- Martin Freeman Defends ‘Miller’s Girl’ Role Over Jenna Ortega Age Gap Backlash: ‘We’re Not Saying It’s Great’ IndieWire
- Martin Freeman reflects on age-gap controversy with Jenna Ortega in ‘Miller’s Girl’ USA TODAY
- Martin Freeman Reacts to Outrage Over ‘Miller’s Girl’ 31-Year Age Gap With Jenna Ortega: The Film Is ‘Grown Up and Nuanced’ and Not Saying ‘Isn’t This Great?’ Variety
- Martin Freeman Defends Controversial Jenna Ortega Movie Miller’s Girl BuzzFeed News
- Jenna Ortega’s ‘Miller’s Girl’ Co-Star Talks Movie’s Age Gap Controversy Forbes
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‘Miller’s Girl’ Star Martin Freeman Defends Age Gap With Jenna Ortega In Film Following Controversy – Deadline
- ‘Miller’s Girl’ Star Martin Freeman Defends Age Gap With Jenna Ortega In Film Following Controversy Deadline
- Martin Freeman says backlash over age gap in Ortega movie wasn’t fair Business Insider
- Martin Freeman reflects on age-gap controversy with Jenna Ortega in ‘Miller’s Girl’ USA TODAY
- Martin Freeman Reacts to Outrage Over ‘Miller’s Girl’ 31-Year Age Gap With Jenna Ortega: The Film Is ‘Grown Up and Nuanced’ and Not Saying ‘Isn’t This Great?’ Variety
- Martin Freeman Compares ‘Miller’s Girl’ Age Gap Drama to ‘Schindler’s List’ AOL
Olivia Colman Criticizes Gender Pay Gap in Hollywood: ‘If I Was Oliver Colman, I’d Be Earning a F— of a Lot More’ – Variety
- Olivia Colman Criticizes Gender Pay Gap in Hollywood: ‘If I Was Oliver Colman, I’d Be Earning a F— of a Lot More’ Variety
- Olivia Colman slams Hollywood pay gap, says she’d make more as a man Entertainment Weekly News
- ‘The Crown’ actress claims she would earn ‘a f–k of a lot more’ if she were a man Fox News
- Olivia Colman On Pay Disparity In Hollywood: “If I Was Oliver Colman, I’d Be Earning A F*** Of A Lot More Than I Am” Deadline
- Olivia Colman on Pay Disparity in Hollywood: “If I Was Oliver Colman, I’d Be Earning a F*** of a Lot More” Hollywood Reporter
Wall Street’s most powerful woman shakes up Citibank in bid to narrow gap with rivals: ‘We’ll be saying goodbye to some very talented and hard-working colleagues’ – Fortune
- Wall Street’s most powerful woman shakes up Citibank in bid to narrow gap with rivals: ‘We’ll be saying goodbye to some very talented and hard-working colleagues’ Fortune
- CEO Jane Fraser: Citigroup reorganization will make some workers ‘very uncomfortable’ Yahoo Finance
- Citigroup CEO reorganizes businesses, cuts jobs amid stock slump CNBC Television
- Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser reorganizes businesses, cuts jobs as bank is mired in stock slump CNBC
- Citi Aligns Organizational Structure With Its Strategy and Simplifies Operating Model Business Wire
Unicef sounds alarm as record numbers of children cross dangerous Darién Gap – The Guardian
- Unicef sounds alarm as record numbers of children cross dangerous Darién Gap The Guardian
- ‘More and more on the move’. Record number of migrant children in Latin America and Caribbean, UN warns CNN
- Migrant kids are moving through Latin America and the Caribbean in record numbers, U.N. says Miami Herald
- Children Fleeing Latin America in Record Numbers, UN Says Voice of America – VOA News
- Number of migrant children moving across Latin America and the Caribbean hits new record amid violence, instability and climate change UNICEF
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Priyanka Chopra Jonas Says It Took Her 22 Years to Cross the Gender Pay Gap – Vulture
- Priyanka Chopra Jonas Says It Took Her 22 Years to Cross the Gender Pay Gap Vulture
- Priyanka Chopra Jonas Reveals She Was Body Shamed for Not Being ‘Sample Size’: ‘I Cried’ Yahoo Entertainment
- Priyanka Chopra says she cried after being told she was too big for ‘sample size’ in fitting Fox News
- Citadel’s Priyanka Chopra Jonas on Receiving Equal Pay for ‘First Time’ After Fighting Her Whole Career PEOPLE
- Priyanka Chopra Jonas Says Amazon’s ‘Citadel’ Was “First Time I Got Equal Pay in 22 Years” Yahoo Entertainment
- View Full Coverage on Google News
With record covid cases, China scrambles to plug an immunity gap
Chinese authorities, who on Thursday reported a record 31,656 infections, are scrambling to protect the most vulnerable populations. They have launched a more aggressive vaccine drive to boost immunity, expanded hospital capacity and started to restrict the movement of at-risk groups. The elderly, who have an especially low vaccination rate, are a key target.
