Digital Twin technology a 'powerful tool' but requires significant investment, say experts

KING'S COLLEGE LONDON

Research News

 

Healthcare and aerospace experts at King's College London, The Alan Turing Institute, the University of Cambridge, and the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences at UT Austin in Texas have said advances in digital twin technology make it a powerful tool for facilitating predictive and precision medicine and enhancing decision-making for aerospace systems. Their opinion piece was published today in Nature Computational Science.

When applied to healthcare, the digital twin, a virtual version of real-life objects that can be used to predict how that object will perform, could predict how a patient's disease will develop and how patients are likely to respond to different therapies.

It is also of huge benefit in aerospace, where, for example, the technology will be needed to monitor and control thousands of drones, ensuring that they are maintained, have efficient and safe flight plans and can automatically adapt to changes in conditions, such as weather, without the need for human interaction.

However, current digital twins are largely the result of bespoke technical solutions that are difficult to scale.

The authors say that these use cases place new demands on the speed, robustness, validation, verification and uncertainty quantification in digital twin creation workflows.

Achieving digital twins at scale will require a drastic reduction in technical barriers to their adoption.

Lead author Professor Steven Niederer from the School of Biomedical Engineering & Imaging Sciences, King's College London said in medicine, the digital twin will allow testing of a large number of therapies on a patient to identify the best option for that individual with their unique disease.

"There is, however, a need to invest in the underlying theory for how to make models, how to run these models at speed and how to combine multiple models together to ensure that they run as expected," he said.

"We also need to further develop the mathematics of how we create digital twins from patient data, how we measure uncertainty in patient data, and how to account for uncertainty in the model in predictions. These are all things which need further investment."

"We are making more measurements in patients in the hospital and from remote monitoring and we need to develop methods for rapidly and robustly combining this patient information into a digital twin to provide a single representation of the patient."

"Another challenge is how do we get better at predicting how the heart will operate under extreme conditions. We often want to predict when the heart will fail, however, we only have information that is obtained from them under normal operating procedures."

Similarly from an aerospace perspective, Dr Karen Willcox, Director, Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin, said in order to be useful, the digital twin must be predictive and quantify uncertainty.

"Digital twins must be able to analyze 'what if' scenarios and issue predictions about the future, in order to guide decision making to manage a physical asset. That means the digital twin cannot be built on data alone, it needs to include both data and predictive models," she said.

Though open challenges remain, the value of digital twins is clear. And they don't have to be perfect to be valuable. "Even with existing limitations, digital twins are providing valuable decision support in many different application areas," said Willcox. "Ultimately we would like to see the technology used in every engineering system. At that point we can start thinking not just about how a digital twin might change the way we operate the system, but also how we design it in the first place."

Mark Girolami, Programme Director for Data-Centric Engineering at The Alan Turing Institute said: "The promise of data driven coupling of mathematical models with the physical reality they represent, the so-called digital twin, is going to be transformational in how we interact with and control the physical world. In healthcare for instance, the increasing power of computers and algorithms are enabling technologies to build a patient-specific digital twin, catering to our diversity as human beings and improving individual health outcomes. However, these promised advances are going to be hard won, requiring further concerted and sustained foundational research and development to fully realise the promise of the digital twin."

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Scientists created building materials effectively protecting from radiation

Bricks made of new materials are cheaper and more environmentally friendly than analogues made of lead and other materials

URAL FEDERAL UNIVERSITY

Research News

 

IMAGE: BRICKS CAN REPLACE LEAD SCREENS, OLEG TASHLYKOV IS SURE. view more 

CREDIT: URFU / ANASTASIA FARAFONTOVA

Scientists at the Ural Federal University (UrFU, Russia) have created clay bricks that are able to attenuate ionizing radiation to a level that is safe for the human body. To the composition of bricks scientists add waste from the industry, which protects against radiation. The article describing the technology was published in the journal Applied Radiation and Isotopes.

"Bricks are a relatively cheap and convenient material with which we can quickly erect protective rooms, structures, walls around objects with radiation," says scientific head of the project, associate professor of the Department of Nuclear Power Plants and Renewable Energy Sources at UrFU Oleg Tashlykov. "The bricks are alloyed with heavy metals - wastes from the metallurgical enterprises. These substances have pronounced radiation-protective properties. Thus, we solve two problems at once. First, by adding crushed absorbers of ionizing radiation to the matrix, in this case from clay, we obtain building materials with the desired protective properties. Secondly, in this way we find a way to utilize industrial waste."

CAPTION

Bricks are a relatively cheap and convenient material with which it can be quickly erect protective rooms, structures, walls around objects with radiation

CREDIT

UrFU / Anastasia Farafontova

The ultimate goal of scientists is to develop a wide range of materials based not only on clay, but also cement mortars or concrete, artificial polymers with different chemical composition and concentration of absorbing substances. In other words, with specified protective properties that meet specific conditions (isotopic composition of radioactive contamination, types of radiation, etc.) at nuclear power plants, in radioactive waste storage facilities, as well as in medical institutions where diagnostics and treatment are carried out using X-ray equipment and irradiating devices.

"Tungsten is widely known to be the most reliable protection against gamma or X-ray radiation, but it is very expensive," says research coauthor, research engineer of the Department of Nuclear Power Plants and Renewable Energy Sources at UrFU Karem Makhmud. "Lead is cheaper but toxic. And, besides, it is plastic and in an upright position can slide under its own weight, forming holes in the radiation protection system and reducing its stability. Our materials are optimal in terms of radiation protection efficiency and ease of manufacture, strength, durability, cost. The latter factor is important, since today the contribution of biological protection to the cost of nuclear power facilities reaches 20-30%."

