Fire, pestilence and a country at war with itself: the Trump presidency is over

Robert Reich
Sun 31 May 2020


 

Donald Trump looks back as he boards Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House on Saturday. Photograph: Patrick Semansky/AP

You’d be forgiven if you hadn’t noticed. His verbal bombshells are louder than ever, but Donald J Trump is no longer president of the United States.

By having no constructive response to any of the monumental crises now convulsing America, Trump has abdicated his office.

He is not governing. He’s golfing, watching cable TV and tweeting.

How has Trump responded to the widespread unrest following the murder in Minneapolis of George Floyd, a black man who died after a white police officer knelt on his neck for minutes as he was handcuffed on the ground?

Trump called the protesters “thugs” and threatened to have them shot. “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” he tweeted, parroting a former Miami police chief whose words spurred race riots in the late 1960s.

On Saturday, he gloated about “the most vicious dogs, and most ominous weapons” awaiting protesters outside the White House, should they ever break through Secret Service lines.

In reality, Donald Trump doesn’t run the government of the United States. He doesn’t manage anything

Trump’s response to the last three ghastly months of mounting disease and death has been just as heedless. Since claiming Covid-19 was a “Democratic hoax” and muzzling public health officials, he has punted management of the coronavirus to the states.

Governors have had to find ventilators to keep patients alive and protective equipment for hospital and other essential workers who lack it, often bidding against each other. They have had to decide how, when and where to reopen their economies.

Trump has claimed “no responsibility at all” for testing and contact-tracing – the keys to containing the virus. His new “plan” places responsibility on states to do their own testing and contact-tracing.

Trump is also awol in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

More than 41 million Americans are jobless. In the coming weeks temporary eviction moratoriums are set to end in half of the states. One-fifth of Americans missed rent payments this month. Extra unemployment benefits are set to expire at the end of July.

What is Trump’s response? Like Herbert Hoover, who in 1930 said “the worst is behind us” as thousands starved, Trump says the economy will improve and does nothing about the growing hardship. The Democratic-led House passed a $3tn relief package on 15 May. Mitch McConnell has recessed the Senate without taking action and Trump calls the bill dead on arrival. 

What about other pressing issues a real president would be addressing? The House has passed nearly 400 bills this term, including measures to reduce climate change, enhance election security, require background checks on gun sales, reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act and reform campaign finance. All are languishing in McConnell’s inbox. Trump doesn’t seem to be aware of any of them.

There is nothing inherently wrong with golfing, watching television and tweeting. But if that’s pretty much all that a president does when the nation is engulfed in crises, he is not a president.

Trump’s tweets are no substitute for governing. They are mostly about getting even.

When he’s not fomenting violence against black protesters, he’s accusing a media personality of committing murder, retweeting slurs about a black female politician’s weight and the House speaker’s looks, conjuring up conspiracies against himself supposedly organized by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and encouraging his followers to “liberate” their states from lockdown restrictions.

He tweets bogus threats that he has no power to carry out – withholding funds from states that expand absentee voting, “overruling” governors who don’t allow places of worship to reopen “right away”, and punishing Twitter for factchecking him.

And he lies incessantly.

In reality, Donald Trump doesn’t run the government of the United States. He doesn’t manage anything. He doesn’t organize anyone. He doesn’t administer or oversee or supervise. He doesn’t read memos. He hates meetings. He has no patience for briefings. His White House is in perpetual chaos.

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His advisers aren’t truth-tellers. They’re toadies, lackeys, sycophants and relatives.

Since moving into the Oval Office in January 2017, Trump hasn’t shown an ounce of interest in governing. He obsesses only about himself.

But it has taken the present set of crises to reveal the depths of his self-absorbed abdication – his utter contempt for his job, his total repudiation of his office.

Trump’s nonfeasance goes far beyond an absence of leadership or inattention to traditional norms and roles. In a time of national trauma, he has relinquished the core duties and responsibilities of the presidency.

He is no longer president. The sooner we stop treating him as if he were, the better.


Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a columnist for Guardian US

LONG READ 

How a decade of privatisation and cuts exposed England to coronavirus 

Government reliance on private contractors follows dramatic changes to local councils and public services

by Felicity Lawrence, Juliette Garside, David Pegg, David Conn, Severin Carrell and Harry Davies

Sun 31 May 2020
FOR CHARTS AND LINKS
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/31/how-a-decade-of-privatisation-and-cuts-exposed-england-to-coronavirus

Every Thursday at 8pm, millions of Britons have opened their front doors or stood on balconies to applaud the NHS. The ritual has been a weekly expression of gratitude to medical workers, and national pride in a state-run health service said to be the envy of the world.

“Let’s not forget,” Boris Johnson said in early March, near the start of the coronavirus crisis, “we already have a fantastic NHS, fantastic testing systems and fantastic surveillance of the spread of disease.”

Yet those who have experienced the government’s emerging testing and tracing operations for Covid-19 have had limited contact with the NHS. Instead, Britons with symptoms are directed to a network of 50 drive-through testing centres, set up by management consultants at Deloitte.

Upon arrival, patients are marshalled not by NHS staff, but workers in hi-vis jackets supplied by outsourcing companies, such as Serco, G4S, Mitie and Sodexo. Those who cannot make the drive have received postal test kits, processed by the private diagnostics company Randox and delivered by Amazon.

When contact tracing to stop the spread of the virus finally moved up the agenda in late April, the health and social care secretary, Matt Hancock, said the job would be done with an as–yet unproven NHS app. The app has been developed by private firms for NHSX, the technology wing of the health service, which is also responsible for a Covid-19 government data operation involving tech companies Palantir, Faculty, Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

On Thursday the government finally launched its long-awaited NHS Test and Trace Service. But despite the name, many of the 25,000 contact tracers tracking those potentially exposed to Covid-19 and advising them to self-isolate will be working not for the NHS, but rather the outsourcing firms Serco and Sitel.

The government’s reliance on private contractors during the public health emergency comes after a decade of public sector reorganisation, marketisation and deep cuts to services and local government in England. The Guardian has interviewed dozens of public health directors, politicians, experts in infectious disease control, government scientific and political advisers, NHS leaders and emergency planners about the years leading up to the pandemic.

They described how an infrastructure that was once in place to respond to public health crises was fractured, and in some places demolished, by policies introduced by recent Conservative governments, with some changes going as far back as Labour’s years in power.

