News Headlines - 05 July 2014

▽UK planned to train and equip 100,000 Syrian rebels | News Pakistan

The UK plans designed to train and equip 100,000 Syrian rebels in order to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad, according to the BBC revealed today. The initiative was rejected by Prime Minister David Cameron, the National Security Council and several senior U.S. officials as "too risky".

▽Militant Leader in Rare Appearance in Iraq - NYTimes.com

Wearing a black turban and black robes, the leader of the self-proclaimed Islamic state that stretches across eastern Syria and much of northern and western Iraq made a startling public appearance, his first in many years, at a well-known mosque in the Iraqi city of Mosul.

▽David Cameron asks top civil servant to look into Westminster child abuse claims | The Guardian

David Cameron has asked the Home Office's most senior civil servant to investigate what happened to a missing dossier of alleged paedophile activity involving politicians in the 1980s.

▽Will Japan's youth go to war because a pretty girl told them to? - Al Jazeera English

While they have clearly underestimated the magnitude of the opposition, the Abe administration seems to have anticipated some resistance. The same day the government made the announcement, they also released an SDF recruitment commercial (Youtube link). This 15-second clip stars Haruka Shimazaki of AKB 48, Japan's most famous idol girl group.

▽Papers on ‘stress-induced’ stem cells are retracted : Nature News & Comment

Nature today retracted two controversial papers on stem cells that it published in January1, 2. The retractions — agreed to by all of the co-authors — come at the end of a whirlwind five months during which various errors were spotted in the papers, attempts to replicate the experiments failed, the lead author was found guilty of misconduct, and the centre where she is employed was threatened with dismantlement. The retraction notice3 includes a handful of problems with the papers that had not been previously considered by institutional investigation teams.