Scientists use high-precision computational codes to create bricks. Also they use for their experimental research the reactor plant of the Institute of Reactor Materials of the State Corporation "Rosatom" (Russia), as well as the production technologies of the Sealing Materials Plant (Russia). The products of joint activities are of great interest to domestic and foreign enterprises of the nuclear industry. There are plans to further study the mechanical and radiation-protective parameters of various natural substances, including those common in the partner countries of Rosatom (Turkey, Egypt, Bangladesh), where nuclear power plants are being built with the participation of Russian specialists.

Indigenous peoples and local communities, key to achieving biodiversity goals

An international study led by the ICTA-UAB states that recognizing indigenous peoples' and local communities' rights and agency is critical to addressing the current biodiversity crisis

UNIVERSITAT AUTONOMA DE BARCELONA

Research News

 

IMAGE: MAASAI WOMEN CONSERVATION PROJECT IN KENYA view more 

CREDIT: JOAN DE LA MALLA

An international study led by the ICTA-UAB states that recognizing indigenous peoples' and local communities' rights and agency is critical to addressing the current biodiversity crisis

Policies established by the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) could be ineffective if the rights and agency of indigenous peoples and local communities are not recognized and fully incorporated into biodiversity management. This is supported by an international study led by the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB) and recently published in the journal Ambio.

The Convention on Biological Diversity is now working to formulate the goals that will frame global biodiversity policy in the years to come. This will be done through an ambitious international plan commonly known as the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework. The objective of this framework is to promote a profound transformation at the social level that allows halting biodiversity loss at global level. Unfortunately, the framework, as currently written, still has a long way to go towards fully recognizing Indigenous Peoples' rights and agency, scientists argue.

"Indigenous Peoples' and local communities' understandings of nature align perfectly well with the Convention on Biological Diversity's vision of Living in Harmony with Nature", says ICREA Research Professor at the ICTA-UAB Victoria Reyes-García, leader of the study. "It seems paradoxical that global discussions on the collective future of the planet do not heed the voices of Indigenous Peoples' and local communities, one of the groups of actors that has contributed the most to safeguarding the planet's biodiversity".

The study, signed by 21 scientists from all over the world, presents a set of arguments why foregrounding Indigenous Peoples' and local communities' rights and agency is essential to the success of future biodiversity policy. Based on an in-depth review of literature, the study highlights that Indigenous Peoples and local communities hold critical knowledge for setting realistic, legitimate and effective biodiversity targets.

"The Global Biodiversity Framework should recognize and address the views and perspectives of Indigenous Peoples and local communities", states Dr. Álvaro Fernández-Llamazares, co-author of the study and researcher at the University of Helsinki. "There is crystal-clear evidence that their knowledge systems, practices and values have so much to offer in addressing the current biodiversity crisis".

The authors argue that Indigenous Peoples' and local communities' participation in biodiversity policy contribute to recognizing and upholding human rights, and call on the Convention on Biological Diversity to fully recognize Indigenous Peoples' and local communities not only as stakeholders, but also as rights, agency and knowledge-holders.

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THOSE WHO OPPOSE ABORTION OPPOSE WEARING MASKS

The abortion fault line is about to start rumbling

Analysis by Ronald Brownstein 

One of the original culture war conflicts may be poised for a resurgence -- with potentially explosive political consequences.

© Andrea Morales/The New York Times/Redux In this May 21, 2019, file photo, activists demonstrate for and against abortion rights in front of the Mississippi state Capitol in Jackson.

The Supreme Court's recent decision to consider the legality of Mississippi's restrictive law prohibiting abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy could trigger the most serious and sustained political debate over the procedure since the final decades of the 20th century. And that could dramatically widen the already gaping demographic and geographic fissures between red and blue America.


Public opinion over abortion today is much more polarized along party lines than it was in the first decades after the Supreme Court established a nationwide right to it in the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. Reflecting those divisions, red and blue states are poised to hurtle in radically different directions if the court grants them more leeway to regulate abortion by retrenching, or even reversing, the Roe decision through its ruling in the Mississippi case.

The battle over abortion that erupted in the 1970s helped trigger a decades-long political realignment that has re-sorted the two parties' coalitions more along lines of cultural attitudes than class interests. But since the Supreme Court reaffirmed the Roe ruling in 1992 in another landmark decision, that debate has been largely abstract and distant, with relatively few Americans seriously believing that the right to abortion could be revoked, pollsters say.

A new Supreme Court ruling providing states greater freedom to restrict abortion access, which could come before the 2022 elections, would dramatically change that equation by making the debate far more tangible.

"It's one thing to say it's a symbolic issue that signals what team you play for," says Robert P. Jones, founder and CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, a nonpartisan group that studies Americans' attitudes about cultural issues. "But it's another thing to say this is something that is actually going to affect people's lives on the ground, their health, their ability to plan their families. All of these are very concrete ways in which this issue could come out of the abstract intellectual debate into the streets in a way we haven't seen" for decades.

Put another way, while many of today's most volatile social issue disputes involve statements of values that will touch vanishingly few Americans in their daily lives -- very few people, for instance, will ever have to decide whether to bake a cake or take the photos for a same-sex wedding -- the potential for significant new restrictions, or even bans, on abortion would amount to a culture war with more widely felt consequences.


A politics of culture, not class

Abortion was part of the explosive complex of issues that shifted the axis of American politics during the 1960s and 1970s. During the first decades after World War II -- the years of electoral dominance for what became known as the Democrats' "New Deal" coalition -- the principal dividing line in the electorate was economic: Most people above a certain level of income and education voted Republican and most below it voted Democratic.

But starting in the mid-1960s with civil rights and voting rights for African Americans -- and then continuing with fierce debates over crime, welfare and changing attitudes about family, sex and the role of women in American life -- the central dividing line between the competing coalitions started to shift, with Democrats drawing more voters who approved of the ways society was changing and Republicans more of those who felt threatened by it. Abortion contributed to that process when the Supreme Court, in its January 22, 1973, Roe v. Wade decision, established a constitutional right to abortion in every state.

