STAR TV

Abuja — The Senate has begun a probe into non-payment of all severance, gratuities and pensions arrears to retired state judicial officers by state governments. Against this backdrop, the Senate yesterday mandated its Committee on Judiciary, Human Rights and Legal Matters to carry out a holistic investigation on the issues surrounding the non-payment of these entitlements and report back within four weeks. The Senate also mandated the committee to review the laws impeding the harmonization of the processes and prompt payment of retirement benefits of all judicial officers in the country. The upper chamber urged the National Judicial Council, NJC to harmonise the payment of retirement benefits of all judges of superior courts of records in the country as it had done with the salaries and emoluments of retired judicial officers listed in Section 6 of the Constitution. The resolutions were sequel to a motion by Senator Chukwuka Utazi, PDP, Enugu

People with depression and social anxiety have some common and specific structural abnormalities in their brains that can be spotted in imaging scans. This was the major finding of a study from Sichuan University in Chengdu in China, which features this week at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America in Chicago, IL. The researchers — Dr. Youjin Zhao and co-author Dr. Su Lui — came to their conclusions after examining high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) brain scans of 37 people with major depressive disorder (MDD), 24 with social anxiety disorder (SAD), and 41 people in good health (the controls). They looked for differences in the gray matter of the brain, focusing specifically on the thickness of the cerebral cortex, a thick outer layer of tissue that is densely packed with neurons and deals with most of the brain's information processing. MDD, commonly referred to as depression, is a serious medical illness characteriz