In [8], Hitchin proved that a compact K/ihlerian twistor space is in fact a projective algebraic manifold. Moreover, it is the twistor space associated to either the Euclidean 4-sphere S 4 or the complex projective plane CF 2 with Fubini-Study metric. The twistor spaces are 3 and the flag of lines in~ p2 respectively. In [10, 11], the author proved the existence of self-dual metric with positive scalar curvature on the connected-sums of two or three copies of the complex projective planes. Their twistor spaces are Moish6zon spaces. In fact, they are the small resolution of the intersection of two quadrics in~ ps with four nodes and the double covering of CP 3 branched along a quartic with thirteen nodes. Recently, the joint work of Donaldson and Friedman [3] produced a general procedure to construct new twistor spaces and hence self-dual manifolds. In this article, we shall follow the spirit of Hitchin's work and prove the

We study large groups of birational transformations Bir(X), where X is a variety of dimension at least 3, defined over C or a subfield of C. Two prominent cases are when X is the projective space P^n, in which case Bir(X) is the Cremona group of rank n, or when X⊂P^{n+1} is a smooth cubic hypersurface. In both cases, and more generally when X is birational to a conic bundle, we produce infinitely many distinct group homomorphisms from Bir(X) to Z/2, showing in particular that the group Bir(X) is not perfect, and thus not simple. As a consequence, we also obtain that the Cremona group of rank n⩾3 is not generated by linear and Jonquières elements.

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For a gerbe Y over a smooth proper Deligne-Mumford stack B banded by a finite group G, we prove a structure result on the Gromov-Witten theory of Y, expressing Gromov-Witten invariants of Y in terms of Gromov-Witten invariants of B twisted by various flat U(1)-gerbes on B. This is interpreted as a Leray-Hirsch type of result for Gromov-Witten theory of gerbes.