The first backlash to the Roe decision came primarily from groups representing US Catholics. Initially through the mid-1970s, many White evangelical Protestant ministers, who were just beginning their own activism in conservative politics, resisted allying with Catholics (with whom they had bitter, centuries-old religious differences) to oppose abortion. But as the decade proceeded, the desire to build the broadest possible coalition of cultural and religious conservatives prompted leaders from Catholic political strategist Paul Weyrich to evangelical minister Jerry Falwell to link arms behind the anti-abortion cause in the hope of assembling what they called a "moral majority." Faced with "the imperative of fighting the liberals on every front," wrote historian Rick Perlstein in his recent book on the late 1970s, "Reaganland," "political necessity begat theological flexibility" among the awakening evangelical activists.

But the shift from a political system primarily based on class to one that revolves mostly around culture still took decades to fully unfold, and for years after the Roe decision Democrats won support from many culturally conservative voters, just as Republicans did from those with more liberal social views. The result was that initially the right to abortion divided both parties' coalitions.

"It really cut across party lines for a long time," says Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University.

Figures provided to me by the Gallup organization underscore his point. Since the mid-1970s, Gallup has been asking Americans whether abortion should be legal in all circumstances, legal in certain circumstances or always illegal. In an April 1975 poll, the results among Republicans and Democrats were virtually identical, with around one-fifth of each saying abortion should always be legal, half saying it should be so in certain circumstances and the rest saying it should always be illegal. In a May 1981 poll, a few months after Ronald Reagan won election on a platform of opposition to legal abortion, slightly more Republicans than Democrats believed abortion should be legal, either always or in certain circumstances, Gallup found.

Results Abramowitz analyzed for me from the University of Michigan's American National Election Studies, a long-standing election-year poll, point toward the same striking conclusion. In his losing 1980 race against Reagan, Democratic President Jimmy Carter won almost exactly the same share of the vote among those who said abortion should never be available as those who said it should always be legal; those who said abortion should never be legal actually gave Carter more support than those who said it should be allowed rarely or sometimes.

As Abramowitz notes, this cross-cutting pressure on abortion within each party "was reflected in the kinds of people who were getting elected. For a long time, you would get quite a few pro-choice Republicans and pro-life Democrats." That was displayed during Reagan's presidency when conservatives mounted their most serious legislative attempt -- arguably to this day -- to eliminate the right to abortion. That effort culminated in a June 1983 Senate vote on a "Human Life Amendment" to the Constitution that would have overturned Roe and allowed states again to ban abortion. The amendment, which needed support from two-thirds of the Senate, failed, drawing only 49 votes in favor, with 50 opposed. In a pattern almost unimaginable today, 15 Senate Democrats, many of them from the South, voted for the amendment, while 19 Republicans, many from the Northeast or West Coast, voted against it.

A party gap on abortion emerges

Over the succeeding decades, and especially in this century, cultural and racial attitudes have increasingly displaced class interests as the central glue of the parties. That current widened the differences between the parties on abortion. By the time a closely divided Supreme Court reaffirmed the nationwide right to abortion in the 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision, a gap had opened between Republican and Democratic views. In 1991 Gallup results, Democrats were 8 percentage points more likely than Republicans to say abortion should be legal in all circumstances; in the 1992 election, according to the American National Election Studies data, Democrat Bill Clinton ran about 25 points better among those who said abortion should always be legal than with those who said it should never be available.

But even so, in both his 1992 and 1996 elections, Clinton (who famously declared that abortion should be "safe, legal and rare") won nearly half the voters who wanted abortion available either never or rarely, the National Election Studies found. Since then, as the electorate's re-sorting along cultural lines has proceeded, the distance between the parties on abortion has exploded.

While the share of Republicans who believed abortion should always be legal rose from the 1970s through the 1990s, Gallup found that by 2020, it had fallen to just 13%. By contrast, the share of Democrats who said abortion should be legal in all circumstances soared to 49% in 2020, well over double its level in the 1970s and early 1980s. In the 2020 presidential race, according to the National Election Studies data, Joe Biden won more than four-fifths of voters who said abortion should always be legal, but only one-fifth of those who said it should always be illegal and fewer than 3 in 10 of those who wanted it only "rarely" available.

The same polarization was evident when congressional Republicans, during Donald Trump's presidency, advanced legislation to ban abortion after 20 weeks. In contrast to the extensive partisan defections in 1983, just two Senate Republicans in 2020 opposed that bill (Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine) and only two Senate Democrats (Bob Casey of Pennsylvania and Joe Manchin of West Virginia) backed it. The ban fell well short of the 60 votes needed to overcome a Senate filibuster.

In all these ways, a Supreme Court decision eliminating or further restricting abortion rights would land in a country where the issue divides the parties far more starkly than it did at the time of Roe. The separation extends beyond Washington through the states. If the Supreme Court gives states more freedom to limit abortion, nearly two dozen states have laws on the books that would either ban abortion entirely or cut off access much earlier in pregnancy, according to a tabulation by the Guttmacher Institute, a research and advocacy group that studies reproductive issues. Almost all of those states were won by Trump.

With the prospect in sight that a more conservative Supreme Court may authorize tighter limits, Republican-controlled states are passing laws at an accelerating pace that clearly undermine Roe's protections: This year alone, Idaho, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas have all approved legislation banning abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected, which can occur as early as six weeks into pregnancy, in practice a near-total prohibition. Arkansas went further, banning abortion "except to save the life of a pregnant woman in a medical emergency," and Oklahoma passed a similar law in addition to its heartbeat measure. For now, Roe prohibits the enforcement of those laws, but that could change depending on how the court rules in the Mississippi case.

In practice, red states already impose many more obstacles to abortion than blue ones, but conservatives welcome the prospect that the court would allow them to diverge further on the core legal question of access to abortion at all.