These efforts, which stop short of approving foreign vaccines, are an attempt to keep the virus from overwhelming a health-care system ill-prepared for a flood of very sick covid patients.
More intensive-care beds and better vaccination coverage “should have started 2½ years ago, but the single-minded focus on containment meant fewer resources focused on this,” said Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Huang believes that even mRNA boosters, which have proved more effective at fighting disease from the latest omicron variants, wouldn’t now resolve the fundamental problem with China’s goal of eliminating infection rather than mitigating symptoms. To raise immunity by allowing a degree of community transmission “is still not acceptable in China,” he said.
China’s strategy of smothering outbreaks originally protected everyday life and the economy while preventing severe illness and death. But it has become increasingly costly as ever-stricter measures fail to keep up with more-transmissible variants.
Earlier this month, the government announced what on paper appeared to be the most significant easing of controls so far, with shorter quarantine times and fewer testing requirements. Officials insist that the 20-point “optimization” plan is not a prelude to accepting outbreaks.
But the effort to break cycles of disruptive lockdowns has had a rocky start. Some cities relaxed measures, while districts in others ordered residents not to set foot outside their homes. The result: confusion, fear and anger.
Confrontations have erupted in a few locations, most prominently at a huge Foxconn plant in central China that makes half the world’s iPhones. The scene there turned violent this week as thousands of workers protested the company’s failure to isolate people testing positive and to honor the terms of employment contracts.
Curbing outbreaks is again taking priority. Shijiazhuang, a city of 11 million about 185 miles from the capital, suspended its reduced requirements for mass testing on Monday and announced five days of citywide screening.
The first deaths to be reported since May — though only one or two per day — have intensified concerns that hospitals are poorly prepared to handle a surge in severe cases. Bloomberg Intelligence estimated that fully relaxing coronavirus controls could leave 5.8 million Chinese needing intensive care in a system with only four beds per 100,000 people.
At a news conference Wednesday, Chinese health officials said the 100-plus critical cases meant more hospital beds and treatment facilities were “very necessary” given the health risks for the elderly and individuals with preexisting conditions. The spread of infection was accelerating in multiple locations, they added, with some provinces facing their worst outbreaks in three years.
Major cities including Beijing, Guangzhou and Chongqing have ordered residents in certain neighborhoods to stay at home. Shopping malls, museums and schools have been closed once more. Major conference centers are being turned back into temporary quarantine centers, reflecting the approach adopted in Wuhan at the start of the pandemic. Some of the tightest restrictions are for nursing homes, with 571 such facilities in Beijing implementing the strictest tier of control measures and preventing all but essential exit and entry.
Opening to a world that’s now mostly living with the virus would cause a wave of deaths, officials fear. China’s vaccines initially were limited to adults ages 19 to 60, a policy that continues to have repercussions for vaccination rates today. Just 40 percent of Chinese older than 80 have received a booster shot, despite months of campaigning and gift-giving to encourage uptake. (Among people older than 60, two-thirds have gotten a booster.)
Since the beginning of the pandemic, China has relied solely on domestic vaccine makers. It approved nine locally developed options, more than any other country, with the earliest and most-used vaccines coming from state-owned Sinopharm and privately owned Sinovac. Both received approval from the World Health Organization early last year after being found to significantly reduce deaths and hospitalizations.
