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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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Harris crossed the threshold amid a wave of endorsements from state delegations Monday evening.

These endorsements are not binding and with President Joe Biden out of the race, delegates are free to vote for the candidate of their choice.

Under a plan outlined by Democratic officials Monday, delegates are expected to vote virtually to confirm Harris as the nominee by August 7.

The Democratic National Committee has long made clear that it is committed to locking in its nominee before the in-person convention begins on August 19 – and specifically before August 7, which, it says, is critical to ensure ballot access in all states and avoid the risk of litigation.

She delivered a speech to staff, previewing her campaign argument against former President Donald Trump and detailing her experience as an attorney general and prosecutor.

The vice president said in her statement Monday that she will continue to travel across the country in the coming months “talking to Americans about everything that is on the line.

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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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As Joe Biden withdraws from the 2024 US presidential race and Kamala Harris gains support from prominent Democrats, data from Betfair Exchange indicates that her odds are improving.

The vice president still faces a significant challenge to surpass Donald Trump, however, who has maintained strong performance over nearly the past year.

At the start of the 2024 Republican National Convention, just days after Mr Trump’s assassination attempt, his chances stood at 69%.

However, this did not significantly dent his lead, likely due to growing concerns about Mr Biden’s fitness to remain in office, which ultimately led to his withdrawal from the race.

The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News.

We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open-source information.

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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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With 78-year-old Donald Trump now certain to face a Democratic candidate younger than he is, the Republican could have the tables turned on him over the questions of age and mental agility that he often sidestepped while Joe Biden was his opponent.

The age gap between Trump and any of his likely Democrat opponents – Kamala Harris, 59; Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, 52; Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, 51 – could make him the sole focus of voters’ desire for a generational handover of power.

And with Biden’s often stumbling public appearances – and especially his disastrous debate – now a thing of the past, there is likely to be a fresh focus on Trump’s mental acuity and his frequently rambling, confused campaign speeches.

Previously he has made high-profile campaign trail gaffes, in which he seemed to think Barack Obama was still president and mistook his arch Republican rival Nikki Haley for Nancy Pelosi.

But that pledge dissolved on Saturday when he returned to disparaging Biden, Harris and the Democratic agenda and has been delivering his usual rants on the campaign trail, often laced with conspiracy theories and even a repeated and bizarre reference to a shark.

“Democrats will be able to use Harris as an offensive chess piece in the suburbs of the country, women’s right to chose and reproductive freedom, and hope that Trump screws up by overreacting so they can accuse him of bring incapable of controlling himself because of his age,” Sheinkopf said, “and it becomes a different race.”

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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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Democrats have poured $81m (£62m) in donations into Vice-President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race on Sunday.

It is the largest 24-hour period of campaign funding in presidential history with more than 888,000 donors making contributions of less than $200 in the day after Mr Biden stepped aside.

Donors who had pulled back their funding over concerns about Mr Biden’s age say they now intend to resume their support for the party.

The surge in donations in the last 24 hours is the single biggest for online contributions to Democrats since 2020, according to the New York Times, when ActBlue raised $73.5m after the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg.The new funds mark a significant turn for the Democratic party, which had seen support erode from major donors after Mr Biden’s poor performance in June’s presidential debate against Donald Trump.Grassroots funding from small donors had also diminished, according to Biden campaign insiders cited in US media.But soon after Mr Biden’s announcement to drop out of the race and his endorsement of Ms Harris’ bid for the White House, Democrats went online to contribute at a startling pace.Win With Black Women, a group of black women leaders, held a Zoom call with more than 44,000 participants on Sunday night to throw their support behind the vice-president.The group says it raised over $1.5m in three hours for her presidential campaign.Joe Cotchett, a San Francisco-based political fundraiser for the Democrats, told NBC News that donors “are now ready to dig into their pockets".Among them is Gideon Stein, president of the Moriah Fund and a donor for the party, who told the US news outlet that he will resume his funding after having paused it because of concerns over Mr Biden’s electability.Several high-profile political donors have also indicated their support for Ms Harris as the Democratic party nominee.

