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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)

Excerpt from:
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.

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

A failed computer app has some people predicting the beginning of the end for the Iowa caucuses as the three-ring political circus to kick off the nations quadrennial presidential sweepstakes.

Not solely because the caucuses are a 19th century system that doesnt adapt well to 21st century sensibilities. Heck, caucuses didnt adapt well to late 20th century sensibilities.

It was inevitable that what the caucuses were meant to do start a long and involved process for picking a few delegates to another meeting, the Democratic National Convention, almost six months later wouldnt measure up to the needs of the 24-hour news networks and their drive to pick instant winners and losers in the presidential race.

But last weeks caucuses didnt really fail in their main function, which is to start the process of picking delegates for the Democratic National Convention.

Despite the problems with producing a count of delegate strength for the cluster of Democratic candidates last Monday night, the Iowa Democratic Party will eventually figure out how many delegates for each candidate will move on to the next round of meetings, where they will be winnowed again before the next round of meetings, and so on until the state will have a representative sample to send to Milwaukee, where this years party convention will be held.

Even after they were elevated to vaunted first in the nation status, the final results of the Iowa caucuses often werent known that first night, because it took so long to get and tabulate results from thousands of meetings across the state. That doesnt much matter to the people who were at those meetings, because if they were chosen to be a delegate to the next round of meetings, they knew it.

The only people really inconvenienced by Mondays computer issues were the talking heads on the 24-hour news networks. And for that, they should not blame the Iowa Democratic Party, but themselves.

The national media, primarily round-the-clock cable news, built the Iowa caucuses into a seminal event on which they could rely for a mixture of folksy features and navel-gazing analysis for months. Sure, Iowans were somewhat complicit in this by being so darn nice. They agree to answer any foolish question that a well-coiffed, overdressed reporter might ask as they eat breakfast at a diner, visit a county fair, milk a cow or push a stroller down Main Street. Full, quotable answer, equal parts insightful comment about a candidates policy and folksy observation about his or her demeanor.

Most times, a reporter doesnt even have to ask for their full name, occupation, age, party affiliation, marital status, number of children and number of times theyve attended a caucus. When I was in Iowa covering the 1988 caucuses, I got the feeling that if I asked for a voters blood type, they would have gladly provided it.

Its likely the Iowa chambers of commerce had a hand in this too, because once every four years they have the opportunity to fill up the hotels, restaurants and bars, not just in Des Moines and Iowa City, but in Davenport, Keokuk, Council Bluffs, Sioux City and Ottumwa.

The problems with using Iowa as a bellwether for the United States are well-known: Its not as demographically or racially diverse as the nation as a whole, its more rural and the average age is older.

The national media usually spend about 45 seconds telling us those shortcomings before spending a half-hour discussing what the latest poll says about which candidates Iowa voters are supporting or which issues are most important to them for securing that support. Its sort of like the long list of side effects read by the announcer at the end of a pharmaceutical commercial after the audio and video has proclaimed a new drug is a miracle cure for some condition.

When Jimmy Carter surprised everyone in 1976 by winning the Iowa caucuses, the national media found themselves struggling to answer two questions Who is Jimmy Carter and where is Iowa? (Fun fact for your next political trivia contest: Carter actually finished second in the caucuses that year, behind uncommitted.)

After Carter won the nomination and the presidency, the national media decided never to be caught so flat-footed again. Every four years they ramped up coverage, so that now political reporters write about events that are happening not just in the election year, but up to two years before.

I plead guilty to such an offense, having written about the appearance of a certain governor at an Iowa political dinner in June 2018. But in my defense, it was our governor.

By summer 2019, cable news was going live from the butter sculpture at the Iowa State Fair with breathless recaps of stump speeches being made to small crowds eating corn dogs. By the fall, they were dispatching teams of fresh, young reporters to travel the back roads of the Hawkeye State. As soon as Christmas and New Years were over, they were counting down the days, hours and minutes to caucus night. The weekend before, they decamped anchors from Washington, D.C., and New York studios and set up panels of pundits and data crunchers to analyze the numbers.

The Democrats even played into their hands by agreeing to release extra numbers on how many people showed up for each candidate as well as the standard count of delegates each candidate wins. This had the double bonus of giving the general public something closer to an election that most people understand, as opposed to a caucus that many people dont, as well as more numbers to crunch. It could even lead to two different winners, one who had the most people show up and another who received the most delegates, with a chance for talking heads to debate which was more important.

So its not surprising that the gathered media were extremely perturbed by a lack of losers to deride and numbers to dissect when the untested app didnt work. But the need for that app was a response to the candidates and the news medias need for quick results on caucus night.

One can expect a bit of reflective hand-wringing about whether they put too much emphasis on the Iowa caucuses and possibly a task force to discuss whether they should change tactics for 2024.

But Id be happy to take the money of anyone whos betting reporters wont be traipsing all over the state in 2023, hanging out in diners, camping out at the state fair and interviewing county chairmen from Burlington to Spirit Lake about how many candidates theyve had in their front parlor.

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Spin Control: Anger over Iowa caucus problems partly the media's fault - The Spokesman-Review