UNITED KINGDOM
Drug use rose after vote
Antidepressant use in England rose significantly compared with other prescription drugs in the wake of the 2016 vote to exit the EU, new research released yesterday found. Researchers at King’s College London looked at official monthly prescribing data for antidepressants for all 326 voting districts in England, comparing it with other classes of drugs in the run up to the June 23 referendum and the weeks that followed. They found that after the vote the volume of antidepressants prescribed increased 13.4 percent. “Job insecurity and worries about one’s future finances are associated with poorer health outcomes. Any event that triggers uncertainty and worries can have a negative effect,” said Sotiris Vandoros, senior lecturer in health economics at King’s College London and an adjunct professor at Harvard University.
UNITED STATES
Trump answers Mueller
President Donald Trump has turned over written answers to special counsel Robert Mueller’s questions about his knowledge of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, his lawyers said on Tuesday, avoiding at least for now a potentially risky sit-down with prosecutors. It is the first time he has directly cooperated with the long investigation. The step comes after months of negotiations over whether and when Trump might sit for an interview. The responses might help stave off a potential subpoena fight over Trump’s testimony if Mueller deems them satisfactory.
UNITED STATES
Judge blasts lawyers
Federal judge Jesse Furman on Tuesday issued a stinging rebuke to Department of Justice lawyers seeking yet again to delay his ruling over whether it is legal to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census. “Enough is enough,” Furman said in New York City as he rejected what he said has become a weekly effort by the department’s lawyers to stop him from ruling on the merits of lawsuits accusing the Department of Commerce of improperly adding the question. “What makes the motion most puzzling, if not sanctionable, is that they sought and were denied virtually the same relief only weeks ago,” Furman said.
UNITED STATES
Ex-Michigan head charged
Former Michigan State University president Lou Anna Simon on Tuesday was charged with lying to police during an investigation of the handling of serial sexual abuser Larry Nassar, becoming the third current or former campus official other than Nassar to face criminal charges in the scandal. Simon is accused of making two false and misleading statements — that she was unaware of the nature of a sexual misconduct complaint that sparked the school’s probe of Nassar and that she only knew a sports medicine doctor, not Nassar himself, was under investigation at that time. If convicted of two felony and two misdemeanor counts of lying to a police officer, the 71-year-old Simon faces up to four years in prison.
DENMARK
Author shot after party
Former gang leader Nedim Yasar, who repented and wrote a book about his experiences, was shot on Monday night by a lone gunman in dark clothes and died in a Copenhagen hospital on Tuesday, police said. Joergen Ramskov, the chief editor of the Radio24syv radio station where Yasar had a talk show, says the 31-year-old was shot after he left a cocktail party for his book Roedder (“Roots”), which was released on Tuesday.
SOUTH KOREA
‘Comfort women’ entity shut
The government yesterday announced the formal shutdown of a controversial Japanese-funded foundation created to help former wartime sex slaves — a move that will further sour ties between the neighbors. It sparked a sharp reaction from Tokyo, which summoned the South Korean ambassador and urged Seoul to respect its “international promise.” The foundation was created as a result of a controversial 2015 bilateral deal, but the agreement angered some victims who described it as falling short of holding Japan responsible for wartime abuses.
CHINA
Civilian focus needed in Sea
More focus should be put on building civilian facilities on islands in the South China Sea and less emphasis on the military to better sooth regional fears about Beijing’s intentions, an influential state-run paper said yesterday. In a commentary, Study Times said there was a “potential risk of war” for areas surrounding the country such as the South China Sea. “Without the strong deterrence power of our military in the South China Sea, the protecting regional peace and stability is merely idle theorizing and falls short of what we would wish,” it said, but added that there must be a greater role for non-military actors in the South China Sea. That means there should be more focus on building lighthouses, civilian airports, maritime search and rescue, scientific research and weather forecasting, it added.
KENYA
Female lawmakers sought
Lawmakers on Tuesday debated a bill that would allocate one-third of all seats in parliament to women, with campaigners optimistic it would pass despite previous failures. Women hold 23 percent of seats in the lower and upper houses of parliament combined, says the Inter-Parliamentary Union — on a par with the global average, but lower than neighbors Rwanda, Ethiopia and Burundi. The 2010 constitution states that no more than two-thirds of any elected or appointed political bodies can be of the same gender, but does not set out a mechanism for attaining that goal. The new legislation would provide for special seats to be created if parliamentary elections fail to achieve the required numbers.
INDONESIA
Whale ate 6kg of plastic
A sperm whale has been found dead with 115 plastic cups and 25 plastic bags in its stomach, raising concern among environmentalists and throwing the spotlight on the country’s rubbish problem. The items were part of nearly 6kg of plastic waste discovered in the 9.5m carcass when it washed ashore in Wakatobi National Park on Monday. Other debris included flip flops and ripped tarpaulins, Wakatobi tourism head La Ode Saleh Hanan told reporters yesterday.
RWANDA
EU zoos to deliver rhinos
Wildlife parks in three European countries on Tuesday announced that they are joining forces to send critically endangered eastern black rhinos back to their natural habitat in Rwanda, where the entire rhino population was wiped out during the genocide in the 1990s. Three female and two male rhinos from the Dvur Kralove Zoo in the Czech Republic, Flamingo Land in Britain and Ree Park Safari in Denmark would first meet in the Czech park to get used to each other and get ready for their transport to the Akagera National Park in eastern Rwanda in May or June. It would be the biggest single transport of rhinos from Europe to Africa, officials said.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
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