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Strict new laws mean those who deviate from the official narrative could face up to 15 years in prison.

In the official media, there's still a reluctance to state there is even a war going on, according to UNSW Honorary Associate Professor Stephen Fortescue.

"It's still described as a special operation," Dr Fortescue told 9news.com.au.

"And it's a special operation to protect those separatist republics of Lugansk and Donetsk."

If you were watching Russian television, you would be under the impression that Russian troops were not fighting on the frontlines.

Instead the Russian army was there to support the separatist fighters.

Bombings and battles in areas like Kyiv and Mariupol are getting little attention on Russian television.

"They get pretty hardcore propaganda which consists of 'The Ukrainian leadership are a bunch of fascists', or the Ukrainian people are under the control of the fascist leadership," Dr Fortescue said.

"There tends to be a little bit of condescension against Ukrainians."

An independent television network and an independent radio station have both shut down in recent weeks.

While many foreign news outlets have been blocked in Russia, the internet is still available.

That means Russians could access more reliable news about the war in Ukraine, but they would need to look for it.

They are some in Russia who are publicly opposed to the war, but there are also many others who are "hardcore patriots", Dr Fortescue said.

"A large percentage of the population in the middle who just don't want to know," he said.

"They just want to get on with their lives."

But the realities of war can't be hidden forever.

Dr Fortescue was living in the USSR the last time the nation engaged in a major war - the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan from 1979 until 1989.

"I worked with ordinary Russian people, and they were really upset their boys were getting killed and they were being lied to," he said.

"Russian authorities went to extraordinary lengths to hide the fact these soldiers were being killed."

Russia 'purposefully and cynically' destroys drama centre in besieged city

As much as polling can be trusted in Russia, it does not appear Vladimir Putin is suffering just yet.

A poll from non-government research organisation Levada-Center showed Mr Putin had an approval rating of 71 percent, his best in four years.

Another poll this week showed 58 percent of Russians approved of the invasion of Ukraine. Only 23 percent opposed it.

See more here:
'Special operation': What Russians are being told about the war in Ukraine - 9News

As the Browns' brass flew back from a meeting with Deshaun Watson, who they hope will be the team's future quarterback, its current quarterback, Baker Mayfield, posted a statement to social media Tuesday night thanking the city of Cleveland and its fans "who truly embraced who I am."

"With many uncertainties, here is where my head and heart is," Mayfield wrote as an introduction to his message, which he addressed to Cleveland and posted to his Instagram and Twitter accounts.

"The past 4 years have been nothing short of truly life changing since I heard my name called in the draft to go to Cleveland. This is not a message with hidden meaning. This is strictly to thank the city of Cleveland for embracing my family and me," he said. "We have made many memories and shared growing in this process through all the ups and downs.

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"I have no clue what happens next, which is the meaning behind the silence I have had during the duration of this process. I can only control what I can, which is trusting in God's plan throughout this process. I have given this franchise everything I have. That is something I've always done at every stage, and at every level. And that will not change wherever I take my next snap. Whatever happens ... I just want to say thank you to the fans who truly embraced who I am and the mentality that aligned so well with this city's hard working people.

"Cleveland will always be a part of Emily and my story. And we will always be thankful for the impact it has had and will have in our lives. Sincerely, Baker Reagan Mayfield."

The Browns flew to Houston on Tuesday to pitch Watson on waiving his no-trade clause to come to Cleveland, a league source told ESPN. The Browns are one of four teams, along with the New Orleans Saints, Carolina Panthers and Atlanta Falcons, that are attempting to land Watson in a trade with the Texans. Watson has already met with the Saints and Panthers and is scheduled to meet with the Falcons on Wednesday.

Watson did not play last season following an offseason request to be traded and the emergence of 22 civil lawsuits against him alleging sexual assault and inappropriate conduct during massage sessions. A grand jury in Texas on Friday declined to indict Watson on criminal charges, signaling the end of criminal proceedings related to him in Harris County, where Houston is located.

Before meeting with the Browns on Tuesday, Watson answered questions on two of the 22 lawsuits filed against him during ongoing depositions, the plaintiffs' attorney, Tony Buzbee, told KHOU 11. Watson had invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination when sitting for two sessions of depositions that began Friday.

Browns general manager Andrew Berry and coach Kevin Stefanski have publicly declared that Mayfield would remain their quarterback, up through the NFL scouting combine in Indianapolis.

