Bill Maher hashed it out with Seth MacFarlane in a heated debate over COVID-19 vaccine mandates, accusing the Family Guystar of wanting to be the “one true opinion” when it comes to the topic.
On a recent episode of Maher’s Club Randompodcast, he claimed people who aren’t doctors are more often correct than those with a medical background. For example, he said our country “did not allow for natural immunity” when it came to COVID-19.
“If you already had the disease you have natural immunity. We didn’t seem to believe in that,” Maher said, to which MacFarlane argued, “That was debunked though. Don’t you know people who have had COVID four or five times? I do. That’s not natural immunity. There’s no immunity there. You’ve had COVID five times.”
Maher then speculated that vaccinated people have had the disease more than once because they have “had too many vaccines,” prompting MacFarlane to question whether he actually believes the vaccine gave him COVID.
“The vaccine, which does weaken you in order to strengthen you, but while you are in a weakened state, yes,” Maher confirmed. “That’s why so many people, like me, got it [and] did not have it while the thing was raging. I was taking zero precautions because I was never that afraid of it.”
Maher only dug his heels in further when MacFarlane, who called out his “anecdotal” experience, noted that vaccinated individuals statistically have a better chance at survival and staying out of the hospital than those who are unvaccinated.
“But that’s assuming all people are alike and that’s one of the giant fallacies in your way of thinking,” Maher fired back. “We are not all alike. Yes, I recommend and have recommended the COVID vaccine for the high-risk people. If you’re 90 or fat, get it. Absolutely. You need it. Some people don’t.”
Seth MacFarlane is better at making the case for vaccines than any public official or medical expert I’ve seen.
The Real Timehost added that you “can’t prevent” the deaths of millions of people in a pandemic, to which MacFarlane hit back, “You can, though!” before questioning Maher on the “cost” of getting the vaccine.
“The fact that you don’t even have a clue what’s the cost of getting a vaccine — that you don’t know the answer to that. You completely want to shut your eyes to the fact that there are repercussions to all medical interventions including a vaccine,” Maher scoffed. “I’m not against doing vaccines. I’m against doing vaccines that I don’t think I need. I should be able to decide that for myself inside my body.”
The host said he’s “not blaming doctors,” but because they were “learning right alongside us” — as MacFarlane pointed out — we should not buy into “the science.”
“There’s no the in science. That’s what you want. You want just to be the one true opinion,” Maher fumed, while MacFarlane assured him, “That’s not true at all. The strength of science is that it has the capacity to evolve.”
The actor continued, “By the time I got the vaccine, this was the most tested vaccine in the history of vaccination. So many people by that point had had it, by the time it got into my arm it was like, ‘Alright, I think I’m gonna be OK.’”
Despite their debate, Maher admitted at the end that he “took one for the team” and got the vaccine anyway.
Wes Anderson‘s new film puts Westerns, theatre, 1950s Americana, and an alien into a blender for another of his atypical — and star-packed — concoctions that he says is about “reckoning with forces beyond your control”.
The one-of-a-kind director never seems too influenced by events in the real world, but he told AFP the COVID-19 pandemic did have an impact. “This movie is certainly informed by the most bizarre viral moment in recent history,” he said. “Writing it during this pandemic, in the middle of the most locked-down lockdown, we were not sure we would ever go out again — so I think that’s sorta in it.”
Hanks is ‘intimidating’
Asteroid City is a bizarre and knotty tale set in a remote desert town where a group of child geniuses are gathered for a science competition that is interrupted by an alien visitor, leaving them locked up in quarantine. But in typically convoluted Anderson form, the desert story is presented as a play being performed in New York.
Anderson says he wanted to pay homage to actors, who remain something of a mystery to him, even after working with the biggest names in the business. “Many of the actors are my friends now, but nevertheless they are different on set,” Anderson said. “Actors recognise something in each other that normal people don’t go through — this thing of being the one who everyone is going to watch. It has this interesting strange effect. It became part of what the movie is about.”
