China Protests Victory
Cities across China further unwound Covid restrictions Friday, loosening testing and quarantine rules in the wake of nationwide protests calling for an end to lockdowns and greater political freedoms.
Anger and frustration with China's hardline pandemic response spilled out onto the streets last weekend in widespread demonstrations not seen in decades.
In the wake of the unrest across China, a number of cities have begun loosening Covid restrictions, such as moving away from daily mass testing requirements, a tedious mainstay of life under Beijing's stringent zero-Covid policy.
At the same time, authorities are continuing to seek to contain protests with heavy security on the streets, online censorship in full force, and surveillance of the population heightened.
As of Friday, the southwestern metropolis of Chengdu will no longer require a recent negative test result to enter public places or ride the metro, instead only requiring a green health code confirming they have not travelled to a "high risk" area.
In Beijing, health authorities called on Thursday on hospitals not to deny treatment to people without a negative PCR test taken within 48 hours.
In January, a pregnant woman in the city of Xi'an miscarried after being refused hospital entry for not having a PCR test result.
China has seen a string of deaths after treatment was delayed by Covid restrictions, including the recent death of a four-month-old baby who was stuck in quarantine with her father.
Those cases became a rallying cry during the protests, with a viral post listing the names of those who died because of alleged negligence linked to the pandemic response.
Many other cities with virus outbreaks are allowing restaurants, shopping malls and even schools to reopen, in a clear departure from previous tough lockdown rules.
In northwestern Urumqi, where a fire that killed ten people was the spark for the anti-lockdown protests, authorities announced Friday that supermarkets, hotels, restaurants, and ski resorts would gradually be opened.
The city of over four million residents endured one of China's longest lockdowns, with some areas shut in early August.
- Home quarantine -
An analysis by state-run newspaper People's Daily on Friday quoted a number of health experts supporting local government moves to allow positive cases to quarantine at home.
The shift would be a marked departure from current rules, which require that they be held in government facilities.
The southern factory hub of Dongguan Thursday said that those who meet "specific conditions" should be allowed to quarantine at home. It did not specify what those conditions would be.
The southern tech hub Shenzhen rolled out a similar policy Wednesday.
Central government officials have also signalled that a broader relaxation of zero-Covid policy could be in the works.
Speaking at the National Health Commission Wednesday, Vice Premier Sun Chunlan said the Omicron variant was weakening and vaccination rates were improving, according to the state-run Xinhua news agency.
A central figure behind Beijing's pandemic response, Sun said this "new situation" required "new tasks".
She made no mention of zero-Covid in those remarks or in another meeting on Thursday, suggesting the approach, that has disrupted the economy and daily life, might soon be relaxed.
NIST Graded Our Post-Quantum Cryptography. Zero Failures.
NIST's Algorithm Validation Test System generated test vectors nobody had seen, we answered them over the ACVP protocol, and NIST graded the result: 2,130 cases across ML-KEM, ML-DSA and SLH-DSA in every parameter set offered, zero failures, demo certificate A11025. This is what that proves, where we deliberately drew the claim narrower than NIST's own matrix, and why the FIPS 140-2 sunset on 21 September makes the distinction between being graded and grading yourself worth understanding.
The Problem Is Not the Problem
People treat the Jack Sparrow line as a joke. The attribution is a joke. The sentence is not. Forty years in markets says the same thing Epictetus said in 125 CE and Robert Merton named in 1948: the event is finite, and the story you appoint to govern it is not. This essay walks the quote back to its actual sources, draws the loop that turns a feeling into an order, and sets out the four places a rule written in advance cuts the loop. Faith is not a hedge. It is a stance.
What KXCO Is, and Why the Hard Problem Was Never Intelligence
The prevailing enthusiasm assumes the hard problem is intelligence. It is not. It is that banks, hospitals, courts and governments are being asked to let software act on their behalf with no way to establish who decided, on what basis, or whether the record will still read in a decade. KXCO founder Shayne Heffernan sets out the architecture that answers those questions, drawn as a graph, and argues that properly constructed AI is an amplifier of human judgement rather than a replacement for it.
AI Intelligence Scales. Accountability Does Not. Why KXCO Is Built for It.
Capability is becoming abundant and everything abundant gets cheap. What does not get cheap is the person who has to sign, and they can only carry what they can see. Four conditions follow from that, and four independent authorities reached the first of them last month without knowing it.
Every story, signed and delivered.
Subscribe to the kxco channel and get the headline, the AI-written key takeaways, and the chain-anchor link the moment we publish. Audio versions and per-ticker subscriptions arrive in the next iteration.