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WASHINGTON (AP) — The International Monetary Fund is warning of rising threats to the global economic recovery posed by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and an outbreak of inflation.

The lending agency called Thursday for greater efforts from wealthy nations to boost coronavirus vaccination rates in poorer countries, while also urging the Federal Reserve and other central banks to respond quickly if current inflation pressures prove not to be transitory.

The IMF panel that sets policy for the 190-nation organization wrapped up its annual meeting with a joint statement expressing concerns about the wide divergence in vaccination rates between wealthy and poor countries.

The group urged greater efforts by wealthy nations toward achieving a goal of having 40% of the population of all countries vaccinated by the end of this year and 70% by the middle of next year.

While nearly 60% of the population in advanced economies are now fully vaccinated, only about 4% of the population in poorer countries are.

“We will take steps to help boost the supply of vaccines and essential medical products and inputs in developing countries and remove relevant supply and financing constraints,” the finance officials pledged.

“The emergence of virus variants has increased uncertainty and risks to the recovery are tilted to the downside,” the group said. “The crisis is exacerbating poverty and inequality.”

The United States was represented at the finance meetings by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell.

The finance officials also noted rising global inflation pressures and said the Fed and other central banks need to “act appropriately” if the price spikes prove to be more of a threat to the economic recovery.

The Fed signaled last month that it soon could begin the process of unwinding some of the extraordinary support it put in place in response to last year’s coronavirus-triggered recession. The move would be a first step toward possible interest rate hikes that would slow growth and keep inflation under control.

The IMF issued an updated economic forecast this week that slightly downgraded its forecast for global growth to 5.9% from 6% in July. The downgrade reflected persistent supply chain disruptions and the wide disparity in vaccination rates. For the United States, the IMF forecast growth of 6% this year, down from its July forecast of 7%.

The IMF policy panel also endorsed the findings of the agency’s executive board on Monday of “full confidence” in IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva. The support for Georgieva came following an investigation into allegations that, while a top official at the World Bank, she and other World Bank officials pressured staff to boost the rankings of China and other countries in an influential business-climate survey that has since been discontinued.

Georgieva told reporters Wednesday that the review showed there was no “there there” to the charges. But Yellen said in a speech Thursday to the IMF policy panel that the results of the review by an outside law firm “could reduce confidence in the international financial institutions if there is not strong action to boost accountability, protect data integrity and prevent misconduct.”

Critics have cited the incident to support their contentions that China and other nations are seeking to exercise improper influence over the IMF, the World Bank and other international financial institutions.

Yellen said the IMF and the other organizations need to find ways to enhance the rights of whistleblowers.

“The United States will monitor developments closely and evaluate any new facts and findings should they become available,” Yellen said.

Anti-poverty groups on Thursday expressed disappointment that the IMF was not more specific on how the agency plans to boost vaccination rates and provide increased resources to fight climate change.

“Given how the pandemic is becoming worse in most of the world’s countries, I’m concerned by the lack of action at the meetings on vaccine distribution, debt relief and general pandemic response,” Eric LeCompte, executive director of the religious development group Jubilee USA Network, said in a statement.

“It’s baffling that we still don’t have plans for the funding and distribution of vaccines to reach all developing countries,” LeCompte said.

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JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) — Republican Gov. Mike Parson on Thursday condemned one of Missouri’s largest newspapers for exposing a flaw in a state database that allowed public access to thousands of teachers’ Social Security numbers, even though the paper held off from reporting about the flaw until after the state could fix it.

Parson told reporters outside his Capitol office that the Missouri State Highway Patrol’s digital forensic unit will be conducting an investigation “of all of those involved” and that his administration had spoken to the prosecutor in Cole County, which includes the state capital, Jefferson City. He didn’t elaborate as to what he meant by “involved” or whether investigators would be looking into whether the St. Louis Post-Dispatch broke the law during the course of its reporting on the data vulnerability.

The Post-Dispatch broke the news about the security flaw on Wednesday. The newspaper said it discovered the vulnerability in a web application that allowed the public to search teacher certifications and credentials.

The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education removed the pages from its website on Tuesday after being told about the issue by the Post-Dispatch, which said it gave the state time to fix the problem before it published its story.

The Post-Dispatch estimated that more than 100,000 Social Security numbers were vulnerable, based on pay records and other data. It found that the school workers’ Social Security numbers were in the HTML source code of the pages involved.

“The state is unaware of any misuse of individual information or even whether information was accessed inappropriately outside of this isolated incident,” the DESE said in a news release.

Though the Post-Dispatch alerted the agency to the problem and held off on the story, the agency’s news release called the person who discovered the vulnerability a “hacker” — an apparent reference to the reporter — who “took the records of at least three educators.” The agency didn’t elaborate as to what it meant by “took the records” and it declined to discuss the issue further than what it said in its news release when reached by The Associated Press.

