Chinese President Xi Jinping blamedmass protests in Chinese citieson youth frustrated by years of the Covid-19 pandemic, but said the now dominant Omicron variant of the virus paved the way for fewer restrictions, European Union officials said.
The senior EU officials, who asked not to be named, recounted the main points of a visit to Beijing by European Council President Charles Michel, who met Mr Xi along with other senior EU officials on Thursday.
The handling of the Covid-19 pandemic and the protests against pandemic restrictions in recent days across more than 20 Chinese cities were among the topics raised by the EU.
“The response we got from the president was an explanation why there were protests – explaining that after three years of Covid-19 he had an issue, because people were frustrated, it was mainly students or teenagers,” one senior EU official said.
“I think that as a way out ... President Xi said that now Covid-19 in China was mainly Omicron. The Delta variant before was much more lethal and Omicron was less lethal, which opened the way for more openness with the restrictions - what we have already seen in some regions,” the EU official said.
EU officials said Mr Michel told Mr Xi that in Europe the focus of the first phase of the pandemic was very much on isolation, quarantine and testing, but it later shifted to vaccination.
“My sense was that this was something that was informative and I had a feeling that China on its side would be increasingly looking to encourage its citizens to be vaccinated, to follow a tiny bit the European experience,” a second EU official said.
China reported 33,073 new Covid-19 infections for Dec 2, of which 3,988 were symptomatic and 29,085 were asymptomatic, the National Health Commission said on Saturday.
That compared with 34,980 new cases a day earlier – 4,278 symptomatic and 30,702 asymptomatic infections, which China counts separately.
Excluding imported infections, China reported 32,827 new local cases, of which 3,933 were symptomatic and 28,894 were asymptomatic, down from 34,772 a day earlier. There were no deaths, the same as the previous day, keeping fatalities at 5,233.
As of Friday, mainland China had confirmed 331,952 cases with symptoms. Case numbers are slipping as China loosens restrictions in some cities, including testing requirements and quarantine rules, and is expected to announce an easing of its Covid-19 quarantine protocols in the coming days.
China’s capital Beijing reported 703 symptomatic and 2,610 asymptomatic cases, compared with 942 symptomatic and 3,026 asymptomatic cases the previous day, local government data showed.
Financial hub Shanghai reported 27 symptomatic cases and 264 asymptomatic cases, compared with 26 symptomatic cases and 209 asymptomatic cases a day before, the local health authority reported.
Guangzhou, a city in the south of nearly 19 million people, reported 826 new locally transmitted symptomatic and 4,096 asymptomatic cases, compared with 654 symptomatic and 5,185 asymptomatic cases a day before, local authorities said.
Chongqing reported 205 new symptomatic locally transmitted COVID-19 infections and 5,640 asymptomatic cases, compared with 189 symptomatic and 6,347 asymptomatic cases the previous day, local government authorities said.
Lapses in strategies to tackle COVID-19 this year continue to create "the perfect conditions" for a deadly new variant to emerge, the World Health Organization's Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Friday.
With the peak of the pandemic behind, countries worldwide are starting to loosen the reins on surveillance, testing and vaccination for the disease which has claimed more than 6 million lives so far.
About 90% of the world's population now has some level of immunity to SARS-COV-2 either due to prior infection or vaccination, according to the global health agency's estimates.
"We are much closer to being able to say that the emergency phase of the pandemic is over, but we're not there yet," Tedros told reporters during a press conference.
His comments come as China experiences a rebound in infections.
Addressing the global gaps in vaccination, WHO's technical lead Maria Van Kerkhove said that the agency wants governments around the world, including in China, to focus on reaching those at risk such as people over the age of 60 and those with underlying conditions.
The further easing of COVID-19 testing requirements and quarantine rules in some Chinese cities was met with a mix of relief and worry on Friday, as hundreds of millions await an expected shift in national virus policies after widespread social unrest.
It was encouraging that China was adjusting its current COVID-19 control strategies, WHO's emergencies director Mike Ryan said.
Ryan said he hopes that a coherent and clear strategy emerges in China "that balances the control of the virus with ... the livelihoods, wellbeing and human rights of the people."
Elon Musk’s Twitter is leaning closely on automation to average content material, removing sure guide evaluations and favoring restrictions on distribution quite than eradicating sure speech outright, its new head of belief and security instructed Reuters.