Allowing states to set their own disparate rules on abortion "would certainly stabilize the issue by returning the question back to the hands of the American people," Penny Nance, CEO and president of Concerned Women for America, a social conservative group, wrote me in an e-mail. "This is the work of freedom, allowing our citizens to debate the issue and develop new policies by convincing one another of what is best."

But Kristin Ford, national communications director for NARAL Pro-Choice America, a leading abortion rights group, says the court would precipitate pitched political battles even in the red states if it weakens or reverses Roe. "Once these [state] bills can become law and it is less of an intellectual exercise, I think there will be significant backlash," Ford says. "It is not the case that voters in red states believe abortion should be completely illegal or inaccessible."

James Henson, executive director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas (Austin), largely agrees. In a recent University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll, a 49% to 41% plurality of Texas adults said they supported the six-week abortion ban that state Republicans approved this month (but which cannot be implemented unless the Supreme Court revises Roe). But Henson says he does not believe "support would hold up" if the law could actually go into effect because "it's effectively a ban on abortion."

And while many Texans "are very open to making the process of obtaining an abortion a strict one," he told me, a consistent majority want to ensure "the option is there." Support for such a restrictive limit, he predicts, would erode if the issue switched from "thinking about a poll question or hearing an opinion leader talk about it" to "the experience actual real women are going to have" in not even necessarily realizing "that they are pregnant before they hit the six-week marker."

Abortion moves back to the front burner

Henson's comments point toward the potential for the Supreme Court to ignite a much more intense conflagration over abortion than the nation has seen in decades. For all the heated rhetoric on either side, and all the moves red states have undertaken in recent years to reduce access to abortion (for instance by tightly regulating abortion clinics), the bedrock legal right to the procedure has not been seriously threatened since the Casey decision nearly three decades ago, legal scholars agree. As a result, many Americans, especially younger ones, consider abortion largely a settled issue, public opinion analysts note.

"We did some focus groups around this issue a while back and one of the things we found is that many of the references to coat hangers and back-alley abortions and fears of returning to a pre-Roe world were kind of lost on young people, and it's largely because they grew up in a world where abortion is legal," says Jones of the Public Religion Research Institute. "It's just a fixed part of the legal landscape, even the cultural landscape, for them. So I think they've never really thought of it as something under threat."

Just the prospect of a Supreme Court decision revising Roe will spotlight more attention on abortion in coming months. Democratic Rep. Judy Chu of California told me in an interview that by early June she will reintroduce her legislation codifying in federal law the legal right to abortion established under Roe; White House press secretary Jen Psaki reaffirmed last week that Biden supported such a bill. In the last Congress, the bill attracted 216 Democratic co-sponsors, and abortion rights advocates are confident that amid the risk of an adverse high court ruling it could draw enough votes to pass the House.

"Roe vs. Wade was enacted in order to make sure that every woman in every state could have access to abortion and therefore choice over their lives," Chu told me. "And it should not be dependent on their ZIP code."

But Chu also says it's not clear whether House Democrats will take up the legislation before the Supreme Court rules in the Mississippi case, which might not come until June 2022. And even if the House approves it, a law codifying Roe would join the long list of liberal priorities that have no chance of clearing the Senate unless the Democratic majority there agrees to retrench or eliminate the filibuster. (Even reaching 50 votes for such a bill might not be guaranteed there.)

Yet even if Congress stalemates on abortion, that might only make a Supreme Court decision restricting it more salient in the 2022 and 2024 elections.

The safest prediction is that more focus on abortion would reinforce the dynamics already polarizing the parties along lines of education, religious practice and geography. A full-scale battle over abortion would likely help Republicans further strengthen the hold over culturally conservatives Whites that the party has solidified in this century, and potentially make further inroads among anti-abortion Hispanics, especially those who are evangelical Protestants.

Nance says conservatives are confident they can win the argument for imposing limits on abortion at least as strict as those Mississippi is seeking. "The question of whether a baby at 15 weeks gestation deserves legal protection is a losing political strategy for Democrats," she wrote me.

But most Democratic strategists, and even some Republicans, believe that a renewed focus on limiting abortion would exacerbate the GOP's already formidable problems with college-educated White voters, as well as younger and more secular voters. In the Public Religion Research Institute's latest polling, more than two-thirds of college-educated White women and nearly two-thirds of both college-educated White men and all adults under 30 said abortion should remain legal in all or most circumstances. So did more than four-fifths of adults who don't identify with any religious tradition -- now about one-fourth of the population.

Though a renewed focus on abortion would surely feed the forces separating the parties demographically and geographically, the bottom line still tilts toward the Democrats: Most Americans have consistently expressed the desire to maintain Roe's basic protections since the ruling almost 50 years ago. Overall, the Public Religion Research Institute found, a solid three-fifths majority of Americans believed abortion should remain legal in all or most cases. In Gallup's polling since the 1970s, no more than about one-fifth of adults have ever said abortion should be completely banned; even among Republicans, only a little over one-fourth support that step today.

In a reversal of the initial political reaction during the 1970s, the Public Religion Research Institute found that White evangelical Protestants are now the only religious group in which a substantial majority say abortion should be illegal in all or most cases; even a narrow majority of White Catholics believe abortion should mostly remain legal. (Slightly more Hispanic Protestants opposed than supported legal abortion, the only other major group for which that was true.)

Ford of NARAL says that Republican elected officials over recent years have had the best of both worlds: "They have walked this tightrope for a long time of throwing red meat to their most extreme base" by voting for severe abortion restrictions in the states or in Washington, while secure in the knowledge that those laws could not be implemented, and potentially trigger a backlash, because of Roe.

The Supreme Court's Mississippi decision could unsettle that balance by allowing more -- or conceivably all -- of those restrictive laws to go into effect, thrilling some voters and terrifying others. And that could trigger powerfully disruptive new tremors along the fault line over abortion that runs deeply through the American electorate but has remained mostly dormant for decades.

