📌 Menendez Guilty, Moon Tunnel, More

New Jersey Democratic Senator Bob Menendez was found guilty of 16 federal corruption charges in a nine-week trial in Manhattan.

The charges relate to a multiyear bribery scheme in which he accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Egyptian and Qatari governments to exercise his power in their favor.

Jurors deliberated for three days before reaching guilty verdicts on all counts. Although such a heavy sentence is considered unlikely, Menendez faces a sentence of over 200 years.

Menendez is refusing to resign despite overwhelming calls to do so. His attorneys say they plan to appeal the verdict. The judge scheduled the senator's sentencing date for Oct. 29.

China reported solid growth in the first half of 2024, but analysts say problems continue to weigh on the second-largest economy.

Meanwhile, the US economy is set to stabilize in the second half of 2024 and into next year, with strong consumer demand, according to the auditing and financial advisory firm Deloitte.

China's National Bureau of Statistics said GDP grew by 5% in the first half, with the second quarter seeing a year-on-year growth rate of 4.7%, slightly down from the 5.3% growth in Q1.

George Magnus, an associate at the University of Oxford China Centre, noted that still-low post-pandemic consumption and ongoing real estate crisis still hamper the country.

A Deloitte economist said the US economy expanded at a slower pace in Q1, predicting growth would hit 2.4% for 2024 before slowing to a more modest 1.1% next year.

World Bank data shows the gap between the top two economies widened last year. China's was just two-thirds the size of the US’s, down from 70% in 2022 and 76% in 2021.

A breakthrough discovery confirms decades of speculation that caves might run under the lunar surface.

The data was gathered in 2010 during NASA’s ongoing Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission. Years on, a signal processing reanalysis suggests there are caves on the Moon.

The researchers suggest caves could be suitable bases for protecting astronauts. Surface temperatures on the Moon reach 127º Celsius when lit by the Sun and drop to -173º facing away.

Other dangers include cosmic and solar radiation, which can be 150 times more potent than it is on Earth, and meteorites, which frequently strike the moon’s surface.

Thai police have found traces of cyanide in the cups of six people who were found dead in a room at a central Bangkok luxury hotel.

The bodies of three women and three men were found inside a hotel suite on the fifth floor of the Grand Hyatt Erawan Hotel by a hotel worker late on Tuesday afternoon.

The people were Vietnamese, and two had American citizenship, the Thai prime minister, Srettha Thavisin, said. He added the cause was “presumably something related to consumption.”

Police shared images of hotel food in the suite, which was still sealed in clingfilm and appeared untouched. But the cups had traces of cyanide and thermoses, police said.

A husband and wife among the dead had invested money with two of the others, suggesting that money could be a motive. The investment was meant to build a hospital in Japan, police report.

In 2023, Thailand arrested a serial killer who poisoned 15 people with cyanide over years. “Am Cyanide” killed people she owed money to that funded her online gambling addiction.

A federal appeals court ruled a state law requiring a person to be at least 21 before obtaining a handgun permit is unconstitutional.

The St. Louis-based 8th US Circuit Court of Appeals sided with gun rights groups in finding Minnesota’s ban violated the rights of 18- to 20-year-olds under the Constitution's Second Amendment to keep and bear arms.

Circuit Judge Duane Benton, writing for a panel of three judges all appointed by Republican presidents, held that under recent Supreme Court rulings that have expanded gun rights, the state's 2003 law could not be deemed valid.

Gun rights groups have filed similar lawsuits challenging age-based restrictions on carrying firearms in other states, including Georgia, Illinois and Pennsylvania.

Benton cited a landmark 2022 ruling by the Supreme Court saying restrictions must be “consistent with this nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

Nobel Prize laureates have asked the Belarus president to free all its political prisoners after the release of 18 seriously ill activists.

The Belarusian human rights group Viasna counts almost 1,400 political prisoners, including its Nobel Peace Prize-winning founder, Ales Bialiatski.

President Alexander Lukashenko cracked down severely on opponents as protests gripped the country in 2020. Only one well-known figure was among the 18 Lukashenko freed.

The 58 laureates include literature prize winners Svetlana Alexievich of Belarus, J.M. Coetzee, Herta Müller, and peace prize laureates Mairead Corrigan Maguire, Oscar Arias, Jody Williams, Shirin Ebadi, Tawakkol Karman and Juan Manuel Santos.

A flock of sheep acting weirdly was found to have devoured a crop of weed.

Wildfires, heatwaves, and flooding destroyed key grazing areas for the flock near Thessaly, Greece. Their hunger drove them to a greenhouse that produces medicinal cannabis.

The owner said, “I don’t know [if I should be] laughing or crying. We had the heatwave, and we lost a lot of production. We had the floods; we lost almost everything. And now this.”

Two hundred and 20 pounds of the crop were destroyed. The shepherd of the flock said his sheep began to exhibit “strange behavior” after returning. “They were jumping higher than goats.”

Sources couldn’t confirm whether the sheep later had the munchies.