Sinopharm and Sinovac distributed their products widely throughout the world as part of a Chinese push to become a leading provider of global public goods and to improve China’s image. Yet in late 2021, demand for Chinese vaccines started to dry up as Pfizer’s and Moderna’s production and distribution increased.
China has still not approved any foreign vaccines or explained its decision to shun what could be an effective way to plug its immunity gap. A visit by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to Beijing in early November ended with an agreement for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine to be made available to foreigners living in China via the company’s Chinese partner, Shanghai Fosun Pharmaceutical.
BioNTech has a development and distribution deal with Fosun that gives the Chinese company exclusive rights to supply the country. But Chinese regulators have repeatedly delayed signing off on the vaccine, despite it being made available in Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan.
When asked last week if the government would approve BioNTech for public use, the director of the Chinese Center of Disease Prevention and Control said authorities were working on a new vaccination plan to be released soon.
Without access to the most effective mRNA-based candidates from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, which have been updated to fight the omicron variant, the world’s most populous country remains reliant on vaccines developed using the original strain of the virus.
Some health experts consider Beijing’s reticence hard to justify. “China should approve the BioNTech and Moderna vaccines for the general Chinese population as soon as possible,” said Jin Dong-yan, a virologist at the University of Hong Kong. “It’s ridiculous that they only allowed foreigners in China to receive the BioNTech vaccine. It is as if they think Chinese people are inferior to foreigners.”
China is instead trying to develop 10 of its own mRNA candidates. The one furthest along is from biotechnology group Abogen Biosciences and the state-run Academy of Military Medical Sciences. Indonesia approved it for emergency use in September, but it has not received the nod from Chinese regulators and may not get that until data is available from Phase 3 clinical trials in Indonesia and Mexico. The trials are expected to conclude in May.
Other options in China include an inhalable vaccine developed by CanSino, which has been available in Beijing, Shanghai and Hangzhou since October. A Chinese-developed antiviral drug, Azvudine, originally used for HIV patients, was approved to treat covid in July. Traditional Chinese medicines are widely used.
But new and more-effective vaccines remain a top priority, and the country’s leading pharmaceutical companies are poised to mass-produce them. CanSino is completing a production facility in Shanghai that will be able to manufacture 100 million doses a year — after receiving approval.
Nasa’s rocket launch to the moon next week aims to close 50-year-long gap | Nasa
Fifty years ago this month, mission managers at the US space agency Nasa gave the final go-ahead for what would turn out to be humanity’s most recent odyssey to the moon. Few realized at the time it would be more than half a century before Nasa would be ready to return, not least Apollo 17 commander Eugene Cernan, whose belief as he stepped back into the lunar module in December 1972 was that it would be “not too long into the future” that astronauts were there again.
At 1.04am EST (6.04am GMT) Wednesday, late technical issues and Florida’s weather gods notwithstanding, Artemis 1, the most powerful rocket ship in history, will attempt to close that decades-long gap.
There will be no humans aboard the Orion capsule on its 25-day, 1.3m-mile journey to the moon and back, but the test mission’s success will pave the way for a crewed landing effort inside four years. Artemis 3, currently slated for 2025 but likely to slip back a year, will add a woman’s name to the only 12 in history – all men from the Apollo flights between 1969 and 1972 – who classify as moonwalkers.
“We’re going back to the moon after 50 years, to stay, to learn to work, to create, to develop new technologies and new systems and new spacecraft in order to go to Mars,” Nasa administrator Bill Nelson said, explaining the purpose of the Artemis program in an interview with Newsweek earlier this year.
“This is a tremendous turn of history.”
The space agency is looking for conditions to finally come together for Wednesday’s launch after a series of delays through the summer and early fall. Attempts in August and September were scrapped after engineers discovered an engine cooling problem, then were unable to fix an unrelated fuel leak.
Hopes of an early October launch were thwarted when the threat of Hurricane Ian forced the space agency to roll the giant $4.1bn Space Launch System (SLS) rocket back to the safety of the hangar.
And some second-guessed Nasa’s decision to leave Artemis exposed on its Cape Canaveral, Florida, launchpad in recent days amid the fury of Hurricane Nicole’s 100mph wind gusts.
That storm led to a further two-day delay until Wednesday – and a thorough post-hurricane inspection by engineers at the Kennedy space center before it was declared fit to fly.