“The undermining of our responsiveness to a pandemic was one of my major concerns,” said Gabriel Scally, a professor of public health at the University of Bristol and a former regional director of public health in the NHS for almost 20 years. “There has been a destruction of the infrastructure that stops England coping with major emergencies. It absolutely explains why you’re now seeing private companies being brought into these functions.”
Councils left in the dark

Local authorities are the Cinderellas of government, their work often overlooked. But in the middle of a public health crisis, counties, districts and boroughs traditionally become the foot soldiers of national response. Few have been as badly hit as the east London borough of Newham, the local authority with the highest Covid-19 mortality rate in England and Wales.

Yet Newham’s director of public health, Jason Strelitz, was left in the dark at the start. He had no official notification that the virus had arrived in his area in mid-March, and only found out when he logged on to the government’s public coronavirus tracker web page to make his daily check on the declared numbers. Strelitz did not know who in Newham had Covid-19, where they had been tested, or which part of the borough they came from.

“We’re really concerned about the way national testing has been set up,” Strelitz said. “We still don’t have a clear picture of who is being tested in our area nor of the extent of community transmission in Newham.”

Jason Strelitz at the Covid-19 hub for local authority action in Newham. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

In normal times, a Public Health England (PHE) representative would be expected to contact Strelitz’s environmental health teams if a case of a notifiable disease was found in the area that needed following up, enabling them to set to work tracing contacts and containing an outbreak. But the government had just abandoned community testing and tracing so local authorities were not being contacted at that point.

Newham is among the most deprived boroughs in the country. Like all the public health directors interviewed by the Guardian, Strelitz has deep knowledge of the characteristics of his patch that make its health inequalities so stark and its residents so vulnerable to the disease. About 30,000 people have been identified by the council as being at high risk – many of them over 70, living alone and isolated.

Even now, with large-scale community testing resumed, Strelitz said he was not receiving useful test data from the centralised, privately contracted operation created by Hancock. He also has concerns about the contact-tracing operation being set up.

In addition to the contact-tracing app, the government has once more turned to outsourcing companies, including Serco and Sitel, to recruit and train 25,000 contact tracers. Working on a salary just above minimum wage, the majority will have no medical training. Using scripts, they will contact those who have tested positive, trace people they have been in contact with, and advise them on how to isolate.

“Contact tracing is a sensitive issue – I’m not sure how well it can be done with a remote call centre with no understanding of people’s local context,” Strelitz said.

Dominic Harrison, the director of public health for Blackburn and Darwen, has similar concerns. Speaking earlier this month he said there was “a huge disconnect” between different branches of government, with some functions of the local public health system having been disabled in recent years.

“People like environmental health officers, community and neighbourhood teams, youth services workers – the people who you could deploy in a crisis, who already know where the vulnerable are and how to reach them – those were the kind of staff they used during 2009 swine flu to work closely with the NHS, but they have been lost,” Harrison said. 

Council workers in Hull disinfect pavements and structures to guard against the transmission of coronavirus. Photograph: Lindsey Parnaby/AFP via Getty ImagesThe Labour leader of Nottingham city council, David Mellen, said Conservative ministers had spent so many years shrinking the state locally “they have forgotten what local authorities can do”. Nottingham has had its central government support grant cut by 80% since 2013 and, like many other councils, no longer has reserves for emergencies such as coronavirus. The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government has made an emergency grant of £3.2bn to councils for Covid-19 costs, which the communities secretary, Robert Jenrick, has defended as fair and generous. Mellen disagrees. Nottingham, he said, had been given £19.8m as its share of the exceptional grant, but had already spent well over £12m extra on Covid-19 while losing at least £19m in revenue because of the lockdown.

A Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) spokesperson did not dispute that cuts to central government grants could have had an impact on local public health networks. However, she pointed to the £3.2bn emergency funding for councils, which she said was in addition to an increase of £2.9bn in councils’ core spending power this year. “Protecting the public’s health is, and has always been, a priority for the UK government,” she said.
A decade of austerity

Next month, Britain will mark an anniversary many Conservative ministers would rather forget. Shortly after 12.30pm on 22 June 2010, George Osborne stepped up to the dispatch box as chancellor of the new coalition government and announced the longest and deepest period of cuts to public service spending since the second world war.

Ushering in a new age of austerity to a raucous Commons, Osborne outlined £81bn of cuts over five years. His aim was twofold: to eliminate the government’s budget deficit and to reduce its debt as a share of GDP. The emergency budget would, he said, bring the country back from the brink of ruin. “It pays for the past. It plans for the future. And it protects the most vulnerable in our society,” Osborne told MPs.

It was the prime minister, David Cameron, who had the previous year introduced the notion of “the age of irresponsibility giving way to the age of austerity”. He said he expected the public spending cuts would be permanent as the private and voluntary sectors stepped in to deliver public services better than the state could. Some government departments would be cut by a third and most public sector workers would have to accept a pay freeze.

Along with welfare, some of the most brutal reductions were imposed on local government in England as Osborne transferred the political risk of austerity to councils. Over the next decade, local authorities had 60% of their funding from central government cut, according to the Local Government Association. At the same time their ability to increase council tax, to try to replace the lost revenue, was capped. The cuts fell disproportionately on those authorities with the poorest populations.

Cameron promised he would “cut the deficit, not the NHS” and Osborne ringfenced its budget. It got cash increases, but these were less than 1% a year, and failed to keep pace with growing demand from an ageing population.

Approximately 32,000 overnight beds have been lost from hospitals in England in just over a decade, including some lost under Labour. Allyson Pollock, a professor of public health at Newcastle University, points out that the number of beds lost is roughly the same as the beds the NHS had to scramble to free up for Covid-19 patients.

When the coronavirus spread to Europe earlier this year, the UK ranked 24th among European countries for its numbers of critical care beds, with 6.6 per 100,000 population, compared with Germany, which topped the league with 29.2 per 100,000.
NHS fragmentation

Two years after Osborne’s announcement, with austerity beginning to bite, the then health secretary, Andrew Lansley, embarked on a complete market-oriented restructuring of the NHS. Despite Cameron’s pre-election promise that there would be no more pointless, disruptive top-down reorganisations, critics argue that Lansley’s 2012 Health and Social Care Act did just that.

Labour had done its fair share of subjecting the NHS to upheaval. Its programme of building new hospitals under the private finance initiative required other hospital and community health services to close, and shrank bed numbers to help cover the high annual fees to private companies. It accelerated changes brought in by the Conservatives to mimic a market, and created NHS trusts that could operate as semi-autonomous corporate bodies. By 2006, Labour’s reorganisations had created 152 primary care trusts (PCTs). Overarching priorities were set by regional strategic health authorities and the Department of Health.

