New Assault After 30 Killed In Burkina Attacks

Security forces freed at least 126 hostages around 12 hours after gunmen attacked the Splendid Hotel and the Cappuccino Cafe across the road in the capital Ouagadougou.

As security minister Simon Compaore announced troops, supported by French military, had retaken the buildings, he said another operation was under way at the Yibi Hotel.

Security forces take up positions outside the hotel

"The attacks on the Splendid Hotel and the Cappuccino are over. But an assault is ongoing at the Hotel Yibi," he told AFP news agency.

He added that three of the attackers were dead.

"Three jihadists - an Arab and two black Africans - have been killed," he said.

Ten bodies were seen on the terrace of the Cappuccino restaurant, while at least 20 people were understood to have been killed in the four-star Splendid Hotel, which is popular with Westerners and UN staff.

Of the 126 hostages freed, 33 were wounded.

Al Qaeda of Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) has claimed responsibility for the attacks, according to the SITE Intelligence Group.

The gun launched the assault on the hotel and restaurant around 8.30pm local time on Friday.

They fired into the air to drive back crowds and torched vehicles, witnesses said.

Vital Nounayon, a waiter at a nearby restaurant, told Reuters: "Lots of people left their cars and motorcycles and ran... (The attackers) also fired on the Cappuccino Cafe across from the hotel before setting it on fire."

said the attackers were wearing turbans.

Security forces arrived a short time later, prompting an intense exchange of gunfire.

Another witness, who only gave his first name, Gilbert, said security forces initially turned around rather than confront the attackers.

Robert Sangare, the head of Yalgado Ouedraogo hospital in the city, told the AFP news agency that one European woman who was taken to his hospital said the gunmen appeared to target white people.

Dozens of French forces arrived overnight from neighbouring Mali to help.

A US defence official said one US military member is providing "advice and assistance" to French forces.

Burkina Faso's new government, appointed on Wednesday after the election of President Roch Marc Kabore in November, was due to hold an emergency cabinet meeting on Saturday.

Burkina Faso, a largely Muslim country, has endured bouts of political turmoil since 2014 when veteran president Blaise Compaore was overthrown in a popular protest.

But the landlocked country has been largely spared violence by Islamist militants who have staged attacks in neighbouring Mali.

AQIM was behind a similar attack that left 20 dead at a luxury hotel in the Malian capital in November.

Dying US Boy Achieves Dream Of Fame In China

Dorian Murray's story went viral online in the country after his father posted the boy's dying wish online.

The Rhode Island youngster was diagnosed with the paediatric soft tissue cancer rhabdomyosarcoma at the age of four.

His family decided to stop treatment last month after discovering the disease had spread to his spinal cord and brain.

Weibo users have been sharing selfies with #DStrong signs

Dorian had told his father Chris that before he "goes to heaven" he "would like to be famous in China".

He said he was interested in the country "because they have that bridge", referring to the Great Wall.

The family posted the story on Monday on their public Facebook page Praying for Dorian, urging support under the hashtag #DStrong.

It was translated and reposted on Chinese sites, despite access to Facebook being heavily restricted in the country.

Dorian's story has since gone viral, with thousands of people uploading selfies at the Great Wall, many with signs using the hashtag.

DStrong was the top trending topic online on Friday morning on Weibo, the country's Twitter-like service, with tens of millions of views.

He even ended up on the state-run China Daily newspaper's front page on Thursday.

"Wish granted," the paper said.

The state-run Xinhua news agency also wrote: "Love has magic power.

"A boy's imagination has turned the anti-invasion wall into a bridge that connects hearts oceans away.

"Language barrier, thousands of miles of distance, East to the West ... all are nothing with this bridge."

One Weibo poster wrote: "I'm so sorry if you can't see how many people are responding in China."

"It's not that the Chinese people are indifferent - it's that we can't log onto Facebook."

Dorian's family said they were "completely in awe" at the response.

Steve Harvey Asks Miss Colombia to Forgive Him for Historic Flub

Steve Harvey continues to make amends for his Miss Universe 2015 flub.

The host welcomes Miss UniversePia Alonzo Wurtzbach and the woman he mistakenly crowned,Miss Colombia Ariadna Gutiérrez, toThe Steve Harvey Show for a two-episode special Monday and Tuesday called Miss Universe: The Truth.

In part 2 of the special, which has already taped, he meets with Gutiérrez, 22, for an emotional conversation. According to Steve Harvey Showproducers, Gutiérrez reveals how the aftermath of the flub has affected her – and if she is ready to forgive Harvey.

