Doctors treating the victims of mysterious, invisible attacks on the US embassy in Cuba have discovered brain abnormalities as they search for clues to explain the damage to their hearing, vision, balance and memory.

The most specific finding to date about physical damage from the attacks shows that whatever it was that harmed the Americans, it led to perceptible changes in their brains. It is one of several factors fuelling growing scepticism that some kind of sonic weapon was involved. Medical testing has revealed the embassy workers developed changes to the white matter tracts that let different parts of the brain communicate, several US officials said, describing a growing consensus held by university and government physicians researching the attacks. White matter acts like information highways between brain cells.

Loud, mysterious sounds followed by hearing loss and ear-ringing had led investigators to suspect “sonic attacks”. But officials are now avoiding that term. The sounds may have been the byproduct of something else that caused damage, said three US officials briefed on the investigation.(theguardian)…[+]

India’s government has expanded a scheme offering payment incentives to Hindus who marry members of the country’s poorest and most oppressed Dalit caste.

A scheme introduced in 2013 offered 250,000 rupees (£2,900) to encourage Hindus from higher castes to marry members of the Dalit (“untouchable”) community, in the hope that it would help to remove the stigma of inter-caste marriage and foster greater social cohesion. To qualify, the annual income of the spouse from the high caste had to be less than 500,000 rupees (‎£5,800). The government envisaged about 500 such marriages annually, but less than 100 have taken place each year. On Wednesday, the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment announced it would scrap the income ceiling, and said all couples in which one spouse is from the Dalit caste would receive the cash incentive.

Ancient prejudices against Dalits remain stubbornly entrenched in India. Marriages between the higher castes and Dalits are very rare, with the vast majority of Indians marrying within their own caste. Many Indians will not even eat with a Dalit. Dalits were traditionally thought to fall outside the four castes that determined the shape of Hindu lives, from jobs and diets to marriage prospects.(theguardian)…[+]

A cacophony of angry and despairing voices across the Middle East and the world has urged Donald Trump not to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel at a planned speech on Wednesday, warning him that any such announcement would destroy the peace process, strengthen the extremists and weaken the US’s standing in the world.

The pope issued an unusually heartfelt plea to the president to respect the status quo on the city, and to conform with UN resolutions. He told thousands of people at his general audience: “I cannot keep quiet about my deep worry about the situation that has been created in the last few days.” Pope Francis said he hoped “wisdom and prudence prevail, in order to avoid adding new elements of tension to a global panorama that is already convulsed and marked by so many cruel conflicts”.

The spokesman for the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, said the US was “plunging the region and the world into a fire with no end in sight”. He added that the Organisation for Islamic Co-operation would meet in Istanbul on 13 December in a special session to co-ordinate a response.(theguardian)…[+]