Drugmaker Insys Therapeutics Inc filed for bankruptcy protection on Monday amid mounting expenses driven by a U.S. Justice Department probe into claims it paid doctors bribes to prescribe a powerful opioid medication.

The Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing marked a first for a drugmaker accused in lawsuits of helping fuel the deadly U.S. opioid endemic and came just days after Insys struck a $225 million settlement with the Justice Department.

The department is now Insys' largest unsecured creditor due to Wednesday's accord, which resulted in a subsidiary pleading guilty to fraud charges and the company entering into a deferred prosecution agreement.

"You had to live-did live, from habit that became instinct-in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."- George Orwell, 1984

Tread cautiously: the fiction of George Orwell has become an operation manual for the omnipresent, modern-day surveillance state.

It's been 70 years since Orwell-dying, beset by fever and bloody coughing fits, and driven to warn against the rise of a society in which rampant abuse of power and mass manipulation are the norm-depicted the ominous rise of ubiquitous technology, fascism and totalitarianism in 1984.

Who could have predicted that 70 years after Orwell typed the final words to his dystopian novel, "He loved Big Brother," we would fail to heed his warning and come to love Big Brother.

"To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone- to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink - greetings!"-George Orwell

1984 portrays a global society of total control in which people are not allowed to have thoughts that in any way disagree with the corporate state. There is no personal freedom, and advanced technology has become the driving force behind a surveillance-driven society. Snitches and cameras are everywhere. People are subject to the Thought Police, who deal with anyone guilty of thought crimes. The government, or "Party," is headed by Big Brother who appears on posters everywhere with the words: "Big Brother is watching you."

We have arrived, way ahead of schedule, into the dystopian future dreamed up by not only Orwell but also such fiction writers as Aldous Huxley, Margaret Atwood and Philip K. Dick.

"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."―George Orwell

Much like Orwell's Big Brother in 1984, the government and its corporate spies now watch our every move. Much like Huxley's A Brave New World, we are churning out a society of watchers who "have their liberties taken away from them, but ... rather enjoy it, because they [are] distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing." Much like Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, the populace is now taught to "know their place and their duties, to understand that they have no real rights but will be protected up to a point if they conform, and to think so poorly of themselves that they will accept their assigned fate and not rebel or run away."

Even the readers of several British tabloids have cast doubt on a source-based story claiming that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un executed one of his generals in a piranha-filled tank.

The eye-grabbing headline first appeared in the Daily Star. The tabloid cited "sources" as saying that Kim executed one of his generals in a manner worthy of a James Bond movie, by throwing him into a fish tank infested with piranhas. In the 1977 film 'The Spy Who Loved Me', the evil Karl Stromberg fed his assistant to a shark and attempted to repeat the trick on Agent 007.

The tank with the carnivorous fish is reportedly part of Kim's Ryongsong Residence, a luxury mansion in northern Pyongyang.

The report does not provide the names of the sources or the general, but is replete with gory detail - it claims that before being thrown to the piranhas, the general's arms and torso were slashed with knives. Whether he drowned, bled to death, or was killed by the piranhas (or whether any of it actually happened), is impossible to tell.

Readers of the Daily Star and other British tabloids that pounced on the story, however, found it hard to take at face value. Instead, a flurry of memes ensued.

A Moscow court has sentenced a former governor of the Komi Republic, a region in Russia's northwest, to 11 years in prison after convicting him of fraud, money laundering, and bribe taking.

In a June 10 ruling, the Zamoskvoretsky district court also ruled that Vyacheslav Gaizer must pay a 160 million-ruble ($2.5 million) fine.

Gaizer and 18 other people, including the former speaker of the region's legislature, an ex-deputy governor, and several local businessmen, were arrested in September 2015.

Prosecutors charged that Gaizer led a "criminal group" that carried out a series of crimes in order to gain ownership of or control over several lucrative enterprises in the Komi region.

At the time of his arrest, investigators said that a search of Gaizer's office revealed a large sum of cash, documents related to offshore companies, and a collection of valuable wristwatches.