Source codes are accessible by right-clicking on public webpages.

The newspaper’s president and publisher, Ian Caso, said in a statement that the Post-Dispatch stands by the story and the reporter, who he said “did everything right.”

“It’s regrettable the governor has chosen to deflect blame onto the journalists who uncovered the website’s problem and brought it to the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education’s attention,” Caso said.

Parson also suggested that the reporter somehow broke the law.

“This individual is not a victim,” Parson told reporters. “They were acting against a state agency to compromise teachers’ personal information in an attempt to embarrass the state and sell headlines for their news outlet. We will not let this crime against Missouri teachers go unpunished.”

Peter Swire, a cyber law expert and professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Cybersecurity and Privacy, said flagging security vulnerabilities on publicly accessible websites is a “public service” and is “clearly not criminal under federal law.”

“Right clicking does not count as criminal hacking,” Swire said.

Joseph Martineau, an attorney for the Post-Dispatch, said in a statement that the reporter “did the responsible thing by reporting his findings to DESE so that the state could act to prevent disclosure and misuse. A hacker is someone who subverts computer security with malicious or criminal intent. Here, there was no breach of any firewall or security and certainly no malicious intent.”

“For DESE to deflect its failures by referring to this as ‘hacking’ is unfounded,” Martineau said.

Jean Maneke, an attorney for the Missouri Press Association, said she doubted any judge “would allow this to proceed very far.”

“Clearly the Post-Dispatch warned the state of this issue,” Maneke said. “There’s no evidence of any criminal or malicious intent in the act. There’s no attempt to steal information. There’s no basis for him (Parson) to say there’s any kind of illegal act from the Post-Dispatch.”

Byron Clemens, a spokesman for AFT St. Louis, Local 420, said the teachers union isn’t aware of any educators’ information being misused.

“But we are concerned over the attempt to deflect responsibility and politicize what is very obviously a security breach by the state,” Clemens said in a statement.

Meanwhile, Parson said the state will address security issues raised by the newspaper’s reporting.

“We are working to strengthen our security to prevent this incident from happening again,” Parson said. “The state is owning its part, and we are addressing areas in which we need to do better than we have done before.”

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Salter reported from O’Fallon, Missouri.

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Microsoft is shutting down its main LinkedIn service in China later this year as Beijing tightens its internet rules.

The company said in a blog post Thursday it has faced a “significantly more challenging operating environment and greater compliance requirements in China.”

Microsoft is the latest American tech giant to lessen its ties to the country after years of trying to tailor its services to the demands of government censors.

LinkedIn said it will replace its localized platform in China with a new app called InJobs that has some of LinkedIn’s career-networking features but will not include a social feed or the ability to share posts or articles.

Chinese regulators have been escalating a broad crackdown on the internet sector, seeking to exercise greater control over the algorithms used by tech firms to personalize and recommend content. They have also strengthened data privacy restrictions and expanded control over the flow of information and public opinion.

LinkedIn in March said it would pause new member sign-ups on LinkedIn China because of unspecified regulatory issues. China’s internet watchdog in May said it had found LinkedIn as well as Microsoft’s Bing search engine and about 100 other apps were engaged in improper collection and use of data and ordered them to fix the problem.

Several scholars this summer reported getting warning letters from LinkedIn that they were sharing “prohibited content” that would not be made viewable in China but could still be seen by LinkedIn users elsewhere.

Tony Lee, a scholar at Berlin’s Free University, told The Associated Press in June that LinkedIn didn’t tell him which content was prohibited but said it was tied to the section of his profile where he listed his publications. Among his listed articles was one about the 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square and another comparing Chinese leader Xi Jinping with former leader Mao Zedong.

Lee said Thursday it is “wishful thinking for LinkedIn to maintain its presence in a different form” without social media elements, its distinctive selling point against other online job boards. He said LinkedIn is better off pulling out of the country entirely than “practicing censorship dictated by China” that damages the company’s worldwide credibility.

It’s been more than seven years since LinkedIn launched a site in simplified Chinese, the written characters used on the mainland, to expand its reach in the country. It said at the time of the launch in early 2014 that expanding in China raised “difficult questions” because it required censoring content, but that it would be clear about how it conducts business in China and undertake “extensive measures” to protect members’ rights and data.

Microsoft, which is based in Redmond, Washington, bought LinkedIn in 2016. LinkedIn doesn’t disclose how much of its revenue comes from China, but it reports having more than 54 million members in mainland China, its third-largest user base after the U.S. and India.

“LinkedIn once served a crucial role, as the only social media network on which Chinese and Western colleagues could communicate away from (Chinese Communist Party) censorship and prying eyes,” said Eyck Freymann, another scholar who received a censorship notice letter this year, in a text message Thursday.