“This has caused a lot of sleepless nights for me,” Harvey says in a promo clip. “I didn’t do any interviews until I could talk to the two people who were affected the most, Pia and Ariadna. No matter how tough it was for me, I can’t imagine how it was for these two women. This finally gives me a chance to have a moment of closure.

Harvey, 58, also reveals that his family has received death threats for the mishap, causing him to fear to allow his children to go out in public.

In Monday’s episode, Wurtzbach tells Harvey that she forgives him for initially not crowning her the winner.

“Don’t beat yourself up for this anymore. Let’s move forward, let’s just be happy,” Wurtzbach, 26, says.

Harvey mistakenly crowned runner-up Gutiérrez as the winner of the pageant on live television. Shortly after he returned to the stage to correct his mistake – and has apologized multiple times for the mistake.

Why are people arguing about 'Black Girl Magic'?

If you search for the phrase online, you'll see it being used to share messages and images of success, defiance or simply beauty.

"We're using it to celebrate ourselves because historically black women haven't had the type of support that other groups have," explains Cashawn Thompson, a caregiver from Washington DC. "Black Girl Magic tries to counteract the negativity that we sometimes hold within ourselves and is sometimes placed on us by the outside world."

The phrase itself, and a variant - 'Black Girls are Magic' - have been in circulation for some time, but Thompson says she was the first to encourage others to rally around it, around three years ago. Together they have been used more than 150,000 times on Instagram, and hundreds of thousands of times on Twitter.

So why the controversy? Well there are a few different strands to unpick.

First, a counter hashtag gained traction - "White Girl Magic" - which was used in a variety of ways, sometimes with a positive sense but often with a provocative edge, as if to suggest that "Black Girl Magic" placed a needless focus on race. "I get #blackgirlmagic is meant to be uplifting, and it's cool, but if there was #whitegirlmagic it would be seen as racist," wrote one user. The hashtag gained ground, but many on Twitter said that it missed the point.

Cashawn Thompson explains some of the resistance to the counter hashtag. "I don't think it's necessary because white women haven't had all the problems that black women have."

But now "Black Girl Magic" has drawn criticism from within the black community too.

Earlier this month black women's magazine Essence published a special edition highlighting "Black Girl Magic", featuring three prominent black women on its covers. Actresses Teyonah Parris and Yara Shahidi, and one of the leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement, Johnetta "Netta" Elzie all talked to the magazine about the phrase in positive terms.

Days later Elle magazine ran an article by Linda Chavers entitled: "Here's my problem with Black Girl Magic. ​Black girls aren't magical. We're human." She argued that the phrase holds black women to unfeasibly high standards - celebrating them when they achieve it, but ​criticising them when they don't.

"The 'strong, black woman' archetype, which also includes the mourning black woman who suffers in silence, is the idea that we can survive it all, that we can withstand it. That we are, in fact, superhuman. Black girl magic sounds to me like just another way of saying the same thing, and it is smothering and stunting. It is, above all, constricting rather than freeing," Chavers wrote.

The piece whipped up a storm online and thousands have taken her to task.

One of the critics was was Jenn M. Jackson, managing editor of the Black Youth Project, who discussed some of her concerns with BBC Trending.

"I think her point would be valid if the term came form outside the black community. but if it comes from within the community, we are setting that standard ourselves. We are choosing to see something magical in black womanhood, and we're not comparing it to anything else."

On both Instagram and Twitter, use of the phrase shows no signs of slowing down.

Google Drive Just Got Some Useful New Features

If you live most of your digital life in Google’s apps, you’ll be pleased with Google Drive’s small albeit useful update.

The company has made it easier to add files to your Drive and organize them into folders, which can be handy if you have a large number of documents and need a quick way to sort through them.

Among the most helpful changes is the ability to drag and drop files into folders directly from search. This makes it more convenient to move files regardless of where they’re saved, whether that be inMy Drive or another folder you’ve created within Google Drive.

The other two additions focus on providing a faster means of adding content to My Drive. When previewing files, there’s a new button that allows you to save that document or photo straight to My Drive. And, if you’re already browsing through files in Drive, a “Move” icon should appear in the toolbar so that you can transfer files to different folders right away. It cuts out the step of having to press the menu button, which looks like three dots stacked on top of one another, to access the “Move” option. 

You’ll see an “Add to My Drive” icon in the toolbar instead of the “Move” symbol if you’re looking through files that have been shared with you in Drive.

France clinical trial: 90 given drug, one man brain-dead

There is no known antidote to the drug, the chief neuroscientist at the hospital in Rennes said.

