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Racism and Sexism Underlie Higher Maternal Death Rates for Black Women, U.N. Says

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Medical school curriculums, for example, U.N. Report include erroneous claims that Black women’s nerve endings are “less sensitive” and require less anesthesia, and that Black women’s blood coagulates faster than that of white women, leading to delayed treatment for dangerous hemorrhages, according to the report. It also found that textbook illustrations of childbirth were depicted on European women’s pelvic anatomy, which could cause unnecessary interventions when nonwhite variability was deemed “abnormal or high-risk.”

“When a Black woman dies during childbirth, whether in São Paulo, Bogotá or New York, it’s often put down to her lifestyle or to individual failure: She didn’t get there in time to see the doctor or the nurse, she made poor life decisions, she was predisposed to certain medical conditions. And then the world moves on,” Dr. Kanem said.

The new report, she said, “categorically refutes that.”

The overall maternal mortality ratio of maternal deaths per 100,000 live births in Latin America, North America and the Caribbean increased by about 15 percent between 2016 and 2020, piquing officials’ interest in possible contributing factors, including race. There are more than 200 million people of African descent in the Americas — one in four people in Latin America and the Caribbean, and one in seven in the United States and Canada.

Among countries that provide maternal death rates by race, the United States has the lowest death rate overall, but the widest racial disparities. Black women in the United States are three times more likely than white women to die during or soon after childbirth. Those problems persist across income and education levels, as Black women with college degrees are still 1.6 times as likely to die in childbirth as white women who have not finished high school.

U.N. officials urged medical schools to re-examine their curriculums and hospitals to strengthen policies surrounding denial of care and patient abuse. Medical teams must also consider innovative ways to help Black women overcome structural barriers that make it difficult to receive sufficient prenatal care, officials said, such as a lack of access to reliable transportation and insurance. The agency suggested partnerships with various Black traditional healers and midwives to help navigate longstanding reservations.

The U.N. project also revealed a profound dearth of surveillance data, which has likely kept the problems from becoming well known, it said. The report encouraged every country to enhance its data collection efforts. Without a transparent look at the problem, the report said, it will be near impossible to design interventions to remedy it.

Tours for the Swimming-Obsessed – The New York Times

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During the pandemic, when Miriam Leitko couldn’t swim because pools were closed, the lifelong swimmer built a lap pool at her home in Willis, Texas. As soon as travel restrictions were lifted in 2021, she signed up for a weeklong trip to Hawaii with SwimVacation, a Maine-based Unveiling Tours operator that specializes in open-water swimming.

“Open-water swimming becomes energizing,” said Ms. Leitko, 64, who has taken 12 trips with the company. The tours, she said, allow her to leave her stress “literally in the ocean.”

Summer vacations are often built around the pleasures of cannonballing into a lake or splashing in the ocean. In contrast, these tours build trips around organized swims that might involve diving among sea lions in the Galápagos, swimming island to island in the Adriatic or gliding over coral reefs in the Caribbean.

“You never feel smaller than when you’re in the ocean, which has a transformative effect,” said Hopper McDonough, the founder and a partner in SwimVacation, which bases most of its trips on yachts in places like Turkey, where the next available departure is September 2024 ($6,995 for one week).

“After the pandemic, we sold out two years in advance,” he said.

Whether participants are seeking transformation, pursuing a Covid-stymied passion or revenge traveling, swim tour operators say they are experiencing a tidal wave of growth.

The England-based company SwimTrek, established in 2003, pegs the explosion to the pandemic-driven outdoor movement.

Nearly a third of SwimTrek’s clients — and growing — are from the United States, where the company has added vacations in Hawaii and Oregon (five days in Oregon’s Cascade Lakes costs $2,600) as well as trips to Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean.

“When you swim in open water, every experience is different, whether that’s the state of the sea, the tides or the wildlife,” said Simon Murie, the founder of SwimTrek. “That’s the beauty, the unpredictability.”

Strel Swimming Adventures, founded by Martin Strel, a marathon swimmer who holds the Guinness World Record for distance swimming at 5,268 kilometers, and his son, Borut, met the surge with new Mexican destinations, including the Sea of Cortez (seven-day trips in October and November from $1,990). The company also offers tours in Greece, Slovenia and Turkey.

Active England, an English adventure operator, has seen “exponential” growth in its swim tours since travel resumed, according to Will Cairns, the company’s founder. Its trips include four days in Devon from June to September for 759 pounds (about $984), with swims in the sea, an estuary and, after a two-mile walk in Dartmoor National Park, a natural pool in the River Dart.

“We have what I call ‘advanced swimmers’ who measure their swims in kilometers,” Mr. Cairns said. “But the majority of people do it for the love of the water.”

Most tour operators divide swimmers into subgroups based on speed and claim to take everyone from former Olympians to occasional dippers interested in swimming two to five kilometers a day (open water swimming is usually expressed in metric terms).

Not all new swim tours are hard core. Bluetits Chill Swimmers, a group devoted to wild swimming — a popular term in Britain for swimming in natural bodies of water — recently partnered with a travel company to offer swimming trips to places like Iceland, where a five-day package includes dips in hot springs, the sea and the fissure at the rift between tectonic plates (the £2,265 fall trip sold out shortly after it was announced this spring).

“Swimming with a group of people who are like-minded and don’t want to marathon swim is a wonderful, joyous occasion,” said Sian Richardson, who founded the group,which celebrates participation rather than competition and now has more than 120,000 members in community groups from Copenhagen to the Great Lakes.

Much Better Adventures offers wild swimming on its multisport tours, which also include hiking and cycling in places like the Canadian Rockies (10 days from $2,103), the Canary Islands (six days from $1,166) and Dominica (nine days from $2,375).

“We don’t believe that all wild swimming needs to be about speed, tow floats or fancy neoprene,” wrote Sam Bruce, the co-founder of Much Better Adventures, in an email. “Instead, just being in the water in a wild place is enough.”

Whatever the difficulty level of the tour, safety is a selling point. Most operators send boats to escort open-water swimmers and choose their locations to avoid dangerous currents, high winds and boat traffic. Trips also go where it may be hard to swim solo.

