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Judge Rules in Favor of Father of 12-Year-Old LAUSD Student Who Challenged COVID Vaccine Mandate
A judge has ruled in favor of the father of a 12-year-old student who filed a lawsuit challenging the Los Angeles Unified School District’s student COVID-19 vaccine mandate.
After three months of hearing arguments and taking the case under submission, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Mitchell Beckloff found that the resolution approving the vaccine directive clashed with state law.
The judge reversed his tentative ruling in which he said he was initially inclined to find in favor of the LAUSD in the case brought by the father, who is identified in court papers only as G.F. and his son as D.F.
In sworn testimony, the father said his son received other required childhood immunizations but believes the COVID vaccine would cause irreparable harm to his son, who previously came down with the virus and recovered from it.
Beijing Rolls out China’s First-Ever COVID Vaccine Mandate
Beijing residents wanting to enter a raft of public places will need to show proof of vaccination from Monday, the first time China has deployed a vaccine mandate, as the city rushes to quash a new outbreak caused by a more infectious subvariant.
The city will require live performances, entertainment venues such as movie theaters, museums and gyms, as well as training and tutoring locations, to restrict entry to people who are vaccinated, Li Ang, deputy director at the Beijing Municipal Health Commission, told reporters at a briefing Wednesday.
The requirement will also apply to medical staff, people working in community service operations, home furnishing operators, express delivery providers and conference attendees. They’ll need to have received a booster shot to continue as normal, Li said. There will be exemptions for people who don’t qualify for vaccination.
The city will maintain a requirement for people to get tested at least every three days to enter all public venues.
Disney Co-Opts Your Childhood Memories to Explain Their Ad Technology
If you’ve ever wondered how the Walt Disney Corporation is mining your data for targeted advertisements across platforms, today’s your lucky day. Baymax of Big Hero 6 and Edna Mode from The Incredibles are here to explain it all.
In leaked videos first obtained and reported on by Vice, Disney characters have been extracted from their original contexts and inserted into the company’s ad sales training and marketing materials. There, in a nightmare scenario, the facsimiles of your beloved childhood memories are re-animated and re-voiced to tell you all about Disney’s innovative advertising technologies.
The cartoon vaguely assures viewers that, all the while, the company is “exceeding the highest standards of privacy and data security.” Whose standards? Who knows.
Journalist Alex Berenson Reaches Settlement With Twitter
Independent journalist Alex Berenson and Twitter have agreed to a settlement over a lawsuit that alleged the big tech company violated Berenson’s constitutional rights when it banned him.
The parties “have reached a settlement in principle,” according to a joint stipulation filed in federal court in California on June 29. However, additional time is needed to finalize details of the settlement, the parties said.
Twitter banned Berenson, formerly of The New York Times, from the platform in August 2021, claiming he violated the company’s rules against promoting COVID-19 misinformation.
Berenson said in the suit that he was assured by a senior executive that he would not be banned, that he did not break the rules, and that Twitter broke its promises and policies in removing him.
Shanghai Announces Two New Rounds of Mass COVID Testing
The city of Shanghai on Tuesday announced two new rounds of mass COVID-19 testing of most of its 25 million residents over a three-day period, citing the need to trace infections linked to an outbreak at a karaoke lounge.
The city government said on its official WeChat account that all residents in nine of the city’s 16 districts would be tested twice from Tuesday to Thursday. People in parts of three other districts would also have to undergo tests.
City lockdowns and repeated mass testing in China, part of its zero-COVID policy that aims to eradicate all outbreaks, have brought case numbers down but many of the measures have fueled anger and taken a toll on the economy.
Xi’an Shuts Back Down as China Finds First Cases of New Omicron Subvariant
China’s northwestern city of Xi’an, home to 13 million people, was partially shut down on Wednesday after it reported the country’s first outbreak of a highly transmissible new Omicron subvariant that is fast dominating the United States and Europe.
The city recorded 18 COVID infections from Saturday to Monday, all of which are of the Omicron BA.5.2 subvariant, according to local disease control officials.
BA.5.2 is a sub-lineage of BA.5, which is already dominant in the U.S. and appears to escape antibody responses among both people previously infected with COVID-19 and those who have been fully vaccinated and boosted, according to researchers.
On Tuesday, Xi’an officials announced sweeping restrictions that would shut down parts of the city for seven days starting from Wednesday.
Meta Sues Chinese Company’s U.S. Subsidiary for Scraping Facebook and Instagram Data
Facebook’s parent company Meta has announced that it’s suing the U.S. subsidiary of a Chinese tech company, accusing it of offering data scraping services for Facebook and Instagram.
The social networking giant also revealed that it’s suing an individual, who the company alleges set up automated Instagram accounts to scrape data from some 350,000 Instagram users.
Both cases have been filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
Twitter Launches Legal Challenge in India Over Orders to Block Content
Twitter has mounted its first legal challenge to the Indian government over official orders to take down content.
The social media company has had a tough time in India since last year, spending months locked in a high-stakes standoff with the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi over freedom of speech.
The San Francisco-based company filed a petition before the High Court of Karnataka, a state in southwest India, on Tuesday according to a listing reviewed online by CNN Business.
Twitter declined to comment on the case. But a source familiar with the filing said that the company had decided to challenge some orders by the government as they “demonstrate excessive use of powers and are disproportionate.”
AI Robo-Doctor Speeds up Sight-Saving Technology
A humanoid robot has quickened sight-restoring research by finding the best conditions to grow replacement retina layers from human stem cells. The artificial intelligence (AI) system known as Maholo took just 185 days to complete experiments that would have taken humans two and a half years. In just a quarter of the time, Maholo processed trial-and-error research made up of 200 million possible conditions.
The robot was created by a joint research group at the RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamic Research (BDR) in Kobe, Japan, to grow functional retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) cells from stem cells.
Team leader Genki Kanda said: “Using robots and AI for carrying out experiments will be of great interest to the public. However, it is a mistake to see them as replacements. Our vision is for people to do what they are good at, which is being creative.”
“We can use robots and AI for the trial-and-error parts of experiments that require repeatable precision and take up a lot of time, but do not require thinking.”