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"We fully expect Baker to be our starter and bounce back," Berry said in January.

But that equation appeared to change Friday when the grand jury declined to indict Watson, leaving Mayfield's future in limbo with the franchise that selected him No. 1 overall in the 2018 draft.

Mayfield has endured a tumultuous tenure in Cleveland over four seasons. He played under four head coaches through his first three seasons in the league. Despite that, Mayfield led Cleveland to its first playoff victory in 26 years during the 2020 campaign.

But in Week 2 of the 2021 season, he suffered a torn labrum in his left, nonthrowing shoulder and struggled the rest of the way. He wound up finishing 27th in the league in QBR as the Browns missed the playoffs and finished with a disappointing 8-9 record.

Mayfield, who underwent surgery to repair the labrum Jan. 19 and is expected to be fully cleared well before training camp, is entering the final year of his rookie deal, which will pay him $19 million in 2022.

Continued here:
QB Baker Mayfield posts message thanking Cleveland fans on same day Browns' brass meet with Deshaun Watson - ESPN

FORT HOOD, Texas - With dozens gathered in the Emergency Operations Center here, the garrison commander asks for a conditions check leading up the start of the Energy Resilience Readiness Exercise March 15.

Its an early Tuesday morning, and with a nod, Col. Chad R. Foster, garrison commander, signals for the power to be shut off. The exercise which would test Fort Hoods energy resilience in light of a power outage, has begun.

Teams from the directorates of public works and emergency services were on stand-by in anticipation of issues or concerns arising from the shutdown of electrical power. Never before has such an exercise of this magnitude been attempted, and post leaders are very interested in regards to the backup generation systems working as designed.

A Department of Defense-mandated exercise, the ERRE was designed to test military installations resilience in the face of a major power outage or other utility failure resulting from a major storm event, sabotage or terrorist attack on the power grid.

According to a press release announcing the test initiative, J.E. Jack Surash, Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army (Installations, Energy and Environment), said testing energy resilience by cutting commercial power to an entire segment of Army installations is an undeniable means of bringing to light the impact an unexpected power outage can have on that installations ability to achieve its mission.

Current multi-domain operations require Army installations to have secure and reliable access to energy and water to achieve mission objectives, he explained. The Army installation objectives of maintaining world class training facilities, the ability to project power or surge the industrial base, and command and control are not achievable without secure and resilient access to energy and water.

He went on to explain that today there exists a number of energy security vulnerabilities, both natural and man-made, associated with interdependent electric power grids, natural gas pipelines, and water resources and systems, which can jeopardize installation security and mission capabilities.

The increased frequency and magnitude of severe storms and grid outages, as well as man-made threats, force Army installations to confront the greater risk of extended power and water disruptions, he said.

Prior to the exercise, garrison leaders used every media available to communicate how the exercise may affect Soldiers and families who work or reside on the installation during the shutdown. Information was distributed via social media, print, television, radio and podcast alerting them what to expect and what to do should they need emergency services.

The garrison commander said that because the ERRE is a DoD-mandated exercise, the post was limited to what areas it could exempt from the exercise.

We have to gather data. We have to accomplish the intent of the exercise that is to allow us to see our infrastructure, how it performs, what improvements need to be made, Foster said. If we leave too much of the installation off, then we wont accomplish that.

He did add, however, that there were several facilities he could identify that would be exempt, including the Killeen-Fort Hood Regional Airport, the Carl R. Darnell Army Medical Center and the Mission Training Complex because the airport is a dual use airfield, the hospitals associated risk involving patient care and the MTC because of its unique mission to prepare Soldiers for a major exercise or deployment.

Brian Dosa, Fort Hoods director of Public Works, added that leaders recognize that this installation is fairly reliant on electricity.

We know that over the past several years weve taken a look at Fort Hood and what its critical missions are, he said. What are the things that we have to do to support our nation. What things to we have to do to support what the Armys asked us to do. What kind of things do we have to do to ensure that we take care of our Soldiers and families across Fort Hood.

Dosa added that through these discussions, installation leaders identified a number of facilities and infrastructures that were deemed to be critical. And that in a number of those, say half of those facilities, would have backup power.

Were also going to find out that maybe some things should have backup systems and dont, he said. So when we turn the power off, we may find out that we should have included this facility on our list of critical facilities, and we need to add this to the list of places to put backup power in the future.