But every area still had a Public Health Observatory, which included infectious disease control teams. Under government pandemic plans, each had to identify rapid response teams for testing and tracing, and these were activated during the swine flu outbreak in 2009.

Health authorities also had consultants in communicable disease control appointed at senior level on a par with NHS hospital consultants. An independent public body, the Health Protection Agency (HPA), provided specialist support on the threat of emerging diseases. There were critics of the structures, but in planning for emergencies there was, at least, a clear chain of command and control. “Labour started the process of fragmenting public health but it was at least still integrated with communicable disease control and the NHS,” Pollock said.

Lansley’s legislation did away with much of that. He abolished PCTs and strategic health authorities. Instead, existing public health structures were stripped out of the NHS and redistributed, along with their budgets and staff. In a dramatic shift, local authorities were given responsibility for public health for their areas, with larger ones being required to appoint a director of public health.

David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Andrew Lansley speaking with staff at Frimley Park hospital in 2011. Photograph: Reuters

“They took a perfectly well-functioning public health system and fractured it,” said Julie Hotchkiss, a PCT director with responsibility for emergency pandemic response who moved to York city council during the changes. She said it took her a year to work out where her infectious disease control nurses had gone. “No one knew and there was no one to ask.”

Dr Jeanelle de Gruchy, the president of the Association of Directors of Public Health, argues it was right for local authorities to have a key role in tackling health inequalities, which tend to relate to people’s living circumstances and socio-economic status. She regards the transfer of public health to local authorities as “incredibly important and positive”. But she adds: “It’s a very big job and the transition came at a time of cuts to the public sector, not just to local government, although those were huge.”

Lansley’s act also created an entirely new agency that has been at the centre of the response to the coronavirus outbreak: Public Health England. It was given two primary responsibilities: improving health and reducing inequalities by tackling “lifestyle” diseases, such as obesity; and protecting the public from infectious diseases and environmental hazards.

The HPA, which had previously taken a lead on infectious disease control, was folded into PHE. Martin McKee, a professor of European public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, argues the result of all these new arrangements was “a hugely weakened and fragmented public health system with consequences writ large in Covid-19”.

The DHSC rejected the suggestion that the system was fragmented and that changes had affected the government’s ability to respond. Lord Lansley did too. He told the Guardian that an independent review of the public health changes from 2013 published by the the King’s Fund thinktank in January, “concluded that they were the right reforms, but were not supported subsequently by the right level of resources”. Combating health threats, such as pandemics, was “no more or less fragmented” after 2013, Lansley said, and the problem was not the new structures or moving public health to local government but money. “Our intention was for a real-terms increase in public health budgets alongside those for the NHS, but this was not followed through from 2015 onwards,” he said.

The ringfenced annual grant for public health from central government to local authorities – currently about £3.2bn – has been cut by a cumulative £850m in real terms since 2015-16, according to the King’s Fund review.

During his two-decade career in government, Scally had been involved in emergency responses for swine flu, foot and mouth, BSE, and the fuel crisis. For previous epidemics, he said, the government took “a public health approach; go in quick and hard, test, trace, isolate, throw everything at it”. But, he said, “the whole system was demolished” by Lansley’s changes, which led him to resign.

He then worked as an adviser for Labour’s former shadow health secretary, Andy Burnham, who is now the mayor of Greater Manchester. Burnham recalls Scally constantly warning him as Lansley’s bill was going through parliament that “we were losing pandemic preparedness”.
Testing time for Public Health England

No branch of government appears to have received more flak over its handling of the Covid-19 outbreak than Public Health England. The government’s chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, suggested it had failed to expand testing at the right moment. Its top executive has been criticised by leading public health experts, such as Prof Anthony Costello of University College London, for being “invisible”.

Even before the outbreak, the agency was a target of complaints from across the spectrum. Leftwing critics have accused PHE of failing to be tough enough in its role of promoting better health. The right has accused it of being the instrument of a nanny state with a bloated budget. PHE has had precious few political friends. But even those who might be natural allies – like Prof John Ashton, the former regional director of public health for north-west England – suggest it has “had a bad Covid war”.

Some of this might be down to bad luck. Its chief executive, Duncan Selbie, caught the virus along with key advisers in Westminster, and its director of health protection, Prof Paul Cosford, has cancer and has been self-isolating, although both have been working throughout.

However, there have also been structural challenges. The Lansley act created an agency that lacked independence from government, in contrast to its predecessor, the HPA. That has led to suspicions that some PHE decisions were politically influenced, such as the varying guidance on what kind of personal protective equipment (PPE) was needed for frontline staff treating Covid-19 patients. In late March, PHE said a lower specification of protective gowns than previously advised could be used, leading unions to accuse it of basing decisions on shortages of PPE, rather than evidence. This month, it downgraded the type of masks NHS workers should use “as a pragmatic approach for times of severe shortage”.

 

Clinical staff wearing PPE as they care for a patient at the intensive care unit at Royal Papworth hospital in Cambridge. Photograph: Getty Images

PHE disputes that it was slow off the mark, and Selbie points out that it rolled out the details for its first diagnostic test in January, making it “the fastest deployment of a novel test in recent UK history”. It says the guidance on PPE has been misunderstood: it was offering a solution in the event of extreme shortages.

“Our track record speaks for itself,” a PHE spokesperson said. “During 2018-19 alone, we responded to more than 10,000 disease outbreaks and emergencies across England, including meningitis, measles, E coli and the first ever UK case of monkeypox. Our flu vaccination programme grows every year and cases of TB have fallen to the lowest level since records began.” They said that far from being invisible, Selbie had been at the coalface, helping to advise government on its decision-making.

The DHSC spokesperson cited a positive report by the International Association of National Public Health Institutes, which described PHE as a “strong, capable, coordinated, united and efficient public health agency”. The report only examined PHE and not the public health systems devolved to local authorities. The same report pointed out that “there is scope for greater clarity in the responsibilities of PHE’s local partners”.

In its defence, PHE has had to absorb disparate functions since its creation in 2013. And it too has been struck by austerity: a public health source said PHE’s operational budget sustained a 40% real-terms cut between 2013 and 2019.