Twitter can be extra aggressively proscribing abuse-prone hashtags and search leads to areas together with baby exploitation, no matter potential impacts on “benign makes use of” of these phrases, stated Twitter Vice President of Belief and Security Product Ella Irwin.
“The largest factor that is modified is the group is absolutely empowered to maneuver quick and be as aggressive as potential,” Irwin stated on Thursday, within the first interview a Twitter govt has given since Musk’s acquisition of the social media firm in late October.
Her feedback come as researchers are reporting a surge in hate speech on the social media service, after Musk introduced an amnesty for accounts suspended underneath the corporate’s earlier management that had not damaged the legislation or engaged in “egregious spam.”
The corporate has confronted pointed questions on its skill and willingness to average dangerous and unlawful content material since Musk slashed half of Twitter’s employees and issued an ultimatum to work lengthy hours that resulted within the lack of tons of extra workers.
And advertisers, Twitter’s important income supply, have fled the platform over considerations about model security.
On Friday, Musk vowed “vital reinforcement of content material moderation and safety of freedom of speech” in a gathering with France President Emmanuel Macron.
Irwin stated Musk inspired the group to fret much less about how their actions would have an effect on consumer progress or income, saying security was the corporate’s prime precedence. “He emphasizes that each single day, a number of occasions a day,” she stated.
The strategy to security Irwin described at the least partly displays an acceleration of modifications that had been already being deliberate since final 12 months round Twitter’s dealing with of hateful conduct and different coverage violations, in keeping with former workers conversant in that work.
One strategy, captured within the business mantra “freedom of speech, not freedom of attain,” entails leaving up sure tweets that violate the corporate’s insurance policies however barring them from showing in locations like the house timeline and search.
Twitter has lengthy deployed such “visibility filtering” instruments round misinformation and had already included them into its official hateful conduct coverage earlier than the Musk acquisition. The strategy permits for extra freewheeling speech whereas slicing down on the potential harms related to viral abusive content material.
The variety of tweets containing hateful content material on Twitter rose sharply within the week earlier than Musk tweeted on Nov. 23 that impressions, or views, of hateful speech had been declining, in keeping with the Middle for Countering Digital Hate – in a single instance of researchers pointing to the prevalence of such content material, whereas Musk touts a discount in visibility.
Tweets containing phrases that had been anti-Black that week had been triple the quantity seen within the month earlier than Musk took over, whereas tweets containing a homosexual slur had been up 31 per cent, the researchers stated.
‘MORE RISKS, MOVE FAST’
Irwin, who joined the corporate in June and beforehand held security roles at different firms together with Amazon.com and Google, pushed again on ideas that Twitter didn’t have the assets or willingness to guard the platform.
She stated layoffs didn’t considerably influence full-time workers or contractors engaged on what the corporate known as its “Well being” divisions, together with in “important areas” like baby security and content material moderation.
Two sources conversant in the cuts stated that greater than 50 per cent of the Well being engineering unit was laid off. Irwin didn’t instantly reply to a request for touch upon the assertion, however beforehand denied that the Well being group was severely impacted by layoffs.
She added that the variety of individuals engaged on baby security had not modified for the reason that acquisition, and that the product supervisor for the group was nonetheless there. Irwin stated Twitter backfilled some positions for individuals who left the corporate, although she declined to supply particular figures for the extent of the turnover.
She stated Musk was centered on utilizing automation extra, arguing that the corporate had up to now erred on the aspect of utilizing time- and labor-intensive human evaluations of dangerous content material.
“He is inspired the group to take extra dangers, transfer quick, get the platform protected,” she stated.
On baby security, for example, Irwin stated Twitter had shifted towards mechanically taking down tweets reported by trusted figures with a observe file of precisely flagging dangerous posts.
Carolina Christofoletti, a risk intelligence researcher at TRM Labs who makes a speciality of baby sexual abuse materials, stated she has observed Twitter not too long ago taking down some content material as quick as 30 seconds after she studies it, with out acknowledging receipt of her report or affirmation of its choice.
Within the interview on Thursday, Irwin stated Twitter took down about 44,000 accounts concerned in baby security violations, in collaboration with cybersecurity group Ghost Information.
Twitter can be proscribing hashtags and search outcomes continuously related to abuse, like these geared toward wanting up “teen” pornography. Previous considerations in regards to the influence of such restrictions on permitted makes use of of the phrases had been gone, she stated.