Working with Hanks was a joy, he told AFP, though he was initially nervous. “He’s a wonderful actor but also a huge movie star… it’s intimidating.”
“But his manner on set is: you suggest something and he says ‘Sorry, I should have thought of that.’ That encourages you to be better because you’re empowered by this person with such an aura.”
Scarlett’s smokey voice
One person who is glaringly absent is Bill Murray, who has appeared in all of Anderson’s films since Rushmore in 1998. “Bill was cast in a part but then he got Covid three days before we were supposed to shoot,” said Anderson. “We replaced him very quickly with the wonderful Steve Carell who was great.”
Luckily, Murray’s health improved to come hang out on set for the last of the shoot, he added, and Carell turns in a hilarious cameo as a hotel owner.
What Anderson often loves most about his actors is their voice, something he discovered when he cast George Clooney as the lead in the animated film Fantastic Mr Fox. “Only when I recorded George did I realise how much it’s about his voice. And that kinda applies to the majority of actors — so much depends on the voice.”
Johansson, who did voiceover for Anderson’s Isle of Dogs (2018) “has this wonderful, slightly smokey voice,” he said. Arguably, no director has ever had a style that is so immediately recognisable as Anderson’s: the symmetrical playhouse-like sets, bright colours, deadpan irony. He can’t help it.
“There’s a way I do scenes that is just me,” he said. “It’s more like a condition than a choice.”
Samsung Galaxy A34 5G was recently launched by the company in India alongside the more expensive Galaxy A54 5G smartphone. How does this phone fare against the Nothing Phone 1 and the iQoo Neo 7? We discuss this and more on Orbital, the Gadgets 360 podcast. Orbital is available on Spotify, Gaana, JioSaavn, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music and wherever you get your podcasts.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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Chinese internet giant Tencent Holdings is cutting prices for cloud services by up to 40 percent from June amid similar moves from rivals that have plunged the sector into a price war.
The fierce competition comes amid soft corporate demand, with the Chinese economy in the midst of a wobbly recovery since abandoning strict COVID-19 restrictions last year.
Alibaba Group Holding said last month it would slash prices for some cloud products by up to 50 percent. State-owned China Mobile joined Tencent on Tuesday in announcing cuts, saying prices for some services would be reduced by up to 60 percent for a limited time.
Charlie Chai, an analyst at 86Research, said Chinese cloud service providers had in the past made efforts to avert a price war but “at the end of the day they still went down this path”. He noted the companies had expanded aggressively and now had too much capacity.
Wei Yunfeng, a researcher at data firm IDC, said the price cuts were triggered in part by high sales targets despite slowing growth for the market.
Chai said a more challenging cloud market would force companies to focus on product differentiation and that Baidu was well positioned as it had “unique, AI-centric products”.
“For participants that choose to join the war, the near-term margin impact can be significant,” he said, estimating it could take 4 to 7 percentage points off their cloud operating profit margins.
Alibaba’s cloud revenue accounts for about 9 percent of its total revenue. Tencent does not provide separate figures for cloud revenue.
Tencent on Wednesday marked a return to revenue growth in the first quarter as it recovered from COVID-related disruptions and a regulatory freeze on gaming licences a year earlier.
James Mitchell, Tencent’s chief strategy officer, told analysts on a call: “The impact of price cuts on Tencent as a whole is not notable.”
Mitchell said cloud services only represent “a mid single digit percentage” of Tencent’s total revenue.
Moreover, price cuts only apply to its infrastructure-as-a-service business, which represent only a portion of Tencent’s cloud services.
Google I/O 2023 saw the search giant repeatedly tell us that it cares about AI, alongside the launch of its first foldable phone and Pixel-branded tablet. This year, the company is going to supercharge its apps, services, and Android operating system with AI technology. We discuss this and more on Orbital, the Gadgets 360 podcast. Orbital is available on Spotify, Gaana, JioSaavn, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music and wherever you get your podcasts.
