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Top executives at Japan’s Kobayashi Pharmaceutical resigned on Tuesday following revelations that a health supplement the company sells may be linked to 80 deaths.

A damning external report funded by the company found that leadership had acted with an “insufficient sense of urgency” over consumer safety risks.

The tablets in question are made with red yeast rice or “beni koji,” which is fermented with mold cultures.

While a a common ingredient in east Asian food and drink for centuries, it can promote organ damage depending on its chemical makeup.

At the time the government called Kobayashi’s delay in reporting the number of cases under investigation “extremely regrettable.”

The company should have recalled the products immediately and reported the incident, but it only decided to do so after an internal investigation process, the lawyers conducting the audit wrote.

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A tortoise miraculously managed to escape its home and climb on to train tracks, sparking delays for commuters.

After a global IT outage caused havoc for many trying to travel on Britain’s trains on Friday morning, more delays were reported between Ascot and Bagshot later that evening.

South Western Railway told Sky News a train driver spotted the culprit - a tortoise named Solomon - on the track near Ascot station just after 6pm.

Engineers carried Solomon off the tracks - and staff “moved the tortoise to a position of safety on the platform at Ascot, which included a short ride on the train itself”.

While staff had planned to leave the reptile with a vet in Staines, the tortoise’s owner identified Solomon and collected him at around 8pm.

Network Rail added on X: "While we are delighted that this story has a happy ending and can reassure passengers that our everyone home safe, every day ambitions extend to pets, we must remind everyone that the railway is dangerous.

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The caustic tone from Sidorov and Solovyov provided a stark contrast with that of Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov that same evening, who had personified cool aloofness, saying that, with four months to go until the election, “much could still change.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin, Peskov has often suggested, has bigger things on his mind than the fracas among his political enemies overseas.

With Moscow in its third year of war against Ukraine, they have jumped on the chaos in the United States as an opportunity to frame Russia as superior to the West and distract from domestic problems.

Despite not having been officially nominated, Harris appears to have already been designated a prime target by Russia’s overwhelmingly white male propagandists.

“The entire deep state will be backing Harris,” Sergei Markov, an analyst with Kremlin ties wrote on his Telegram channel.

Instead, the state news agency ran with a comment from the aide of Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council who loves threatening the West with nuclear annihilation.

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A majority of England’s nine water and sewage companies are “failing to get the basics right”, according to annual rankings which labelled four operators as responsible for 90% of serious pollution incidents.

It said that fact “polarised performance” across the sector as firms UK-wide face pressure to cut raw sewage discharges through heightened, and long overdue, investment in their infrastructure.

Separate EA data covering 2023, released in March, showed spills into England’s rivers hit record levels last year.

Labour’s plans include tougher penalties for poor performance and the ability to block rewards for failure when annual bonuses and shareholder payouts are due.

The body’s chair Alan Lovell said: "For the nation to have cleaner rivers and seas, water companies must take responsibility to understand the root cause of their problems.

“As part of this we are taking forward our biggest ever transformation in the way we regulate, recruiting up to 500 additional staff, increasing compliance checks and quadrupling the number of water company inspections by March next year.”

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The European Union says it has notified Meta that its “pay or consent” model for Facebook and Instagram might violate consumer protection laws.

The EU’s Consumer Protection Cooperation (CPC) Network says the company has until September 1st, 2024, to propose changes to its model, which it calls “misleading” and “confusing” for users, or face potential fines.

CPC regulators, who began their investigation after complaints from consumer watchdog groups, claim the company uses confusing language to explain how both the paid and “free” versions of Facebook and Instagram work and that its rollout pressured people to make a choice without enough time to consider how it would affect them.

They also say that calling the ad-free versions of Facebook and Instagram “free” is misleading since it still requires users to consent to the use of their data for targeted ads.

Didier Reynders, EU Commissioner for Justice, says customers shouldn’t be “lured into” thinking they won’t see ads if they pay the subscription, or that it’s free despite the company profiting from their personal data.

