicly since January, his work has not been published and nothing is known about the health of the babies.

“That’s the story — it’s all cloaked in secrecy, which is not productive for the advance of understanding,” said Stanford bioethicist Dr. William Hurlbut.

He talked with Hurlbut many times before He revealed at a Hong Kong science conference that he had used a tool called CRISPR to alter a gene in embryos to try to help them resist infection with the AIDS virus. The work, which He discussed in exclusive interviews with The Associated Press, was denounced as medically unnecessary and unethical because of possible harm to other genes and because the DNA changes can pass to future generations.

Since then, many people have called for regulations or a moratorium on similar work, but committees..

A woman who was suspended by TikTok after posting viral videos critical of the Chinese government’s actions in Xinjiang said in a Twitter post that the Chinese video-sharing app has restored her account and apologized.

New Jersey teenager Feroza Aziz had posted a series of videos that initially looked like makeup tutorials, before quickly morphing into stinging rebukes of China’s treatment of Uighur Muslims. “So the first thing you need to do is grab your lash curler, curl your lashes, obviously, then you’re going to put them down and use your phone that you’re using right now to search up what’s happening in China,” she said in one.

Here is a trick to getting longer lashes! #tiktok #muslim #muslimmemes #islam pic.twitter.com/r0JR0HrXbm

— feroza.x (@x_feroza) November 25, 2019

“I thought if I made this sound like a makeup tutorial, people would want to watch it,” Aziz earlier told CNN. “When I spoke straightly about the Uighur Muslims, that video got taken down.”

TikTok, owned by ..

(MEXICO CITY) — Mexicans reacted Wednesday with anger to U.S. President Donald Trump’s pledge to designate Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organizations.

Mexican officials and experts don’t fear that Trump will send killer drones into Mexico. Such drone strikes have been a mainstay of U.S. anti-terror operations in Pakistan and Afghanistan, but nobody thinks they would be launched into Mexico.

What Mexicans do fear a terrorism designation could send bilateral relations back into the dark days of the 1990s, when annual U.S. certifications of Mexico’s anti-drug efforts became a regular source of friction.

The possibility of U.S. sanctions and aid reductions constantly loomed over Mexico between 1987 and 2002, when the certification process was weakened to a less threatening form. Mexico was faced with loss of aid or access to international financing, as well as possible trade, visa and banking sanctions.

“Every time, those procedures made cooperation with the United States tremendo..