It was PHE that initially had responsibility for testing, tracing and advising isolation for those who became infected. It was a huge and complicated task, but one the World Health Organization has made clear from the outset was the single most important thing countries could do to suppress the disease. The government’s decision to abandon large-scale testing and tracing on 12 March remains one of its most controversial decisions.

PHE says it reprioritised limited resources rather than abandoning tracing completely. “When the lockdown began, our contact-tracing resource was refocused on to complex outbreaks in care homes, prisons and immigration centres,” Selbie said. “The good news is, now that we have testing capacity in place and are working towards recovery, we can start mass contact tracing through the NHS test and trace programme.

“PHE’s contact tracing during the ‘‘contain’ phase of the pandemic bought several weeks of time for the government and the NHS to prepare for what was to come, and has undoubtedly saved lives,” he said.

Greg Clark, the chair of the Commons science and technology select committee, accused PHE of choosing to “concentrate” tests in its own limited number of labs rather than expanding capacity rapidly by using university and private labs, as the Germans and South Koreans had done, even though the need for mass testing was “identifiable from the beginning”. PHE responded by blaming the DHSC, saying it was responsible for decisions on testing policy.

The DHSC spokesperson said: “Although Britain had a world-class pharmaceutical industry, it did not have the existing diagnostic base necessary to test hundreds of thousands of people each week for a new virus.” She said the government had more than doubled the capacity of NHS and PHE laboratories since early March, with more than 3m tests carried out by mid-May, and that anyone with symptoms could now book a test.

The government boasts that its new Test and Trace programme will mobilise an “army” of contact tracers. But in the two months leading up to 12 March, PHE’s team resembled no more than a small platoon. The Guardian has established it consisted of just 70 staff in its field services, 120 in local health protection teams, and 20 specially recruited clinical staff. In total, the contact tracing operation to manage the pandemic consisted of just 210 people.

Documents released on Friday by the government’s Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies (Sage) suggest the contact-tracing operation initially only envisaged the need to deal with a handful of cases a week. Minutes from an 18 February meeting of the group said: “Currently PHE can cope with five new cases a week (requiring isolation of 800 contacts).” The minutes added: “Modelling suggests this capacity could be increased to 50 new cases a week (8,000 contact isolations) but this assumption needs to be stress-tested with PHE operational colleagues.”

Rather than ramp–up capacity, the government scientists instead agreed in the same meeting they would need data “to feed into trigger points for decisions on when the current monitoring and contact-tracing approach is no longer working”. The minutes added: “When there is sustained transmission in the UK, contact tracing will no longer be useful.”

PHE told the Sunday Telegraph that the reference to five cases a week was based on a modelling of how it would cope with imported cases of Covid-19 – and it was certain it had capacity to track and trace more cases at that time. “The model used an assumption of five importation events per week in the initial phase,” a PHE spokeswoman said. “This means five imported cases and subsequent cases that may arise as a consequence of those imported cases; the modelling considered the associated contacts for both. Modelling stated that the number of contacts could be managed by PHE.”

However, two days later, at another Sage meeting, the advisers acknowledged “individual cases could already have been missed” and again discussed when it would be appropriate to abandon the nascent operation. Appearing to acknowledge such a move would be controversial, the minutes said: “Any decision to discontinue contact tracing will generate a public reaction – which requires consideration with input from behavioural scientists.”

By the time community tracing was shelvedin mid–March, PHE had “contact traced” only 3,500 people who were likely to have been in close proximity with infected people on flights, cruises or other places where there were known outbreaks. Of those, only 3% tested positive for Covid-19 and were advised to self-isolate.

In other words, PHE had managed to identify and warn about 100 people with Covid-19 who might otherwise have spread the disease – a tiny fraction of the infected people. Vallance said there were 5,000 confirmed Covid cases when the community testing and tracing programme stopped, but epidemiologists at Imperial College London estimated 1.8 million people in Britain were infected by the end of March.

William Hanage, a professor of infectious disease epidemiology at Harvard University, said the numbers of PHE staff dedicated to contact tracing in Britain in the weeks leading up to mid-March was shocking. “I am sure that the people involved in this programme worked incredibly hard, and I have the utmost respect for them, tasked with doing this in the face of a global pandemic,” he said. “But it beggars belief to see these numbers held up as adequate.”
The elusive 100,000 target

On 2 April, three weeks after capacity had been overwhelmed and PHE had abandoned testing in the community, Hancock announced a five-pillar testing plan. He pledged to scale up the country’s testing capacity to reach a target of 100,000 tests a day by the end of the month.

But the architecture created in the postwar years to respond to pandemics was no longer standing. In the past, the Public Health Laboratories Service had been tasked with disease control, and with coordinating support and advice to the NHS and others. In 2003, Labour folded it into the HPA. Fifty PHLS labs that existed two decades ago have been merged with hospital labs or “consolidated” by successive governments to make efficiency savings. As of January this year, just eight laboratories remained under direct PHE control, along with 122 NHS labs in England.  

 Matt Hancock giving one of Downing Street’s daily coronavirus press briefings. Photograph: Pippa Fowles/10 Downing Street/AFP via Getty Images

Hancock expected hospital labs testing patients and staff and PHE to make up 25,000 of the ambitious 100,000 target. For the other 75,000 he turned to the private sector. Deloitte, one of the big four accountancy firms, was asked to set up a network of 50 drive-through rapid testing centres, and yet more private companies, such as Serco, Sodexo, Mitie and G4S, would operate and manage the day-to-day running of them.

A lab network to process the tests was also established. Deloitte was again given the coordinating role in the creation of new Lighthouse labs in Milton Keynes, Glasgow, Belfast and Cheshire and a further facility in Cambridge, with day-to-day running entrusted to a coalition of private and public partners, including universities and drug companies.

But Hancock’s 2 April announcement made no mention of one of the main purposes of testing: tracking or tracing.

The Guardian soon received reports from people trying to get tested of chaos at some sites, with results going astray, dangerously leaking swab samples arriving at labs, queues of more than three hours and symptomatic people being unable to book a test or told to make round trips of more than 100 miles to test centres. Many still report results taking seven to 10 days to arrive – too long to be useful for quarantine purposes – but the DHSC maintains that 97% of test results are obtained within 48 hours.

In the last week of April, the government changed its criteria for counting tests to include ones that had been dispatched, even if they had not been received, returned or processed. The date of 30 April came and Hancock missed his 100,000 target; the number of tests conducted that day was 81,611. But the next day, on 1 May, he appeared to smash it, as 122,347 tests were recorded in government data. The magic number had, by Hancock’s own admission, included nearly 30,000 postal tests sent out but not yet analysed. By 3 May the number was back down to 76,496, and the government would fail to meet its target for the next seven days, before getting back on track on 11 May.