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In a written reply to Congress Lok Sabha MP Hibi Eden on whether the Centre responded to the incident in which a US-based tech firm was authorised by the Kerala government to collate, collect, and manage and handle health data of people, Union Minister of State for Information and Technology, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, on Wednesday said no data pertaining to Kerala was shared with the US tech company.
“We are not aware of any such incident in which a US-based tech firm was authorised by the Kerala government to collate, collect, manage and handle the health data of the people. Neither was any reference made by the Kerala government in this regard as well,” he said.
To another question from the MP on whether the data collected by Aarogya Setu till May 10, 2022, was deleted in accordance with the Aarogya Setu Data Access and Knowledge Sharing Protocol, 2020, Chandrasekhar said, “The data has been deleted in accordance with the protocol.”
“In accordance with the provisions of the Aarogya Setu Data Access and Knowledge Sharing Protocol, 2020, the contact tracing feature of the Aarogya Setu mobile application has been discontinued,” the MoS, IT said in response to the Congress MP, who wanted to know if there was a demand to share the contact tracing data collected through the Aarogya Setu mobile application.
Aarogya Setu is an Indian Covid-19 contact tracing, syndromic mapping and self-assessment digital service, primarily a mobile application, developed by the National Informatics Centre under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.
The app logged more than 100 million downloads within 40 days of its launch in April 2020, during the first Covid wave in India.
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Three weeks removed from an instant classic episode with Pedro Pascal, Saturday Night Live returned with not one, but two new inductees to the five-timers club, with Woody Harrelson hosting and Jack White as the musical guest. So why was the episode so instantly forgettable? Let’s recap and see if our memory jogging makes us feel better about it all in retrospect.
What’s The Deal For The SNL Cold Open For Last Night (2/25/23)?
The show can’t let go of Donald Trump just as Trump can’t let go of us, so here’s James Austin Johnson once more, this time speaking to the fine folks of East Palestine, Ohio, scene of a toxic disaster in the wake of a train derailment there. The one thing JAJ’s Trump has going for him and us is that his rambling riffs always manage to land into some amusing logic circles, such as his boasting about Trump-branded water whilst also managing to compliment Ohio residents on the new rainbows forming in their discolored waterways. When he hears farmers complain about how the spilled chemicals have infected their dirt, JAJ’s Trump declares: “Don’t eat the dirt. You should be eating the cold McDonald’s I brought you.”
There’s no good reason or explanation that would have him introduce the woman who’s the outspoken grand jury forewoman in a case against Trump, but the writers shoehorned her into the sketch anyhow. I suppose it’s a good sign of my mental health that I have no idea if Chloe Fineman’s impersonation is remotely close to the real thing, nor do I want to find out. But I know enough to know this isn’t how you open a quality episode.
How Did The SNL Guest Host Woody Harrelson Do?
Woody Harrelson stars in the upcoming film Champions, in theaters March 10. In a meandering and sometimes aimless monologue, Woody reminded us he loves smoking weed, is trying not to drink as much as before, and is still a vegan. I’m not sure I’d heard Woody was an anti-vaxxer, but he definitely wasn’t subtle about comparing the COVID vaccine manufacturers to drug cartels forcing us into quarantine and only letting us out if we took their drugs — supposedly this was a movie script he read in November 2019?!? No wonder the SNL cast left him hanging at the end of the monologue when he asked about his 5-Timers Club jacket.
As for the night’s sketches, they all felt a bit lackluster.
