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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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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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“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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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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The bodies of a couple who were on a sailing trip across the Atlantic Ocean have been found on a life raft that washed up on a remote Canadian island almost six weeks after they were last seen.

Briton Sarah Packwood, 54, and her Canadian husband, Brett Clibbery, 70, are thought to have abandoned their yacht and died before washing up on Sable Island – known as the “graveyard of the Atlantic” – east of Nova Scotia in Canada on 12 July.

One theory investigators are exploring is that the yacht was struck by a passing cargo ship that did not notice the collision, according to Canadian news website Saltwire.

Brett proposed to me in the main cabin of the boat.” The couple then married on Theros in 2016 and Packwood moved to Canada in 2018, purchasing land with Clibbery on Salt Spring Island.

In a video posted to their YouTube channel, Theros Adventures, on 12 April the pair named the trip the Green Odyssey, and explained how it would rely on sails, solar panels, batteries and an electric engine repurposed from a car.

In what would be their final post, the pair wrote on Facebook: “Captain Brett and First Mate Sarah set sail on the 2nd leg of The Green Odyssey on board Theros – GibSea 42 foot sailboat.

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Two outbreaks of mpox in sub-Saharan Africa are raising concerns about the continued spread of the virus globally — and the surge of a deadlier strain than the one that began circling the globe in 2022.

“We live in an interconnected world, so the spread of this virus can continue to happen, and that is something that requires strong surveillance,” Maria Van Kerkhove, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the WHO, told reporters on Thursday.

“We are sequencing our cases, and we’re looking out for [the deadly strain] — but at the moment, it’s the global outbreak” variant, Lucille Blumberg, an honorary consultant for the National Institute for Communicable Diseases in South Africa, tells NPR.

In DRC, there are similar challenges reaching sex workers who are heavily stigmatized, Jason Kindrachuk, associate professor in medical microbiology and infectious diseases at the University of Manitoba, tells NPR.

South Africa, for example, could tap into established HIV programs where “many people have experience communicating sensitively and working with key population groups,” Blumberg says.

Beyond vaccines, fundamental public health work — communicating the risks, offering testing and treatment, doing contact tracing, and above all mobilizing the community — could also help, Van Kerkhove says.

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Scientists have for the first time discovered a cave on the Moon.At least 100m deep, it could be an ideal place for humans to build a permanent base, they say.It is just one in probably hundreds of caves hidden in an “underground, undiscovered world”, according to the researchers.Countries are racing to establish a permanent human presence on the Moon, but they will need to protect astronauts from radiation, extreme temperatures, and space weather.Helen Sharman, the first British astronaut to travel to space, told BBC News that the newly-discovered cave looked like a good place for a base, and suggested humans could potentially be living in lunar pits in 20-30 years.But, she said, this cave is so deep that astronauts might need to abseil in and use “jet packs or a lift” to get out.Lorenzo Bruzzone and Leonardo Carrer at the University of Trento in Italy found the cave by using radar to penetrate the opening of a pit on a rocky plain called the Mare Tranquillitatis.It is visible to the naked eye from Earth, and is also where Apollo 11 landed in 1969.The cave has a skylight on the Moon’s surface, leading down to vertical and overhanging walls, and a sloping floor that might extend further underground.It was made millions or billions of years ago when lava flowed on the Moon, creating a tunnel through the rock.The closest equivalent on Earth would be the volcanic caves in Lanzarote, Spain, Prof Carrer explains, adding that the researchers visited those caves as part of their work.

When you make these discoveries and you look at these images, you realise you’re the first person in the history of humanity to see it,” Prof Carrer said.Once Prof Bruzzone and Prof Carrer understood how big the cave was, they realised it could be a good spot for a lunar base.

“After all, life on Earth began in caves, so it makes sense that humans could live inside them on the Moon,” says Prof Carrer.The cave has yet to be fully explored, but the researchers hope that ground-penetrating radar, cameras or even robots could be used to map it.Scientists first realised there were probably caves on the Moon around 50 years ago.

Then in 2010 a camera on a mission called the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter took pictures of pits that scientists thought could be cave entrances.But researchers did not know how deep the caves might be, or if they would have collapsed.Prof Bruzzone and Prof Carrer’s work has now answered that question, although there is much more to be done to understand the full scale of the cave.“We have very good images of the surface - up to 25cm of resolution - we can see the Apollo landing sites - but we know nothing about what lies below the surface.

There are huge opportunities for discovery,” Francesco Sauro, Coordinator of the Topical Team Planetary Caves of the European Space Agency, told BBC News.The research may also help us explore caves on Mars in the future, he says.

That could open the door to finding evidence of life on Mars, because if it did exist, it would almost certainly have been inside caves protected from the elements on the planet’s surface.The Moon cave might be useful to humans, but the scientists also stress that it could help answer fundamental questions about the history of the Moon, and even our solar system.The rocks inside the cave will not be as damaged or eroded by space weather, so they can provide an extensive geological record going back billions of years.The research is published in the scientific journal Nature Astronomy.Graphic by Gerry Fletcher

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Celebrities, politicians and untold thousands of tourists have done it for years but cuddling koalas at a Brisbane wildlife sanctuary is coming to an end after feedback from visitors.

Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary opened in the Queensland capital in 1927, and describes itself as the world’s first koala sanctuary.

Now it has announced an end to koala holding as of Monday, replacing it with “close-up” experiences instead.

The move comes as an international animal welfare organisation leads calls for koala cuddling to be officially outlawed.

Here’s what you need to know about holding koalas in Australia:

With additional reporting by Australian Associated Press

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Three rusty water-trucks stand at the edge of Kibbutz Malkiya, on Israel’s border with Lebanon; little bigger than a family car, they look like something out of an old cartoon.A collection of industrial leaf-blowers is stacked nearby.“This is all we have,” resident Dean Sweetland explains.

“We have just these - and the leaf-blowers - to blow the fire back onto the dead areas.”Dean, a Londoner who moved to the kibbutz eight years ago, is one of a dozen residents left to tackle recent bushfires in the area, sparked by Hezbollah rockets from Lebanon.“We’re on our own,” he says.

From the back terrace of his home - built from shipping containers, a few hundred meters from the Lebanese border - Dean Sweetland points out the plumes of grey smoke rising from the hills nearby, to the sound of distant bombs and fighter jets.Most of the other residents of Kibbutz Malkiya were evacuated in the days following the Hamas attacks on Israel on 7 October, when its Hezbollah allies in Lebanon began firing on communities here.

Families evacuated eight months ago are still living in temporary accommodation further south.The blazes here are a vivid reminder that the Israeli government’s promise to secure these northern areas and get residents back home is still unfulfilled.“We feel like we’re the forgotten people,” Dean says.

“They don’t care about the north.”The attitude among many in the country, he says, is “let it burn”.“I think we have to take out Hezbollah for 10km, maybe more,” says Yariv Rozenberg, the deputy commander of Kibbutz Malkiya’s civil defence team.“You can’t kill them all, and they won’t leave from here.

Before a meeting of the war cabinet to discuss the situation on Tuesday night, the Israeli military’s chief of staff, Lt Gen Herzi Halevi, said the country was “approaching the point where a decision will have to be made”.The armed forces, he said, were “prepared and ready to move to an offensive”.Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, visiting troops and firefighters in the northern town of Kiryat Shmona on Wednesday, said the government was prepared for “a very strong action in the north.”“One way or another we will restore security to the north,” he said.Many believe a ceasefire in Gaza would help cool the situation further north.“Gaza is the key,” Dean says.

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