U.S. demand inChina's manufacturing industryhas reportedly dropped sharply as the country continues to grapple with COVID-19 lockdowns.
Some U.S. companies have signaled plans to shift away from China. Apple is planning to pivot some production elsewhere in Asia, such as India and Vietnam, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday.
A worker on the assembly line at the Shanghai Sany Heavy Machinery Co. facility in the Lingang Special Area and Comprehensive Zone in Shanghai, China, on Thursday, Aug. 25, 2022. (Qilai Shen/Bloomberg via Getty Images / Getty Images)
U.S. manufacturing orders in China are down 40%, according to the CNBC Supply Chain Heat Map.
China's manufacturing purchasing managers' index, which measures the performance of the country's manufacturing industry, came in at 48.0 in November, the lowest reading in seven months, according to the country's National Bureau of Statistics.
Meanwhile, China's non-manufacturing PMI, which reflects business sentiment in the country's service and construction industry, dropped from 48.7 in October to 46.7 in November.
In this photo provided Nov 23, 2022, protesters face off against security personnel in white protective clothing at the factory compound operated by Foxconn Technology Group who runs the world's biggest Apple iPhone factory in Zhengzhou in central Ch (Associated Press / AP Images)
China has stuck by its zero-COVID policy amid a rise in COVID-19 cases in recent weeks.
The latest round of lockdowns sparked protests throughout the country, with hundreds of workers demonstrating this week in Zhengzhou at the flagship factory of manufacturer Foxconn, which serves as Apple's main subcontractor in China.
The top Republican on the House Oversight Committee said that Twitter staff involved in suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story ahead of the 2020 presidential elections will face Congress and testify about their actions.
Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the GOP ranking member on the Committee, made the remarks in a Friday appearance on Fox News after Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk dropped part one of the so-called “Twitter Files,” an expose of the inner workings of Twitter’s censorship machine.
“Every employee at Twitter who was involved in suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story will have an opportunity to come before Congress and explain their actions to the American people,” Comer told program host Sean Hannity.
Musk and independent journalist Matt Taibbi on Friday unveiled a series of internal Twitter communications that give insight into steps taken by staff at the social media platform around suppressing the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story.
Republicans have long accused Twitter—and some media outlets—of suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story, which included reporting that bolstered claims that the president lied when he said he had no involvement in his son’s overseas business dealings.
U.S. President Joe Biden (L) waves alongside his son Hunter Biden after attending mass at Holy Spirit Catholic Church in Johns Island, S.C., on Aug. 13, 2022. (Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images)
‘Marking This as Unsafe’
In order to suppress the Hunter Biden report, Twitter executives marked it as “unsafe,” limiting its spread and even blocking it from being directly shared via the platform’s direct message function, Taibbi said in comments on the disclosures. He noted that such extreme restrictions were reserved for content such as child pornography.
Messages between executives in Twitter’s communications and policy departments, shared by Taibbi in screenshots, show some confusion about the actions taken, with a communications executive writing: “I’m struggling to understand the policy basis for marking this as unsafe.”
The disclosures show that both Democrats and Republicans had access to Twitter’s censorship system and each side lodged various requests and complaints with the social media platform’s staff. But because of Twitter employees’ predominantly left-leaning political convictions, Democrats had more avenues to press their case, Taibbi said.
The Epoch Times has been unable to independently verify the content of the disclosures shared by Musk and detailed by Taibbi.
‘Just the Beginning’
Comer, in his interview on Fox News, said that the Twitter Files expose shows that the New York Post’s reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop is “being vindicated.”
A rally organized to out activism that encourages children to question their gender identity and sexual orientation has inspired fury.
Now, threats of a rage-filled counter-protest have rally organizers requesting law enforcement officers to attend their planned gathering on Dec. 3 at a beach in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
Conflict bubbled up after three very different groups organized the Protect the Children rally to display solidarity against policies aimed at sexualizing children, alienating them from their parents, and helping them pursue gender-transition treatment. They plan to gather at Fort Lauderdale Beach on the corner of Las Olas Boulevard at 11 a.m.
