BEIJING (AP) — The company that assembles Apple Inc.’s iPhones apologized Thursday for a pay dispute that triggered employee protests at a factory where anti-virus controls have slowed production.

Employees complained Foxconn Technology Group changed the terms of wages offered to attract them to the factory in the central city of Zhengzhou. Foxconn is trying to rebuild the workforce after employees walked out last month over complaints about unsafe conditions.

Videos on social media showed police in white protective suits kicking and clubbing workers during the protest that erupted Tuesday and lasted into the next day.

Foxconn, the biggest contract assembler of smartphones and other electronics for Apple and other global brands, blamed a “technical error” in the process of adding new employees and said they would be paid what they were promised.

“We apologize for an input error in the computer system and guarantee that the actual pay is the same as agreed and the official recruitment posters,” said a company statement. It promised to “try its best to actively solve the concerns and reasonable demands of employees.”

Late Wednesday, Apple said it had people on the ground at Foxconn’s Zhengzhou facility.

“We are reviewing the situation and working closely with Foxconn to ensure their employees’ concerns are addressed,” the company based in Cupertino, California, said.

The dispute comes as the ruling Communist Party tries to contain a surge in coronavirus cases without shutting down factories, as it did in 2020 at the start of the pandemic. Its tactics include “closed-loop management,” or having employees live at their workplaces without outside contact.

Authorities promised last month to reduce economic disruption by cutting quarantine times and making other changes to China’s “zero-COVID” strategy, which aims to isolate every case. Despite that, the infection surge has prompted authorities to suspend access to neighborhoods and factories and to close office buildings, shops and restaurants in parts of many cities.

On Thursday, people in eight districts of Zhengzhou with a total of 6.6 million residents were told to stay home for five days. Daily mass testing was ordered for a “war of annihilation” against the virus.

Apple earlier warned iPhone 14 deliveries would be delayed after employees walked out of the Zhengzhou factory and access to the industrial zone around the facility was suspended following outbreaks.

To attract new workers, Foxconn offered 25,000 yuan ($3,500) for two months of work, according to employees, or almost 50% more than news reports say its highest wages usually are.

Employees complained that after they arrived, they were told they had to work an additional two months at lower pay to received the higher wage, according to an employee, Li Sanshan.

Foxconn offered up to 10,000 yuan ($1,400) to new hires who choose to leave, the finance news outlet Cailianshe reported, citing unidentified recruiting agents.

Foxconn’s statement Thursday said employees who leave will receive unspecified “care subsidies” but gave no details. It promised “comprehensive support” for those who stay.

The protests in Zhengzhou come amid public frustration over restrictions that have confined millions of people to their homes. Videos on social media show residents in some areas tearing down barricades set up to enforce neighborhood closures.

Foxconn, headquartered in New Taipei City, Taiwan, earlier denied what it said were comments online that employees with the virus lived in factory dormitories.

An experimental vaccine provided broad protection against all 20 known influenza A and B virus subtypes in initial tests in mice and ferrets, potentially opening a pathway to a universal flu shot that might help prevent future pandemics, according to a U.S. study published on Thursday.

The two-dose vaccine employs the same messenger RNA (mRNA)technology used in the COVID-19 shots developed by Pfizer (PFE.N) with BioNTech (22UAy.DE), and by Moderna (MRNA.O). It delivers tiny lipid particles containing mRNA instructions for cells to create replicas of so-called hemagglutinin proteins that appear on influenza virus surfaces.

A universal vaccine would not mean an end to flu seasons, but would replace the guess work that goes into developing annual shots months ahead of flu season each year.

“The idea here is to have a vaccine that will give people a baseline level of immune memory to diverse flu strains, so that there will be far less disease and death when the next flu pandemic occurs,” study leader Scott Hensley of the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania said in a statement.

Unlike standard flu vaccines that deliver one or two versions of hemagglutinin, the experimental vaccine includes 20 different types in the hope of getting the immune system to recognize any flu virus it might encounter in the future.

In lab experiments, vaccinated animals’ immune systems recognized the hemagglutinin proteins and defended against 18 different strains of influenza A and two strains of influenza B. Antibody levels induced by the vaccine remained unchanged for at least four months, according to a report published in the journal Science.

The vaccine reduced signs of illness and protected from death even when the ferrets were exposed to a different type of flu not in the vaccine, the researchers said.

Moderna and Pfizer both have mRNA flu vaccines in late-stage human trials, and GSK (GSK.L) and partner CureVac (5CV.DE) are testing an mRNA flu vaccine in an early-stage safety trial in humans. These vaccines are designed to defend against only four recently-circulating influenza strains but could theoretically be changed up each year.