Using “trusted reporters” was “one thing we have mentioned up to now at Twitter, however there was some hesitancy and admittedly just a few delay,” stated Irwin.
“I feel we now have the power to really transfer ahead with issues like that,” she stated.
Six of 11 alleged assailants connected with Antifa, a far-left extremist group, have taken plea deals and pled guilty to charges related to violent attacks on supporters of outgoing President Donald Trump at a “Patriot March” in San Diego shortly after the 2020 election.
Counter-protesters, some carrying Antifa flags, wait to confront a "Patriot March" demonstration in support of then President Donald Trump in the Pacific Beach neighborhood of San Diego on Jan. 9, 2021. (Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images)
Stanford University has opened an investigation into its president, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, a renowned neuroscientist and former biotech executive, for research misconduct after experts alleged papers on which he was an authorincluded altered images, the university confirmed.
The university’s board will oversee the investigation.
The revelations followed a report Tuesday in the Stanford Daily that the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) Journal was reviewing a 2008 paper co-authored by Tessier-Lavigne. The Daily’s story outlines how experts including Elisabeth Bik, a scientific integrity expert who has investigated image manipulation in scientific papers widely, raised concerns about a total of four papers that Tessier-Lavigne co-authored between 2001 to 2008, including two on which he was the senior author.
Scientists have been scrutinizing the papers on PubPeer, a site where researchers can flag potential problems in articles, the Daily reported.
The Chronicle of Higher Education first reported the university board’s investigation.
“The university will assess the allegations presented in the Stanford Daily, consistent with its normal rigorous approach by which allegations of research misconduct are reviewed and investigated,” the university said in a statement.
Tessier-Lavigne gained renown in biotech circles as a research executive at Genentech starting in 2003, a golden period at the company. He left Genentech in 2011 to become president of Rockefeller University, and in 2016 became president of Stanford. Tessier-Lavigne is also a co-founder of Bay Area-based Denali Therapeutics, which is developing medicines for neurodegenerative disorders. He is on the board both at Denali and at Regeneron, and previously was on the boards of Pfizer, Agios Pharmaceuticals, and Juno Therapeutics, according to his resume.
Tessier-Lavigne, who specializes in brain development and repair, was a professor at Stanford and the University of California, San Francisco, before joining Genentech.
In a statement released by the university, Tessier-Lavigne said: “Scientific integrity is of the utmost importance both to the university and to me personally. I support this process and will fully cooperate with it, and I appreciate the oversight by the Board of Trustees.”
In its story Tuesday, the Daily reported that the EMBO Journal had started a review into the 2008 study co-authored by Tessier-Lavigne after concerns about the images were raised on PubPeer. The otherstudies in question were published in Science and Nature, according to the newspaper.
The university acknowledged to the Daily that there were “issues” in the papers. But a Stanford spokesperson, Dee Mostofi, told the newspaper that Tessier-Lavigne “was not involved in any way in the generation of presentation of the panels that have been queried” in two of the papers, including the one under review by the EMBO Journal. The university told the Daily that the concerns in the other two papers “do not affect the data, results, or interpretations of the papers” — an assertion that Bik contested in the Daily’s story.
The university also told the Daily that Tessier-Lavigne was notified about the errors in some of his papers in late 2015, and that he in turn informed the journals. None of the papers has been corrected.
On Wednesday, Holden Thorp, the editor-in-chief of the Science journals, acknowledged that Tessier-Lavigne had reported the issues with the images to the journal and prepared “Errata” for the two papers published in Science. “However,” Thorp said in a statement, “due to an error on our part,Sciencenever posted these Errata. We regret this error, apologize to the scientific community, and will be sharing our next steps as they relate to these two papers as soon as possible.”
Stanford’s statement announcing the investigation came after the initial Daily story was published on Tuesday. According to the Daily, the investigation may look into a fifth article co-authored by Tessier-Lavigne, published in 1999 in the journal Cell.
It was fitting, one activist said, that the sky was storming on the night before the North Shore Birth Center closed, as patients, midwives, and community members gathered to commemorate its 42-year run. Over 30 people stood in a circle on the small hill by the cottage-like facility as rain whipped around them and the last of the daylight faded.