“Someone else has done the planning for you,” said Kate Rew, the founder of the Outdoor Swimming Society, a British volunteer group that promotes swimming outdoors, who has traveled with SwimTrek. If you’re doing a couple of kilometers in new places, she said, “you need a lot of knowledge and local contacts.”

And there’s at least one side benefit. “People sleep so well,” said Mr. Cairns of Active England. “Two to three swims a day is exhausting.”

Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram and sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to get expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places to Go in 2023.

America’s Foreign Vacations Tell Us Something About the U.S. Economy

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Forget Emily. These days, a whole flood of Americans are in Paris.

People spent 2020 and 2021 either cooped up at home or traveling sparingly and mostly within the continental U.S. But after Covid travel restrictions were lifted for international trips last summer, Americans are again headed overseas.

While domestic leisure travel shows signs of calming — people are still vacationing in big numbers, but prices for hotels and flights are moderating as demand proves strong but not insatiable — foreign trips are snapping back with a vengeance. Americans are boarding planes and cruise ships to flock to Europe in particular, based on early data.

According to estimates from AAA, international travel bookings for 2023 were up 40 percent from 2022 through May. That is still down about 2 percent from 2019, but it’s a hefty surge at a time when some travelers are being held back by long passport processing delays amid record-high applications. Tour and cruise bookings are expected to eclipse prepandemic highs, with especially strong demand for vacations to major European cities.

Paris, for example, experienced a huge jump in North American tourists last year compared with 2021, according to the city’s tourism bureau. Planned air arrivals for July and August of this year climbed by another 14.4 percent — to nearly 5 percent above the 2019 level.

“This year is just completely crazy,” said Steeve Calvo, a Parisian tour guide and sommelier whose company — The Americans in Paris — has been churning out visits to Normandy and French wine regions. He attributes some of the jump to a rebound from the pandemic and some to television shows and social media.

“‘Emily in Paris’: I never saw so many people in Paris with red berets,” he said, noting that the signature chapeau of the popular Netflix show’s heroine started to pop up on tourists last year. Other newcomers are eager to take coveted photos for their Instagram pages.

“In Versailles, the Hall of Mirrors, I call it the Hall of Selfie,” Mr. Calvo said, referring to a famous room in the palace.

Robust travel booking numbers and anecdotes from tour guides align with what companies say they are experiencing: From airlines to American Express, corporate executives are reporting a lasting demand for flights and vacations.

“The constructive industry backdrop is unlike anything that any of us have ever seen,” Ed Bastian, the chief executive officer at Delta Air Lines, said during a June 27 investor day. “Travel is going gangbusters, but it’s going to continue to go gangbusters because we still have an enormous amount of demand waiting.”

Transportation Security Administration data shows that the daily average number of passengers who passed through U.S. airport checkpoints in June 2023 was 2.6 million, 0.5 percent above the June 2019 level, based on an analysis by Omair Sharif at Inflation Insights.

And in many foreign airports, the burst of American vacationers is palpable: Customs lines are packed with U.S. tourists, from Paris’s Charles de Gaulle to London’s Heathrow. The latter saw 8 percent more traffic from North America in June 2023 than in June 2019, based on airport data.

In a weird way, the rebound in foreign travel may be taking some pressure off U.S. inflation.

International flight prices, while surging for some routes, are not a big part of the U.S. Consumer Price Index, which is dominated by domestic flight prices. In fact, airfares in the inflation measure dropped sharply in June from the previous month and are down nearly 19 percent from a year ago.

That is partly because fuel is cheaper and partly because airlines are getting more planes into the sky. Many pilots and air traffic controllers had been laid off or had retired, so companies struggled to keep up when demand started to recover after the initial pandemic slump, pushing prices sharply higher in 2022.

“We just didn’t have enough seats to go around last year,” Mr. Sharif said, explaining that while personnel issues persist, so far this year the supply situation has been better. “Planes are still totally packed, but there are more planes.”

And as people flock abroad, it is sapping some demand from hotels and tourist attractions in the United States. International tourists have yet to return to the United States in full force, so they are not entirely offsetting the wave of Americans headed overseas.

Domestic travel is hardly in a free fall — July 4 weekend travel probably set new records, per AAA — but tourists are no longer so insatiable that hotels can keep raising room rates indefinitely. Prices for lodging away from home in the U.S. climbed by 4.5 percent in the year through June, which is far slower than the 25 percent annual increases hotel rooms were posting last spring. There is even elbow room at Disney World.

Even if it isn’t inflationary, the jump in foreign travel does highlight something about the U.S. economy: It’s hard to keep U.S. consumers down, especially affluent ones.

The Fed has been raising interest rates to cool growth since early 2022. Officials have made it more expensive to borrow money in hopes of creating a ripple effect that would cut into demand and force companies to stop lifting prices so much.

Consumption has slowed amid that onslaught, but it hasn’t tanked. Fed officials have taken note, remarking at their last meeting that consumption had been “stronger than expected,” minutes showed.

The resilience comes as many households remain in solid financial shape. People who travel internationally skew wealthier, and many are benefiting from a rising stock market and still-high home prices that are beginning to prove surprisingly immune to interest rate moves.

Those who do not have big stock or real estate holdings are experiencing a strong job market, and some are still holding onto extra savings built up during the pandemic. And it is not just vacation destinations feeling the momentum: Consumers are still spending on a range of other services.

“There’s this last blowoff of spending,” said Kathy Bostjancic, chief economist for the insurance company Nationwide Mutual.

It could be that consumer resilience will help the U.S. economy avoid a recession as the Fed fights inflation. As has been the case at American hotels, demand that stabilizes without plummeting could allow for a slow and steady moderation of price increases.

But if consumers remain so ravenous that companies find they can still charge more, it could prolong inflation. That’s why the Fed is keeping a close eye on spending.

Ms. Bostjancic thinks consumers will pull back starting this fall. They are drawing down their savings, the labor market is cooling, and it may simply take time for the Fed’s rate increases to have their full effect.

But when it comes to many types of travel, there is no end in sight yet.

