US to cut all ties with World Health Organization over virus

United Nations, Jun 6: US President Donald Trump’s response to protests against the killing of African-American George Floyd has included language “directly associated with racial segregationists” from America's past, a group of UN human rights experts have said.

There have been widespread protests across the United States as Floyd, 46, was killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis. People from diverse backgrounds have called for justice and have voiced their support to the protests.

In the wake of protests over the killing of Floyd, Trump had tweeted that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

“The response of the President of the United States to the protests at different junctures has included threatening more state violence using language directly associated with racial segregationists from the nation’s past, who worked hard to deny black people fundamental human rights," a statement issued on Friday by over 60 independent experts of the Special Procedures of the United Nations Human Rights Council said.

"We are deeply concerned that the nation is on the brink of a militarised response that reenacts the injustices that have driven people to the streets to protest,” it said.

A report in The New York Times had said that the phrase "When the looting starts, the shooting starts” was used by Miami’s former police chief Walter Headley in 1967. Headley had been “long accused of using racist tactics in his force’s patrols of black neighbourhoods,” the NYT had said.

They said the recent killing of Floyd has shocked many in the world, “but it is the lived reality of black people across the United States. The uprising nationally is a protest against systemic racism that produces state-sponsored racial violence, and licenses impunity for this violence.”

They noted that following the recent spate of killings of African-Americans, many in the United States and abroad are finally acknowledging that “the problem is not a few bad apples” but instead the problem is the very way that economic, political and social life are structured in a country that prides itself in liberal democracy, and with the largest economy in the world.

Separately, 28 UN experts called on the US Government to take decisive action to address systemic racism and racial bias in the country's criminal justice system by launching independent investigations and ensuring accountability in all cases of excessive use of force by police.

“Exactly 99 years after the massacre in Tulsa, involving the killing of people of African descent and the massive loss of life, destruction of property and loss of wealth on ‘Black Wall Street’, African Americans continue to experience racial terror in state-sponsored and privately organised violence,” the experts said.

Strongly condemning the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, the experts called for systemic reform and justice. “Given the track record of impunity for racial violence of this nature in the United States, Black people have good reason to fear for their lives.”

Taylor, a 25-year-old emergency medical technician was shot in her bed when police raided the wrong house; Arbery, 25, was fatally shot while jogging near his home by three white men who chased and cornered him; and Floyd was accused of using counterfeit currency in a store and died in the street while a white officer knelt on his neck and three others participated and observed.

“The origin story of policing in the United States of America starts with slave patrols and social control, where human property of enslavers was ‘protected’ with violence and impunity against people of African descent. In the US, this legacy of racial terror remains evident in modern-day policing,” the experts said.

The experts also raised concern about the police response to demonstrations in several US cities, termed by some the ‘Fed Up-rising’, that have been marked by violence, arbitrary arrest, militarisation and the detention of thousands of protesters. Reporters of colour have been targeted and detained, and some journalists have faced violence and harassment.

“Statements from the US Government inciting and threatening violence against protesters stand in stark contrast to calls for leniency and understanding which the Government had issued in the wake of largely white protests against COVID-19 restrictions on services like barbershops, salons, and spas,” the experts said.

Hundreds of thousands of people across the world are joining the anti-racism demonstrations days after the killing of George Floyd in United Sates. 

The protests are being held in cities including London, Manchester, Cardiff, Leicester and Sheffield.

Demonstrators attached ropes to the statue of Edward Colston before pulling it down to cheers and roars of approval from the crowd. Images on social media show the statue was eventually rolled into the city's harbour. 

It was not the only statue targeted on Sunday. In Brussels, protesters clambered onto the statue of former King Leopold II and chanted "reparations".

The word "shame" was also graffitied on the monument, reference perhaps to the fact that Leopold is said to have reigned over the mass death of 10 million Congolese.

In London, thousands of people congregated around the US embassy for the second day running.

While protests were mainly peaceful, there were some scuffles near the office of Prime Minister Boris Johnson and outside the Parliament gates.

In Hong Kong, about 20 people staged a rally in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement on Sunday outside the US consulate in the semi-autonomous Chinese city.

"It's a global issue," Quinland Anderson, a 28-year-old British citizen living in Hong Kong, told The Associated Press news agency.

"We have to remind ourselves despite all we see going on in the US and in the other parts of the world, Black lives do indeed matter."

Several dozen demonstrators took part in a Black Lives Matter protest held in Tel Aviv's central Rabin Square.

A rally in Rome's sprawling People's Square was noisy but peaceful, with the majority of protesters wearing masks to protect against coronavirus. Participants listened to speeches and held up handmade placards saying "Black Lives Matter" and "It's a White Problem".