Local chapters of Moms for Liberty, Fathers for Freedom, and Gays Against Groomers wanted to come together to peacefully speak against “radicalized sexual curriculum, gender ideology, child grooming, parental alienation, and ‘gender-affirming care,'” said Eulalia Jimenez, president of the Moms for Liberty Miami chapter.
But when Antifa members heard of the gathering, they urged their peers in Twitter posts to “confront this hatred” and “protest against hate.” They referred to Protect the Children rally organizers as “fascists” proliferating “stochastic terrorism,” and spread fliers that read, “We can’t allow this kind of bigotry to go unchecked.”
The term “stochastic terrorism” refers to public demonization through so-called “hate speech,” which some say can be used to incite violence against a person or group.
Antifa members display their own signs at the site of a protest against a drag bingo event at a church in Katy, Texas, on Sept. 24, 2022. (Bobby Sanchez for The Epoch Times)
A flier for the Antifa response urges, “Assert your right to exist! Counter protest against far-right bigotry and stand with the LGBTQ+ community. Bring masks, signs, and rage. Stand against those who aim to erase your existence.”
Jimenez isn’t surprised. Antifa members often disrupt Moms for Liberty gatherings and shout down parents speaking at local school board meetings, she said.
The Protect the Children rally was planned at the beach because it’s a place where people congregate, a “good spot to spread awareness, empower others, and create unity,” Jimenez said.
She hopes the event will be about peace, unity, “empowering others and informing parents and citizens,” she said. “We feel children should have the right to be children.”
The rally isn’t meant to be against other groups.
“It’s not about ugliness and nastiness,” Jimenez said. “And unfortunately, the other side, that’s the way they roll.”
Hijacking LGBT
Antifa’s rhetoric harms the gay community, said Anthony Raimondi, a board member of Gays Against Groomers (GAG).
“As an organization, we want to protect the LGBT community in the sense that the community has been hijacked,” Raimondi told The Epoch Times.
Years ago, gay people erroneously were assumed to be pedophiles, he said.
“We have come so far” in dispelling that assumption, he said. But in the current culture, as many gay people and others oppose efforts to block the sexualization of children, “it’s almost like we’ve been set back,” Raimondi said.
On social media, GAG founder Jaimee Michell has described her group as “a coalition of gays against the sexualization, indoctrination, and medicalization of children.”
Gays Against Groomers posted on its Twitter feed that the gay community has “fought for decades to dismantle binary gender stereotypes, just for radicals to build them up again, and butcher and sterilize children who don’t abide by them.”
Michell also has posted on Twitter, “There is no such thing as a trans kid.”
Anthony Raimondi, a board member of the Miami chapter of Gays Against Groomers, plans to speak at a Protect the Children rally on Fort Lauderdale Beach on Dec. 3, 2022. (Courtesy of Anthony Raimondi)
Jimenez understands the frustration. She’s not just the local leader of the conservative group Moms for Liberty. She’s also the mother of a gay daughter. So she values groups like Gays Against Groomers, she says, because they’ve “stood up and said, ‘No! You’re not going to use us.'”
Jimenez respects that they assert, “We choose [whom] to love, but we don’t push anything on the kids.”
She also has compassion for those participating in Antifa activities. Many, she said, are kids who are just being used.
“Many of them don’t even understand what is really going on,” Jimenez said. “They’re just so desperate for love and attention, and they’re going about it the wrong way.
“Others,” she continued, “are just plain—in my opinion—evil and they do not care who they hurt and what they have to do to get what they want.”
Antifa has the right to assemble, says Florida Fathers for Freedom organizer Elon Gerberg. He’s not worried about the group’s so-called “counter-protest,” calling it nothing more than a “distraction.”
The Protect the Children rally is “about coming together to bring attention to this attack on our children,” Gerberg told The Epoch Times. “In my opinion, they are our most precious commodities and our future leaders. If we can’t stand up for them, who can you stand up for?”
In signing the Parental Rights in Education bill in March, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, “put his head on the chopping block for parents and the children of the state,” Gerberg said.
Before it was signed into law, the five-page legislation was debated around the country and was reviled by its opponents, who misleadingly referred to the measure as the “Don’t Say Gay Bill.”