“Despite economic headwinds, we’re seeing very strong demand for summer leisure travel,” said Mike Daher, who leads the U.S. Transportation, Hospitality & Services practice at the consulting firm Deloitte.

Mr. Daher attributes that to three driving forces. People missed trips. Social media is luring many to new places. And the advent of remote work is allowing professionals — “what we call the laptop luggers,” per Mr. Daher — to stretch out vacations by working a few days from the beach or the mountains.

Mr. Calvo, the tour guide, is riding the wave, taking Americans on tours that showcase Paris’s shared history with France and driving them in minivan tours to Champagne.

“I have no clue if it’s going to last,” he said.

Despite Aspartame Warning, Beverage Companies Likely to Stick With It

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About eight years ago, in response to customer concerns about possible health risks associated with the artificial sweetener aspartame, PepsiCo decided to remove the ingredient from its popular diet soda.

Sales flopped. A year later, aspartame was back in Diet Pepsi.

Today, the top three ingredients listed in the tiny print on the backs of cans and bottles of Diet Pepsi — and on its competitor Diet Coke — are water, caramel color and aspartame.

A trip through the grocery store reveals the ingredient on the labels of not only diet sodas but also diet teas, sugar-free gums, sugar-free energy drinks and diet lemonade drink mix. By some estimates, thousands of products contain aspartame.

The use of aspartame, which is often known by the brand name Equal, in food and beverage products has long been scrutinized. The latest iteration came on Thursday, when an agency of the World Health Organization declared that aspartame could possibly cause cancer and encouraged people who consume a significant number of beverages with aspartame to switch to water or other unsweetened drinks.

But even with the emergence of many new artificial sweeteners, as well as those that are plant- and fruit-based, Big Food just can’t quit aspartame, and analysts don’t expect it to this time. That’s because the ingredient is one of the least expensive sugar alternatives to use, it works especially well in beverages and mixes, and people like the way it tastes.

There was also pushback about the urgency of the W.H.O.’s announcement. In a quick rebuke, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said it disagreed with the findings, reiterating its stance that aspartame is safe. And a second W.H.O. committee said a 150-pound person would need to drink more than a dozen cans of Diet Coke a day to exceed the safe threshold for the sweetener.

“The big beverage companies have been doing contingency planning for months, experimenting with different sweeteners, with a goal of having the taste and quality of the diet beverages being as consistent as possible with existing products,” said Garrett Nelson, who covers the beverage industry at CFRA Research. But they are not likely to change the recipe unless they see a significant drop in consumer demand based on the W.H.O. report, he said.

“If consumers really stop buying Diet Coke because of this report, if sales start to suffer, it might be time to go to Plan B,” Mr. Nelson said.

Coca-Cola referred questions to the American Beverage Association, the lobbying arm for the industry. “Aspartame is safe,” Kevin Keane, the interim president of the organization, said in a statement.

PepsiCo did not respond to questions for comment, but in an interview with Bloomberg Markets that aired on Thursday, Hugh F. Johnston, the chief financial officer of PepsiCo, said he did not expect a big consumer reaction.

“I do believe that, in fact, this is not going to be a significant issue with consumers based on just the preponderance of evidence that suggests aspartame is safe,” Mr. Johnston said.

The assessment of the W.H.O. agency adds to consumer confusion around aspartame, but it is also the latest in a recent spate of research focusing on the potential risks and questioning the true benefits of artificial sweeteners. Just a few weeks ago, the W.H.O. advised against using artificial sweeteners for weight control, saying a review of studies did not show long-term benefit in reducing body fat in children or adults. The review also suggested that the sweeteners were tied to an increased risk of Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular diseases.

This year, researchers at North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill released a study that found a chemical formed after digesting another sweetener, sucralose, breaks up DNA and may contribute to health problems.

For years, food and beverage companies and regulators have typically denounced research that raises questions about artificial sweeteners, broadly arguing that the studies were flawed or inconclusive or that the health risks were minuscule.

“A substantial body of scientific evidence shows that low- and no-calorie sweeteners provide effective and safe options to reduce sugar and calorie consumption,” Robert Rankin, president of the Calorie Control Council, the lobbying association for manufacturers and suppliers of nearly two dozen alternative sweeteners, said in an emailed statement on Thursday.

Indeed, most food and beverage companies that use aspartame are reluctant to switch partly because aspartame is less expensive than other alternatives and is 200 times as sweet as sugar, meaning a little goes a very long way.

“One of the benefits of aspartame is that it’s been made for so long that manufacturers have really refined the costs and processing of it so well and they get a superior product,” said Glenn Roy, an adjunct organic chemistry professor at Vassar College who spent more than three decades working at food companies, including NutraSweet, General Foods and PepsiCo.

On top of that, the F.D.A. approved aspartame in 1974, giving companies decades of data and information on what aspartame can and cannot do in products. For instance, it can enhance and extend certain fruit flavors, like cherry and orange, making it a preferred sweetener for beverages and chewing gum. But when heated, aspartame loses its sweetness, making it less desirable for baked or cooked products.

Food and beverage companies are releasing new no- or low-sugar products in response to consumer demand, but many are being made with newer sweeteners, or a blend of sweeteners. Each new product undergoes a litany of sensory and flavor tests before it is released.

But for products that have been around for decades, like diet sodas, loyal customers are accustomed to a specific taste, and they could be turned off by changes in ingredients, scientists warn.

Trump asks top Georgia court to disqualify election probe prosecutor and toss grand jury report

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ATLANTA (AP) — Lawyers for former President Donald Trump are asking Georgia’s highest court to prevent the district attorney who has been investigating his actions in the wake of the 2020 election from prosecuting him and to throw out a special grand jury report that is part of the inquiry.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has been investigating since early 2021 whether Trump and his allies broke any laws as they tried to overturn his narrow election loss in Georgia to Democrat Joe Biden. She has suggested that she is likely to seek charges in the case from a grand jury next month.

Trump’s Georgia legal team on Friday filed similar petitions in the Georgia Supreme Court and Fulton County Superior Court naming Willis and Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney, who oversaw the special grand jury, as respondents. A spokesperson for Willis declined to comment. McBurney did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.