Of the six men in hospital, three could have permanent brain damage, Gilles Edan added.

Reports that the drug is a cannabis-based painkiller have been denied by the health ministry.

A fifth man is suffering from neurological problems and a sixth man is being monitored but is not in a critical condition, Mr Edan said.

The trial, which involved taking the drug orally and has now been suspended, was conducted by a private laboratory in Rennes.

The experimental drug was manufactured by the Portuguese company Bial.

All those who volunteered for the trial have been recalled and the Paris prosecutor's office has opened an investigation.

Health Minister Marisol Touraine pledged to "get to the bottom... of this tragic accident".

"I was overwhelmed by their distress" she told reporters. "Their lives have been brutally turned upside down".

Analysis

By James Gallagher, health editor, BBC News website

This is the bitter price of the new medicines we take for granted. Testing such experimental drugs, at the cutting edge of science, can never be completely risk-free.

The safety and effectiveness of these drugs are rigorously tested in animals. The risks are low but there must still be a leap of faith when they are tried in people for the first time.

This trial has been taking place since July without such major events being reported. Generally in Phase I trials the dose is increased slowly over time, which could be why the side-effects are appearing now.

The hospitalised men started taking the drug regularly on 7 January and began showing severe side-effects three days later.

Three of the volunteers are now facing a lifetime of disability in this "accident of exceptional gravity".

It is a high price to pay, but thousands of people do safely take part in similar trials each year.

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The trial was conducted by Biotrial, a French-based company with an international reputation which has carried out thousands of trials since it was set up in 1989.

In a message on its website, the company said that "serious adverse events related to the test drug" had occurred.

The company insisted that "international regulations and Biotrial's procedures were followed at every stage".

According to the health ministry, the adverse effects occurred on Thursday.

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Clinical trials

Trials typically have three phases to assess a new medicine for safety and effectiveness

• Phase I tests for safety. A small number of people, sometimes healthy, and sometimes with a medical condition, are given a tiny dose of the drug under careful supervision, not to test if the drug works, but in order to check for any side effects
• Phase II sees the drug given to people who have a medical condition to see if it does indeed help them
• Phase III trials are only for medicines or devices that have already passed the first two stages, and involve them being compared to existing treatments or a placebo. The trials often last a year or more, involving several thousand patients                                                                                                                                                                                     The study was a Phase I clinical trial, in which healthy volunteers take the medication to evaluate the safety of its use, the ministry said. Before any new medicine can be given to patients, detailed information about how it works and how safe it is must be collected.                                                                                                                                           Clinical trials are the key to getting that data - and without volunteers to take part in the trials, there would be no new treatments for serious diseases such as cancer, multiple sclerosis and arthritis.
  Every year around the world thousands of people take part in clinical trials but incidents like this are very rare, the BBC's Hugh Schofield reports from Paris.
  New EU regulations to speed up clinical drug trials and streamline testing procedures across the 28-nation bloc are due to take effect in 2018.

Burkina Faso attack: Ouagadougou hotel hit by gunfire

Eyewitnesses said two car bombs went off outside the Splendid hotel at around 19:30 local time (same as GMT).

Three to four masked men then stormed the Splendid Hotel, which is used by UN staff and westerners, witnesses said.

A member of staff at the nearby Cappuccino cafe told Agence France Presse that "several people" had been killed there.

Local media report that at least one person has been taken hostage inside the building.

One jihadi monitoring group said al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb claimed it was behind the attack.

Eyewitnesses reported hearing exchanges of gunfire between the men and security forces, as well as sporadic gunfire from inside the four-star hotel close to the country's international airport.

At least one car was seen burning outside the building.

Three hours after the attack started, an Associated Press reporter at the scene reported seeing soldiers in an armoured vehicle arrive in the area.

In the latest developments:

• Local TV station Burkina 24 says that security forces are preparing to intervene
• France's ambassador to Burkina Faso, Gilles Thibault, says a curfew is in place until 06:00 local time
• The US embassy in Ouagadougou says it is aware of the incident and is "closely following" the situation                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     A similar attack by Islamist militants on a hotel in neighbouring Mali in November left 20 people dead.
• Burkina Faso had recently held its first presidential election since a coup earlier last year.
  That coup toppled long-time leader Blaise Compaore, who had governed for 27 years.
  "We are still in a context of political fragility, so I think the timing of this attack is meaningful," Cynthia Ohayon, an analyst with the International Crisis Group, told the BBC from Ouagadougou.
  "The country has long borders with Mali and Niger, and we know there are armed groups present on the border, so this was probably something we had coming."