For Chris Hopson, the chief executive of NHS Providers, which represents foundation trusts in England, Hancock’s single-minded focus on reaching an arbitrary number cost the country another precious month. “Too much of April was wasted by focusing on the 100,000 tests by 30 April target at the expense of other aspects of a clear strategy,” he said. “The testing strategy, if there was one, got hijacked on the basis of just meeting that target when there were lots of other things that needed to be done.”

Hopson said the saga also illustrates the danger of trying to control testing from the centre. “We need to be ready to do test, track and trace in every part of the country. That can only be done effectively with greater local control.”

Great explorers you’ve probably never heard of

Florence Baker: the polyglot slave girl turned intrepid explorer

The Transylvanian-born orphan was sold to an English traveller, with whom she discovered the wonders of Africa, married and fought to abolish slavery


Marcel Theroux Sun 31 May 2020
 

Lady Florence Baker, pictured in London in about 1870. Photograph: Henry Maull/Alamy

Passport details
Lady Florence Baker, née Flora Barbara Maria von Szász, or Sass. Born 6 August 1841 in Nagyenyed, then in the Kingdom of Hungary, now Aiud in present-day Romania.

Claim to fame
The details of Florence Baker’s early life are sketchy – fordramatic reasons. As an orphan she was sold into the Ottoman slave trade, and in 1859 found herself on the auction block in Vidin, in present-day Bulgaria. Blonde, blue-eyed and polylingual, she caught the eye of English traveller Samuel Baker, who bought her.

Baker, a middle-aged widower, took her with him as he headed to Africa to search for the source of the Nile. Along the way, Florence learned Arabic, brokered peace when their team of locals mutinied, and nearly died of sunstroke. They didn’t find the source of the Nile, but she and Samuel were the first Europeans to see Murchison Falls and Lake Albert in Uganda. When Samuel went back to England in 1865 to be knighted, she went with him as his wife. Explorer David Livingstone wrote snarkily: “Baker married his mistress at Cairo and by all accounts she deserved it after going through all she did for him.” It’s said that a scandalised Queen Victoria refused to receive them at court. Between 1870 and 1873, the Bakers made another expedition to east Africa to try to suppress the slave trade – presumably a cause Florence felt strongly about.

Supporting documentation
Florence kept diaries of her travels in English, but has been overshadowed by her husband and still lacks a definitive biography. In the writings of others – Samuel especially – she emerges as a person of enormous resourcefulness and sangfroid, whether serving afternoon tea to guests in the jungle or preparing a last-ditch defence against the king of Bunyoro’s army.

Distinguishing marks
It may just be the long exposure times of 19th-century photography, but pictures of Florence portray an icy calm and imperturbability.

Last sighted
Widowed in 1893, Florence lived until 1916 at Sandford Orleigh, the Bakers’ estate in Devon, and was doubtless gratified when the Daily News called her “a refined English lady”.

Intrepidness rating
Florence, like Daenerys Targaryen in Game of Thrones, was blessed with resilience that seems to require supernatural explanat

China, Iran mock US amid ongoing riots: 'I can't breathe'


Sam Dorman
MAY 30, 2020

China fired back at the United States' concerns with Hong Kong's freedom by pointing directly at the racial unrest that has exploded in America, simply tweeting, "I can't breathe".

© REUTERS/Eric Thayer TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY A demonstrator looks on during a rally near the White House against the death in Minneapolis police custody of George Floyd in Washington, D.C. U.S. May 30, 2020. REUTERS/Eric Thayer TPX IMAGES OF THE DAYhttps://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/china-iran-mock-us-amid-ongoing-riots-i-can-t-breathe/ar-BB14Oon0

Tweets from Hua Chunying, a foreign ministry spokesperson, came as the U.S. struggles with nationwide riots that have erupted in response to George Floyd's death in Minneapolis.

Her "I can't breathe" attack touched a nerve as both Floyd and Eric Garner -- both unarmed black men -- uttered that expression moments before they died, while facing what many believe was excessive force by police.

State Department spokesperson Morgan Ortegus had castigated China for the way it treated Hong Kong protesters. "Freedom-loving people around the world must stand with the rule of law and hold to account the Chinese Communist Party, which has flagrantly broken its promises to the people of Hong Kong," Ortagus said.

US, UK CALL FOR ACTION AT UN SECURITY COUNCIL OVER CHINA'S HONG KONG CRACKDOWN

"I can't breathe." pic.twitter.com/UXHgXMT0lk— Hua Chunying 华春莹 (@SpokespersonCHN) May 30, 2020

That tweet was just the latest in an apparent strategy of China accusing the U.S. government of hypocrisy as it faced criticism for the way it countered pro-Democracy protests in Hong Kong. Most recently, President Trump has announced that he would block Hong Kong's trading privileges after China's ceremonial parliament voted to bypass the semi-autonomous territory in enacting national security legislation.

In another tweet, Hua posted a segment from RT, which is funded by the Russian government, blasting the U.S. for supporting violent protests in Hong Kong while denouncing rioters as "thugs."

ORTAGUS CALLS OUT CHINA FOR 'BREAKING THEIR WORD' IN HONG KONG: 'WE'VE SEEN THE EROSION OF RULE OF LAW'

Iran similarly attacked the U.S., tweeting an altered press release in which the State Department attacked Iran amid ongoing protests in 2018.

"Some don't think #BlackLivesMatter," Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif said. "To those of us who do: it is long overdue for the entire world to wage war against racism. Time for a #WorldAgainstRacism."

Hua also suggested the U.S. employed similar regulations and likened Hong Kong to China's "hand."

CHINA'S NATIONAL SECURITY BILL FOR HONG KONG THREATENS LIBERTIES, AUTONOMY: US, WESTERN POWERS

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo set the stage for Trump’s announcement by notifying Congress on Wednesday that Hong Kong no longer has the high degree of autonomy that it is guaranteed under the “one country, two systems” framework.

China, Iran mock US amid ongoing riots: 'I can't breathe'

Trump said Friday that his administration would begin eliminating the “full range” of agreements that had given Hong Kong a relationship with the U.S. that mainland China lacked, including exemptions from controls on certain exports.

“China has replaced its promised formula of one country, two systems, with one country, one system,” he said, echoing statements by pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong.