“I wholeheartedly support Kamala Harris and her candidacy for President of the United States in our fight for democracy in November,” he said in a post on X.Another big name political donor, Alexander Soros, the son of philanthropist George Soros, said Ms Harris is “the best and most qualified candidate we have”.

“Dem delegates need to pick a swing state winner,” he wrote on X on Sunday following Mr Biden’s announcement.

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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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Stars including Robert De Niro, Lizzo and Barbra Streisand are reacting to the news that US president, Joe Biden, is bowing out from the presidential election and not seeking another term in office after weeks of pressure to step aside.

Within hours of the news being announced on Sunday (21 June), two-time Oscar winner De Niro showed support for the frontrunner nominee, Democrat Vice President Kamala Harris, to take on Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election in November.

In a statement issued via his spokesperson Stan Rosenfeld, De Niro said: “In an act of shrewd politics and selfless patriotism, Joe Biden is stepping aside to clear the path for another Democrat to become president .

Billie Eilish’s brother and musical collaborator Finneas posted a photo on Instagram of his family standing with the president and wrote: “I see a person putting the people before themselves and their pride today, and for that, I have an enormous amount of respect.”

Comedian Kathy Griffin, who was fired from CNN in 2017 after sharing a photo of herself holding an effigy of Trump’s decapitated head, wrote online: “Let’s make history!!!

Freaky Friday actor Jamie Lee Curtis said she supported Biden’s decision and endorsed Harris’s nomination, writing on Instagram: “She is trusted and tested and she is a fierce advocate for women’s rights and people of color and her message is one of hope and unity for America at her time of great national divide.”

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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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“We’re grateful for the progress leading companies have made toward fulfilling their voluntary commitments in addition to what is required by the executive order,” says Robyn Patterson, a spokesperson for the White House.

Without comprehensive federal legislation, the best the US can do right now is to demand that companies follow through on these voluntary commitments, says Brandie Nonnecke, the director of the CITRIS Policy Lab at UC Berkeley.

After they signed the commitments, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI founded the Frontier Model Forum, a nonprofit that aims to facilitate discussions and actions on AI safety and responsibility.

“The natural question is: Does [the technical fix] meaningfully make progress and address the underlying social concerns that motivate why we want to know whether content is machine generated or not?” he adds.

In the past year, the company has pushed out research on deception, jailbreaking, strategies to mitigate discrimination, and emergent capabilities such as models’ ability to tamper with their own code or engage in persuasion.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has used satellite imagery and AI to improve responses to wildfires in Maui and map climate-vulnerable populations, which helps researchers expose risks such as food insecurity, forced migration, and disease.

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Researchers from Google have built a new weather prediction model that combines machine learning with more conventional techniques, potentially yielding accurate forecasts at a fraction of the current cost.

The model, called NeuralGCM and described in a paper in Nature today, bridges a divide that’s grown among weather prediction experts in the last several years.

It then incorporates AI, which tends to do well where those larger models fall flat—typically for predictions on scales smaller than about 25 kilometers, like those dealing with cloud formations or regional microclimates (San Francisco’s fog, for example).

But the real promise of technology like this is not in better weather predictions for your local area, says Aaron Hill, an assistant professor at the School of Meteorology at the University of Oklahoma, who was not involved in this research.

That means the best climate models are hamstrung by the high costs of computing power, which presents a real bottleneck to research.

While many of the AI skeptics in weather forecasting have been won over by recent developments, according to Hill, the fast pace is hard for the research community to keep up with.

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Biden announced on Sunday afternoon in a letter that he will not be seeking a second term in this year’s presidential election and threw his support behind Harris.

Craig Snyder, the group’s director, told Newsweek in an email on Sunday afternoon that the organization believes Harris “is best suited to defeat Donald Trump in November.”