Trump’s legal team — Drew Findling, Jennifer Little and Marissa Goldberg — acknowledged that the filings are unusual but necessary given the tight time frame. Willis has indicated she will use the special grand jury report to seek an indictment “within weeks, if not days.” Two new regular grand juries were seated this week, and one is likely to hear the case.

“Even in an extraordinarily novel case of national significance, one would expect matters to take their normal procedural course within a reasonable time,” the filings say. “But nothing about these processes have been normal or reasonable. And the all-but-unavoidable conclusion is that the anomalies below are because Petitioner is President Donald J. Trump.”

The petitions seek to bar Willis and her office from continuing to prosecute the case. It also asks that the report produced by the special grand jury that had ben seated in the case be tossed out and that prosecutors be prevented from presenting any evidence from the panel’s investigation to a regular grand jury.

The filings ask that the courts stop “all proceedings related to and flowing from the special purpose grand jury’s investigation until this matter can be resolved.”

In a previous filing in March, Trump’s lawyers made similar requests and asked that a judge other than McBurney hear their claims. Willis rejected the arguments as being without merit. McBurney kept the case and has yet to rule on the Trump team’s requests.

That has left Trump “stranded between the Supervising Judge’s protracted passivity and the District Attorney’s looming indictment” with no choice other than to seek action from the Supreme Court, his lawyers wrote.

Willis opened her investigation shortly after Trump called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in January 2021 and suggested the state’s top elections official could help him “find” the votes needed to overturn his election loss in the state. Last year, she requested a special grand jury, saying the panel’s subpoena power would allow her to compel the testimony of witnesses who might otherwise be unwilling to talk to her team.

The special grand jury, which did not have the power to issue indictments, was seated last May and dissolved in January after hearing from 75 witnesses and submitting a report with recommendations for Willis. Though most of that report remains under wraps for now according to a judge’s order, the panel’s foreperson has said without naming names that the special grand jury recommended charging multiple people.

Trump’s lawyers, in their March filing, argued the special grand jury proceedings “involved a constant lack of clarity as to the law, inconsistent applications of basic constitutional protections for individuals being brought before it, and a prosecutor’s office that was found to have an actual conflict, yet continued to pursue the investigation.”

Willis argued in a response in May that those arguments failed to meet the “exacting standards” for disqualifying a prosecutor and failed to prove that due process rights had been violated or that the grand jury process was “tainted” or the law governing it unconstitutional.

In Friday’s filings, Trump’s attorneys said that Willis and McBurney had “trampled the procedural safeguards” for the rights of Trump and others who may be targeted by the investigation.

“The whole of the process is now incurably infected,” they wrote. “And nothing that follows could be legally sound or publicly respectable.”

Strike Prevents Actors From Promoting Films at Premieres or Festivals

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It has already been a difficult year for movie theaters film promotion , with the North American box office down roughly 20 percent from last year. And that was when actors could promote their films.

With SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union, on strike as of Friday, its 160,000 members are officially barred from not only acting in projects involving the major Hollywood studios but also from engaging in any publicity efforts for films and TV shows that have already been completed.

That means no appearances, either online or in person, including at the upcoming Comic-Con International in San Diego, many of the fall film festivals and any movie premieres or television promotional events. Earlier this week, SAG-AFTRA officials convened conference calls with Hollywood’s top agencies and publicists to explain the strike rules for both the production and the promotion of coming projects. And on Thursday, after announcing the strike, the union released its rules for its membership.

“It’s going to be expensive, because the only other way to compensate for the lack of publicity is to buy more noise,” Terry Press, a top Hollywood marketer, said. “When you don’t have any form of publicity, which is free to a certain extent, you have to try to make up that noise. Ultimately, that’s expensive, especially in the summer, where there’s very little advertising that you can actually buy that’s going to capture large groups of people.”

It’s also going to be awkward. That was apparent even before the actors’ union announced on Thursday that it had approved a strike. A few hours earlier, Christopher Nolan’s starry “Oppenheimer” was premiering in London.

“Oppenheimer” is one of the summer’s most anticipated films, a movie struggling theater owners have been pointing to — along with Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” and the latest “Mission: Impossible” chapter with Tom Cruise — as one that could pump some life into a struggling business.

But at the premiere at the Odeon Theatre in Leicester Square, it was clear that the strike would have an impact. First it was moved up an hour, so that the cast full of boldface names — including Matt Damon, Emily Blunt, Robert Downey Jr., Florence Pugh and Cillian Murphy — would be able to walk the red carpet. Then they all left before the screening started, in solidarity with the union.

“They are off to write their picket signs,” Mr. Nolan quipped to the crowd of 800 people.

Universal Pictures said it would still hold its New York premiere of “Oppenheimer” on Monday but none of the actors would be in attendance.

The lack of buzzy premieres and the usual round of publicity for films is troubling for a movie theater industry that has been hoping business would increase in the second half of the year.

The strike is also concerning for the fall film festival circuit, which counts on actors appearing in person to promote their prestige films geared toward the awards season. “The whole festival circuit, those movies are nothing but publicity driven,” Ms. Press said.

Normally actors on the hunt for Oscar gold make the pilgrimage to Italy for the Venice International Film Festival at the end of August, then head to Colorado for the Telluride Film Festival and then Canada for the Toronto International Film Festival — the three early stops on the campaign trail.

“The grammar of releasing those movies requires the festival circuit,” Ms. Press said. “That is when I think you’re going to start to run into serious repercussions.”

Television is also affected. Despite the Emmy nominations announced on Wednesday, none of the actors nominated will be able to promote their work. When asked how the awards show — which is scheduled for September but likely to be postponed if the walkout is prolonged — will be affected by the strike, Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the union’s chief negotiator, said: “Our strike rules will not allow any form of promotion for television series, or streaming series that have been produced under these contracts. My expectation is that it will bring any actor participation in Emmy campaigning to a close.”

‘10 Seconds’: Outrage Follows Acquittal in Italy Abuse Case

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For days, many Italians have flooded social media with two unusual calls to outrage: “#10secondi” and “#palpatabreve,” or “10 seconds” and “brief grope.”