 A NYPD police car is set on fire as protesters clash with police during a march against the death in Minneapolis police custody of George Floyd, in the Brooklyn borough of New York City, U.S., May 30, 2020. REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz TPX  

50 SLIDES © Eduardo Munoz/Reuters 

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A Hong Kong government statement accused Trump and his administration of smearing and demonizing the government’s duty to safeguard national security and called allegations that the security law would undermine individual freedoms “simply fallacious.”

“President Trump’s claim that Hong Kong now operated under ‘one country, one system’ was completely false and ignored the facts on the ground,” the statement said.

Separately, Hong Kong Secretary for Justice Teresa Cheng told reporters that it was “completely false and wrong” to say the territory was losing its autonomy.

Trump's exit from WHO met with dismay from global health experts

“The U.S. government has gone rogue at a time of humanitarian emergency”

 Karla Adam  USA Today MAY 30, 2020

LONDON —Global health experts and government officials joined in criticism Saturday over President Trump's plans to cut ties with the World Health Organization and funnel U.S. money elsewhere.

In the remarks made in the Rose Garden on Friday, Trump blamed China for the covid-19 pandemic and accused Beijing of effectively controlling the WHO and pressuring it to “mislead the world.”

The United States is the single biggest financial contributor to the U.N. agency, and its exit will hit its budget even as it struggles with a global pandemic that has resulted in more than 364,000 deaths.

Trump said that the annual $400 million that the U.S. contributes to the organization will be redirected “to other worldwide and deserving urgent global public health needs” without giving specifics.

Jens Spahn, Germany’s health minister, tweeted in English on Saturday that Trump’s decision to sever ties with the organization was “a disappointing backlash for International Health.”

Spahn added that the WHO “needs reform” if it is to make “any difference for the future.” Germany will take over the rotating E.U. presidency in July and the minister said finding a way for the European Union to “take a leading role and engage more financially” with the U.N. agency would be prioritized.

South Africa’s health minister, Zweli Mkhize, called Trump’s move “unfortunate.”

“Certainly, when faced with a serious pandemic, you want all nations in the world to be particularly focused … on one common enemy,” he told reporters, according to the Associated Press.

A spokesman for the British government said the WHO had an “important role to play in leading the international health response” to the pandemic. “We have no plans to withdraw our funding,” the statement said.

The European Union urged Trump to reconsider

In a joint statement, E.U. Commission president Ursula von der Leyen and foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell said that “as the world continues to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, the main task for everyone is to save lives and contain and mitigate this pandemic.”

“Now is the time for enhanced cooperation and common solutions,” the statement added. “Actions that weaken international results must be avoided. We urge the U.S. to reconsider its announced decision.”

A number of scientists and global health experts also stepped forward to voice their support for the organization.

© Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images A photo on May 29, 2020 shows a sign of the World Health Organization at its headquarters in Geneva.


In Australia, Peter Doherty, the founder of the Doherty Institute, whose modeling has played a role in the government’s response to the crisis, tweeted that the WHO is “central to the global fight against COVID-19.” He added that the “leadership has seemed overcautious in some of its statements,” but added that “much of the real, essential work of the WHO” goes on at lower, professional levels.

Gail Carson, director of network development at the International Severe Acute Respiratory and Emerging Infection Consortium, warned that a pandemic was “not the time” to make health political.

Richard Horton, the editor of the Britain-based Lancet medical journal, which has not shied away in its criticism of Trump’s handling of the crisis, wrote: “We give our 100% support to the World Health Organization at this time of crisis.”

“The U.S. government has gone rogue at a time of humanitarian emergency,” he added.

Elon Musk and SpaceX pull off another feat few thought possible
Christian Davenport


Cape Canaveral, Fla. — The goal was always to fly humans. So even when SpaceX built a spacecraft designed to fly cargo and supplies to the International Space Station — but not astronauts — the designers added a curious feature designed to make a point: a window.

© Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, FL - MAY 30: SpaceX founder Elon Musk jumps for joy at a gathering following NASA commercial crew astronauts Doug Hurley (L) and Bob Behnken blast off from historic Launch Complex 39A aboard the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in the crew Dragon capsule bound for the International Space Station. (Photo by Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post)

Inside SpaceX, that window became a symbol of its larger ambitions and a reminder to its workforce that human spaceflight was the ultimate goal, the reason Elon Musk started the company to begin with, as it works to eventually get people to Mars.

Since its founding in 2002, SpaceX has achieved remarkable feats few thought possible. It was able to design rockets that not only propelled their payloads to orbit, but landed back on Earth to be reused.

It launched the Falcon Heavy, a monster of a rocket with three boosters and 27 engines. It opened up the Pentagon’s launch market, which for a decade had been dominated by a joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing.

But for all the successes over the years, and all the hype the company has generated along the way, it had never flown a single person.

Until Saturday.

At 3:22 p.m., SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket blasted off from the same launchpad that sent Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins to the moon in 1969. On board were two of NASA’s finest, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, a pair of friends whose job was to test the systems of the Dragon spacecraft.

While the launch was delayed on Wednesday because of bad weather, Saturday’s flight went off without a hitch on a steamy Florida afternoon, and the spacecraft achieved orbit, sending Behnken and Hurley on a trip to catch up to the International Space Station, whizzing around the globe at 17,500 mph.

With the successful flight, SpaceX now joins rarefied company. Only three nations have sent humans to orbit. And while NASA has for years relied on contractors to build the rockets and spacecraft that have flown its astronauts, this launch was done under an unusual arrangement. Under what NASA calls its “commercial crew program,” it is relying on two contractors, SpaceX and Boeing, to design and build spacecraft to ferry its astronauts to the space station.

While NASA oversees the program and has deep insight into the rockets and spacecraft, the companies own and operate the hardware, not NASA.

For NASA, the launch was validation that the private sector could handle the immense burden of human spaceflight — an endeavor many, even those inside the space agency, believed never should have been outsourced to the private sector.

For SpaceX, it is a tremendous victory, and it now becomes the first private company to fly people to orbit. (Virgin Galactic, the venture founded by Richard Branson, has twice flown people to the very edge of space and back, in up-and-down suborbital flights.)

During a post-launch news conference, Musk was emotional, his voice catching.

“I’m really overcome with emotion, and it’s really hard to talk,” he said. “We have not yet docked, and of course we need to bring them back safely. So it’s a lot of work to do. But it’s just incredible.”