In “Jail Scene,” the first live sketch after the monologue, Woody plays a prisoner getting a visit from his lover (Chloe), but their chat through the glass is figuratively shattered by running commentary by the two prison guards (Ego Nwodim and Kenan Thompson) contradicting them at every turn. They had a premise but didn’t really take it anywhere interesting. A similar fate befell the “Slingshot” sketch, where Woody and Kenan are with their dates (Ego and Heidi Gardner) waiting for an amusement park ride, where the twist is that Kenan goes from cool and confident in line to immediately passing out on the slingshot, while Woody goes from nervous before to giddy during and after. They then just repeat the gimmick with Ego and Heidi. Kenan does attempt to blurt out some revelations of some sort but it’s all muddled, which blunts any actual heightening of the game.
The “please don’t destroy” trio returned for their first short video of 2023 (wait, is that right?), and it finds Ben Marshall wondering why John Higgins and Martin Herlihy don’t want to hang out with him anymore. Woody offers to help find out via stakeout, which leads to them to a house in Connecticut where John and Martin have gone to great lengths to create their own life without Ben. Uh oh!
There’s a lot of yelling in this Naval submarine launch sketch, but that’s because it seems that the U.S. Navy learned nothing from the UK’s 2016 #NameOurShip poll that resulted in Boaty McBoatface. This American ship is christened Mr. Dingleberry’s Goochballoon ASDFJKL; 6969. But not for long.
And this week’s winner for best branded content in the form of a “fake ad” that might as well be a real ad short film goes to Cologuard! Tell them what they’ve won. You’ve just earned yourselves some extra publicity in the form of making stool samples sound like sexual innuendos. Congrats, Cologuard! “This is sick.” “Yeah, but not sick from colon cancer.”
How Relevant Was The Musical Guest Jack White?
Jack White last appeared on SNL in October 2020 as a last-minute replacement for Morgan Wallen, which made his 2023 return his fifth time performing on the show, and fourth outside of The White Stripes. So Woody paused during his first introduction of White to wonder aloud: “Does he get a jacket, too?”
For White’s first song, he went with a medley of “Taking Me Back/Fear of the Dawn,” the first two tracks on White’s 2022 rock album release, “Fear of the Dawn.”
It’s movie awards season, so this blatant ripoff of The Whale is so blatant, it’s a pivotal part of the sketch’s premise and plot twists.
If you thought a movie exploiting fat people and lauding Brendan Fraser but only allowing him to make a comeback in a fat suit, then just wait until you giggle at the prospect of Woody’s character gaining 450 pounds of real weight in six months for his movie role, only to find out it was all for nothing, and then find out his castmates felt their movie prep was equally traumatic, but then remember that Woody is still just in a fat suit? So many layers. Four hundred and fifty layers?
Who Stopped By Weekend Update?
At least Colin Jost and Michael Che looked like they were having a blast tonight during their part of Update.
Since we’re fresh of the NBA’s All-Star break and a momentous record-breaking moment by LeBron James, we’ve got JAJ as Bill Walton to talk hoops. His Walton shares the same aptitude for nonsensical riffing as his Trump, only with more pot-fueled growling and basketball play-by-play broadcasting tangents.
Heidi Gardner showed up, too, as proud mom of five Gina Bianchi. Gina’s got four daughters and one son, and she clearly prefers her son to her daughters. A little too much, if you ask anyone.
At the end of the segment, they flashed a tribute card for Eugene Lee, who died earlier this month at 83. Lee was designing sets for Broadway shows that so impressed Lorne Michaels that he not only hired Lee to design the original sets and staging for Studio 8H, but kept him on staff from 1975 up until this season! R.I.P.
At 12:52 a.m. Eastern, Steve Higgins informs us we’re going to watch two men speak at the most beautiful gym in the world, which means Woody and Bowen Yang in suits or tuxes, with Michael Longfellow also in formalwear playing a piano.”This gym is so classy it should be called a James.” That line from Bowen got the biggest laugh? For a final sketch of the night, it came off too mellow and mild, when we’re all hoping for wacky and wild. Oh well.
Before goodnights, the show also paused for a brief tribute card for Richard Belzer, who died a week ago. Belzer was SNL’s original warm-up act in the 1970s and even appeared in some sketches in those early seasons, and of course was known to millions as Munch.
