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The coronavirus outbreak hit Hong Kong as the territory was still reeling from months of political unrest. Last year, the mass protests that started after the special administrative regions chief executive, Carrie Lam, attempted to introduce an extradition bill with mainland China evolved into nightly confrontations between police and demonstrators. Protesters were arrested in their thousands.

Then, at the start of the year, as news of the coronavirus outbreak started to surface, an exhausted population had something else to worry about. The epidemic, which has infected more than 44,000 people and killed more than 1,100 of them, has rekindled old fears. Once more, it has made many Hong Kong citizens feel that, in a crisis, they are unable to rely on a supportive, competent government: local leaders have kept dithering, half closing the border, then closing it a little more, while being unable to even guarantee a steady supply of face masks and toilet paper. Throughout, they wait for guidance from Beijing on how to act.

While anxiety about the spread of the coronavirus has been keeping many people at home, the protests havent entirely ceased: they may have fewer participants, but night skirmishes are still ongoing. On Saturday, a few hundred people gathered to commemorate the death of a university student who fell while trying to escape teargas in October; police dispersed the protest and arrested 119 people. Smaller protests, too, still end with teargas, pepper spray and arrests.

Meanwhile, newer forms of dissent have been emerging from last years mobilisation. The recent strike of hospital workers, who were demanding the closure of the border with mainland China to avoid an outbreak in Hong Kong, was organised by the Hospital Authority Employees Alliance, a trade union organisation that in December counted just 300 members. After a unionisation drive inspired by the general strikes organised during last years protests, it is now 18,000-strong. The strike didnt succeed, but it showed how the protest movement in Hong Kong has evolved to integrate different types of actions and demands.

The sight of hospital workers on strike while a public health emergency is unfolding might be shocking, but it is proof of the depth of mistrust Hong Kong has towards the authorities, both here and in Beijing. After all, the territory was one of the main victims of the Sars epidemic which originated in Guangdong in November 2002, but was kept mostly secret by the Chinese government until February 2003. Chinas cover-up continued well into April; meanwhile, 299 people in Hong Kong lost their lives.

Once the crisis was brought under control, the authorities signed the Mainland and Hong Kong Closer Economic Agreement (CEPA), to help Hong Kong get out of its post-Sars economic gloom. Among other things, this allowed millions of mainland tourists to visit without a visa. Neighbourhoods started to shapeshift, as old shops had to make way for new stores catering for mainlanders desires and needs; landlords couldnt raise rents fast enough as new tenants with extravagantly priced clothes and pharmaceuticals to sell were eager to tap into the Chinese visitors bonanza.

As the protests escalated last year, the Chinese propaganda organs on the mainland resorted to shaping the narrative in nationalistic terms: Hong Kong demonstrators were traitors to the motherland with foreign backing, they said, sparking an animosity so strong that the sides took to calling each other cockroaches (for the protesters) and dogs (for mainland Chinese). That antagonism certainly hasnt abated in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak. Some shops in Hong Kong have put up signs saying they will not serve Mandarin speakers or anyone from the mainland ostensibly as a precaution against the virus, as if that gave a veneer of respectability to discrimination. In social media and in graffiti, anti-Chinese sentiment has been steady: there are widespread claims that mainlanders are hoarding masks and hand sanitiser (the long queues outside shops are, in fact, mostly filled with locals). They are blamed for depriving Hong Kong of its resources, from hospital beds to milk formula, even if a quick look around the city shows that the people profiteering from face masks and disinfectant come from across the geographical and linguistic spectrum.

This time round the Chinese government has been acting faster than it did in 2003, while still falling into its habit of suppressing news and pumping out propaganda. The Hong Kong government, on the other hand, has fumbled its response to the point that one of the richest cities in Asia finds itself without toilet paper. Even now, it is still trying to ban people from hiding their identities by wearing face masks at protests. When hospital workers were striking, Lam refused to speak with them, and introduced one half-hearted measure after another on border controls.

At the moment, most land borders are closed, but the airport is still open. Rumours thrive, and people are panic-buying: rice, toilet paper, face masks, hand sanitiser. Few doubt that once the coronavirus emergency subsides, the protests will start again: against a local government appointed from on high, which cannot even guarantee basic supplies at a time of crisis, and against the fear of being absorbed into mainland China. The hostility towards both has only been intensified by the epidemic.

Ilaria Maria Sala is a writer and journalist based in Hong Kong

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The coronavirus outbreak has only heightened Hong Kongs hostility towards Beijing - The Guardian

Since the appearance of the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) movement in December 2018, and with the recent demonstrations and strikes against pension reform, the question of police violence in France has entered the mainstream.