Head of US Central Command Gen. Frank McKenzie had requested in early May that an aircraft strike force, B-52 bombers, troops and an anti-missile system be sent to the region, referring to "specific" threats to the US and allied forces as well as interests in Iraq and elsewhere.

Speaking aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln in the North Arabian Sea, Gen. Frank McKenzie, head of US Central Command, has said he may recommend boosting US forces in the Middle East to further act as a "stabilising" factor against Iran, writes The Wall Street Journal.

The commander justified this expansion upon concluding that the deployment of this aircraft carrier and other forces had already proved instrumental in warding off allegedly imminent Iranian threats to US assets.

On a brief tour of the region this week, the general claimed the enhanced US force in the region has, for now, stabilised the situation, but insisted Tehran posed a very real danger, and according to him, an attack could be imminent. Lauding the augmented US force in the area, he said: "We think this is having a very good stabilising effect."

China's vast gold stockpile saw another boost in May, marking an ongoing increase for a sixth straight month, according to the latest data published by the People's Bank of China.

Last month, the central bank raised its bullion reserves to 61.61 million ounces from 61.10 million in the previous month. As of the end of May, the nation's stockpile was valued at $79.83 billion compared to $78.35 billion a month earlier. In tonnage terms that marks an increase of 15.86 tons, after almost 58 tons of gold were added over the five months through April.

In May, the country's total foreign exchange reserves, the world's largest, reportedly edged 0.2 percent, or $6 billion higher, reaching $3.101 trillion. The increase shifted the expectations of analysts polled by Reuters, who projected the reserves to drop by five billion to $3.090 trillion.

The much-acclaimed series 'Chernobyl' tells the story of the 1986 nuclear disaster and the authorities' attempts to play it down. Ironically, 33 years on, it's Western leaders who need to learn how to be honest and transparent.

It was the accident which some think led directly to the fall of communism. "Reformers in the Soviet Union, and Mikhail Gorbachev himself, used Chernobyl as an argument for more accountability and greater frankness, because the initial reaction of the Soviet authorities was anything but transparent. It became a symbol of what was wrong with the Soviet system," says Professor Archie Brown, author of 'The Rise and Fall of Communism', as cited in yesterday's Sunday Express newspaper.

Just three-and-a-half years after Chernobyl, the Berlin Wall came down, and in 1991, the USSR itself ceased to exist.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said on Sunday that President Donald Trump might ease U.S. restrictions on Huawei if there was progress in the trade row with China - but absent a deal, Washington would maintain tariffs to cut its deficit.

"I think what the president is saying is, if we move forward on trade, that perhaps he'll be willing to do certain things on Huawei if he gets comfort from China on that and certain guarantees," Mnuchin said. "But these are national security issues."

Washington has imposed and then toughened import tariffs on Chinese goods in a bid to reduce the United States' trade deficit and combat what it calls unfair trade practices.

US Senators Chris Murphy (D-CT) and Todd Young (R-IN) have co-sponsored a bill to reign in President Donald Trump's power to sell arms to Saudi Arabia while sidestepping Congress, by forcing a vote on the deals.

The Republican and Democratic Senators plan to introduce a resolution that would potentially restrict the Trump administration's flourishing arms trade with, and security assistance to, Saudi Arabia, on Monday.

After lawmakers' unsuccessful previous attempts to stop American weapons from being funneled to Riyadh, the latest effort refers to a provision of the Foreign Assistance Act that allows Congress to vote to request information on the human rights record of a particular country. After being provided the data, Congress can vote to roll back any aspect of future or ongoing security assistance, including the supply of arms to that country.

The resolution is specifically aimed at forcing a vote on 22 arms deals struck between the US and the Saudis, as well as on any future weapons sales.

Kazakhstan is undergoing a change of leadership after the resignation of its head Nursultan Nazarbayev. The election came to an end with more than 70% of votes cast for his successor Tokayev, according to the preliminary results.

Kazakhstan, a large Central Asian country located between Russia and China, which is a major energy player in the region, has a new head of state for the first time since gaining independence in 1991.

On Sunday, Kazakhs went to over 9,000 polling stations throughout the country in a snap presidential election, which had a record seven candidates on the ballot. Some 12 million voters were registered in the nation of 16 million people.