Photo: NBC
Who Was The Episode’s MVP?
For an episode in which only a few members of the cast carried most of the load (JAJ, Chloe, Kenan, Ego and Heidi), ’twas James Austin Johnson who had to do the most in terms of hair and makeup changes and character variety. So JAJ is our MVP for this week.
Next week, Travis Kelce, tight end from the 2023 Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs, hosts, with musical guest Kelsea Ballerini.
Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.
Amazon.com would require employees to be in office at least three days a week from May 1, the e-commerce giant said on Friday.
The COVID-19 pandemic had altered the workplace, with companies sending employees home to work remotely. Even as lockdowns eased around the world, a large population of employees remains remote or in a hybrid environment.
In a message that was posted on Amazon‘s blog, chief executive Andy Jassy wrote the decision was taken at a meeting earlier this week and the move would make it easier to learn and collaborate.
“This shift will provide a boost for the thousands of businesses located around our urban headquarter locations in the Puget Sound, Virginia, Nashville, and the dozens of cities around the world where our employees go to the office,” Jassy wrote.
The company added there would be some exceptions to the rule — customer support roles and salespeople would have the option of working remotely.
Amazon had said in October 2021 it would let individual teams decide how many days corporate employees would be expected to work from office in a week.
In January this year, Amazon announced plans to cut jobs in the United States, Canada, and Costa Rica. The steps were taken under laying off of 18,000 employees, the e-commerce giant said in a memo to staff seen by Reuters.
The company reportedly terminated 2,300 employees in Seattle and Bellevue, according to an update on the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) site. The US labour law requires companies planning a mass layoff to inform employees 60 days before the closure.
Amazon was one among many tech companies to announce layoffs and job cuts over the past few months.
The OnePlus 11 5G was launched at the company’s Cloud 11 launch event which also saw the debut of several other devices. We discuss this new handset and all of OnePlus’ new hardware on Orbital, the Gadgets 360 podcast. Orbital is available on Spotify, Gaana, JioSaavn, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music and wherever you get your podcasts.
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Apple is expected to report its first decline in quarterly revenue in nearly four years after strict COVID-19 curbs in China rapped the economy and related protests upended iPhone production at its biggest supplier Foxconn.
Investors will look for details on how Chief Executive Tim Cook is trying to bolster demand in a weak economy that has prompted mass layoffs in the tech industry, a move Apple has so far avoided thanks to frugal hiring during the pandemic.
“With supply chain challenges largely normalized, we now believe Apple is entering a period of slower demand due to macro factors,” said Cowen analyst Krish Sankar, adding that he expects 2 percent fewer iPhone units to be sold in 2023.
The world’s biggest public company is expected to report on Thursday that iPhone sales fell about 5 percent for the all-important holiday quarter, according to Refinitiv. The last time iPhone sales slipped was in the August-October period in 2020, months into the COVID-19 pandemic.
UBS analysts expect iPhone sales to have held up better in the United States than China and Europe, as the economies reeled from the impact of COVID-19 and the Russia-Ukraine war.
Some demand for the iPhone will likely be pushed into the current quarter after supply restrictions in the first quarter and some demand lost due to lack of product availability in the holiday period, BofA analyst Wamsi Mohan said.
The services business, a key growth engine for the company and home to Apple’s music and video streaming services, is set to post its lowest revenue growth for the holiday quarter — another fallout of consumers limiting spending.
THE CONTEXT
The disruption at the world’s biggest iPhone plant in Zhengzhou, China triggered a rare warning from Apple in November and limited stocks of its higher-end iPhone 14 models during what is typically its biggest sales quarter, powered by product launches and the holidays.
Greater China, including Hong Kong, is key to Apple’s fortunes, contributing roughly a fifth to annual revenue. The Cupertino, California-based tech behemoth had in 2019 pared its total sales forecast due to an economic slowdown in the country following the Sino-US trade war.