The universal flu vaccine, if successful in human trials, would not necessarily prevent infection. The goal is to provide durable protection against severe disease and death, Hensley said.

Questions remain regarding how to judge efficacy and potential regulatory requirements for a vaccine against possible future viruses that are not currently circulating, Alyson Kelvin and Darryl Falzarano of the University of Saskatchewan, Canada, wrote in a commentary published with the study.

While the promising results with the new vaccine “suggest a protective capacity against all subtypes of influenza viruses, we cannot be sure until clinical trials in volunteers are done,” Adolfo García-Sastrem, director of the Institute for Global Health and Emerging Pathogens at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, said in a statement.

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The country is in trouble if during a national emergency the economy could be so easily rigged to favour connected insiders

Crony capitalism in the House of Lords is not a good look for Britain. Yet during the Covid crisis, there appeared to be a strong case that political access allowed privileged individuals to extract a great deal of wealth from the state. On Wednesday, the Guardian produced astonishing evidence for those wishing to prosecute this argument. It suggested that Michelle Mone, a Tory peer, her husband, Douglas Barrowman, and her children secretly received £65m originating from the profits of PPE Medpro, a company that was awarded large government contracts during the pandemic after she recommended it to ministers. If capitalism during a national emergency can be so easily rigged to favour connected insiders then the country is in trouble.

The government lubricated such questionable deal-making by setting up a “VIP lane” into which suppliers recommended by politicians or officials were fast-tracked. PPE Medpro’s business was referred to the VIP lane after Lady Mone contacted the ministers Michael Gove and Lord Agnew to offer help in May 2020. A few weeks later, the government contracted to pay the firm £203m for protective equipment for the NHS. A court later said that the VIP lane was unlawful. Perhaps worse, it was ineffective. The government is now in dispute over millions of surgical gowns supplied by PPE Medpro that it says were not up to scratch. PPE Medpro insists its products passed inspections.

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Increasing numbers of primary-age pupils are missing targets. Nurseries as well as schools need resources to catch up

Children in England should have learned to read by age seven. Given an age-appropriate book, they are expected to be able to focus on understanding – who the story is about, what is happening – rather than expend effort on sounding out individual words. Literacy, numeracy and social and physical skills are the blocks on which all learning is built. So it is concerning that the latest research on the pandemic’s effects shows that the number of very low attainers in reading, in the third year of schooling, has more than tripled.

In a sample of 6,000 pupils from 81 schools, the proportion who fell below expected levels rose from 2.6% to 9.1% between 2017 and this year. There was also a marked decline in maths, with very low attainers increasing from 2.6% to 5.5% of the total. While there were some signs of a recovery in the 12 months to spring 2022 – a period when schools remained open, with catchup schemes in place – the head of the Education Endowment Foundation, Prof Becky Francis, says that inequality exacerbated by the pandemic is now the “biggest challenge” facing schools overall.

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Summer heatwaves in France, Germany, Spain and Britain led to more than 20,000 “excess” deaths, a report compiling official figures said on Thursday.

Temperatures hit nearly 40 degrees Celsius or above from Paris to London in 2022 and climate scientists from the World Weather Attribution group found that such high temperatures would have been “virtually impossible” without climate change.

A heatwave in 2003 caused more than 70,000 excess deaths across Europe, largely in France, and led many countries to implement measures such as early warning systems, asking people to check on others and opening air-conditioned schools.

This and related action plans may have eased some of the impact of heatwaves in 2022, but the death toll was still “higher than expected,” Chloe Brimicombe, a heatwaves researcher at the University of Graz in Austria, said.

“I consider this … the most impactful heatwave since 2003,” she told Reuters.

Because authorities do not attribute most deaths directly to heat, statisticians use the excess formula to give an estimate, looking at how many more people died in a given period than would be expected compared with a historical baseline.

Heat can kill by inducing heatstroke, which damages the brain, kidneys and other organs, but it can also trigger other conditions such as a heart attack or breathing problems.

The World Meteorological Organization said this month that Europe had warmed more than twice as much as the rest of the world over the past three decades, while the Copernicus Climate Change Service said summer 2022 was the hottest on record.

France reported about half of the summer’s excess deaths in Western Europe, with 10,420 fatalities in total.

Excess deaths reached 3,271 in England and Wales during the summer, Britain’s Office of National Statistics reported.

Spain recorded 4,655 heat-attributable deaths between June and August while the German health agency reported 4,500.

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