#ABOLISHICE

Trump's ICE deported 348 parents without ensuring children could go with them

The Trump administration deported at least 348 migrant parents without ensuring they wanted to leave their children behind in the U.S. after being forcibly separated from them, according to a government watchdog report made public on Monday.

© U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement / Handout via Getty Images Immigration Hotels

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) even deported some parents who told deportation officers they wanted their children to come with them, the investigation by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Office of Inspector General found.

In May 2018, for example, a migrant father asked to be deported with his daughter, who had been separated from him, the DHS investigators found. ICE deported him the following month without his daughter.

DHS inspectors wrote that ICE records indicated that additional parents who said they wanted to be deported with their children were nevertheless expelled from the country without them.

"Therefore, at least some of ICE's removals of parents without their children were intentional, and not just inadvertent incidents resulting from human error or inaccurate records," the 28-page report said.

Even when ICE recorded a parent's decision to allow their children to remain in the U.S., some of the documents were "significantly flawed," the report said, noting the finding suggested "that not all parents who purportedly waived reunification did so knowingly and voluntarily."

The findings released Monday contradict statements made by high-ranking Trump administration officials, including former DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who indicated that migrant parents who were deported without their children opted to leave them behind in the U.S.

"There was no parent who has been deported to my knowledge without multiple opportunities to take their children with them," Nielsen testified before a House committee in March 2019.

Despite these statements, DHS investigators found that ICE did not have "clear guidance" on documenting or processing decisions by parents on whether they wanted their separated children to remain on U.S. soil without them.

"The report is consistent with the horrifying facts we discovered in the litigation: that parents were deported without the opportunity to bring their children with them," Lee Gelernt, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) lawyer representing separated families in federal court, told CBS News. "Throughout the litigation we learned that some parents were even told their child would join them on the plane only to have the plane take off without the child."

About 2,800 migrant families were separated in the spring of 2018 when the Trump administration implemented its "zero tolerance" crackdown across the entire U.S.-Mexico border. Parents were generally prosecuted for crossing the border illegally, while their children were incorrectly designated as unaccompanied minors and sent to government-overseen shelters.

That border-wide policy, which officials said was designed to deter unauthorized migration, ended in June 2018 after a massive public uproar forced former President Donald Trump to discontinue the mass separations. A federal judge also blocked the practice and ordered the administration to reunite the families it had separated.

Biden administration begins reuniting some migrant children with their parents

More than 1,500 migrant families were split up in late 2017 and early 2018 before "zero tolerance" became a formal policy along the entire border. Many parents were deported without their children during that time. As of May 19, advocates had yet to locate the parents of 391 children, according to a federal court filing.

U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw, who has overseen the family separations case, also ordered the Trump administration in the summer of 2018 to give separated parents a notice that allowed them to choose between three options: being deported with their children, allowing their children to stay in the U.S. or asking for more time to speak to a lawyer before make a decision.

Prior to the issuance of that notice in July 2018, the DHS investigators found that parents did not "consistently" have the opportunity to reunite with their children before being deported.

One assistant ICE field office director told investigators that during the early implementation of "zero tolerance," his agents deported parents without asking them whether they wanted their children to join them. Some officers at one field office did try to document the parent's oral decision, the report said.

The DHS inspector general's office said it could not substantiate concerns that parents who purportedly allowed their children to remain in the U.S. were misled or coerced into making that decision.

In September 2019, Sabraw, the federal judge, found that nearly a dozen parents were eligible to come back to the U.S. because they had been likely coerced into signing off on their deportation or provided misleading information. Nine of those parents returned to the U.S. in January 2020 to reunite with their children.

President Biden, who has denounced the Trump-era separations as cruel, created a task force soon after taking office to locate migrant parents and children who remain separated and facilitate their reunifications.

Unlike the Trump administration, the Biden administration is allowing eligible separated families to reunite on American soil. Earlier this month, four migrant parents were allowed to enter the U.S. legally to reunite with their children, some of whom they had not seen in over three years.

The ACLU estimates that 1,000 migrant families remain separated.

On Monday, DHS spokeswoman Sarah Peck said the department agreed with the report's recommendations, which included making sure that ICE deportation agents properly document whether a parent wants to allow their children to remain in the U.S. without them.

"This report's findings are a tragic reminder of how parents and children were cruelly separated by the prior administration," Peck said in a statement to CBS News. "We are working tirelessly to reunite separated families and rebuild our immigration system so our laws are administered fairly and humanely."

Canadians of Italian origin find justice in apology for internment during WW2

OTTAWA — After decades of digging through archival material and talking with the relatives of people of Italian origin detained in Canada during the Second World War, Montreal historian Joyce Pillarella says Canada's long-awaited apology gives her family and others the moral justice they have been waiting for.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

Pillarella started learning more than 20 years ago about the struggles of the more than 600 people who were interned when she found a postcard sent from her grandfather who was confined at a camp near Fredericton, N.B.

She then started combing through Canada's national archive before she started talking to the families of those affected.

"When I was starting to do cold calls to try to find families, a lot of people didn't want to talk to me," she said in an interview with The Canadian Press.

"What I realize now is that they didn't want to talk because they felt insignificant, their story was insignificant. They were afraid of being judged wrongly. There was the shame of the story."

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is set to deliver a formal apology in the House of Commons Thursday for the internment of Canadians of Italian background during the Second World War for several years at three camps in Petawawa, Ont., Minto, N.B., and Kananaskis, Alta. The apology is not expected to come with individual compensation.

Justice Minister David Lametti, the first Canadian justice minister of Italian heritage, said the internment happened following an order-in-council that was promulgated by the then-justice minister Ernest Lapointe, and it resulted in taking hundreds of people of Italian origin from their families and declaring about 31,000 as "enemy aliens."