Despite what opponents said, the bill doesn’t prohibit teachers or students from discussing a child’s questions about sexual orientation or gender identity, and it doesn’t keep them from talking about LGBT loved ones in class.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said he wants to keep the military’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate in place to protect the health of the troops, as Republican governors and lawmakers press to rescind it.
This past week more than 20 Republican governors sent a letter to President Joe Biden asking that the administration remove the mandate, saying it has hurt the U.S. National Guard’s ability to recruit troops. Those troops are activated by governors to respond to natural disasters or unrest.
Congress may consider legislation this coming week to end the mandate as a requirement to gather enough support to pass this years’ defense budget, which is already two months late.
Austin said he would not comment on pressure from the Hill.
“We lost a million people to this virus,” Austin told reporters traveling with him Saturday. “A million people died in the United States of America. We lost hundreds in DOD. So this mandate has kept people healthy.”
“I’m the guy” who ordered the military to require the vaccine, Austin added. “I support continuation of vaccinating the troops.”
Last year Austin directed that all troops get the vaccine or face potential expulsion from the military; thousands of active duty forces have been discharged since then for their refusal to get the shots.
A University of Pennsylvania researcher believes he has created a one-and-done vaccine that could fight against 20 influenza strains and last a patient’s lifetime, the school announced last week.
Dr. Scott Hensley and his team created the “multivalent” vaccine to establish immunity against all known flu strains, but it is not intended to replace the annual flu shots, the researchers explained in their published paper. Yearly shots are tailored to combat the strongest strain that year, but the university’s shot is intended to fight the next massive flu pandemic.
“The idea here is to have a vaccine that will give people a baseline level of immune memory to diverse flu strains, so that there will be far less disease and death when the next flu pandemic occurs,” Hensley said in a statement.
The CDC estimates the flu has caused 52,000 deaths annually between 2010 and 2020.
Researchers created the shot using the same technology Pfizer and Moderna used to make the COVID-19 jab. Rather than providing a “sterilizing” effect on individuals, the universal flu vaccine elicits a “memory immune response that can be quickly recalled and adapted to new pandemic viral strains,” the researchers said.
Hensley and his team have found success testing the jab on mice, even when the animals were exposed to flu strains different from those used in the shots they were given.
Hensley and his team are looking to test the jab on humans in clinical trials.The Philadelphia Inquirer
The team is planning on testing the universal vaccine on humans soon.
The vaccine is designed for people of all ages, but Hensely told the Philadelphia Inquirer that it would be the most effective when administered to children.
“If the vaccine is given early in childhood, it may provide an initial blessing of induced immunity,” Hensley said.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping is unwilling to accept Western vaccines despite the challenges China is facing with COVID-19, and while recent protests there are not a threat to Communist Party rule, they could affect his personal standing, U.S. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said on Saturday.
Although China's daily COVID cases are near all-time highs, some cities are taking steps to loosen testing and quarantine rules after Xi's zero-COVID policy triggered a sharp economic slowdown and public unrest.
Haines, speaking at the annual Reagan National Defense Forum in California, said that despite the social and economic impact of the virus, Xi "is unwilling to take a better vaccine from the West, and is instead relying on a vaccine in China that's just not nearly as effective against Omicron."
"Seeing protests and the response to it is countering the narrative that he likes to put forward, which is that China is so much more effective at government," Haines said.
"It's, again, not something we see as being a threat to stability at this moment, or regime change or anything like that," she said, while adding: "How it develops will be important to Xi's standing."
China's foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent on Sunday.
China has not approved any foreign COVID vaccines, opting for those produced domestically, which some studies have suggested are not as effective as some foreign ones. That means easing virus prevention measures could come with big risks, according to experts.
China had not asked the United States for vaccines, the White House said earlier in the week.
One U.S. official told Reuters there was "no expectation at present" that China would approve western vaccines.
"It seems fairly far-fetched that China would greenlight Western vaccines at this point. It's a matter of national pride, and they'd have to swallow quite a bit of it if they went this route," the official said.
Haines also said North Korea recognized that China was less likely to hold it accountable for what she said was Pyongyang's "extraordinary" number of weapons tests this year.
Amid a record year for missile tests, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said last week his country intends to have the world's most powerful nuclear force.