“If we didn’t design it to be out there in harsh weather we picked the wrong launch spot,” Nasa’s associate administrator for exploration systems development, Jim Free, told a Friday press briefing.
Nelson, a former space shuttle astronaut, acknowledged delays as “part of the space business”.
“We’ll go when it’s ready. We don’t go until then, and especially on a test flight. [We’ll] make sure it’s right before we put four humans up on the top,” he said after the September scrub.
Those humans will be aboard Artemis 2, a 10-day interim mission planned for May 2024 that will fly astronauts beyond the moon without landing, testing new life-preservation systems and equipment designed for long-duration spaceflights.
The “crew” for Artemis 1 includes sensor-rigged mannequins called Helga, Zohar and Moonikin Campos, who will gauge radiation levels, and a soft toy Snoopy and Shaun the Sheep as gravity detectors.
“We’re never going to get to Artemis 2 if Artemis 1 isn’t successful,” Free said.
As the technology has evolved, so have Nasa’s reasons for wanting to be back on the lunar surface. The agency is looking beyond the brief exploration visits of the Apollo era, and it wants to establish a long-term human presence, including construction of a lunar base camp, as groundwork for crewed missions to Mars by the mid-2030s.
Scientific discovery, economic benefits, building a global alliance, and inspiring a new generation of explorers are among Nasa’s stated goals for what it calls the “Artemis generation”.
Nasa’s Moon to Mars vision, of which the Artemis program is just one part, has a wider brief of pulling in international and commercial partners to deep space exploration, including Elon Musk’s SpaceX and heavy lift Starship rocket that could be ready for its first orbital test flight as soon as next month.
Unstated is the desire to keep the US ahead of Russia, and particularly China, in the next era of human spaceflight.
Analysts, including Nasa’s own inspector general, see the Artemis program’s $93bn price tag, including $4.1bn for each of the first launches, as unsustainable. They note it is already billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule.
But some experts see a political willpower in Washington DC to keep the moon to Mars program fully funded, even if Republicans seize the House and the nation’s purse strings from Democrats when the final midterm election results are in.
“The coalition in support is bipartisan, much more tied to constituent interest. There is political support,” said the founder of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, John Logsdon.
“[But] so many things have to happen before the first Mars landing mission is feasible that all you can say is, if everything goes as planned, then yes, we will send humans to Mars.”
Canada wants 1.45 million more immigrants by 2025 to fill labor gap
The new immigration plan aims to take in 465,000 people in 2023, rising to 500,000 in 2025. The Canadian immigration department says it admitted 405,000 newcomers last year, which was “the most we’ve ever welcomed in a single year.”
“We’re building on that and setting higher targets in the years ahead, because immigration is critical to growing our economy and helping businesses find the workers they need,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tweeted.
The rhetoric from Canada stands in contrast with many at the top of government in other Western countries, where officials have talked up curbing immigration and cast migrants as an economic burden.
British Home Secretary Suella Braverman, for example, faced criticism this week for describing migrants crossing the English Channel as “an invasion on our southern coast.” In an effort to stem an influx of asylum seekers traveling across the dangerous route into Britain, Braverman has supported a bid to deport people to Rwanda to press asylum claims there — a previous government plan that sparked outrage and hit a legal wall.
Rising border crossings are also at the forefront of polarizing issues in the United States, where some politically ambitious Republican governors have shuttled migrants to cities led by Democrats in protest over Biden administration policies.
In Canada, often a destination for economic immigration, the country’s growth policy appeared to be less divisive. Immigrants made up 23 percent of the population this year, the largest proportion in the country in more than 150 years, the census agency announced last week.
Canada has long adopted an approach of attracting immigrants to offset the impact of low birthrates and an aging population, and it has reshaped some policies to overcome pandemic-related disruptions to movement and migration. “Canadians understand the need to continue to grow our population if we’re going to meet the needs of the labor force, if we’re going to rebalance a worrying demographic trend, and if we’re going to continue to reunite families,” Fraser said.
The country has about three workers for every retired citizen, Fraser said, describing the targets as unprecedented for economic migration. “We need more workers in every sector in every region of the country, regardless of whether it’s front-line health-care workers, truck drivers, home builders or software engineers,” he said.