"Not a single person was ever convicted, and in addition, people weren't afforded due process," he said in an interview.

"There wasn't anything other than the fact that their name may have appeared on a list somewhere."

Pillarella said the Canadian government asked the RCMP to prepare lists of Canadians of Italian heritage after Italy invaded Ethiopia in the mid-1930s.

She said Italian-Canadians had to do a lot of their business through the Italian consulates at the time.

"People had to be sympathetic with the consulate or at least appear to be, because otherwise they're not going to get anything done," she said.

Lametti said people were put on RCMP lists for having made donations to the Italian Red Cross or for being members of certain labour groups.

"It is true that the Fascist Party did have organizations in Canada but, in the 1930s, they were popular," he said. "It didn't mean that people were disloyal to Canada. In fact, Italian-Canadians generally were very much disappointed when Italy joined Germany in that war effort."

Joan Vistarchi, whose father Salvatore Vistarchi was interned between June 1940 and March 1943, said the RCMP arrested her father in his Montreal apartment without giving him any reason.

"He was put on a train, and he didn't know where he was going. Nobody would say where they were going, but he ended up in the Fredericton internment camp in New Brunswick," she said.

Vistarchi noticed as a child her father would remain very silent on June 10 every year. She asked her mother what was wrong with her dad but her mother would wave it off by saying, "I just don't think he's feeling well today."

When Vistarchi became a teenager, she learned that her father's sadness on June 10 was because he was detained on that day.

"It was kept pretty silent for a long, long time, and then, only little pieces came out," she said. "To his dying day, (my father) wondered why was he imprisoned or put in an internment camp."

Pillarella contacted some 150 families across Canada to collect the stories of the people who were interned during the war.

She said the suffering of the women and the children left behind could be even greater than that of the men who were detained in internment camps.

"For the women in the 1940s, there were big families usually, I mean it was common (to have) six, seven, eight children. The breadwinner was gone," she said. "Taking care of a household in the 1940s was a big, big job. … It's not like today where we have appliances."

She said families of Italian origin were stigmatized as "state enemies" and had to battle to survive as kids had to get pulled out of school, and women ended up finding domestic work on top of taking care of their big families.

"People didn't want to hire Italians. They didn't want to rent to Italians," she said. "There were people that were afraid to help (Italian-Canadians) because they thought 'Oh my god, the RCMP is watching. My husband's gonna get interned also."

Cinna Faveri said her father, Rev. Libero Sauro, was interned in September 1940 and was released in December of the same year. Four of his seven sons were serving in the Canadian military at the time.

Two of her brothers were airmen serving in England, and another one was a signalman fighting in Italy and Holland, she said.

She said her family, unlike most in the Italian community in Canada, was comfortable talking about what happened.

"Whenever I mentioned it to anybody, my close friends, my new friends, anybody, they're shocked," she said.

"They don't know it. Nobody knows about it."

Lametti said it's critical to share the stories of these families through commemoration and education.

"We're sorry," he said, adding his message to families was "as your parents made sure that this stood as something that would make you better Canadians, we're hoping to tell your story, so that all Canadians can be better."

Faveri said the apology is necessary even if it's too late.

"It's far too late in coming. But, because for historical reasons, it has to come, even if it's late."

Vistarchi said the apology is important because the names of people who were interned are going to be cleared, and the descendants will be given some kind of closure.

"However, I really feel in my heart of hearts, as much as I really am grateful for this apology, that it would have been nice if one, at least one, of these internees had been alive to hear this. They're all dead," she said.

"Those are the ears that should have heard this apology."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 24, 2021.

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This story was produced with the financial assistance of the Facebook and Canadian Press News Fellowship.

Maan Alhmidi, The Canadian Press

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Greek dog owners protest mandatory sterilization of pets

ATHENS, Greece (AP) — Several hundred dog owners and their pets gathered Sunday outside Greece’s Parliament in protest against a draft law that will make sterilization of household pets — especially cats and dogs — mandatory.

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The dog owners railed against the bill’s “abolition of amateur breeding, the backbone of dog loving,” as they called it in a statement. Most of them were also hunters and protested against last year’s ban on hunting, due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Government officials have said the bill does indeed target so-called “amateur breeding” by non-specialists, who do it for the money. They say there are often abusive practices, with female dogs forced to breed continuously for maximum profit and often discarded when of no further use to the breeder.

The protesters saw it differently, and were often emotional about it.

“We are here to show our love to our children. They are not just our dogs, (they are) what we have been loving since we were kids and those who govern want to take them away from us,” a tearful Christos Xiros, one of the protesters, told The Associated Press.

The protesters dispersed peacefully after chanting slogans and listening to a speech.

The draft bill is still at the consultation stage. It will then be submitted to Parliament.

___

Srdjan Nedeljkovic contributed to this report.

Demetris Nellas, The Associated Press

Japan reporter freed from Myanmar says inmates were abused

TOKYO (AP) — A Japanese journalist who was freed from a Myanmar prison said Friday that military and police interrogators repeatedly asked him about his friends, clients and made-up allegations

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Yuki Kitazumi, a freelance journalist and a former reporter for Japan’s Nikkei business news, also said other inmates told him about abuses they suffered at the hands of authorities, including repeated beatings during nonstop, dayslong interrogations.

Kitazumi was detained at Yangon’s notorious Insein prison for a month before his release and return to Japan last week. He was arrested by authorities while in the country covering the aftermath of the February's military coup and accused of offenses including violating the terms of his visa.

The ruling military junta said he was released as a gesture of friendship toward Japan.

While in prison, Kitazumi said he met political prisoners who he became friends with. He said they shared news and discussed their concerns about developments in Myanmar and the country's future.

They also asked him that once he returned to Japan to report what’s happening in Myanmar to the rest of the world. With no stationary, he dipped a bird feather into instant coffee or grape juice to write a memo on scrap paper.

They also told tales of abuse.