So theres going to be some learning about backup power thats in place, and frankly, will it be sustainable for an extended period, Dosa said.

He added that despite having the power shut down for an extended period, he was confidant Fort Hood will weather the storm.

Im not terribly concerned, he said. Dominion Energy is our electric provider. We privatized our electricity and natural gas systems in 2017 with this company. Theyre our privatized partner or system owners. So were talking with Dominion Energy about turning our power off and restoring the power. Theyre going to do it in such a way to try and minimize the risk of power spikes. Thats a risk out there that could happen but neither of us are terribly concerned about power spikes.

In addition, Dosa described how Fort Hood is vigilant about its use of electrical power.

We have a system on Fort Hood called a building control system; we call it the utility monitoring and control system, or UMCS, that can remotely control the heating and air conditioning ventilation systems in many of our buildings, he said. Were actually able to control and set the air conditioning or heat back in the evenings or weekends so that were not wasting it.

He explained how the UMCS is going to allow evaluators to look at the building and see how its performing remotely.

That system, he said, also gives facility managers the ability to do something called load shutting when the electricity demand on Fort Hood is the highest primarily because of the air conditioning demand during the summer or heating demands during the winter months.

When the Texas grid is under stress, were able to remotely turn it back a little bit to save electricity, Dosa added. Weve done that in the past. This past summer during the July 4th and other four-day weekends, we actually took the opportunity to practice load shutting where we turned the electricity back by turning the air conditioning down.

Those peak periods also were considered when the date for the ERRE was discussed.

We picked March 15 because not only is it spring break so that we dont have to figure out how were going to conduct school without electricity, he said, Its typically a relatively mild week in terms of the temperature. Its probably not going to be too cold or too hot that week or that particular day.

Dosa added that the exercise will help when decisions are made to renovate some of the housing units on post.

We do have old homes, of our 6,000 homes about two-thirds were built pre-1978, he said. We have one of our villages that was built in 1948 McNair Village and we have a few of our villages built in the 1950s. Were in the process of doing some renovation projects to build some new buildings to update our inventory.

He added that the posts privatized partner for housing, Lend Lease, recently secured a multi-billion dollar loan for all of their Army projects, and of that, Fort Hood is going to get $420 million of new capital coming in to support its family housing, including construction of nearly 600 new homes in Chaffee Village.

Dosa explained that Fort Hood has a lot to learn and gain from an exercise of this magnitude and that defense leaders reached out to Massachusetts Institute of Technology-Lincoln Laboratory for assistance evaluating the installations response to the power shutdown.

They are a team that has worked ERREs at other installations, he said. The purpose of their being here is to help us see ourselvesmake observations and make recommendations to Fort Hood leaders and to Army leaders about how we can improve our posture with respect to energy resiliency.

According to Dosa, 15 members from MIT-Lincoln Laboratory will augment 20 DPW evaluators to inspect and assess post facilities.

We want to cover our bases, get as much as we can and make as many observations as we can, he said. Theyve been here a couple of times in preparation for the ERRE to get to know us, to get to know our systems, and were looking forward to partnering with them.

Christopher Lashley, technical subject matter expert with MIT-Lincoln Laboratory, said his group is mostly here to accompany the DPW team to obtain data and see if there were any issues in the field.

Were trying to capture the best picture we can of whats happening, he said.

Also part of the DPW, MIT team evaluating Fort Hoods response were members of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Were making sure the generators start up, Andrew Stringer, part of the USACE contingent, said. Were making sure the generators are connected to what we think theyre connected to and identifying any areas that arent going as expected. When the main power goes off, this should come up just a couple of seconds later.

Throughout the exercise, on-post families were provided free meals and activities to entertain their children, and Soldiers were afforded meals through field kitchens.

Sgt. 1st Class Rachel Fakeye, manager of Theodore Roosevelt Warrior Restaurant, said that her crew was up early and ready to serve Soldiers.

They got here at 5:30 a.m. to start prepping, she said. Her crew is pretty new and has not had experience working in a field kitchen.

This is the first time most of them have had to be on field equipment, she said. Its also a good chance to make sure everything works.

Thus far, the Army has tested installation energy resilience by shutting off electric power to: Fort Stewart, Georgia; Fort Greely, Alaska; Fort Knox, Kentucky; and Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

More here:
Readiness exercise tests Fort Hood's energy resilience | Article | The United States Army - United States Army

The future is digital. Hybrid working, speaking to loved ones far away, community organising to send supplies to Ukraine: the internet has made this all so much easier. But so far, weve struggled to rein in the wild west of the internet, where abuse, crime, and disinformation can spread unchecked.

