While You Were Sleeping: 5 stories you might have missed, Dec 22
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Armed police are seen on the balcony of a Charles University building in central Prague, where a student shot and killed 14 people.
PHOTO: AFP
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Student kills 14 people in Prague university shooting
A 24-year-old Czech student killed 14 people and wounded 25 others - 10 seriously - at his Prague university on Dec 21 before he was “eliminated”, police said, in what was the country’s worst-ever mass shooting.
Police Chief Martin Vondrasek said authorities were tipped off earlier in the day that the man was likely heading to Prague from his town in the Kladno region outside the capital with intentions of taking his own life.
Shortly after that, the shooter’s father was found dead.
Police evacuated a Charles University Faculty of Arts building where the shooter was due to attend a lecture, but then were called in at the faculty’s different building, arriving within minutes after reports of the shooting came in, Chief Vondrasek said.
Giuliani seeks bankruptcy after $200m defamation judgment
REUTERS
Rudy Giuliani filed for bankruptcy on Dec 21, just days after he was ordered to pay US$148 million (S$196 million) to two former Georgia election workers he falsely accused of fraud as he worked to overturn Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential election loss.
Guiliani, who was known as “America’s mayor” for his leadership of New York after the Sept 11, 2001, attacks, faces a crush of debts stemming from his work on behalf of former president Trump.
He also faces criminal charges in Georgia.
Embattled Harvard president facing plagiarism claims
NYT
Harvard University’s president was planning to submit three corrections to her 1997 dissertation after a committee investigating plagiarism allegations against her found that she had made citation errors, a university spokesperson said.
Professor Claudine Gay, who was inaugurated as Harvard’s president in September, has already submitted corrections to two published articles in recent weeks that were the focus of a review by the Harvard Corporation, the university’s governing board.
Questions about Prof Gay’s academic integrity have rocked her already tumultuous first semester as the university’s first Black president, as she faced a pressure campaign to resign over her congressional testimony about anti-Semitism on campus earlier this month.
A whiff of tears reduces male aggression, says study
PHOTO: ISTOCKPHOTO
Watching someone cry often evokes an emotional response – but according to a new study published on Dec 21, human tears themselves contain a chemical signal that reduces brain activity linked to aggression.
The research was carried out by the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, and appeared in PLOS Biology, a US science journal.
Though it involved female tears, because women made themselves available as donors, it probably isn’t a sex-dependent effect, the authors say.
Court jails Chilean for murder of Japanese student
AFP
A French appeals court on Dec 21 upheld the prison sentence of a Chilean man for the premeditated murder of his Japanese ex-girlfriend in 2016.
A lower court last April had sentenced Nicolas Zepeda to 28 years in prison for killing Narumi Kurosaki, then aged 21, in December 2016 in the eastern French city of Besancon.
“You have been found guilty of premeditated murder,” judge Francois Arnaud said on Dec 21, as he confirmed the sentence, with the 33-year-old standing head-bowed in the courtroom.