Speaking on a later panel, Admiral John Aquilino, the commander of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, said China had no motivation to restrain any country, including North Korea, that was generating problems for the United States.
"I'd argue quite differently that it's in their strategy to drive those problems," Aquilino said of China.
He said China had considerable leverage to press North Korea over its weapons tests, but that he was not optimistic about Beijing "doing anything helpful to stabilize the region."
In November 2016, German-American entrepreneur Cyriac Roeding read a profile of Sam Gambhir, a physician and scientist at Stanford University School of Medicine, in a magazine. In the article, Gambhir described how he had devoted his career to early cancer detection, only to lose his teenage son Milan to a highly aggressive brain tumor in 2015.
Roeding, the cofounder and former CEO of mobile shopping app Shopkick, was struck by Gambhir’s story and immediately sent him an email, asking to meet. Over the next few months, the pair developed a friendship and Gambhir became Roeding’s guide to the complex world of biology and engineering.
One day, Gambhir pitched his own idea—a poignant one. “Sam asked a simple but profound question,” Roeding remembers. “He said, ‘What if we stopped searching for cancer altogether; what if we didn’t look anymore? What if, instead, we forced the cancer to reveal itself?’”
With cancer, time is of the essence—the quicker it’s found, the longer the patient will live. Early cancer detection has become a key target in oncology—there are dozens of companies working on liquid biopsy technology, which scans blood samples for fragments of DNA shed by cancer cells. But this wasn’t good enough for Gambhir. His painful personal experience told him that waiting for cancer to grow large enough to be detectable in the bloodstream was too slow, and it didn’t tell you anything about where to find the tumor. “We cannot rely on cancer signals that nature may simply not provide to us at all times,” he told Roeding. “But if webioengineerthe signal, then early tumors can become consistently visible.”
That’s the premise behind Earli, which Roeding and Gambhir launched together in June 2018. The California-based startup has already raised $40 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Marc Benioff, and Khosla Ventures.
Earli’s approach essentially forces the cancer to reveal itself. Bioengineered DNA is injected into the body; when it enters cancer cells, it forces them to produce a synthetic biomarker not normally found in humans—something like limonene, a chemical found in the peel of citrus fruits. If subsequent breath or blood tests find traces of that biomarker, it could be a sign of cancer.
The next step is figuring out where exactly the cancer is in the body. An injected compound forces the cancer cells to produce an enzyme that then gobbles up a radioactive tracer, rendering it visible to the naked eye in a scan. Localizing the cancer makes it treatable—clinicians can use precision radiation or targeted surgery to then take it out. Earli is also planning to use the same approach to target and treat cancer—to kill the cells after finding them—although this idea is still in its early stages.
The plan is for Earli to be used at every stage of cancer prevention and treatment: for diagnostic monitoring in high-risk groups like smokers; for pretreatment, to find out if there is cancer anywhere else in the body; during treatment, to make tumors easier for surgeons to locate; and post-treatment, to detect earlier any recurring cancer.
Earli’s technology “seems very exciting,” says Shivan Sivakumar, a researcher in early cancer detection at the University of Oxford who is not affiliated with the company. There is “100 percent” a need for it, he says—but first he wants to see the proper clinical trials done.
Those trials started in June 2021 in Melbourne, Australia, after successful test runs in mice and dogs. The first human participant was 84-year-old Ted Cunningham, an engineer with late-stage lung cancer—the goal of the trials is to show that the technology is safe and that it can find cancer in patients already confirmed to have it. “I was diagnosed fairly late with cancer, and that to me was the biggest problem,” Cunningham says. “If somebody would just get this very early, it would have to be an advantage for the people trying to treat you.”
Sam Gambhir never got to see his idea in action. Six months after the company was founded, he was diagnosed with cancer that had already spread to his bone marrow. He died 16 months later, in July 2020. “For a guy who spent his entire career trying to prevent this from happening, the irony is not lost on us,” says David Suhy, Earli’s chief scientific officer. Roeding and Suhy feel the pressure to make Earli’s approach work. “We’re here to carry Sam’s torch,” says Roeding. “And we’ve got to make this thing fly.”