The hashtags refer to a court sentence, made public this week in Rome, that acquitted a 66-year-old school janitor who was accused of improperly touching a 17-year-old student, including by sticking his hands into her pants and touching her bottom.

In court, the janitor admitted some touching, saying the teenager had been pulling up her pants and — mimicking her gesture — he had reached out and lifted her pants as a joke, but he denied putting his hands inside her trousers. The student testified in court last February that the entire episode lasted between five and 10 seconds.

In its decision last week, a court in Rome ruled that the janitor’s behavior could not be construed as either libidinous or lustful because it had taken place at the school, a public place in front of other students; because it had only lasted “a handful of seconds”; and because the janitor had apologized immediately after and made light of the episode. The prosecutor’s office has until July 21 to appeal the verdict.

Uproar followed the public release of the ruling — along with renewed conversations about sexual harassment and abuse in Italy, where rights activists have long criticized a culture of ingrained sexism. The ruling also inspired a rush of videos showing women and men touching their own breasts while a timer counts down 10 seconds: Some silently stare into the camera, some perform skits mocking the decision, some sing jingles they have written.

In the video that kicked off the trend, the actor and comedian Paolo Camilli stares into the distance and violently mauls his chest. “Less than 10 seconds have passed, if this isn’t harassment, then I don’t know,” he says in the video, which has been seen on TikTok and Instagram thousands of times.

In a telephone interview, Mr. Camilli, who gained international recognition after appearing in “The White Lotus” television series, called the court ruling absurd.

“My first thought was, how can a person measure 10 seconds” while they were being molested, he said. “And then,” he said, he realized that “10 seconds can be an infinity” for someone experiencing a painful situation.

In the wake of the #MeToo movement, many Italians’ dismissive attitude toward allegations of sexual harassment set the country apart from the United States and other European countries where many of the authorities, as well as corporations and prominent members of the public, denounced abuse and targeted its perpetrators.

But several court cases in recent years have provoked anger in Italy about entrenched gender stereotypes and the difficulty of legal cases surrounding abuse charges. Last week’s ruling set off a new round of debate, bringing in everyone from lawyers to influencers.

“A woman’s body is not owned by men. It is not owned by anyone, just women themselves,” wrote Francesco Cicconetti, an Italian influencer with more than 200,000 followers on Instagram. “You don’t have the right to touch them, not even for one second, let alone five or 10.”

The incident at the school took place in April 2022, and the case went to trial late last year; the student and the janitor were identified only by their initials in the court ruling. The three judges of the presiding court — who all happened to be women — agreed with the defense that because of the public setting, in the atrium of the school with dozens of students present, the janitor’s actions did not have a lustful intent. The judges concluded that he had committed no crime.

The janitor’s lawyer, Claudia Pirolli, said that articles and videos protesting the ruling had not adequately presented the public context in which the episode had taken place, which she said ruled out flagrant sexual assault.

“It’s not what it seems,” she said, adding that her client had a clean record and was a year from retiring. “A conviction would have destroyed him,” she said.

A lawyer for the student, who is now an adult, could not be reached for comment.

Some legal observers said that the ruling clashed with past decisions by Italy’s highest court.

“The Supreme Court in Italy had already clarified that the intent of the molester — libidinous or otherwise — is not relevant when establishing if he or she is guilty of sexual harassment,” said Marco Bellandi Giuffrida, a court clerk in Cremona who has written about the ruling.

The Rome court had reasoned incorrectly, he said in an interview, both because intent was “difficult to assess,” and because it presented “a very strong burden of proof for the molested person.” He expected the prosecutor in Rome, who had asked that the defendant be sentenced to 42 months in prison, to appeal.

The case may have touched a raw nerve in Italy because of its uneven record when it comes to the issue of violence, abuse and sexual harassment against women, and a mixed public attitude toward the issues.

The national statistics institute, ISTAT, said in a 2019 report that nearly a quarter of the population felt that women could provoke sexual assault by the way they dressed, while nearly 40 percent felt that women could avoid sexual intercourse if they really didn’t want it.

Still, many court cases have drawn outrage, including an infamous 1999 ruling that suggested that a woman cannot be sexually assaulted if she were wearing jeans because, the ruling contended, the pants are impossible to remove unless she helps — what became known as the “jeans alibi.” A Turin court last year cleared a man of sexual assault because the woman had left the bathroom door open, which the court ruled was “an invitation.”

But Italy’s highest court often overturns these sorts of decisions, said Elena Biaggioni, a lawyer and vice president of D.i.Re, a national anti-violence network run by women’s organizations. “Its rulings are very sophisticated in the reasonings, especially when it comes to sexual violence,” she said.

International institutions have repeatedly upbraided Italy on this front. After seven men were acquitted of charges of sexually assaulting a woman, the European Court of Human Rights condemned an Italian court, saying it was upholding presumptions and stereotypes of female sexuality and essentially victim blaming. The European court wrote that the Italian court’s reasonings were “guilt-inducing, moralizing and conveyed sexist stereotypes.”

A Council of Europe group that monitors violence against women has found that sexual assault convictions are very low in Italy. And last year, the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, a group affiliated with the United Nations, said that an Italian woman who accused a man of attacking her had been discriminated against, as a result “of deeply rooted stereotypes” that led Italian courts to favor the male defendant over her.

“It’s a cultural question,” said Ms. Biaggioni, adding that in the Roman court’s ruling, the man’s account had appeared to persuade the judges more than the minor’s version.

“But if you rule that it’s fine for an older man to touch a 17-year-old’s bottom in school, you are minimizing those actions,” she said.

Pogacar Gains on Vingegaard at the Tour de France

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Tadej Pogacar gained a little more time on Jonas Vingegaard in the Tour de France on Friday, preferring to chip away at the reigning champion’s lead rather than making one huge move to grab the yellow jersey — and maybe clinch the Tour.

Though he finished the stage third of the day’s riders, Pogacar, who is from Slovenia, got the best of his rival for the third straight mountain stage, where the Tour is usually won or lost. But by delaying his attack until the last quarter-mile, he gained only eight seconds, and Vingegaard, a Danish cyclist, maintained a nine-second lead with 13 stages completed.

