Word: asylum
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Researchers discovered the first antidepressants purely by chance in the 1950s. Seeking a treatment for schizophrenia, scientists at the Munsterlingen asylum in Switzerland found that a drug that tweaked the balance of the brain's neurotransmitters - the chemicals that control mood, pain and other sensations - sent patients into bouts of euphoria. For schizophrenics, of course, that only made their condition worse. But researchers soon realized it made their pill perfect for patients with depression. On first trying it in 1955, some patients found themselves newly sociable and energetic and called the drug a "miracle cure." The drug, called imipramine...
...according to Rahman Saki, chairman of the Norwegian-Iranian Support Committee - an aid group - Heydari is considering asking Norwegian authorities for political asylum. "There is no way he will return to Tehran. If he goes back, it will undoubtedly mean imprisonment and torture," Saki says. According to the Swedish newspaper Sydsvenskan, Heydari will take a couple of days to figure out his plans, and during that time he will not give any interviews. The Norwegian Foreign Ministry said Thursday that it had yet to be contacted in the case. (See pictures of terror in Tehran...
...Heydari applies for asylum, it will mark a significant defection for Iran - especially at a time when the Iranian people and the rest of the world are watching for cracks to appear in the government following last month's violence. Davoud Hermidas Bavand, a scholar and former diplomat in Iran, told the Los Angeles Times that such a defection would be huge: "If it is true, then it is going to be a precedent, because it has not happened since the beginning years of the [1979] revolution, when some of the appointed postrevolutionary diplomats defected and sought asylum. This case...
...Thailand's military packed more than 4,000 Hmong asylum seekers into trucks and drove them from refugee camps to neighboring Laos, a single-party state that's been accused of persecuting the Hmong since they backed U.S. forces during the Vietnam War. Thailand maintains that Hmong living illegally in Thailand are economic migrants, not political refugees in need of international protection - but the decision to forcibly repatriate them drew international condemnation. Human Rights Watch called the expulsion "appalling," while the U.S. State Department argued that the refugees deserved to be protected from threats they faced in their homeland...
...Natacha Bouchart, conservative mayor of Calais and a backer of Sarkozy's anti-immigration hard line, says her city and others on the coast are "hostage to the British" asylum laws. She says the U.K. should tighten those rather than shift the responsibility on French authorities to keep illegal aliens from making it to Britain. (Read a TIME postcard from Calais...