Analysts, however, expect a much-faster recovery this time as factories have restarted in China and Apple diversifies its production footprint with plants in India.
“Commentary from luxury goods companies indicates China is rebounding quickly, which implies Mar-quarter Chinese iPhone sales should be better than expected,” Evercore ISI analysts said in a note.
Apple launched the iPad Pro (2022) and the iPad (2022) alongside the new Apple TV this week. We discuss the company’s latest products, along with our review of the iPhone 14 Pro on Orbital, the Gadgets 360 podcast. Orbital is available on Spotify, Gaana, JioSaavn, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music and wherever you get your podcasts.
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Respiratory Medicine that monitored heart measures through smartwatches. Researchers at Tel Aviv University equipped close to 5,000 Israelis with smartwatches and monitored their physiological parameters over two years.
Of those monitored, 2,038 received the booster dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, allowing the researchers to objectively compare measures before and after the participants took the vaccine, and confirm the safety of the vaccine.
The team also examined the safety of the booster by analysing the medical files of 2,50,000 members of Maccabi Health Services anonymously.
They were able to evaluate the safety of the vaccines from three perspectives: subjectively — what the participant reports, objectively — what the watch detects, and clinically — what the doctor diagnoses.
“The smartwatches were used to monitor a number of parameters such as heart rate, variation in heart activity, quality of sleep, number of daily steps taken, and more,” said Professor Dan Yamin from Tel Aviv University.
“We saw clear and significant changes after administration of the vaccine, such as an increase in heart rate compared to the pulse rate measured before vaccination, and then we saw a return to the participant’s baseline, i.e., the pulse levels after vaccination returned to their previous levels after six days. Hence, our study confirms the safety of the vaccine,” Yamin said.
The researchers said the most surprising finding was that the watches were more sensitive than the people they were monitoring. Many participants reported fatigue, headache, etc. after receiving the vaccine, and after two or three days reported that they felt normal and well, they said.
“In contrast, from examining their watches, we saw distinct changes in heart rate that continued for several more days,” Yamin said.
“There were also vaccinated participants who did not report any side effects at all and yet definitely experienced physiological changes, based on data from their smartwatches. In other words, we learned that the smartwatches were more sensitive to changes in general feeling than the participants themselves,” he added.
In the medical literature, 25 unusual side effects attributed to the COVID vaccine were reported, and the researchers paid special attention to look for rare cases of inflammation of the heart muscle (myocarditis) and pericarditis.
The researchers checked the frequency of these unusual side effects among a quarter of a million Maccabi members and found no increase in serious incidents of any kind associated with vaccination.
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Catch the latest from the Consumer Electronics Show on Gadgets 360, at our CES 2023 hub.
After a pair of Islamist bombings rocked the south-central Indian city of Hyderabad in 2013, officials rushed to install 5,000 CCTV cameras to bolster security. Now there are nearly 700,000 in and around the metropolis.
The most striking symbol of the city’s rise as a surveillance hotspot is the gleaming new Command and Control Center in the posh Banjara Hills neighbourhood. The 20-story tower replaces a campus where swarms of officers already had access to 24-hour, real-time CCTV and cell phone tower data that geolocates reported crimes. The technology triggers any available camera in the area, pops up a mugshot database of criminals and can pair images with facial recognition software to scan CCTV footage for known criminals in the vicinity.
The Associated Press was given rare access to the operations earlier this year as part of an investigation into the proliferation of artificial intelligence tools used by law enforcement around the world.
Police Commissioner C V Anand said the new command centre, inaugurated in August, encourages using technologies across government departments, not just police. It cost $75 million (roughly Rs. 620 crore), according to Mahender Reddy, director general of the Telangana State Police.
Facial recognition and artificial intelligence have exploded in India in recent years, becoming key law enforcement tools for monitoring big gatherings.