“In the end it was a successful day for us, and we take a couple of seconds back,” Pogacar said after the stage, adding: “The Tour is still long, and it’s a good situation for us. Now we go day by day and try to see for these kind of opportunities to take a couple of seconds.”

Jai Hindley of Australia held third but fell to 2:51 back of the lead, underlining the two-man nature of the race.

With flat terrain and only one minor climb earlier, Stage 13 came down to the final climb up the Col du Grand Colombier, in the Jura Mountains near the Swiss border. That mountain debuted on the Tour only in 2012 but already has developed a fearsome reputation, and is ranked hors catégorie, or “beyond categorization,” the designation for the most difficult climbs. It has been used as the finish of a stage only once before, in 2020, when Pogacar was first to the top on the way to his first Tour victory.

The first 76 miles of the 86-mile stage on Friday produced a breakaway of about 20 riders, including Michał Kwiatkowski of Poland, who went on to win the stage. But the real action began when the main pack, including Vingegaard and Pogacar, reached the foot of the Colombier.

Pogacar’s strong UAE Team Emirates took to the front of the pack and set a fierce pace. Pogacar rode directly behind his teammates, and Vingegaard sat right on his back wheel. One by one, riders fell off the back of the group, unable to keep up with the tempo. Then it remained a question of when Pogacar would attack. He waited longer than expected.

With 400 meters to go, Pogacar finally unleashed his unmatched acceleration. Only Vingegaard could go after him. Pogacar gained four seconds on his rival in that last quarter-mile and also picked up a four-second time bonus for finishing third in the stage.

Vingegaard had beaten Pogacar on the first major mountain stage last week, taking a 47-second lead and prompting speculation that he was on his way to winning back-to-back Tours. But Pogacar, the 2020 and 2021 winner, got the best of Vingegaard in the next two tough stages, gradually eroding his lead.

There is no letup for the riders as the race approaches the Alps. Saturday brings five climbs, and Sunday could be a showpiece stage of the Tour with a mountaintop finish at St.-Gervais Mont Blanc. Even after that monster stage, a time trial and two more mountain stages are to come next week.

Pogacar will consider that more than enough time to catch the leader. But Vingegaard is still in yellow a day closer to Paris.

5 Restaurants in Naples, Italy

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The worldwide culinary fame of Italy’s third-largest city boils down to one word: pizza. You can hardly hurl a tomato in the food’s purported birthplace — a scruffy, graffiti-stained port city of monumental Baroque buildings and narrow cobbled passageways — without hitting a gaggle of culinary pilgrims jockeying to enter one of the hundreds (or thousands, by some counts) of pizzerias.

But a slew of top-notch trattorias, osterias and ristoranti exist right alongside pizza titans like Sorbillo and Da Michele. Drawing on the cornucopia of livestock and produce from the fertile fields and coastal waters of the Campania region — cattle, goats, shellfish, wheat, artichokes, zucchini, figs, citrus fruits and more — these eateries dish out local inventions from mussel soup to homegrown pastas to limoncello.

So when you’re ready to foray beyond the overcrowded dens of dough and red sauce, here are five addresses in five neighborhoods offering both traditional and creative takes on beloved Neapolitan recipes and ingredients. Buon appetito.

History suffuses this homey, family-run restaurant tucked into the tight grid of streets that forms the working-class Quartieri Spagnoli district, a hillside zone where laundry seems to hang from every rusted wrought-iron balcony.

As opera arias and sentimental Italian ballads echo off the swirly, hand-painted, 18th-century wall tiles, a succession of time-honored Neapolitan dishes passes from the open kitchen to the worn wooden tables, where a mainly Italian clientele gobbles them down: fried eggplant, fried zucchini, fried rice balls, myriad meatballs and ziti under generous ladles of thick, tomato-beef Neapolitan ragù (also on sale in jars for 8.50 euros, or about $9.25).

The seafood offerings are equally worthy, including tender anchovies and cod drenched in a dense sauce of tomatoes, capers and olives. For a coda, you can balance salty with sweet thanks to a sticky baba au rhum — a favorite Franco-Polish dessert adopted in Napoli in the 18th century.

Osteria della Mattonella, Via Giovanni Nicotera 13. A three-course meal costs around 25 euros per person.

Centuries ago, women from Napoli’s lower classes would gather outside royal residences in hopes of being granted the discarded entrails of the animals slaughtered for aristocrats’ banquets.

These days you need only go to one of the city’s tripe restaurants to taste this enduring favorite, traditionally referred to as cucina povera — the food of the poor — which is made variously from pigs’ feet, veal snout and bovine stomachs.

Begun as a pushcart business in 1945, Tripperia O’Russ has for decades occupied a simple, brightly lit white dining room on a middle-class residential street near the city’s botanical gardens, earning a reputation as Naples’s top temple of tripe. Amid the sound of hacking, a mix of local folks from all walks of life gather to dine on simple soups, pastas and stews loaded with slow-cooked innards.

The Tris Trippa sampler, ideal for the uninitiated, is a trio of tripe preparations: with potatoes and a thin sauce of olive oil, onions, peppers and tomato; with heavy tomato sauce; and with a mix of tomato sauce and beans. Those with more daring palates can enjoy carpaccio-ish slices of cooked veal tripe with just a lemon wedge as accompaniment. The restaurant serves no desserts, but big bottles of Peroni beer (2.50 euros) complement the onslaught.

Despite its rustic décor and location in Naples’s historic center, this cozy and popular spot is no relic. Loaded with craft beers (including a mild, easy-drinking house I.P.A.) and a secondary menu of gluten-free options, the four-year-old restaurant is run by a young, tattooed staff and serves a clientele of in-the-know international foodies.

Nonetheless, the reverent, old-school menu would have your Neapolitan grandmother smiling with recognition at items like eggplant parmigiana and pasta with potatoes and provolone cheese.

