Well, that was quite a week, wasn’t it? The Beachcomber offers this weekly collection of stories from everywhere but Washington D.C., for readers looking to climb out of the rabbit hole for a moment and re-connect to the world.
WORLD
India: According to this New York Times story, a joint investigation by India’s National Center for Disease Control and the India office of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta has solved a decades-old mystery regarding the cause of an annual, deadly illness in children in Muzaffarpur, India. The surprising culprit? Lychee fruit.
Germany: In a proposed settlement filed late Tuesday in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, Volkswagen agreed to pay at least $1.2 billion to settle claims from U.S. owners over the rigging of the German automaker’s larger diesel engines to cheat emissions tests. This follows an earlier settlement worth $15 billion to about 500,000 owners of their smaller-engined vehicles. Former CEO Martin Winterkorn and about three dozen others remain under criminal investigation in Germany for the scandal.
Ukraine: Al Jazeera writes about the heightened tensions and increased fighting between government troops and Russian-backed rebels in the region; and in a separate but related story, Moscow and Kiev trade accusations after an incident involving a Ukrainian military plane and Russian off-shore gas rigs in the Black Sea.
STATESIDE
NPR has a story about state legislatures across the country bringing bills to the floor to increase penalties for protestors participating in unauthorized protests. In North Dakota, a proposed bill would allow motorists to run over and kill any protestor obstructing a highway, as long as it was not done “intentionally.”
Also on NPR, we find out that there is still some good in the world in this story from Victoria, Texas, where donations to rebuild a mosque that was burned down last week have now surpassed $1 million.
EVERGREEN ENLIGHTENMENT
The Seattle Times takes a look at the state’s new lieutenant governor, Cyrus Habib, and how technology helps him oversee the legislature, despite the fact that he has been blind since the age of 8.
And from our “This just in…” department, we have the SeattlePI with the story of Seattle City Council’s decision to divest $3 billion from Wells Fargo, over the bank’s involvement with the Dakota Access Pipeline.