The Feb. 1 coup that ousted the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi reversed years of progress toward democracy in Myanmar after five decades of military rule. It was met with widespread public opposition that the military has tried to silence through force, including killing people protesting on the streets and imprisoning activists and journalists.

Even during civilian rule Myanmar's security forces were accused of abuses, most notably against minority Muslim Rohingya who were forced to flee the country by the hundreds of thousands to escape what the U.S. has called a campaign of genocide.

“Although I was released, none of the problems in Myanmar have been resolved,” Kitazumi said at an online news conference hosted by the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan.

Kitazumi said other prisoners told him about abuses they suffered before coming to Insein.

He said they described being blind-folded, handcuffed behind their backs and forced to kneel on concrete floors while being interrogated in that position, sometimes for days without sleep or rest. He said any negative comments about the junta led to being beaten.

“Ghastly interrogations are going on," Kitazumi said.

Kitazumi said he was given far better treatment during his own interrogations and suffered no such abuse. He said his interrogators only went as far as banging on a desk and yelling.

Officials repeatedly asked him about what he said was an untrue allegation that he had bought and given a video to his local friend. He said he repeatedly denied the allegation, but nevertheless said a confession presented to him said he didn't clarify otherwise. He refused to sign it.

Myanmar’s army-run Myawaddy TV has said Kitazumi was arrested for “inciting” anti-military civil disobedience and riots. Kitazumi also became the first foreign journalist charged with violating visa regulations under a new statute that the state press has described as aiming at “fake news.”

Despite the charges, Kitazumi said he was never asked in his court hearing about details of his stories or footage he mostly sent and published in Japan. He believes his arrest was a warning to other foreign journalists.

With his release, all charges were dropped, he said.

About 80 journalists have been arrested since the coup. Roughly half are still detained.

Japan has criticized the military government’s deadly crackdown on opposition but has taken a milder approach than the U.S. and some other countries, which have imposed sanctions against members of the junta.

Mari Yamaguchi, The Associated Press

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Tokyo organizers say Olympics are 'safe' -- public disagrees

TOKYO (AP) — The IOC wraps up its final planning sessions on Friday with Tokyo Olympic organizers, just two months before the games are to open. Much of the focus is on persuading a skeptical public and medical community that the games should go ahead.

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“We have much to do over the next three days,” IOC Vice President John Coates said on Wednesday as the sessions began.

The core problem is that 60 to 80% of people in Japan, depending how the question is asked in public opinion polls, don't want the postponed Olympics to open in the middle of a pandemic despite repeated assurances from organizers that games will be “safe and secure.”

There is no indication so far the games will be canceled. The International Olympic Committee has repeatedly said they are going ahead.

But the IOC's most senior member Richard Pound, in an interview with Japan's JiJi Press, said that the final deadline to call it off was still a month away.

"Before the end of June, you really need to know, yes or no,” JiJi quoted Pound as saying. Pound repeated — as the IOC has said — that if the games can't happen now they will be canceled, not postponed again.

Kaori Yamaguchi, a bronze medalist in judo in the 1988 Olympics and a member of the Japanese Olympic Committee, hinted in an interview with Japan's Kyodo news agency this week that organizers were cornered. She has been skeptical about going ahead.

“We're starting to reach a point where we can't even cancel anymore,” she said.

Tokyo, Osaka and many other prefectures are under a state of emergency and health-care systems are being stretched. Emergency measures are to end on May 31, but they are likely to be extended and approach the July 23 opening date.

“If the current situation continues, I hope the government will have the wisdom not to end the emergency at the end of May,” Haruo Ozaki, head of the Tokyo Medical Association, told the weekly magazine Aera.

Ozaki has consistently said government measures to control the spread of COVID-19 have been insufficient. About 12,000 deaths in Japan are attributed to the virus, and the situation is exacerbated since few in Japan has been fully vaccinated.

Ozaki warned that if the emergency conditions are not extended, the virus and contagious variants will spread quickly.

“If that happens, there will be a major outbreak, and it is possible that holding the Games will become hopeless,” he added.

Ozaki is not alone with this warnings.

The 6,000-member Tokyo Medical Practitioners’ Association called for the Olympics to be canceled in a letter sent last week to Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike, Olympic Minister Tamayo Marukawa, and Seiko Hashimoto, the head of the organizing committee.

“We believe the correct choice is to the cancel an event that has the possibility of increasing the numbers of infected people and deaths,” the letter said.

"Stop Tokyo Olympics” campaign organizer Kenji Utsunomiya said he planned to deliver petitions Friday with 375,000 online signatures to Tokyo organizers and Suga. He delivered the petitions earlier to Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike.

IOC President Thomas Bach, aware Japan's medical system is stretched, said Wednesday that national Olympic committees could provide “additional medical personnel” to aid Japan.

He gave no details, but this move would also add to the burdens on national Olympic committees, many of which are struggling to meet guidelines to enter delegations into Japan.

Bach had to cancel at trip to Japan this month because of the virus, but is expected to arrive in Japan in July, just days before the Olympics open.

___

Kantaro Komiya contributed to this report.

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More AP Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/olympic-games and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports

aera

Stephen Wade And Yuri Kageyama, The Associated Press

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'Like hell:' As Olympics loom, Japan health care in turmoil

TOKYO (AP) — As she struggled to breathe, Shizue Akita had to wait more than six hours while paramedics searched for a hospital in Osaka that would treat her worsening COVID-19.

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When she finally got to one that wasn’t overwhelmed with other patients, doctors diagnosed severe pneumonia and organ failure and sedated her. Akita, 87, was dead two weeks later.

“Osaka’s medical systems have collapsed,” said her son, Kazuyuki Akita. He has watched from his home north of Tokyo as three other family members in Osaka have dealt with the virus, and with inadequate health care. “It’s like hell.”