Among the antipasti, the mozzarella in carrozza demonstrates that the classic Campania cheese can be melted into tasty variations that require no pizza oven. Heated to stretchiness and spread on thick slices of egg-dipped grilled bread, the mozzarella becomes the star of a bubbly, gooey sandwich. The cheese makes another cameo in the crispy fried paccheri — a beloved Neapolitan noodle stuffed with a combination of tomato sauce, beef, pork, pork lard, raisins, pine nuts and mozzarella.

If you can (and it will be a challenge), save room for the meaty, tomato sauce-drenched chunks of rabbit cacciatore — a favorite dish from the nearby island of Ischia.

La Locanda Gesù Vecchio, Via Giovanni Paladino 26. A three-course meal costs around 30 euros per person.

Plenty of onions and lots of time. Those are the secrets to Genovese sauce, a Naples specialty despite its Genoa-derived name. Concocted mainly from finely sliced onions — slow-cooked over a low flame for several hours — along with olive oil and tender slivers of beef, the sauce is so emblematic of Naples that it probably deserves a towering monument in the grand square that the restaurant overlooks, Piazza Municipio.

The chunky, chewy ziti with Genovese sauce is just one of the flavorful noodle creations at Seafront Pasta Bar, a minimalist Scandinavian-chic dining room above the boutique for the Di Martino pasta manufacturer, which also operates the restaurant. Like the ziti, the dry noodles sold in the shop and served upstairs are made at the company’s factory in the nearby town of Gragnano, a pasta mecca in Italy thanks to its long history of pasta-making and the many top brands still based there.

Rich local flavors also come together in the spaghetti alle vongole — a swirl of buttery noodles larded with tender, sweet clams and charred garlic that arrive under a glass dome of olive-oil smoke — and bucatini with an Ischia-inspired tomato sauce containing tender shredded rabbit.

Noodles even contribute to certain desserts, notably “pastamisù,” a classic tiramisù topped with coffee-soaked pasta shards that have been baked to crispiness.

Sea Front Pasta Bar, Piazza Municipio 1. For two pastas and dessert, expect to pay around 60 to 70 euros.

To find the new Sustanza restaurant, cross the street from the national archaeological museum; enter the soaring, glass-covered arcades of the 19th-century Galleria Principe di Napoli; slip past the potted palms and white-coated bartenders that fill the Art Nouveau-style Scotto Jonno cocktail bar; and climb the carpeted stone steps until you reach elegant dining rooms decorated with swirling Liberty-esque wallpaper and real Tiffany lamps.

Opened in May, this hidden-away restaurant serves intricate dishes of southern Italian and Mediterranean ingredients accompanied by natural wines. The menu comes courtesy of the chef Marco Ambrosino, a native of the nearby island of Procida who previously made a name for himself at 28 Posti in Milan.

On a recent evening, his concoctions featured several imaginative deployments of classic Campania ingredients, notably an artichoke heart filled with mountain truffle cream, and succulent mutton in a light sauce of jus and fermented butter. Dessert might be an herbaceous fig-leaf sorbet in laurel oil.

For a nightcap, consider returning to the ground-floor lounge. The Strega del Vesuvio cocktail (15 euros), as red and potent as the volcano it is named for, blends Scotch, gin, coffee liqueur and a cordial of tomatoes grown on Vesuvio’s slopes into a tangy, smoky digestivo.

Aspartame is Possibly Linked to Cancer in Humans, the WHO Says

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A World Health Organization agency declared on Thursday that aspartame, an artificial sweetener widely used in diet drinks and low-sugar foods, could possibly cause cancer.

A second W.H.O. committee, though, held steady on its assessment of a safe level of aspartame consumption. By some calculations using the panel’s standard, a person weighing 150 pounds could avoid a risk of cancer but still drink about a dozen cans of diet soda a day.

The declaration by a W.H.O. agency of a cancer risk associated with aspartame reflects the first time the prominent international body has weighed in publicly on the effects of the nearly ubiquitous artificial sweetener. Aspartame has been a contentious ingredient for decades.

The International Agency for Research on Cancer, or I.A.R.C., said it based its conclusion that aspartame was a possible carcinogen on limited evidence from three observational studies of humans that the agency said linked consumption of artificially sweetened beverages to an increase in cases of liver cancer — at levels far below a dozen cans a day. It cautioned that the results could potentially be skewed toward the profile of people who drink higher amounts of diet drinks and called for further study.

Still, people who consume high amounts of aspartame should consider switching to water or other unsweetened drinks, said Dr. Francesco Branca, director of the W.H.O. Department of Nutrition and Food Safety.

But, he added: “Our results do not indicate that occasional consumption should pose a risk to most.”

Concerns about rising global rates of obesity and diabetes as well as changing consumer preferences have resulted in an explosion of no- and low-sugar food and beverages. Aspartame, one of six sweeteners approved by U.S. regulators, is found in thousands of products, from packets of Equal to sugar-free gum, diet sodas, teas, energy drinks and even yogurts. It is also used to sweeten various pharmaceutical products.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which approved aspartame decades ago, on Thursday issued an unusual criticism of the global agency’s findings and reiterated its longstanding position that the sweetener is safe. In a statement, the F.D.A. said it “disagrees with I.A.R.C.’s conclusion that these studies support classifying aspartame as a possible carcinogen to humans.”

The F.D.A. also said that “aspartame being labeled by the W.H.O. as ‘possibly carcinogenic to humans’ does not mean that aspartame is actually linked to cancer.” The F.D.A. declined to make any of its experts available for interviews to discuss the agency’s specific concerns.

But its salvo against the international organization was sure to ignite further debate in Europe — where the sweetener is still deemed safe — and renew review in the United States. And the dueling global agencies’ pronouncements are likely to fuel confusion among consumers.

The W.HO. has occasionally been out of step with other authorities on potential cancer risks, like glyphosate, and later led the way toward establishing that it was dangerous to human health. The international body’s designation of a cancer link to that ingredient in Roundup, a weed killer, became the stepping stone for lawsuits against the makers of the herbicide.

Around the world, the powerful beverage industry has fought long and hard against any regulatory or scientific finding that tied artificial sweetener use to risks of cancer or other health problems. Aspartame is only the latest battleground for multinational companies to push back against new studies or potential links to health risks.