He said that on Wednesday, when the launch was scrubbed due to bad weather, his adrenaline was running at “100 percent.” But then when the flight didn’t go off “it went to zero. I collapsed and slept the longest I had in probably a year.”

By Saturday, the feeling had changed dramatically. Musk felt calm and relaxed, ready to go, even though the skies were threatening again.

“I didn’t feel nervous. I felt like it was going to work,” he said.

Initially, Musk only gave SpaceX a 10 percent chance of succeeding as a company. And as for the people who doubted SpaceX, Musk said he thought their “probability assessment was correct. Fortunately, fate smiled upon us and brought us to this day.”

The goal now is to make human spaceflight routine. Saturday’s mission was a test flight, the first flight of the Dragon spacecraft with humans on board. And SpaceX will focus on Sunday’s docking with the space station, and then eventually ensuring Behnken and Hurley come back safely.

It’s hoping to fly another mission with astronauts to the station by Aug. 30, though officials have said that date is tentative and will likely change.

Beyond flying humans to the station in low Earth orbit at about 240 miles high, SpaceX ultimately wants to fly people to the moon, some 240,000 miles away. It recently won a contract from NASA to build a spacecraft capable of landing humans on the lunar surface.

Ultimately, though, Musk wants to send humans to Mars, a hugely ambitious goal.

To do that, the company is working on a next-generation spacecraft, known as Starship, that ultimately SpaceX hopes would be able to fly dozens of people to deep space.

On Friday, the day before achieving its historic flight with astronauts, a Starship prototype blew up on the test stand at the company’s facility in Boca Chica, Tex. It was a huge explosion, sending a fireball into the sky, that was reminiscent of the failed attempts of SpaceX’s early days, when three of its Falcon 1 rockets failed to reach orbit.

At the time, many looked at those failures as evidence that SpaceX would never be successful, let alone be able to fly people to orbit.

But SpaceX pressed on, undeterred.

'How are we here again?' Black America on edge after police killing of George Floyd

By Jenny Jarvie and Melissa Etehad, Los Angeles Times


ATLANTA — It was as if someone had lighted a fuse.

Almost as soon as a cellphone video appeared on social media showing a black man struggling to breathe — and finally going silent — with his neck under the knee of a white Minneapolis police officer, black Americans in the city’s Longfellow neighborhood took to the streets calling for justice.

Within days, the city was smoldering as protestors started fires and torched stores and a police station. Demonstrations swiftly spread to Los Angeles, where activists blocked a highway, and Atlanta, where protesters set a police vehicle on fire and smashed the windows of the CNN Center.

Watching it all play out on the news, Christie Peters, a 43-year-old real general contractor in Atlanta, cried for three days straight.

“It’s just a lot to carry,” she said. “I think it just comes from a place of feeling ineffectual, because what you’re asking black people to do is have faith in a system where almost every position of power in this system is led by people who look like, speak like, vote like the very people who are perpetrating this against us.

“So how do you have faith in that system?”

It did not help that, like many Americans, she had spent the past months cooped up indoors, out of work and on edge amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

“With 40 million people unemployed, this is a powder keg waiting to explode,” she said. “I feel fatigued every day. I think it’s just mental exhaustion about the unknown future of this country.”

Amid the anxiousness of living through a pandemic that has disproportionately killed minorities, the death of George Floyd at the hands of police quickly became a symbol of what many say is the nation’s failure to deliver on its promise of equality.

The altercation between the 46-year-old Floyd and Minneapolis police was set in motion before sunset Monday, when officers responded to a call from a convenience store south of downtown. An employee at Cup Foods reported that a man had tried to use a counterfeit $20 bill.

Not long after police officers arrived, Floyd was dead.







a car on fire in a parking lot: After a peaceful march of hundreds to the Georgia State Capitol in Atlanta on Friday, May 29, 2020, protestors returned to the area around the CNN Center and confronted police amid outrage over the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.10 SLIDES © Alyssa Pointer/Atlanta Journal-Constitution/TNS

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After a peaceful march of hundreds to the Georgia State Capitol in Atlanta on Friday, May 29, 2020, protestors returned to the area around the CNN Center and confronted police amid outrage over the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

The video was released hours later. For many, it brought back memories of Eric Garner, an unarmed black man who died in 2014 in New York after police placed him in a chokehold face down on the sidewalk.

Both men had cried out the same words: “I can’t breathe.”

“We keep thinking, ‘How are we here again?’” said Margaret Sullivan, the 32-year-old host of a Minneapolis radio show that highlights marginalized voices.

Sullivan started her “Ms Margaret Live” show on KFAI Radio in March 2016, inspired by the fatal shooting just months before of 24-year-old Jamar Clark in north Minneapolis. Four months later, Philando Castile was shot by a police officer in Falcon Heights, Minn., five minutes from where she lives.

“We are outraged because Philando should have been the case to stop all of this,” Sullivan said Friday. “So for us, as Minnesotans, to have this happen back-to-back, it’s not new. We have been screaming about this.”

Carol Anderson, chair of African American Studies at Emory University, said she was struck by the cavalier manner in which the officer pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck.

As people screamed at the officer to stop, his message was clear, she said: “‘We can do this to you with impunity.’”

“We have a nation that consistently criminalized blackness, that has systematically denied the humanity of black people,” Anderson said.

In Minneapolis, city leaders, white and black, stressed that protesters were right to be angry.

“All throughout America and right here in Minneapolis, we feel as if there was a knee on all of our collective necks, a knee that says ‘black life does not matter,’” Andrea Jenkins, the City Council’s vice president, said Thursday. “I am a part of this system to help to take that knee off of our necks.”

Jenkins, who is black, urged the mayor to declare a state of emergency calling racism a public health issue.

“Till we name this virus, this disease, that has infected America for the past 400 years, we will never ever resolve this issue,” she said.

The political tension heightened Friday morning when President Donald Trump took to Twitter to call the protesters “thugs” and threaten to take military action to bring Minneapolis “under control.”

“When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” Trump tweeted.

By the end of Friday, the officer who pinned Floyd down, Derek Chauvin, was arrested and charged with third-degree murder and manslaughter.

“Third-degree is a Band-Aid” Sullivan said. “It needs to go all the way. We are not letting up because we’ve seen this too many times.”

The sense of deja vu was felt by black Americans across the country.

In 2013, black activists took to the streets across the nation to protest a Florida jury’s decision that found George Zimmerman not guilty of murdering Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager, in 2012.