Hospitals in Osaka, Japan’s third-biggest city and only 2 1/2 hours by bullet train from Summer Olympics host Tokyo, are overflowing with coronavirus patients. About 35,000 people nationwide — twice the number of those in hospitals — must stay at home with the disease, often becoming seriously ill and sometimes dying before they can get medical care.

As cases surge in Osaka, medical workers say that every corner of the system has been slowed, stretched and burdened. And it’s happening in other parts of the country, too.

The frustration and fear are clear in interviews by The Associated Press with besieged medical workers and the families of patients in Osaka. It's in striking contrast with the tone in the capital Tokyo, where Olympic organizers and government officials insist the July Games will be safe and orderly even as a state of emergency spreads to more parts of the country and a growing number of citizens call for a cancellation.

Some see Osaka as a warning for what could happen to the rest of Japan if the crisis worsens at a time when officials — and the world — are focused on the Olympics.

Osaka's struggles are a “man-made disaster,” Akita told AP in a written message, caused in part by officials lifting an earlier state of emergency despite signs of a rebound in infections. He thinks his mother might have lived if she'd been treated sooner.

Many here are stunned by what's happening. Japan, after all, is the world’s third-biggest economy and has, until now, managed the pandemic better than many other advanced nations. But the current surge has sent the daily tallies of the sick and dying to new highs.

The turmoil is most evident in Osaka.

Paramedics, clad in protective gear, cannot perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and must take extreme precautions to avoid exposure to aerosols, officials and health workers say. Disinfecting an ambulance takes an hour after it has carried a COVID-19 patient, keeping paramedics from rushing to the next call.

Emergency patients get only the treatment that happens to be available, not what’s most likely to increase their chance of survival, medical experts say.

A patient suffering from heart failure, for example, was rejected by an advanced emergency hospital, and a child in critical condition could not find a pediatric hospital because they were all full, according to an Osaka paramedic who would only give his first name, Satoshi, because he is not authorized to talk to the media. The child later died, he said.

“Our job is to bring people who are dying and deteriorating to the hospital," he said. "In the current situation, we are not even able to do our job.”

As emergency measures drag on amid surging cases, Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga has seen support for his government slide. While he insists Japan will safely hold the Olympics, polls show 60% to 80% are against pushing ahead with the Games.

There is no indication so far the Olympics will be canceled. The International Olympic Committee, which was wrapping up its final planning sessions on Friday with Tokyo Olympic organizers, has repeatedly said they are going ahead.

But the IOC’s most senior member Richard Pound, in an interview with Japan’s JiJi Press, said that the final deadline to call it off was “before the end of June.” Pound repeated — as the IOC has said — that if the Olympics can’t happen this summer they will be canceled, not postponed again.

Japanese medical groups say they cannot accommodate the possible health needs of the Olympics as pressure for coronavirus treatment rises and medical workers and government officials try to speed up a slow-moving vaccination rollout. Less than 2% of the total population has been fully vaccinated.

As the vaccination pace gradually picks up, the government plans to open two large inoculation centers Monday using Moderna shots, one of two new vaccines expected to be approved Friday.

This week Osaka passed Tokyo, the nation’s biggest city, with the most total virus deaths, at 2,036. Of about 15,000 patients in Osaka, only about 12% landed at hospitals, while the rest had to wait at home or in hotels. The number of COVID-19 deaths that happened outside of hospitals in April tripled from March to 96, including 39 in Osaka and 10 in Tokyo, police statistics show.

Japan’s daily cases and deaths are small by global standards, and the country has one of the world’s largest per-capita numbers of hospital beds.

So why the struggles?

It is partly because unprofitable COVID-19 treatment is largely limited to public-run hospitals, which account for only about one-fifth of Japan’s 8,000 hospitals. Private hospitals, many of them small, are hesitant or unprepared to deal with coronavirus cases.

The government has also significantly reduced local health centers, which are key to infectious disease prevention, from about 850 in the 1990s to 469 in 2020, causing bottlenecks because of staff shortages and overwork.

Less than 5% of about 1.5 million hospital beds in Japan are set aside for COVID-19 treatment, an increase from less than 1,000 in April of last year, according to Health Ministry data, but still not enough.

The recent surge has seen more serious cases that have quickly filled hospital beds.

More than half of about 55 coronavirus deaths at the Osaka City Juso Hospital are from the latest surge, said Dr. Yukio Nishiguchi, head of the hospital. “It’s like being hit by a disaster,” he said.

Osaka Gov. Hirofumi Yoshimura, criticized for being too slow, said he regretted not being able to predict the faster-than-expected surge of serious cases.

While acknowledging that Osaka’s medical systems are severely strained, Yoshimura said that patients are being properly sorted by health centers and that those still at home are staying there “by consent.”

Because hospital beds for serious cases have filled up, patients with milder symptoms, but still in need of hospitalization, have to stay home or at hotels. And people who need other, non-coronavirus treatment are also suffering.

Naoki Hodo, a funeral director in southern Osaka, said that in April an emergency operator refused to send an ambulance for his 85-year-old aunt, telling the family to call back when they found a hospital themselves. His aunt had a badly swollen eye and hadn’t eaten for two days.

It took the family six hours of frantic calls to hospitals on a list given by the operator before they found one. The aunt is still hospitalized, and her doctor says she may never see again on one of her eyes.

Nishiguchi, who specializes in colorectal cancer surgery, said the pandemic has caused him to scale down or postpone operations for his cancer patients.

“Our priority is to save the lives under threat right now, and I hope people understand,” he said.

Hodo, the mortician, wears full protective gear when he goes to collect COVID-19 victims’ bodies at hospitals. The dead are placed in double waterproof body bags and then in coffins when they leave the hospital, so families cannot see their faces.

“They can’t even have a proper farewell with their loved ones,” Hodo said. “It’s heartbreaking.”

Mari Yamaguchi And Kantaro Komiya, The Associated Press

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