To do nothing is to go even further down the rabbit hole, into a dystopia where no-one trusts anyone, and the most vulnerable in society, especially children, bear the brunt of our inaction.

In 2019, I stood on a Conservative manifesto that pledged to make the UK the safest place in the world to be online, and from July to December 2021, I chaired a Joint Committee of the Lords and the Commons in charge of scrutinising the draft Online Safety Bill. We set out a clear list of recommendations back in December, on how to make the legislation stronger, whilst also protecting freedom of speech and the freedom of the press. Based on the evidence we received, and our report, the Government has drastically changed the bill for the better, accepting sixty-six recommendations made by the Joint Committee.

Free speech campaigners and those representing victims of online harms alike told the Committee how important it was for the Bill to explicitly list which offences platforms would have to clamp down on. The Daily Telegraph has also campaigned for years for a greater duty of care from tech companies to protect people from content that promotes harm. The Government has accepted the Joint Committees recommendation to do this, stating now that social media companies will become legally responsible for acting against hate crimes, the glorification of suicide, terrorism, child abuse and the organisation of illegal immigration, as well as other existing offences.

Nick Clegg and other tech policy makers in Silicon Valley will no longer just be able to use their own judgement on whether content hosted and promoted on their systems is offensive. British laws passed in our Parliament will, as it always should have done, take that role. This is the most important aspect of the bill, that illegal activity offline will be regulated online, and that this will be based on laws passed by our parliament. Fraser Nelson was wrong in his recent article in the Daily Telegraph to assert that the Online Safety Bill will make companies like Facebook even more powerful. In fact, it will do the reverse, it will require them to meet safety standards set by an independent regulator and based on UK laws.

The Joint Committee heard from Martin Lewis that a man lost 19,000 to an online investment scam, as did a grandmother who lost the money her grandchild inherited from their deceased parent. We learned how easy it is to advertise false, and sometimes dangerous, products and services on Facebook and Google. If the Bill excluded paid-for ads from scope, it would allow fraud to keep happening. The Government has now said the big social media companies will be required to prevent fraud, even in paid-for ads, in a major win for consumer rights. Big Tech lobbied against this change, despite already claiming in their terms of service to not allow fraudulent ads.

The Childrens Commissioner told us that over half of 1113-year-olds have seen pornography online, distorting their views of healthy relationships and consent and leading to addiction. But if pornographic websites dont host user-generated content, then even if they present a threat to children, they fell out of scope of the Online Safety Bill. Again, in a victory for childrens rights, the Government has accepted our recommendation and will now mandate age assurance systems.

And lastly, the Joint Committee heard from Rio Ferdinand, Dame Margaret Hodge MP, and the Football Association that anonymity can disinhibit some users, leading to an onslaught of attacks, like the abuse directed at England footballers after the Euros final last summer. At the same time, Stonewall and the Nobel Peace Prize winning journalist Maria Ressa told us anonymity allows for people at risk to express themselves and reach out to the world. We told the Government that giving users the choice about whether they want to engage with anonymous accounts, rather than banning anonymity outright, would allow the problem to be addressed whilst protecting freedom of speech: Im glad theyve agreed. The social media platforms will also have to act against race hate on their platforms, whether it is posted by anonymous accounts or not.

Its clear that the Online Safety Bill has been greatly strengthened. Were finally tipping the balance in favour of democracy over algorithms, setting a gold standard for online safety for the free world to follow.

Read more:
We're taking back control from Silicon Valley - The Telegraph

Two years on from the start of the coronavirus pandemic, let me tell you what life is like in my Hong Kong neighborhood. Playgrounds are wrapped in red-and-white caution tape and barricaded with plastic fencing to keep children out, and the swings have been tossed over the crossbar to ensure that no illicit amusement takes place. The governments disastrous public messaging about a possible citywide lockdown has led to widespread panic-buying, so gossip swapped while Im out walking my dog focuses on which shops have restocked.

All restaurants have to close at 6 p.m., and bars arent open at all. A restaurant down the street from my apartment now offers happy-hour deals starting at 10 a.m. Gyms, movie theaters, campsites, and beaches have been shut down entirely. If I want to take a walk on my own in a remote country park, I am legally required to wear a mask.