“Aspartame is safe,” Kevin Keane, interim president of the American Beverage Association, said in a statement. He cited the dueling W.H.O. announcements, singling out the second panel, the Joint Expert Committee on Food Additives, that performed a concurrent review and left its recommended daily intake amount unchanged. It also deemed the evidence for cancer in humans “not convincing,” a W.H.O. summary shows.

“After a rigorous review, the World Health Organization finds aspartame is safe and ‘no sufficient reason to change the previously established acceptable daily intake,’” Mr. Keane said. “This strong conclusion reinforces the position of the F.D.A. and food safety agencies from more than 90 countries.”

Coca-Cola referred questions to the American Beverage Association and PepsiCo did not respond to requests for comment.

The safety of sugar replacements, including the decades-old science dispute over the use of saccharin in the diet drink Tab, has been heavily scrutinized. Once linked to bladder cancer in rats, Congress mandated further study of saccharin. Since then, according to the F.D.A., 30 studies showed the rodent results did not apply to humans; U.S. officials removed saccharin from a list of potential carcinogens. More recently, other sweeteners have come under scrutiny for their ties to possible health risks.

At the center of the dispute over aspartame are rodent studies from 2005-2010 by Italy-based researchers that showed a link to cancer. The F.D.A. has dismissed the long-debated studies as “compromised.”

Dr. William Dahut, chief scientific officer of the American Cancer Society, which led one of the key studies the W.H.O. relied on, said the findings should be considered alongside the W.H.O.’s report earlier this year that indicated artificial sweeteners offered no help in achieving weight loss or protection from other chronic conditions.

He said there was little evidence now to suggest a daily Diet Coke would elevate the risk of cancer, adding that “more research is needed.” Overall, he said, the science was more definitive on reducing cancer risk by avoiding tobacco, alcohol, processed meat and excess body weight.

The I.A.R.C. said it could not rule out the possibility that the studies linking aspartame to liver cancer were a result of chance or other factors associated with drinking diet soda.

The W.H.O.’s cancer agency has four categories: carcinogenic, probably carcinogenic, possibly carcinogenic and no classification. Those levels reflect the strength of the science rather than how likely the substance is to cause cancer.

The other W.H.O. group on food additives recommended that daily consumption should be below 40 milligrams of aspartame per kilogram of a person’s weight — slightly lower than the suggested U.S. level of 50 milligrams.

The F.D.A. said it estimated that a person weighing 132 pounds would need to consume 75 packets of aspartame sweetener to reach the threshold of exposure to a potential risk.

For its review of aspartame, the I.A.R.C. convened 25 cancer experts from 12 nations in Lyon, France, to conduct the review of existing studies. It concluded that there was limited evidence for cancer in humans based on three studies linking artificially sweetened drinks to increases in hepatocellular carcinoma, the most common type of liver cancer.

One study in 2016 was led by W.H.O. officials, who looked at nearly 500,000 people in Europe who were followed for about 11 years. The study tracked participants’ juice and soft drink intake and the relationship to liver and bile duct cancers. It examined those who drank artificially sweetened soft drinks and found that each additional serving of diet soft drink a week was associated with a 6 percent increased risk of liver cancer.

A U.S. study published last year by researchers from Harvard, Boston University and the National Cancer Institute examined sweetened beverage consumption reported by people on questionnaires and cancer case registries. Researchers found an elevated risk of liver cancer in people with diabetes who said they consumed two or more artificially sweetened sodas a day. That study found no increase in liver cancer among diet soda drinkers who did not have diabetes.

A third study, led by the American Cancer Society, examined the use of beverages sweetened by sugar and artificial sweeteners and cancer death data. It found a 44 percent increase in liver cancer among men who never smoked and drank two or more artificially sweetened drinks a day. Even adjusting for high body mass — in itself a cancer risk factor — the men had a 22 percent increase in risk, data in a supplement to the study shows.

The American Beverage Association, which represents Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, has been vocal in saying that the W.H.O.’s food additive panel — not the cancer experts — should be the lead authority evaluating aspartame.

In recent weeks, the beverage industry trade group has financed a new coalition led by Alex Azar, an appointee of former President Donald J. Trump, and Donna Shalala, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton. Both Mr. Azar and Ms. Shalala were former secretaries of the Department of Health and Human Services. In an opinion article in Newsweek earlier this month, the two embraced the F.D.A.’s position on the safety of aspartame, and called the agency “the world’s gold standard for independent regulatory bodies.”

The trade group had previously contested another review of aspartame’s potential links to cancer in California. In 2016, a state committee discussed reviewing aspartame, but it went no further.

California officials said this week that the state could review the latest W.H.O. decision.

Besides aspartame, the W.H.O.’s cancer agency has deemed other possible carcinogens to range from the seemingly benign, like Ginkgo biloba extract and aloe vera leaf extract, to the more concerning, like gasoline exhaust and perfluorooctanoic acid, the most common of the industrial chemicals known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, that has recently been subject to billion-dollar settlements over drinking water contamination.

In deeming aspartame a possible carcinogen, the I.A.R.C. also dipped into one of the central controversies of aspartame research. It concluded that there was some evidence for cancer in lab animals based on studies performed by the Ramazzini Institute in Italy, citing the group’s finding of increased tumors in aspartame studies from the mid-2000s. Based on concerns over the group’s methods and interpretations, though, the findings were deemed limited.

For its part, the Ramazzini Institute said in 2021 that its work on aspartame was validated and that its earlier findings were “savagely attacked by the chemical manufacturing and processed food industries and by their allies in regulatory agencies.”

Dr. Branca of the W.H.O. responded to questions about the need for an I.A.R.C. review during a news conference on Wednesday, saying that 10 million people die of cancer each year. “So there’s a societal concern that our organization needed to respond to,” he said.

He said the results demonstrated a clear need for further high-quality research.

“We’ve in a sense raised a flag here, indicating that we need to clarify much more in the situation,” Dr. Branca said. “It is not something which we can dismiss at this moment.”

Julie Creswell contributed reporting.

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