And the stream of shocking social media videos continues: at an anti-pension reform demonstration in Lyon this year, a police officer fired a teargas grenade at students filming the crowd from the balcony of their apartment. Another one fired a flash-ball at a demonstrator at point-blank range. At a gathering in the centre of Paris, police appeared to throttle Cdric Chouviat, a 42-year-old motorcycle courier, who later died with a broken larynx. These images of the police beating vulnerable people, blinding others or blowing off their hands have forced the authorities to admit that police violence actually exists.

Until now, the head of state had seemed to rule out any discussion of the matter. In March 2019, during his great national debate, President Macron said, Do not speak of repression or police violence; such words are unacceptable in a state under the rule of law. The same week the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, Michelle Bachelet, urged the government to undertake a full investigation of all reported cases of excessive use of force.

Confronted with pictures of a police officer tripping up a demonstrator, prime minister douard Philippe admitted for the first time that there was a problem, describing the footage as violent and unacceptable. Interior minister Christophe Castaner followed suit, stressing that policing must be exemplary. For his part, Macron claims to expect top-grade professional practice. Either this marks a genuine change of tune or it is just a means of defusing public outrage.

The modern-day French police are shaped by the violence of their history many of their methods of surveillance and repression found their way to the homeland from the repertoire of forces in charge of indigenous north Africans in former French colonies. Throughout the colonial period, police agents and officers took their experiences from places such as Algeria and applied them to the policing of working-class neighbourhoods and the quelling of insurrections in mainland France. The manhunt, capture and strangulation techniques that recently killed Adama Traor or Chouviat, and the use of sexual violence to humiliate, as in the case of Tho Luhaka in 2017, are part of this long history.

But the story of police violence goes hand in hand with efforts to expose it to the wider public. In the early 1970s, organisations such as the Arab workers movement started condemning racist policing crimes. They tried to counter attempts by the police to criminalise victims by describing people who had been killed to the media as repeat offenders, drug abusers, responsible for the violence they suffered. The brutal, racist behaviour of French police was never treated as such. The term bavure, or blunder, is still used for police encounters that end in death.

Come the early 2000s, new types of independent media gave families and supporters of victims an outlet, and in the 2010s mainstream newspapers finally took on board the concept of police violence, albeit in quotation marks to cast doubt on its validity. It was not until 11 January 2020 that Le Monde referred to, what can only be described, without inverted commas, as police violence.

The recent changes in police violence are part and parcel of the neoliberal restructuring that started in the early 1970s with the launch of global security and defence markets. New approaches to management evolved to boost police productivity, which increasingly governed itself like a business with targets to achieve. The police are valued for their performance in hitting these targets; and the easiest way to do this is to make arrests for drug possession or irregular identity papers, which means targeting ethnic minorities and the working classes.

The number of fatalities caused by French police has more than doubled in the past five years, now standing at an average of 25 to 35 victims a year. The victims are still mainly from ethnic minorities and working class. Whether they face demonstrators or banlieue youths, police officers perpetrate the forms of violence that the upper classes deem necessary to prop up an increasingly unequal social order. Police violence is not the result of the French state losing control: it is a long-established technique of government.

Recent changes and acknowledgments that something is wrong are nothing more than smokescreens. As if to illustrate this point, the recent announcement that the police would stop using GLI-F4 teargas grenades was followed by plans to replace it with another teargas grenade, GM2L, which some have argued is just as bad.

None of this violence has lessened the will for popular resistance. Just as the family and friends of victims of police violence have organised around this for decades, the gilets jaunes movement has brought new segments of the population into contact with police violence. Despite it, they persist in organising and building forms of solidarity, hinting at a freer form of life.

Mathieu Rigouste is a researcher in social sciences and the author of La Domination Policire (2013)

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The violence of the French police is not new, but more people are seeing it now - The Guardian

Fox News parent company board member Paul Ryan, who previously served as speaker of the House, made a bold prediction Tuesday: If President Donald Trump wins a second term, he will take on the issue of health care again which would devastate peoples lives if it comes to fruition.

The potential impact of repealing the Affordable Care Act, as Republicans tried and failed to do in 2017, would mean tens of millions more people living without health insurance or paying increased premiums, and insurance companies would again be allowed to deny coverage due to preexisting conditions. Indeed, Ryan gave a presentation on the issue in 2017 in which he appeared to object to the whole principle of health insurance in the first place and spoke positively of switching over to an economy of individual price-shopping for important medical procedures.

As a result of these high stakes, health care was a major issue that drove Democratic victories in 2018. (And the Trump administration is still trying to get the whole ACA thrown out in court.)

Ryan made his prediction Tuesday in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, at the Middle East and Africa Summit hosted by the Milken Institute, an economic think tank founded by Michael Milken who is both a noted philanthropist and one of the most notorious corporate criminals of the 1980s.

