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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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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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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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Sanders, who had previously supported Biden’s reelection bid, expressed concern about the media’s role in pushing the President out of the race.

The Vermont senator’s hesitation to immediately endorse Harris stands in contrast to the wave of support she has received from within the Democratic Party.

When pressed about what it would take for him to endorse the Vice President, Sanders emphasized the importance of the upcoming campaign, highlighting critical issues such as climate change and economic rights.

Sanders pointed to disparities in American society, noting that “life expectancy for working-class people is 10 years shorter than it is for the rich.”

While expressing confidence that he will eventually endorse Harris, Sanders made it clear that he wants to ensure the campaign aligns with his vision for addressing the needs of working families.

Some Hillary Clinton supporters have argued that Sanders’ long campaign against her in the 2016 Democratic primaries and his perceived reluctance to unite the party helped Donald Trump defeat her in the general election.

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A woman charged over the alleged hit-and-run murder of a young mother south of Brisbane has been remanded in custody after a brief court hearing.

Police allege 23-year-old Kiesha Thompson was deliberately struck by an SUV just before 9am on Friday in the Logan suburb of Daisy Hill, south of Brisbane.

The alleged driver — 24-year-old Larissa Rita Mae-Leigh Sant — has been charged with one count of murder.

Ms Sant did not appear when the case was heard in the Ipswich Magistrates Court this morning and her lawyer made no application for bail.

In a video released by Queensland police, Ms Thompson’s aunt Amanda Matthias praised the first responders who tried to save her niece.

Her brother, Koby Torto, said Ms Thompson had had a “difficult life”.

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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