Police aren’t just using technology to solve murders or catch armed robbers. Hyderabad was among the first local police forces in India to use a mobile application to dole out traffic fines and take pictures of people flaunting mask mandates. Officers also can use facial recognition software to scan pictures against a criminal database. Police officers have access to an app, called TSCOP, on their smartphones and tablets that includes facial recognition scanning capabilities. The app also connects almost all police officers in the city to a host of government and emergency services.
Anand said photos of traffic violators and mask-mandate offenders are kept only long enough to be sure they aren’t needed in court and are then expunged. He expressed surprise that any law-abiding citizen would object.
“If we need to control crime, we need to have surveillance,” he said.
But questions linger over the accuracy and a lawsuit has been filed challenging its legality. In January, a Hyderabad official scanned a female reporter’s face to show how the facial recognition app worked. Within seconds, it returned five potential matches to criminals in the statewide database. Three were men.
Hyderabad has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on patrol vehicles, CCTV cameras, facial recognition and geo-tracking applications and several hundred facial recognition cameras, among other technologies, Anand said. The investment has helped the state attract more private and foreign investment, he said, including Apple’s development centre, inaugurated in 2016; and a major Microsoft data centre announced in March.
“When these companies decide to invest in a city, they first look at the law-and-order situation,” Anand said.
He credited technology for a rapid decrease in crime. Mugging for jewellery, for example, plunged from 1,033 incidents per year to less than 50 a year after cameras and other technologies were deployed, he said.
Hyderabad’s trajectory is in line with the nation’s. The country’s National Crime Records Bureau is seeking to build what could be among the world’s largest facial recognition systems.
Building steadily on previous government efforts, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have seized on the rise in surveillance technology since coming to power in 2014. His flagship Digital India campaign aims to overhaul the country’s digital infrastructure to govern using information technology.
The government has promoted smart policing through drones, AI-enabled CCTV cameras and facial recognition. It’s a blueprint that has garnered support across the political spectrum and seeped into states across India, said Apar Gupta, executive director of the New Delhi-based Internet Freedom Foundation.
“There is a lot of social and civic support for it too – people don’t always fully understand,” Gupta said. “They see technology and think this is the answer.”
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The company that assembles Apple’s iPhones has announced it is easing COVID-19 restrictions at its largest factory in China that led thousands of workers to quit and drastically slowed production.
Foxconn Technology said in a statement on one of its official WeChat social media accounts that it would end the so-called “closed loop” system at the facility in Zhengzhou, central China, that required workers to stay in their workplaces and dormitories to prevent the spread of coronavirus infections.
The move announced Wednesday came about a week after China began easing harsh COVID-19 curbs despite signs the number of infections is rising.
Following a spate of protests across the country last month many “zero-COVID” restrictions were lifted. That means people no longer need to take frequent COVID-19 tests to travel on public transport. If they do test positive for the virus, they can isolate at home if they have only mild or no symptoms instead of being sent to a quarantine center.
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s government is still officially committed to stopping virus transmission. But the government’s latest moves suggest authorities will tolerate more infections without quarantines or shutting down travel or businesses.
Thousands of workers at the huge factory in Zhengzhou walked out in late October over complaints of unsafe working conditions — such as food shortages due to closed cafeterias — and a virus outbreak at the plant.
The last quarter of the year is typically a busy season for companies like Foxconn as they ramp up production ahead of the end of year holiday rush. Apple has warned that iPhone 14 deliveries would be delayed due to manufacturing disruptions.
Foxconn, headquartered in New Taipei City, Taiwan, has been trying to rebuild its workforce after the massive walkout in late October. The company then ended up apologizing after a pay dispute triggered protests by workers who said Foxconn had changed the terms of wages offered to attract them to the factory.
In its announcement, the company said it would no longer provide free meals to workers because factory cafeterias would reopen. Instead, meal expenses will be deducted from employees’ wages as usual, though workers who must quarantine after testing positive for the virus will still get free meals.
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