This situation feels all the more shocking because in early 2020, Hong Kong was ahead of the COVID curve, not lagging behind it. As soon as news emerged of a still-mysterious virus, everyone here began wearing masks and adapted to social distancing almost immediately; I wrote article after article about what life would look like in the weeks to come in America, having seen the future myself. While the West was caught off guard, Hong Kong felt prepared.

Now medical facilities are overwhelmed with sick patients, and because morgues have struggled to keep pace, body bags are piled up in hospitals alongside patients still receiving treatment. Coffins are being shipped in to meet the demand. Construction workers are racing to build isolation facilities, including one that looks like a wartime field hospital on the border with the mainland. Some 300,000 people are in isolation or under home quarantine. After recording only 213 deaths and about 13,000 cases of COVID-19 from January 2020 to early 2022, the city is swamped by the current Omicron wave, which began at the start of the year and has led to more than 960,000 cases and more than 4,600 deaths.

Hong Kong was lauded for controlling the coronaviruss spread with its zero-COVID strategy. It has ample vaccine doses. It is wealthy enough to support its poorest people if it chooses to. It has effectively shut down swaths of its economy, including its lucrative tourism sector, to battle the virus.

And yet this month, it recorded one of the highest COVID death rates in the world. What just happened?

Hong Kong has employed its zero-COVID strategy since the onset of the pandemic. The approach has not been as restrictive as the one used in mainland China, which calls for shutting down whole metropolises and testing their population over a handful of COVID cases. The city has an aggressive test-and-trace program, as well as toughened border controls, to catch infections and break transmission lines, and enacts social-distancing measures when cases spike. All of this helped Hong Kong buy itself time in the early stages of the pandemic, when vaccines were not available, keeping deaths to a minimum.

But now it clings to measures not based on sound science, and which experts have dismissed as largely performative (while also being heavily damaging to its travel- and service-based economy). It has neither pivoted to a more flexible approach nor prepared for an outbreak that analysts repeatedly warned was inevitable.

The missteps are almost too numerous to recount, but the worst ones have to do with Hong Kongs singular inability to vaccinate its population. The governments efforts were from the start imbued with politics and marred by poor messaging. It initially rushed through approval of the China-made Sinovac vaccine, and city leaders made a show of being inoculated with it, despite a better optionBioNTechs mRNA jabbeing available. (The large majority of deaths have been among the unvaccinated, but officials refuse to disclose data on which vaccine was administered to those who died after being vaccinated.) Press releases highlighting, with little context, the vaccines adverse effects were amplified by the media, leading to intense skepticism. Distrust in the government, still lingering from its handling of prodemocracy protests in 2019, did not help the cause. And most troubling has been the poor vaccination rate among the citys elderly population, a persistent problem. Today, just 55 percent of people older than 80 have received one vaccine shot, and 36 percent have received two.

Lam Ching-choi, a physician and a member of Chief Executive Carrie Lams cabinet, told me that the governments early reliance on family doctors to advise patients on vaccination was a mistake: Many warned the elderly to be cautious about receiving the vaccine. Predictably, COVID has swept through residential care homesmore than 29,000 elderly care-home residents have been infected during the current wave. Lam also told me that the government should have offered at-home vaccination for residents with mobility issues, and said the authorities would soon begin implementing that program. Yet it will start only next week, more than two months into the surge and more than a year after the vaccine rollout initially began.

The 21-day hotel quarantine required for all arrivals into Hong Kong, even for those without COVID, is dangerous and unscientific, experts told me, but the government has continued the practice anyway, leading to cross infections and a spike in cases. A government-funded study published last year warned about vaccine hesitancy, but officials did little beyond sloganeering and a perfunctory poster drive. The government also insisted on issuing compulsory testing notices to residents even when testing and quarantine facilities were already overloaded, leading to more stress on a teetering health system. Flight bans from countries including the United States and Britain are scheduled to be in place until next month, though the governments own advisers say there is no reason for this to continue.

In sum, decision makers ignored public-health expertise, driven instead by politics and overly enthusiastic efforts to show fealty to Beijing. The result has been an embarrassingly shambolic effort that has created a preventable public-health disaster, yet another glaring failure of governance from an administration whose defining characteristic is catastrophic ineptitude.