In 2014, rallies were held for Eric Garner. Then for John Crawford, a 22-year-old black who was shot dead by police in Ohio after he was seen carrying a toy gun. Then for Michael Brown, an unarmed teenager who was killed outside an apartment complex in Ferguson, Mo.

Sullivan described Floyd’s death as a tipping point, coming not just after so many other local cases of police injustice but at a time when the coronavirus has built up anxiety and highlighted the health and economic disparity between blacks and whites.

“COVID-19 is affecting us at higher rates and job loss too,” she said. “People are barely making it, so we are already at a higher stress. In black culture, when something happens, we all gather, we come together and lean on each other, and we couldn’t do that, so that adds to all that separation, anxiety and stress.”

As the virus spread, data began to show that black people were not only feeling the economic impact more, but hospitalized and dying at much higher rates than whites. That data, public health experts said, reflect deep-rooted social and economic inequalities.

DeRay Mckesson, a Black Lives Matter activist who hosts “Pod Save the People,” said Floyd’s death was an example of Minneapolis’ policy failure.

Unlike in many other cities, the police department does not ban neck restraints, allowing certain types if the person is actively resisting arrest and more extreme holds — which can render somebody unconscious — if the person is “exhibiting active aggression” or an officer’s life is in danger.

“These are not isolated incidents,” Mckesson said. “These are the results of a system that was designed to produce these outcomes.”

As with most of the high-profile cases of police violence, Floyd’s death became a national story only because it was captured on raw video captured by cellphone, he said.

Many activists were quick to link Floyd’s death to a long list of recent injustices in states as far afield as Kentucky and Georgia.

Thursday night, seven people were shot in downtown Louisville, Ky., as they protested the death of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency medical technician who was shot when the police raided her apartment in March.

The gunfire during the protests “came from within the crowd, not from police officers,” said Mayor Greg Fischer.

Earlier this month, protests erupted in Brunswick, Ga., and then spread across the nation after a video showed a white father and son confront and fatally shoot Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old black man, as he jogged in a Georgia neighborhood. That incident happened in February, but it was not until the video was released and the protests swelled that the white men were arrested and charged with felony murder.

In Atlanta, Christie Peters said she didn’t think many white people really understood the level of anxiety she and her husband felt as they watched the video of a grown man being choked by police or read news stories of a woman who’d been shot in her home.

“I have never committed a crime and I still am terrified,” she said. “That should not be in a place where I pay taxes, where I have every financial and legal responsibility as a citizen, but I don’t have full rights and protections. I don’t see blue-eyed, blond-haired Marcia getting killed in her bed. That doesn’t happen.”

———

(Jarvie reported from Atlanta and Etehad from Los Angeles. Chris Megerian contributed to this report.)

———

©2020 Los Angeles Times

Visit the Los Angeles Times at www.latimes.com

AOC castigates cops for ramming protesters in Brooklyn: 'NO ONE gets to slam an SUV through a crowd of human beings’

NY COPS DO A CHARLOTTESVILLE 
By CATHY BURKE
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS |
MAY 30, 2020


A disturbing cop confrontation with an angry crowd in Brooklyn protesting the fatal police arrest of a black Minnesota man drew the ire of progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Saturday night, who raged,“NO ONE gets to slam an SUV through a crowd of human beings.”(Obtained by Daily News)

A disturbing cop confrontation with an angry crowd in Brooklyn protesting the fatal police arrest of a black Minnesota man drew the ire of progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Saturday night, who raged,“NO ONE gets to slam an SUV through a crowd of human beings.”

The incident came when a small crowd at Flatbush and St. Mark’s in Brooklyn hauled a steel barrier to the middle of the street, blocking an NYPD vehicle.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., was appalled, tweeting, "NYPD officers just drove an SUV into a crowd of human beings.”(Jeff Bachner/New York Daily News)

The Twitter video shows another cop vehicle pulling up alongside and slowly pushing through the throng, with protesters scattering and one seen clinging to the hood of the vehicle.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., was appalled, tweeting, "NYPD officers just drove an SUV into a crowd of human beings.”

"They could‘ve killed them, &we don’t know how many they injured. NO ONE gets to slam an SUV through a crowd of human beings. @NYCMayor these officers need to be brought to justice, not dismissed w/“internal reviews.”

The confrontation came during a third day of protests around the country over the death of George Floyd, who died after former Minneapolis Officer Derek Chauvin kept him pinned, kneeling on his neck, for over eight minutes. Chauvin has been charged with murder and manslaughter.

Mayor de Blasio, speaking at a live press conference late Saturday, blamed the pockets of violence on a small group of determined outsiders who came to “create chaos.”

He promised to look into the video of cops driving through the protesters but also stressed that it was important to “start at the beginning," when demonstrators surrounded the car “to do violence.”

The situation was escalating, he said, and police needed to get out of the area quickly.

When Astrologer Bejan Daruwalla Said COVID-19 Will End By May 21

Bejan Daruwalla's son Nastur Daruwalla, who is also an astrologer, has said the next year will be the best year for India.

Updated: May 31, 2020 1:41 PM IST

By India.com News DeskEmail

Edited by Poulomi GhoshEmail

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Bejan Daruwalla

New Delhi: After noted astrologer Bejan Daruwalla passed away in Friday at the age of 88, reportedly from COVID-19, the video of the astrologer predicting the end of the virus by May 21 is being widely circulated. 

In this video, he could be seen predicting that the coronavirus situation will end by May in India. Interestingly, the ministry of home affairs has released a unlock 1.0 guideline to be maintained from June — from June 8 to be specific. Also Read - 'Unlock 1' in Gujarat: New Set of Relaxations Announced | Read Guidelines Here

  Also Read - Mann ki Baat: From COVID-19 to Locust Plague, Here's PM Modi's Message to All Indians | Top Highlights

In beginning of Apr 2020, 90 year old Bejan Daruwalla predicted that Covid-19 disease will almost end by mid May.He passed away today because of Covid-19 infection at a private hospital in Ahmedabad #BejanDaruwalla pic.twitter.com/KZWLP9gbp0 

— BOJack (@SinceMarch2010) May 29, 2020

The other predictions of the famous astrologer including that of PM Modi’s political success etc., are also being widely discussed on various platforms of social media.
Bejan Daruwalla’s son Nastur Daruwalla, who is also an astrologer, has said the next year will be the best year for India. “India, despite its poverty and joblessness, will rise like a phoenix. Next year will be the best year for India and the country will soon emerge as a superpower,” Nastur Daruwalla said to TOI.