NEWS

 

Amber Heard files legal documents claiming Johnny Depp has not paid divorce settlement

 

Amber Heard has filed legal documents claiming Johnny Depp has not paid the divorce settlement, according to US reports.
The Danish Girl actress had reached an agreement with the 52-year-old actor in August that he would pay her $7 million, which she wanted to be donated to charity, but her legal team have filed a Request for Order with Los Angeles Superior Court accusing the actor of failing to pay the money.

 

Snowden says he does not expect pardon from Obama.

 

Since September, there has been a campaign calling for a presidential pardon that has won support from figures such as financier George Soros and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.

Edward Snowden says he does not expect a pardon from US President Barack Obama which would spare the fugitive whistleblower from a toughened approach when Donald Trump takes power.

"I'm not counting on it," Snowden said in an interview published by Yahoo News on Monday.

The former National Security Agency contractor leaked thousands of classified documents to the press in 2013 which revealed the vast scope of US surveillance of private data that was put in place after the 9/11 attacks.

After fleeing his home in Hawaii, he now lives in exile in Russia where he has sought asylum.

Should he ever return to the United States, Snowden would be tried for espionage and other charges carrying up to 30 years in prison.

Since September, there has been a campaign calling for a presidential pardon that has won support from figures such as financier George Soros and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.

The campaign says Snowden should be welcomed home "as a hero" for actions that benefited the public because they reined in US surveillance programs and led to improved privacy protection laws.

Snowden's lawyers are trying to win him clemency before Obama leaves office in January or a plea bargain that would shield him from spending a lot of time in jail.

 

Drug gives lung cancer patients four extra months

Most lung cancer patients survived four months longer on an immunotherapy drug than those treated with chemotherapy, according to trial results published Monday.

Importantly, they also experienced fewer side-effects, researchers reported in The Lancet medical journal.

Patients with non-small-cell lung cancer -- which represents by far the majority -- survived for 13.8 months on average on the drug called atezolizumab, compared to 9.6 months for those on chemotherapy, the study authors said.

And the difference was likely even bigger, as several participants on chemotherapy were given immunotherapy after the trial ended, possibly boosting their survival.

"Atezolizumab reinvigorates patients' immune systems against cancer," the study's lead author Achim Rittmeyer of the University of Goettingen in Germany, said in a statement.

"Our trial has shown that this has significant results for their survival."

Lung cancer is the most common cancer, affecting some 1.8 million people in the world every year, said Rittmeyer.

It is also the leading cause of cancer death in the world.

According to the American Cancer Society, 80-85 percent of lung cancers are non-small-cell types.

The trial recruited 850 patients without any remaining treatment options, and compared how long they survived -- half on atezolizumab and the rest on chemotherapy, the standard treatment.

Immunotherapy trains people's immune systems to attack tumour cells without killing healthy cells.

Chemotherapy, in contrast, targets all fast-dividing cells in the body, good and bad alike.

Unlike viruses or bacteria, cancer cells are not intruders but our own cells gone haywire, which explains why they circulate undisturbed by the immune system.

Still in its infancy, immunotherapy -- including atezolizumab -- is being tested on many cancer types.

In October, America's Food and Drug Administration fast-tracked atezolizumab for the treatment of patients with non-small-cell lung cancer.

"The time in which chemotherapy will no more be the mainstay of treatment of metastatic non-small-cell lung cancer is perhaps not so far away," Elisabeth Quoix of France's Strasbourg University Hospital wrote in a comment on the study, also carried by The Lancet.