Freymann, a doctoral student in China studies at Oxford University, said it is “shameful that Microsoft spent months censoring its own users — and, worse, pressuring them to self-censor” but that the company ultimately made the right choice to pull the plug.

Google pulled its search engine out of mainland China in 2010 after the government began censoring search results and videos on YouTube. It later considered starting a censored Chinese search engine nicknamed Project Dragonfly but dropped the idea following internal protest in 2018.

Other U.S.-based social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are blocked within China.

Microsoft’s own search engine, Bing, was temporarily blocked in China in early 2019, leading the company’s president, Brad Smith, to reveal that executives sometimes have difficult negotiations with the Chinese government over censorship and other demands.

“We understand we don’t have the same legal freedom that we do in other countries, but at the same time, we stick to our guns,” Smith told Fox Business News in January 2019. “There are certain principles that we think it’s important to stand up for, and we’ll go at times into the negotiating room and the negotiations are sometimes pretty darn direct.”

Adding to the sensitivities this year was a massive hack of Microsoft’s Exchange email server software that U.S. officials have blamed on criminal hackers associated with the Chinese government.

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NEW DELHI (AP) — As the first wave of the pandemic began to take hold in India, Sanchi Jawa and her 59-year-old father, Harish Jawa, realized that they had the symptoms of a COVID-19 infection. They decided to isolate and get tested — but this was no easy task during the spring of 2020.

The father and daughter had to make multiple calls to several private labs in the capital of New Delhi before they could arrange for the gold standard in COVID-19 testing — a real-time reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction test, or RT-PCR.

It cost nearly $70 per test. A price Sanchi, 29, a digital marketer, and her father, a successful business owner, could afford but was out of reach for the majority of Indians, who have a per capita income of less than $160 per month, according to the World Bank.

“It (RT-PCR tests) should be accessible to the common man, and everybody should be able to get it done,” Sanchi said.

Over a year later, most Indians can access PCR tests at a fraction of the cost — due to a large-scale public-private partnership, known as InDx, that set up the local know-how and infrastructure to manufacture these tests within India.

Soon after the pandemic broke out, India’s government, with funding from The Rockefeller Foundation, tasked the country’s most advanced bioscience innovation hub — the publicly funded Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms, or C-CAMP — with quickly finding a way to locally produce virus test kits.

But that was not a simple task as most components of the RT-PCR test — including the mixers required to analyze samples — were not manufactured in India and had to be imported from China and South Korea, driving the price up.

With global trade almost at a standstill, and huge demand for test kits from the U.S. and U.K., delivery was also extensively delayed.

Reagents, primers, and other chemical components — like amidites and deoxyribonucleotide triphosphates, which are essential for the chemical analysis used to detect the virus’ presence — had never been widely manufactured in the country and had to be imported. Even accessory parts, like plastic vials used in the testing process, were mostly imported.

Working with Indian manufacturers of medical technologies, along with support from Tata Consultancy Services, the C-CAMP-led program pushed through a rapid change.

India expanded from 14 laboratories capable of conducting COVID-19 tests in February 2020 to more than 1,500 over the next six months. The country now has nearly 3,000 such labs.

The price of RT-PCR tests has fallen to as little as $7 in some parts of the country, a near tenfold decrease from when they were first made available.

The availability of locally made testing components has allowed the government to procure test kits for as cheap as 50 cents per unit when buying in bulk from manufacturers. Indian authorities can now dole out free RT-PCR tests for those who can’t afford the fees, and set low price ceilings for paid RT-PCR tests at private labs.

Lalith Kishore, chief operating officer of COVID-19 Scale Up Program at C-CAMP, says the public-private partnership has helped more than 160 Indian companies to innovate, create mechanisms and collectively manufacture more than a million RT-PCR test kits per day.

“A lot of these companies have enabled the complete reversal in terms of our dependance on imports with regards to diagnostics,” Kishore said.

India’s ramping up of COVID-19 testing capacity has enabled the country to conduct more than 580 million tests to date.

More than a million tests are still being administered in the country daily, and 80% of the test kits used are now completely manufactured in India.

Manisha Bhinge, managing director of Programs and Health Initiative at The Rockefeller Foundation, which pumped $3.5 million into the initiative, said she believes the increase in availability of COVID-19 tests allowed the country to implement a robust testing program that helped public health experts devise more effective policies to handle the virus outbreak.

This was especially important during the deadly second wave of infections in the country that peaked in May 2021 with more than 400,000 cases being detected each day.

“The scope of the crisis would’ve been significantly more, if we did not have the testing capacity in place to guide public health officials to understand how the outbreak was rolling out,” Bhinge said.

She added that while the scale up in production of test kits and other components of diagnostics have aided India in battling the pandemic and enabled self-sufficiency in molecular diagnostics, it has also created a new market for countries looking to procure diagnostic technologies and test kits.