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Fox Corp. board member Paul Ryan says Trump will "go after" health care reform in second term - Media Matters for America

Leading health experts from around the world have been meeting at the World Health Organizations Geneva headquarters to assess the current level of knowledge about the new COVID-19 disease, identify gaps and work together to accelerate and fund priority research needed to help stop this outbreak and prepare for any future outbreaks.

The 2-day forum was convened in line with the WHO R&D Blueprint a strategy for developing drugs and vaccines before epidemics, and accelerating research and development while they are occurring.

This outbreak is a test of solidarity -- political, financial and scientific. We need to come together to fight a common enemy that does not respect borders, ensure that we have the resources necessary to bring this outbreak to an end and bring our best science to the forefront to find shared answers to shared problems. Research is an integral part of the outbreak response, said WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. I appreciate the positive response of the research community to join us at short notice and come up with concrete plans and commitment to work together.

The meeting, hosted in collaboration with GloPID-R (the Global Research Collaboration for Infectious Disease Preparedness) brought together major research funders and over 300 scientists and researchers from a large variety of disciplines. They discussed all aspects of the outbreak and ways to control it including:

This meeting allowed us to identify the urgent priorities for research. As a group of funders we will continue to mobilize, coordinate and align our funding to enable the research needed to tackle this crisis and stop the outbreak, in partnership with WHO, said Professor Yazdan Yazdanpanah, chair of GloPID-R. Equitable access making sure we share data and reach those most in need, in particular those in lower and middle-income countries, is fundamental to this work which must be guided by ethical considerations at all times.

During the meeting, the more than 300 scientists and researchers participating both in person and virtually agreed on a set of global research priorities. They also outlined mechanisms for continuing scientific interactions and collaborations beyond the meeting which will be coordinated and facilitated by WHO. They worked with research funders to determine how necessary resources can be mobilized so that critical research can start immediately.

The deliberations will form the basis of a research and innovation roadmap charting all the research needed and this will be used by researchers and funders to accelerate the research response.

GloPID-R is a global alliance of international research funding organizations investing in preparedness and response to epidemics.

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12 February 2020 News release World experts and funders set priorities for COVID-19 research - World Health Organization

Democratic National CommitteeChair Tom Perez met privately on Tuesday with members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus to hear concerns over the nominating process from the partys left flank. The conversation came in the wake of progressive frustration over the Iowa Democratic Partys handling of the caucuses last week in which Sen. Bernie Sanders topped former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, but a series of snafus prolonged and frustrated the process, obfuscated the results, and left Buttigieg claiming a two-delegate victory.

Perez, according to people in the room, brought up the debacle himself, criticizing the IDP foritshandling of the caucus, promising the limited recanvass Sanders has called for would be carried out effectively and professionally. Last week, Perez had attempted to take belated control of the situation at one point, he even called for a recanvass of the results but was rebuffed by Iowa Democratic Party Chair Troy Price, who said Perez didnt have the authority to do so.

What happened last week was completely unacceptable, Perez told The Intercept in a statement. We are all in this together. We succeed together, and we all endure challenges together. Weve been successful in electing Democrats up and down the ballot in 2017, 2018, and 2019, and I think were going to win this presidential election in 2020. Thats our sweet spot, and we are building the organizational structure needed to get there. And I think we have to have a conversation, and Ive said this more than once, about the issue of primaries versus caucuses.

The role of American oligarch Mike Bloomberg in the race also came up in the meeting. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., asked Perez what procedures he had in place to monitor conflicts of interest for the officials he names to key Democratic National Convention committees. Tlaib noted that the former New York City mayor had two paid surrogates on the DNCs rules committee. The DNC had previously said the committee members had no say over a recent decision to change the rules for qualifying for Democratic debates a rules change that would allow Bloomberg to participate. Perez did not spell out any particular conflict of interest provision the DNC uses, but instead said that he also named Larry Cohen, a supporter of Bernie Sanders, to a committee.

Reps. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., and Brenda Lawrence, D-Mich., told Perez they were frustrated by reports that some DNC members were considering changing the rules around superdelegates to allow them to vote in the first round at the convention, a clear effort to undermine a progressive candidate.Perez was emphatic that no such rules change would be made, arguing that the process had been allowed to play out through internal committees and that process would be respected. We made these reforms, we did it in a very inclusive way, we voted, and we are implementing them. Period. End of story, Perez told The Intercept, reflecting what he told the CPC.(Lee and Lawrence both endorsed Sen. Kamala Harris for president.)

Congressional Progressive Caucus Co-Chair Mark Pocan, and Reps. Katherine Clark, Yvette Clarke, and Sheila Jackson Lee attended the meeting as well, sources said, though Co-Chair Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., and Vice Chair Ro Khanna, D-Calif., were not there.

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DNC Chair Tom Perez Gets Earful From Progressive Caucus - The Intercept