“Subscriptions as an alternative to advertising are a well-established business model across many industries,” Meta spokesperson Matt Pollard told The Verge in an email, “Subscription for no ads follows the direction of the highest court in Europe and we are confident it complies with European regulation.”

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A 2009 agreement insisted on by the European Commission meant that Microsoft could not make security changes that would have blocked the update from cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike that caused an estimated 8.5 million computers to fail, the Big Tech giant said in comments to the Wall Street Journal newspaper.

Thousands of flights were delayed or cancelled, leaving passengers stranded at airports worldwide, the UK’s NHS service was affected and contactless payments failed to work.

Microsoft has Windows Defender, its in-house alternative to CrowdStrike, but because of the 2009 agreement made to avoid a European competition investigation, had allowed multiple security providers to install software at the kernel level.

Microsoft’s main competitor, Apple, in 2020 blocked access to the kernel on its Mac computers, arguing it would improve security and reliability.

Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, a Microsoft spokesman said the company could not make a similar change because of the EU agreement.

Under its new Digital Markets Act, Europe is currently trying to force Apple to give access to its iPhone to allow alternative app stores and web browsers to be used.

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A wealth of promising home-grown titles from the Xbox Games Showcase 2024 back in June gave existing users plenty of reasons to stay subscribed.

Xbox Game Pass has had a really solid July for content, and it’ll get even sweeter if the rumors of Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 hitting the service soon pan out.

I wrote recently about how games might not be enough to find those elusive “new” users in an article linked below, revolving around the dilemma that the overall number of “core” console players simply isn’t growing.

While speaking to developers at shows over the past year, a lot of the discourse revolves around “black hole” games like Fortnite and Roblox, which vacuum up users and turn them into mono-gamers with no interest in playing anything else.

Xbox Game Pass is an attempt to cut through that trend in the name of supporting and showcasing the variety of art the industry has to offer — meeting new customer cohorts halfway.

The vastness of its Activision-Blizzard purchase seems to have led to a lost couple of years of momentum for Xbox as a brand, with attention focused solely on its variety of court cases.

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For the third consecutive year, the young leftwingers with mohawks, torn T-shirts and facial piercings began descending on Sylt at the weekend, mainly by train, to disrupt the seasonal repose of the elites.

The Aktion Sylt pressure group said it aimed to make “safe retreats for fascist subsidy collectors, tax-evading Nazi heirs and backward world destroyers things of the past!”

Their presence has been registered with the authorities, who have ordered the encampment’s residents to sleep in tents, use chemical toilets and dispose of their own litter until the site is dismantled by midday on 6 September, said Hans-Martin Slopianka, a district spokesperson for North Frisia.

Marvin Bederke of Aktion Sylt said he expected up to 300 participants – the agreed limit – at the improvised campsite near the local airport, where private planes bring the rich and famous of the EU’s top economy to enjoy the island’s windswept charms.

Activists criticise the “gentrification” in the community’s small villages, meaning that most people who work at Sylt’s designer shops, restaurants, bars and private clubs often can no longer afford to live on the island and have to commute.

The leftwing author and trade union official Marco Höne will travel from Stuttgart in the south-west for a gathering on 7 August titled Your Wealth Makes Me Throw Up, where he will read from his book Rich and Ugly.

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Ms. Harris tapped former Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., who once oversaw Barack Obama’s vice-presidential vetting, to oversee her choice of a potential running mate, according to two people briefed on the matter.

Two of Ms. Harris’s top political advisers, Sheila Nix and Brian Fallon, joined the Monday morning call of senior staff members on the Biden-turned-Harris campaign — a sign of her team’s widening footprint inside the operation.

The next step in the party’s formal nomination of Ms. Harris will come on Wednesday, when the rules committee of the Democratic National Convention is scheduled to meet to set a date for a virtual roll-call vote of the state delegations.

Any momentum toward a competitive nominating contest appeared to melt away early Monday when a half-dozen Democratic governors quickly fell into line behind Ms. Harris — among them Andy Beshear of Kentucky, JB Pritzker of Illinois, Wes Moore of Maryland and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan.

