What happened
Three men were killed yesterday at San Diego’s largest mosque and the two teenage suspects were later found dead of apparent self-inflicted gunshot wounds in a car nearby, officials said. One of the victims was a guard at the Islamic Center of San Diego, which also houses a school. “I think it’s fair to say his actions were heroic, and undoubtedly he saved lives,” San Diego Police Chief Scott Wahl said at a news conference. The attack is being investigated as a hate crime. 

Who said what
Police had been urgently searching for the alleged gunmen, ages 17 and 18, after the 17-year-old’s mother called to report her potentially suicidal son missing with several firearms and her car, Wahl said. Investigators found “anti-Islamic writing in the car” where the teens were found and the words “hate speech” written on one of the firearms, The New York Times said, citing law enforcement officials. A suicide note “contained writings about racial pride,” according to CNN.  

What next?
In a “grim and familiar American ritual,” the Times said, political leaders “condemned the violence” and promised that “police officers would increase patrols at religious sites” in San Diego and other major cities. 

What happened
A federal jury in California yesterday rejected Elon Musk’s high-profile lawsuit against OpenAI and its leaders, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, because he had not filed it within the statute of limitations. U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers agreed and quickly dismissed the suit. Musk, an estranged OpenAI cofounder, had wanted his former partners forced out of their leadership roles, an unwinding of the company’s conversion to a for-profit endeavor and roughly $150 billion in damages. 

Who said what
The quick verdict capped a three-week trial that “fixated the tech world on the grievances and drama” of the world’s most powerful AI moguls, The Wall Street Journal said. Musk accused Altman of “betraying a shared vision” of creating OpenAI as a “nonprofit dedicated to guiding artificial intelligence’s development for the good of humanity,” The Associated Press said. 

What next?
The verdict “preserves the status quo” in Silicon Valley’s AI race and “removes one of the final roadblocks” to OpenAI’s expected $1 trillion initial public offering, The New York Times said. But Altman now has to “address the challenges to his reputation from some extremely personal testimony,” Reuters said, “including multiple witnesses describing him as a liar.”

As the Iran war continues, food and vital medicines are increasingly scarce in the country, according to The Australian. The costs of some medicines have “risen by 400%,” but antidepressants and sleeping pills are being “dispensed without prescriptions.” 

A similar rise in sedative and antidepressant use is playing out in other countries around the world that also face conflict or suffer under the pressures of economic and political repression. And as mental health needs continue to stretch resources, many experts fear that the consequences could echo the fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic. 

Some pharmacists in Iran call the boom in antidepressants a form of “mass sedation,” said The Australian. These healthcare professionals believe that relaxing the strictness of distribution policy keeps the public in a “state of artificial calm” designed to “delay any popular uprising while the war continues.” 

The parallel conflict in Lebanon is also “pushing anxious residents toward sedatives and sleeping pills,” said Ynet News. In its campaign against Ukraine, Russia is experiencing a “spiral” of antidepressant use, said El País. The war has had a “larger emotional impact on its population” than the Covid pandemic.

In Cuba, economic and political crises present an “outlook that feels bleaker than the collapse of the Soviet Union,” said The Guardian. As a growing mental health problem “envelops the island,” many citizens are “turning to prescription drugs” to cope with the U.S.-imposed oil blockade on a nation reeling from years of economic decline.