In Spain, several thousand people gathered on the streets of Barcelona and at the US embassy in Madrid.

Many in Madrid carried homemade signs reading "Black Lives Matter", "Human rights for all" and "Silence is pro-racist".

"We are not only doing this for our brother George Floyd," said Thimbo Samb, a spokesman for the group that organised the events in Spain mainly through social media. "Here in Europe, in Spain, where we live, we work, we sleep and pay taxes, we also suffer racism."

Wuhan, Apr 15: In the six days after top Chinese officials secretly determined they likely were facing a pandemic from a new coronavirus, the city of Wuhan at the epicenter of the disease hosted a mass banquet for tens of thousands of people; millions began traveling through for Lunar New Year celebrations.

President Xi Jinping warned the public on the seventh day, Janaury 20. But by that time, more than 3,000 people had been infected during almost a week of public silence, according to internal documents obtained by The Associated Press and expert estimates based on retrospective infection data.

That delay from Jan 14 to Jan. 20 was neither the first mistake made by Chinese officials at all levels in confronting the outbreak, nor the longest lag, as governments around the world have dragged their feet for weeks and even months in addressing the virus.

But the delay by the first country to face the new coronavirus came at a critical time — the beginning of the outbreak. China's attempt to walk a line between alerting the public and avoiding panic set the stage for a pandemic that has infected almost 2 million people and taken more than 126,000 lives.

A This is tremendous, a said Zuo-Feng Zhang, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. If they took action six days earlier, there would have been much fewer patients and medical facilities would have been sufficient. We might have avoided the collapse of Wuhan's medical system.

Other experts noted that the Chinese government may have waited on warning the public to stave off hysteria, and that it did act quickly in private during that time.

But the six-day delay by China's leaders in Beijing came on top of almost two weeks during which the national Center for Disease Control did not register any cases from local officials, internal bulletins obtained by the AP confirm. Yet during that time, from Jan 5 to Jan 17, hundreds of patients were appearing in hospitals not just in Wuhan but across the country.

It's uncertain whether it was local officials who failed to report cases or national officials who failed to record them. It's also not clear exactly what officials knew at the time in Wuhan, which only opened back up last week with restrictions after its quarantine.

But what is clear, experts say, is that China's rigid controls on information, bureaucratic hurdles and a reluctance to send bad news up the chain of command muffled early warnings. The punishment of eight doctors for rumor-mongering, broadcast on national television on Jan. 2, sent a chill through the city's hospitals.

Doctors in Wuhan were afraid, said Dali Yang, a professor of Chinese politics at the University of Chicago. It was truly intimidation of an entire profession. Without these internal reports, it took the first case outside China, in Thailand on Jan 13, to galvanize leaders in Beijing into recognising the possible pandemic before them. It was only then that they launched a nationwide plan to find cases distributing CDC-sanctioned test kits, easing the criteria for confirming cases and ordering health officials to screen patients, all without telling the public.

The Chinese government has repeatedly denied suppressing information in the early days, saying it immediately reported the outbreak to the World Health Organization.

Allegations of a cover-up or lack of transparency in China are groundless, said foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian at a Thursday press conference.

The documents show that the head of China's National Health Commission, Ma Xiaowei, laid out a grim assessment of the situation on Jan. 14 in a confidential teleconference with provincial health officials.

A memo states that the teleconference was held to convey instructions on the coronavirus from President Xi Jinping, Premier Li Keqiang and Vice Premier Sun Chunlan, but does not specify what those instructions were.

The epidemic situation is still severe and complex, the most severe challenge since SARS in 2003, and is likely to develop into a major public health event, the memo cites Ma as saying.

The National Health Commission is the top medical agency in the country. In a faxed statement, the Commission said it had organised the teleconference because of the case reported in Thailand and the possibility of the virus spreading during New Year travel. It added that China had published information on the outbreak in an open, transparent, responsible and timely manner," in accordance with important instructions repeatedly issued by President Xi.

The documents come from an anonymous source in the medical field who did not want to be named for fear of retribution. The AP confirmed the contents with two other sources in public health familiar with the teleconference. Some of the memo's contents also appeared in a public notice about the teleconference, stripped of key details and published in February.

Under a section titled sober understanding of the situation, the memo said that clustered cases suggest that human-to-human transmission is possible. It singled out the case in Thailand, saying that the situation had changed significantly because of the possible spread of the virus abroad.

With the coming of the Spring Festival, many people will be traveling, and the risk of transmission and spread is high, the memo continued.