“We want to hold Beth Israel Lahey accountable,” Kristin Shapiro, a mother and member of the Save the North Shore Birth Center Coalition, told the crowd.
Directly across the street loomed Beth Israel Lahey’s Beverly Hospital, which owns the birth center and, on Thursday, shut it down.
When the hospital first announced the closure in May, local parents swiftly mounted a campaign. They reactivated a Facebook group called “Save the North Shore Birth Center,” largely dormant since the last time the hospital sought to close it a decade ago. But the hospital has chosen not to change course, citing “the current staffing climate and its direct effect on the hospital’s ability to ensure the quality of care offered by the service.”
“It’s about money and power,” midwife Monica Joyce said. “The hospital never supported the midwives,” said doula and former patient Rollyn Bornhorst, adding, “They created the staffing problem.”
To the birth center’s supporters, the closure is a clear sign of how little the health care system values evidence-based reproductive care that happens outside the hospital, and how much business decisions have come to drive the birthing options that are available.
“We’re in this medical health care metropolis — Boston in particular — and everyone’s like, ‘Oh, my God, we have one birth center.’ And I’m like, that’s kind of why,” said Nashira Baril, who is working to open a new birth center in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood. “We’re talking about a model where the health care system has continually advantaged obstetrics over midwifery.”
Birth centers are typically staffed by midwives, focused on unmedicated births and regular reproductive care in comfortable non-hospital settings, without physicians, medication, or even much technology. (There’s a reason the North Shore Birth Center looks more like a home than a medical facility, even from the outside.) They’re a safe option for low-risk births, while midwives can provide care at affiliated hospitals for higher-risk pregnancies.
From 2020 to 2021, the number of birth centers across the country almost doubled to over 400, according to the March of Dimes. But the North Shore Birth Center was one of just a handful in Massachusetts, and the last one operating in the eastern half of the state since March 2020. In a state with some of the most elite health care facilities in the world, these centers struggle to stay open.
The cottage-like center has operated in Beverly since 1980.ALISSA AMBROSE/STAT
The official closure of the birth center comes about three years after a contested merger of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Lahey Health system, which included Beverly Hospital and the birth center. When hospitals merge, much of the debate centers around preventing monopolies and price increases, but that kind of consolidation can also lead to a reduction in services, said Erin Fuse Brown, director of the Center for Law, Health & Society at Georgia State University.
“The idea is: We can have a center of excellence that will serve all of our patients adequately and maybe better, so they say. But that means that every little hospital in each community doesn’t need its own — fill in the blank — birth center,” Fuse Brown said. “What that looks like on the ground is that the community loses access to their preferred provider. They lose access to choices.”
But once entities are consolidated, there’s almost nothing regulators can do to prevent this sort of closure, she added. So any potential avenue to challenge the closure would likely be related to whether closing the birth center violates the conditions that the attorney general set when the merger took place.
Even consumer protections like antitrust laws tend to be called upon more in regard to mergers and acquisitions than to closures in health care, said Indra Wood Lusero, founder and director at Elephant Circle, a birth justice organization, and member of the Birth Rights Bar Association.
Lusero believes there may be a way for community members to leverage consumer protections to challenge the closure. But they also noted that despite ample research on the safety and effectiveness of midwifery and birth centers, especially in maternity care deserts, the model of care is not always valued by the industry or its lawyers.
“There isn’t yet much official recognition that the services in a birth center [and] provided by a midwife using the midwifery model of care outside of a hospital, are distinct,” they said. “It’s just like, ‘What do you mean? Obstetric services in the hospital are great.’”
But many patients, even those who always planned to give birth in the hospital, say their experience receiving care from the North Shore Birth Center’s midwives was transformative.
Jordan Caress-Wheelwright moved her prenatal care to the birth center after she and her wife felt continually marginalized and neglected when treated at a hospital. Caress-Wheelwright worked at a coffee shop at the time, spending all day on her feet. Sometimes she’d notice bleeding on her shift, so she’d slip down into the basement on her break to call the doctor. There were several times when she spent her whole 15-minute break on hold, waiting to talk to somebody. Without being able to get needed guidance, she left her shifts early several times, choosing to lose pay to be especially cautious.
At the hospital, she also felt like people didn’t understand her as a more masculine-presenting mother; the language on clinical paperwork assumed her spouse would be a man, as did the staff. At the birth center, “immediately, it was a totally different feel,” she said.