Middle and low income countries now have “more stability and security and access to affordable medical technologies,” she said.

Cheap, and sometimes free RT-PCR tests have allowed millions of Indians like Mohit Dabla, 23, a driver who earns $300 a month, a chance to access world class virus testing.

When he first got symptoms in September 2021, his employer asked him to get a RT-PCR test. He was in luck as a government dispensary around the corner from his home in New Delhi offered the test free of charge.

“There is no way I could have paid $70 for a test,” Dabla said.

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CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) — As the third president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Francis Amasa Walker helped usher the school into national prominence in the late 1800s.

But another part of his legacy has received renewed attention amid the nation’s reckoning with racial justice: his role in shaping the nation’s hardline policies toward Native Americans as a former head of the U.S. office of Indian Affairs and author of “The Indian Question,” a treatise that justified forcibly removing tribes from their lands and confining them to remote reservations.

MIT is now grappling with calls from Native American students and others to strip Walker’s name from a campus building that is central to student life — part of a broader push for the nation’s higher education institutions to atone for the role they played in the decimation of Native American tribes.

“Walker might be the face of Indian genocide and it is troubling that his name is memorialized at MIT,” says David Lowry, the school’s newly-appointed distinguished fellow in Native American studies and a member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina.

MIT President L. Rafael Reif wrote in a recent column in MIT Technology Review that addressing Walker’s legacy is an “essential step” in the school’s commitment to its Native American community. Native students account for 155 of the school’s nearly 3,700 students this year.

“The question we are working through now is what to do with these facts, as well as other aspects of the history of MIT and Native communities,” wrote Reif, who stopped short of weighing in on the name change debate in his column and declined to be interviewed.

Built in 1916, Walker Memorial houses student group offices, the college radio station and a campus pub. Its focal point is a great hall decorated with soaring murals meant to depict scientific learning and experimentation.

Alvin Harvey, a doctoral student and president of the MIT Native American Student Association, says the classical-style building overlooking the Charles River is one of the most visible reminders of the school’s white, Western-centric past.

“As a Native American individual, you feel the full brunt of what MIT built its foundations on,” said Harvey, a 25-year-old New Mexico native and member of Navajo Nation. “The ideology that Western men, white men are going to lead the United States and the world into a new utopia of technological development.”

MIT was among the nation’s first colleges to benefit from the Morrill Act, a 1862 law that helped create the U.S. public higher education system. The law allowed for the transfer and sale of federal lands to colleges to help establish their campus, or bolster an existing one. But many millions of those acres were actually confiscated from Native American tribes.

In MIT’s case, it received at least 366 acres scattered across California and a number of Midwest states, High Country News reported last year. At the time, their sales helped generate nearly $78,000, or more than $1.6 million in today’s dollars, the magazine said.

Lowry cautions that those land and revenue estimates are likely conservative and that some students in his course on the “Indigenous History of MIT” are working on a fuller accounting.

Simson Garfinkel, an MIT alum who wrote a recent article on Walker’s life and legacy in MIT Technology Review, worries that renaming Walker Memorial would only serve to erase the contributions of a singular figure in MIT history.

“Without Walker there would be no MIT. He was pivotal to making it the institution it is today,” Garfinkel said. “He placed it on vastly better financial footing, dramatically expanded enrollment and brought a discipline to the school that was really needed.”

As president from 1881 until his death in 1897, the former Union Army general and Boston native helped improve student life and oversaw the introduction of the first female and Black students on campus.

Garfinkel also argued that “The Indian Question” offered significant and lasting contributions to the wider understanding of indigenous peoples, even if its analysis and policy recommendations were ultimately racist and “problematic.”

The book, published in 1874, included detailed descriptions of American tribes, their populations and the offenses incurred against them, mainly by white people illegally settling on their lands and instigating violence.

But Walker also described Native Americans as “an obstacle to the national progress” and concluded the country was justified in pushing Native Americans off their ancestral lands. He recommended confining them to reservations and forcing them to adopt European farming and production methods.

Rather than remove Walker’s name from the building, Garfinkel suggests providing more historical context by installing an informational marker on site.

“Walker was an amazing person who we need to understand in all of his complexity,” he said. “It’s easy to rename buildings, but much harder to learn about the past.”

Harvey said MIT has taken promising steps, such as appointing Lowry, recognizing Indigenous Peoples Day and providing a new campus space for Native American student groups.

But it still needs to hire more Native faculty and provide other support for Native students, he said. As for Walker Memorial, Harvey suggests not only renaming it, but turning it into a center for indigenous sciences.

“MIT is missing out on this huge swath of indigenous knowledge,” he said. “Indigenous people are practicing their own valuable sense of science, engineering and knowledge of the natural world, and it’s being completely shut out.”

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This story has been corrected to show that Walker Memorial was built in 1916, not 1816.

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