The opposition Conservative Party, while critical of the government’s Tuesday announcement, still expressed support for efforts to increase immigration.
The plan was also met with questions from reporters over whether the government would address the pressure on affordable housing in parts of Canada, and any discrimination or challenges immigrants may face in finding adequate support after their arrival.
While the new plan forecasts a drop in the number of refugees, the U.N. refugee agency said it welcomed “Canada’s continued leadership on refugee resettlement.”
The policy “makes good sense in many ways,” Canadian refugee lawyer Maureen Silcoff wrote, but she urged the government “to focus on the inequities that vulnerable refugees face because of caps.”
New Discovery Fills Long-Missing Gap in Evolutionary History
The upper jaw of the infant of Yuanmoupithecus. Credit: Terry Harrison, NYU’s Department of Anthropology
The oldest gibbon fossil was discovered in southwest China.
The earliest gibbon fossil has been found by a team of researchers, filling a long-missing evolutionary gap in the history of apes.
The study, which was published in the Journal of Human Evolution, focuses on the hylobatid family of apes, which comprises 20 species of living gibbons that are found throughout tropical Asia from northeastern India to Indonesia.
“Hylobatids fossil remains are very rare, and most specimens are isolated teeth and fragmentary jaw bones found in cave sites in southern China and southeast Asia dating back no more than 2 million years ago,” explains Terry Harrison, a professor of anthropology at New York University and one of the paper’s authors. “This new find extends the fossil record of hylobatids back to 7 to 8 million years ago and, more specifically, enhances our understanding of the evolution of this family of apes.”
The fossil, found in the Yuanmou area of Yunnan Province in southwestern China, is of a small ape called Yuanmoupithecus xiaoyuan. The study’s analysis concentrated on the teeth and cranial specimens of Yuanmoupithecus, which included an upper jaw from a young child who was less than two years old at the time of its death.
An excavation near the village of Leilao in Yunnan, one of the locations where Yuanmoupithecus remains have been found. Credit: Terry Harrison, NYU’s Department of Anthropology
Using the size of the molar teeth as a guide, Yuanmoupithecus was estimated to be close in size to modern-day gibbons, with a body weight of roughly 6 kilograms—or about 13 pounds.
“The teeth and the lower face of Yuanmoupithecus are very similar to those of modern-day gibbons, but in a few features the fossil species was more primitive and points to it being the ancestor of all the living species,” observes Harrison, part of NYU’s Center for the Study of Human Origins.
Ji discovered the child’s upper jaw during a field survey, and by comparing it with modern gibbon skulls kept at the Kunming Institute of Zoology, he was able to identify it as a hylobatid. In 2018, he invited Harrison and other colleagues to work on specimens gathered over the previous 30 years that were housed in the Yunnan Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology and the Yuanmou Man Museum.
“The remains of Yuanmoupithecus are extremely rare, but with diligence, it has been possible to recover enough specimens to establish that the Yuanmou fossil ape is indeed a close relative of the living hylobatids,” notes Harrison.
The Journal of Human Evolution study also found that Kapi ramnagarensis, which has been claimed to be an earlier species of hylobatid, based on a single isolated fossil molar from India, is not a hylobatid after all, but a member of a more primitive group of primates that are not closely related to modern-day apes.
“Genetic studies indicate that the hylobatids diverged from the lineage leading to the great apes and humans about 17 to 22 million years ago, so there is still a 10-million-year gap in the fossil record that needs to be filled,” Harrison cautions. “With the continued exploration of promising fossil sites in China and elsewhere in Asia, it is hoped that additional discoveries will help fill these critical gaps in the evolutionary history of hylobatids.”
Reference: “The earliest hylobatid from the Late Miocene of China” by Xueping Jia, Terry Harrison, Yingqi Zhang, Yun Wub, Chunxia Zhang, Jinming Hui, Dongdong Wua, Yemao Hou, Song Li, Guofu Wang and Zhenzhen Wang, 13 September 2022, Journal of Human Evolution.
DOI: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2022.103251
The study was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Yunnan Natural Sciences Foundation, and the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The researchers also received access to skeletal and paleontological collections at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C., among others, in conducting their study.