The birth center midwives knew both Caress-Wheelwright and her wife. And when she delivered, they stayed with her the entire time. Days later, when she began to feel sick, they immediately helped her to get care at the hospital and advocated to physicians for her to get a needed CT scan, which revealed an underlying lung infection. Caress-Wheelwright credits the attentive midwives with saving her life.
“The thing that I didn’t expect that was truly magical is that it feels like a family,” Caress-Wheelwright said. “You see everybody and they’re all equally invested.” Caress-Wheelwright and other patients said they saw firsthand what the core of midwifery care can look like: continuous care that places a premium on both safety and what a person wants during their pregnancy.
“It was just night and day from what I had experienced prior in terms of prenatal care and birth support and empowerment and having it be centered around the person, versus feeling like I was just another number in the system,” said Emilee Regan, a leader of the Save the North Shore Birth Center Coalition.
The hospital plans to support midwifery care in other ways after closing the birth center, according to a press release. It plans to add a birthing tub to the hospital’s maternity offerings, expand midwifery services at other practices in neighboring towns, lease the birth center space to an independent practice, and provide $1.5 million in grants to other organizations opening birth centers.
Regan and the other advocates said they don’t see some of these measures as realistic or helpful.
“You can’t really deliver birth center care at a hospital,” said Joyce, who worked at the center years ago and is now at Boston Medical Center.
Supporters of the birth center, including midwives and former patients and their children, gathered at a local brewery to honor the center’s community impact.ALISSA AMBROSE/STAT
The birth center closed, but advocates are not ready to give up their fight for midwifery care in their region or in Massachusetts. They’ve established a GoFundMe to raise money to formalize their group — which until this point has been a bootstrap group, mostly made up of mothers volunteering their time and energy to engage with the hospital.
“We will rename ourselves and rise stronger and braver,” Shapiro told the crowd outside the birth center, before everyone reconvened at Gentile Brewing Company, a local, kid-friendly bar, to present the center’s midwives with gifts and commune together.
At the bar, kids born at the birth center ran around and screamed. Their mothers — a few of whom were also born at the birth center themselves, in its earlier days — reminisced, laughed, and consoled each other, while always keeping one eye on the bathroom door to make sure none of their kids accidentally locked themselves inside.
The Laundress on Thursday recalled millions of its laundry and cleaning products in response to a bacteria exposure risk,according tothe Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC).
The recall encompasses 8 million units of certain laundry detergents, fabric conditioners, stain solutions, surface cleaners and other cleaning products from the company that safety regulators said consumers should "immediately stop" using. The CPSC said they include The Laundress items with lot codes "beginning with a prefix letter F and the last four digits numbered 9354 or less, H and the last four digits numbered 2262 or less, and T and the last four digits numbered 5264 or less."
The Laundress has set up a recall website where consumers can find the full list of impacted products.
According to the CPSC release, the recalled products might contain bacteria such as Burkolderia cepacia complex, Klebsiella aerogenes and Pseudomonas, which can enter the body through the eyes, breaks in the skin and inhalations.
"The company is aware of 11 consumers who have reported Pseudomonas infections and is investigating these reports to see if there is any connection to the recalled products," the CPSC's release said.
While the bacteria typically doesn't affect people with healthy immune systems, exposure for immunocompromised people and individuals with chronic lung conditions or external medical devices poses a "risk of serious infection that may require medical treatment," safety regulators said. For such individuals with recalled products, The Laundress recommended "rewashing the clothing" with an alternative product even though the "risk of bacteria being present on cleaned clothes is low."
People can "rewash" clothing, dishes or surfaces "with an alternative product" if they have worries about having used The Laundress’ recalled products, the company said.
Websites where the affected products were sold include The Laundress and Amazon. In addition to The Laundress stores, they were also sold at retailers such as Bloomingdale’s, The Container Store, Saks Fifth Avenue, Target, Nordstrom and Brooklinen through September, the CPSC reported.
"We deeply apologize to all our loyal customers for this situation," The Laundress said Thursday in a Facebook post. "We are undertaking decisive steps with our suppliers to ensure production processes meet our safety and quality standards."
Consumers that have the recalled products should take a photo of the lot code "with their initials and the date written in marker" for the refund process before disposing of them, according to the CPSC.
They can visit thelaundressrecall.com to submit a reimbursement request.