Haley, the former South Carolina governor and United Nations (U.N.) ambassador running for the GOP ticket, ended her campaign in March following losses on Super Tuesday in competition with Trump who is the Republican Party’s presidential nominee.

She also polled well among moderates and college-educated voters that don’t support Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) agenda.

Snyder told Newsweek that Haley’s “disparaging comments” were “motivated by political rather than substantive concerns, and we are certain that those comments will not be a decisive factor in the ultimate voting decision of the Haley voters whose extraordinary act in the primaries of protest against Donald Trump as the leader of the Republican Party means they are going to give the Democratic nominee at the very least serious consideration in November.”

In another social media post, the PAC expressed support for Harris and wrote “We welcome @KamalaHarris taking the torch that @JoeBiden passed to her.”

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A Russian court has sentenced Alsu Kurmasheva, a Russian-American journalist for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, to six-and-a-half years in prison after a rushed, secret trial.

Gershkovich’s trial was similarly concluded with unusual haste, raising hopes of a prisoner swap involving the Wall Street Journal reporter, which has long been the subject of private discussions between Russian and US officials.

Still, Kurmasheva’s verdict, handed down on the same day as Gershkovich’s, suggests that Russia might be seeking to trade her for Russians wanted by the Kremlin, including several deep-cover spies behind bars in the west.

Since the start of the war in Ukraine, Russia has launched an unprecedented crackdown on protesters, independent news outlets and foreign social media networks.

In March 2023, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, signed off on a draconian law imposing a jail term of up to 15 years for spreading intentionally “fake” news about the military, in effect criminalising any public criticism of the war.

Stephen Capus, the RFE/RL president and CEO, on Monday denounced the trial of Kurmasheva and her conviction as “a mockery of justice” and said that “the only just outcome is for Alsu to be immediately released from prison by her Russian captors”.

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The United Nations has blamed Facebook for the dissemination of hate speech against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar that resulted in their ethnic cleansing.

This influence on others is known as a (positive) network effect, where increased numbers of people improve the value of a product.

In doing so, one could be helping Facebook to refine its algorithms so that it can better single out specific individuals for certain purposes, some of which could be as nefarious as those of Cambridge Analytica.

For those of us who do not engage in such objectionable behavior, it is helpful to consider whether Facebook has crossed certain moral “red lines,” entering the realm of outright wickedness.

Likewise, Facebook would have crossed a red line if it had intentionally assisted in the dissemination of hate speech in Myanmar.

The recent worrisome revelation that Facebook hired an opposition-research firm that attempted to discredit protesters by claiming that they were agents of the financier George Soros is not encouraging.

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Donald Trump said he’d like to take North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un to a baseball game as he boasted about their friendship at a Michigan rally on Saturday.

Under Kim’s leadership, “the government maintains fearful obedience by using threats of torture, executions, imprisonment, enforced disappearances, and forced labor,” Human Rights Watch reports.

Trump mentioned Orbán during the same Michigan rally, celebrating praise he claimed to have received from the authoritarian leader.

“Viktor Orbán… said when asked what happened with the world it’s falling to pieces, the wars all over, he said, ‘Bring back Trump.

The Hungarian leader has similarly praised Trump, calling the former president his “good friend” earlier this year when the duo met in Washington, DC.

Trump has also repeatedly praised Russia’s Vladimir Putin – even taking his side over that of US intelligence at a press conference in Helsinki in 2018 – and Xi Jinping of China.

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A gunman has shot dead five people in a nursing home in the Croatian city of Daruvar, some 130 kilometers (80 miles) east of the captial, Zagreb, Croatian media reported on Monday.

The Index news portal said five people died immediately, while others were wounded and still receiving medical assistance.

The suspect fled the scene, but the police soon caught him in a cafe near the facility in the town of Daruvar, the report said.

Police officials were not available immediately to confirm the shooting.

Shootings in the Balkan country are rare.

This is a breaking news story.

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