Democrats were delighted by the jolt of energy, with donors flocking to give after Mr. Biden’s exit: The Harris campaign announced on Monday that it had raised $81 million in her first 24 hours, a record sum, from 888,000 unique contributors.

Tim Walz of Minnesota was due for a round of cable TV interviews on Monday night and Tuesday morning, during which he planned to explain the party’s nominating process and promote his own political biography.

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The Ministry of Emergency Management and Climate Readiness said as of early afternoon Monday, there were about 440 properties on evacuation order and 3,000 under alert, calling the situation “dynamic and everchanging.”

On Monday afternoon, Sooke Potholes Park on Vancouver Island was closed due to a wildfire detected near Mavis Lake east of Victoria.

In an interview with CBC News shortly before 5:30 p.m. PT, Sooke Mayor Maja Tait said there is currently no risk to the wider community, but as a precaution, the district has cancelled a scheduled council meeting so it can react if anything changes.

That same fire also forced the evacuation of the Bowron Lake provincial park canoe circuit and the artistic enclave of Wells, impacting up to 1,000 residents, tourists and temporary workers, according to Mayor Ed Coleman.

Farther south, the city of Williams Lake, B.C., home to more than 10,000 people, ordered a local state of emergency Sunday night after a fire broke out along Mackenzie Avenue, which is a strip of businesses and industry.

Locals posted photos and video of water bombers flying low over the neighbourhood on Sunday evening, and by midnight Mayor Surinderpal Rathor confirmed residents who had been “tactically evacuated” from their homes were allowed to return.

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“I first saw this in 2013 - an enormous amount of oxygen being produced at the seafloor in complete darkness,” explains lead researcher Prof Andrew Sweetman from the Scottish Association for Marine Science.

And because these nodules contain metals like lithium, cobalt and copper - all of which are needed to make batteries - many mining companies are developing technology to collect them and bring them to the surface.

And his discovery, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, raises new concerns about the risks of proposed deep-sea mining ventures.

The scientists worked out that the metal nodules are able to make oxygen precisely because they act like batteries.“If you put a battery into seawater, it starts fizzing,” explained Prof Sweetman.

And this discovery suggests that the nodules themselves could be providing the oxygen to support life there.Prof Murray Roberts, a marine biologist from the Univerisity of Edinburgh is one of the scientists who signed the seabed mining petition.

“There’s already overwhelming evidence that strip mining deep-sea nodule fields will destroy ecosystems we barely understand,” he told BBC News.“Because these fields cover such huge areas of our planet it would be crazy to press ahead with deep-sea mining knowing they may be a significant source of oxygen production.”Prof Sweetman added: “I don’t see this study as something that will put an end to mining.“[But] we need to explore it in greater detail and we need to use this information and the data we gather in future if we are going to go into the deep ocean and mine it in the most environmentally friendly way possible.”

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The European Union has stripped Hungary of the right to host the next meeting of foreign and defence ministers over its stance on the war in Ukraine.It comes weeks after Hungary assumed the presidency of the Council of the European Union, a role in which it would normally host the event, and amid anger over a meeting Prime Minister Viktor Orban held with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow earlier this month.

Every six months, under each new council presidency, the EU’s foreign and defence ministers hold informal meetings to discuss the biggest global issues facing the bloc.

Following the decision, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto wrote on Facebook: "What a fantastic response they have come up with.

"Mr Orban’s meeting with Mr Putin came as part of what he described as a “peace mission” - launched days after Hungary assumed the council presidency - that also saw him visiting the leaders of Ukraine and China as well as Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in the US.

The trip sparked condemnation from leaders across the EU, with European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen describing it as “nothing but an appeasement mission”.Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo said Mr Orban had “no mandate to negotiate or discuss on behalf of the EU”, while Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said the trip sent “the wrong signal to the outside world and is an insult to the Ukrainian people’s fight for their freedom”.The episode is one of numerous occasions since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on which Hungary has been at odds with most of the rest of the EU about the appropriate response.

After winning re-election in April 2022, just months after the invasion, Mr Orban told a crowd of supporters that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was among the people he would have to “battle” in his fourth term.Last year, he repeatedly used Hungary’s veto to delay a €50bn (£42bn) package of non-military financial aid to Ukraine.