The question to ask, not unreasonably, would be: How come we either didnt have a good plan or didnt execute a good plan? Gabriel Leung, the dean of medicine at the University of Hong Kong and a pandemic-response adviser to the government, told me. When I asked whether he had any thoughts on the answer to that question, Leung responded, Suffice to say that we have done our very best to generate the best science to inform policy decisions. And, as Margaret Thatcher once said, Advisers advise; ministers decide. Lets put it at that.

Much of the world has struggled with various phases of the pandemic, but Hong Kongs difficulties are in no small part due to the fact that the city no longer has even its previous limited democratic accountability to push the government to review public-health decisions, thanks to a crackdown by Beijing and the imposition of a draconian national-security law. For varying reasons, many residents believed the governments fiction that only a small minority of people would be affected by these changes, but the mishandling of COVID has highlighted how the reengineering of Hong Kong will touch all aspects of life.

With opposition voices silenced, Hong Kongs rulers claimed they could more efficiently govern. But in the city legislature, overhauled last year to ensure that nationalism and obedience are valued over competence and political know-how, suggestions on how to tame the outbreak have included the wildly impractical (using cruise ships as temporary isolation facilities) and the patently absurd (dropping fresh food into Hong Kong by drone). Even this newfound sense of urgency on the part of lawmakers and the government has emerged only after Chinese President Xi Jinping spoke last month of the overriding mission to bring the current outbreak under control.

At the same time, pro-Beijing pundits and mainland officials have cast pandemic response, and adherence to dynamic zero COVID, as a loyalty test. (Determining what exactly dynamic zero COVID means is futile; the description shifts from official to official and day to day. Nevertheless, authorities insist that it shouldnt be questioned.) The director of Chinas Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office said this month that patriotic forces must forcefully expose, criticize, and sanction with laws the anti-China destabilizing forces who launched smearing attacks, spread rumors, and created panic to disrupt the anti-pandemic efforts. Addressing the United Nations, a Hong Kong doctor said that the idea of living with the virus was tantamount to the U.S. creating biological terrorists, in a melodramatic screed that seemed scripted for a comic-book villain. Hong Kongs civil service has become a targeted group, fingered as being polluted by Western ideas for questioning the COVID strategy.

Hong Kongs pandemic response definitely shows the NSL [national-security law] new order is not only about election and activists, but extends to all realms of life, Ho-Fung Hung, a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the author of the forthcoming book City on the Edge: Hong Kong Under Chinese Rule, told me by email.

As they did with the imposition of the national-security law, mainland officials felt the need to step in to address COVID-related problems that the Hong Kong government had created for itself, a move that has been met with slavish praise. Newspapers controlled by the Chinese government here have splashed their pages with adoration for workers arriving from over the border. Pro-Beijing lawmakers have rushed to social media to post their gratitude to the motherland for its support. My inbox fills up daily with statements thanking Beijing for taking control. The citys secretary of health applauded the mainlands donation of traditional Chinese medicine. (Authorities in Singapore, by contrast, have warned that there is no scientific evidence that one such remedy, called lianhua qingwen, can be used to prevent or treat COVID-19, while Australia has banned the sale of the treatment entirely.) The endless, unrestrained flattery seems akin to the celebration of an arsonist who lights his house on fire, cuts the water hose, and then cheers as the fire brigade arrives to extinguish the flames.

All the while, the broader political purge and repression of rights that was already under way in Hong Kong has carried on undisrupted. Half a dozen people were arrested and charged with sedition last month. In early March, the former head of the bar association, a British lawyer, was questioned by national-security police before he left the city, followed through the airport by reporters from Chinese state media. Authorities accused a U.K.-based rights group of endangering national security and demanded that it take down its website. Carrie Lam, the citys chief executive, employs wartime rhetoric as an excuse to exercise emergency powers. The longer the coronavirus outbreak persists, the more policies to combat it become intertwined with the ever-expanding security apparatus.

Listing Hong Kongs mistakes triggers a sense of dj vu: a politicized and inept response, an unwillingness to adapt existing strategies to the viruss mutations, an inability to overcome vaccine skepticism, long-running fissures in society torn open by COVID. For years, we were told by pro-Beijingers that these were the Wests problems, not ours.

Two years ago, we looked at the U.S. and Europe, dumbstruck at how badly they were managing the pandemic. Two years on, we are experiencing what Siddharth Sridhar, a virologist at the University of Hong Kong, describes as a plane crash in slow motion, having apparently learned little from the Westsor our ownexperience.

Go here to read the rest:
What Happened to Hong Kong? - The Atlantic