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In the biggest news of all, Rivian and Volkswagen announced a $5 billion joint venture that will co-develop core parts of the hardware and software platform to be used in cars from both automakers.

We love that because it aligns so beautifully with our mission: the ability to help accelerate putting highly compelling electric vehicles into the market, which will ultimately drive more demand.

A core objective of how we’ve structured the joint venture is that we don’t lose the velocity and the speed and the decisiveness and lack of bureaucracy that exists within our software function today.

Beyond just simplification of how we manage running over-the-air updates across so many different instances, it also gets us a lot of supply chain leverage in a way that we, Rivian, haven’t had in the past.

In fact, you can imagine the day of the announcement, I had a handful of phone calls from CEOs of big semiconductor suppliers, and they’re like, “Hey, we can work harder on pricing.” So, that was awesome.

So, taking away all those mechanical design studio packaging constraints that we had before, and then solving the biggest challenge, which was network architecture by this being that as a project, it’s just a very different type of relationship.

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At least six people have been killed after a gunman opened fire in a care home in Croatia, sparking calls for stricter gun control in the Balkan country.

Croatia’s President Zoran Milanovic said he was shocked by the “savage, unprecedented” mass shooting and called for rules on gun ownership to be “even more rigorous”.

Marin Piletic, Croatia’s minister for Labour, Pensions, Families and Social Policy, said the mother of the suspect had been a resident of the care home for 10 years.

He also had a previous record for disturbing public order and domestic abuse, according to Croatian national police chief Nikola Milina.

“I was stacking the medicines and then I heard gunshots,” a shocked employee of the nursing home told state broadcaster HRT.

Last year, two mass shootings in neighbouring Serbia left more than 18 people dead and led many Serbs to hand in thousands of registered and unregistered weapons as part of a government amnesty.

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A conspiracy theorist being sued by two survivors of the Manchester Arena bombing is “perfectly entitled” to believe the deadly attack was an “elaborate hoax”, his lawyer has told a court.

Martin Hibbert and his daughter Eve, then 14, were among the hundreds of people injured when 22-year-old Salman Abedi detonated a homemade bomb at an Ariana Grande concert in May 2017.

They are suing self-styled journalist Richard Hall for alleged harassment and breaches of data protection laws in a civil trial at the High Court in London.

“Mr Hall says her parents are invoking their daughter’s catastrophic disability as part of a huge fraud on the general public,” he added.

The barrister said Mr Hibbert had made a “positive choice” to co-operate with the media and while there was one incident of filming, it was from a public highway and the footage was never published.

It bears similarities to defamation lawsuits brought against US conspiracy theorist Alex Jones by relatives of victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting, which he claimed was a hoax.

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“Consolidation is in full swing and I’m excited to see who will still be there at the end of the year,” said one managing director, on condition of anonymity.

Installers face significant challenges, including employee utilization, short waiting times for commissioning, and declining demand due to higher interest rates, inflation, and high electricity prices.

He also said that large online providers could exploit current market conditions, affecting even reputable solar installers.

“Price competition in the balcony module segment makes a normal PV system seem too expensive,” said another executive.

Another long-standing installer compared the current market to 2012, criticizing the media’s focus on low prices from third-rate Chinese manufacturers.

“I’m pessimistic about the second half of the year,” he said, noting the need for future support and policies to ensure sector stability.

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Despite vast hurdles and skepticism, Dr. Neff pulled it off, pioneering an East-West deal that gave bankrupt Moscow hard currency, reduced nuclear threats and produced one of the greatest peace dividends of all time.

The jitters intensified as Russia announced plans to store thousands of unused weapons from missiles and bombers in what American experts saw as decrepit bunkers policed by impoverished guards of dubious reliability.

Frank N. von Hippel, a physicist who advised the Clinton White House and now teaches at Princeton, called Dr. Neff an underappreciated hero who personally engineered the single biggest instance of arms reduction in the nuclear age.

His father, skilled at woodworking and fixing things, owned a print shop and taught business classes in Portland at Lewis & Clark College, where Tom received a tuition-free education in English, math and physics.

Five hundred metric tons — roughly a million pounds — Dr. Neff replied, giving what he considered a high estimate for the amount of Soviet bomb fuel soon to become surplus because arms control treaties were setting it aside.

A Russian brochure reprinted his opinion article, put the overall cost of the transaction at $17 billion and said that reactor fuel had supplied half of all American nuclear power plants.

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BRUSSELS — Hungary on Monday said it had asked the European Union to take action against Ukraine for imposing a partial ban on Russian oil exports, arguing the move was jeopardizing Budapest’s energy security.

Kyiv last month adopted sanctions blocking the transit to Central Europe of pipeline crude sold by Moscow’s largest private oil firm, Lukoil, sparking fears of supply shortages in Budapest.

The escalating diplomatic spat comes as ties between Ukraine and Hungary hit rock-bottom, with Kyiv last week lashing out at Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán for meeting Russian President Vladimir Putin within a self-styled “peace mission.”

The ban means the country’s central Slovnaft refinery would “receive 40 percent less oil than it needs,” Fico said, arguing it would also reduce Slovak fuel exports to Ukraine that make up a 10th of Kyiv’s consumption.

Following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, the EU banned imports of Russian oil arriving at the bloc by sea, but allowed landlocked countries like Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic to continue buying supplies via the Russia-to-Europe Druzhba pipeline until they could find an alternative solution.

But Budapest, which has angered Ukraine by holding up EU sanctions against Russia and has stalled Kyiv’s attempts to join the bloc, hasn’t tried to find other options, said Isaac Levy, an analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air think tank.

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“I first saw this in 2013 - an enormous amount of oxygen being produced at the seafloor in complete darkness,” explains lead researcher Prof Andrew Sweetman from the Scottish Association for Marine Science.

And because these nodules contain metals like lithium, cobalt and copper - all of which are needed to make batteries - many mining companies are developing technology to collect them and bring them to the surface.

And his discovery, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, raises new concerns about the risks of proposed deep-sea mining ventures.

The scientists worked out that the metal nodules are able to make oxygen precisely because they act like batteries.“If you put a battery into seawater, it starts fizzing,” explained Prof Sweetman.

And this discovery suggests that the nodules themselves could be providing the oxygen to support life there.Prof Murray Roberts, a marine biologist from the Univerisity of Edinburgh is one of the scientists who signed the seabed mining petition.

“There’s already overwhelming evidence that strip mining deep-sea nodule fields will destroy ecosystems we barely understand,” he told BBC News.“Because these fields cover such huge areas of our planet it would be crazy to press ahead with deep-sea mining knowing they may be a significant source of oxygen production.”Prof Sweetman added: “I don’t see this study as something that will put an end to mining.“[But] we need to explore it in greater detail and we need to use this information and the data we gather in future if we are going to go into the deep ocean and mine it in the most environmentally friendly way possible.”

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The vast production site is located in Water Oakley, Berkshire, 26 miles from central London, and is set to become the U.K. “creative home” for Amazon MGM Studios.

“The acquisition of a studio with such a storied heritage not only empowers us to produce more film and television in the U.K., but also unveils a wealth of opportunities in the local community with respect to jobs and skills training at all levels of the production process.”

The first Amazon MGM Studios production to be located at Bray following the acquisition will be the second season of the Russo Brothers’ spy series Citadel, starring Richard Madden and Priyanka Chopra Jonas, which is scheduled to begin filming in September.

Ridley Scott built and shot the miniatures for his Academy Award-winning sci-fi thriller Alien at the studios in 1978, and a few years before the cult classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show was brought to life here.”

Bray is also known as the home of British horror specialist Hammer Films, which moved on-site in 1951 and became known for projects with the likes of Christopher Lee and such movies as The Mummy, The Curse of Frankenstein, and Terence Fisher’s Dracula.

Crew and technicians lived on-site during productions, creating the first ‘house-style’ studio and fostering a warm and creative on-set community that many award-winning directors, producers, and actors came to love.”

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