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Taylor Rooks debuted the second season of her Bleacher Report show "Take It There" on Wednesday. ... [+] Photo courtesy of Bleacher Report

Its rare to land, keep and enjoy your dream job at 27 years of age, but thats exactly what Bleacher Reports Taylor Rooks has accomplished.

The second season of her Bleacher Report video interview series Take It There With Taylor Rooks premiered on Wednesday with an in-depth conversation with Boston Celtics star Jaylen Brown. Even when she was an anchor or reporter at SNY or in the studio or on panels at Big Ten Network, there were always tightly controlled segments and time constraints. She doesnt have this issue with B/R.

We have these athletes for hours, she said on a rainy, gloomy Tuesday afternoon in Midtown Manhattan. And you can talk about whatever, and it makes them feel like they wanna talk about whatever.

Rooks is also the shows executive producer, and helps book the shows guest herself through personal relationships with athletes or their management teams. Its a sense of creative control that not many at her age in her position can attain.

I always tell people, I think life moved really quickly for me, Rooks said. I think I had a lot of advantages in terms of the fact that my first job was a national job. That kind of jump-started learning the things I needed to learn.

WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA - OCTOBER 19: Taylor Rooks attends the B/Real Premiere Event at Kimpton La Peer ... [+] Hotel on October 19, 2018 in West Hollywood, California. (Photo by Phillip Faraone/Getty Images for Bleacher Report)

Rooks was born in St. Louis but spent most of her childhood in Georgia, growing up in a household that loved football and basketball. Like her two parents, she enrolled at the University of Illinois, where her dad Thomas was a star running back in the 80s.

Rooks and quickly made a name for herself in Champaign-Urbana. During her freshman year, she started a blog called The Online Sideline that became so popular that Fox Sports took notice and asked her to work for them at Fox and Scout.com until she graduated. That included student broadcasts for the Big Ten Network and the NCAA womens NIT for CBS Sports Network when Rooks was just 19. Admittedly, Rooks thinks she definitely thrived because of the internet age she came up in and the compelling content she created.

I owe a lot of my career to social media, the internet era, Rooks said. And I feel no shame in saying that.

After graduating with a degree in broadcast journalism in 2014, she worked at the Big Ten Network for two years. Rooks appeared on BTN Live, served as a social media correspondent and hosted an interview series called Court Convo. But she wanted a job with a bit more responsibility and a move to New York City. SNY offered her a job to host, report and anchor, take on more responsibility. She moved over in 2016.

SANTA MONICA, CALIFORNIA - JUNE 24: Taylor Rooks attends 2019 NBA Awards at Barker Hangar on June ... [+] 24, 2019 in Santa Monica, California. (Photo by Leon Bennett/WireImage)

That was, for me, the place where I learned what it was to really be a journalist, Rooks, who never had interest in sideline reporting, said. I saw what theyre looking at to produce a show, what makes it, what doesnt, how a newsroom works.

Sometimes Rooks wishes she started at a small local paper where she wouldve had to be a one-man band, where she wouldve had to do and learn everything on the job.

I think I was spoiled a little bit with my first job at the Big Ten Network. It was such a good, easy place, Rooks said. I love Big Ten Network. But I took such a leap learning once I got to SNY.

It was her first real newsroom experience. SNY had a small team attitude, and Rooks stayed up late at times when news broke on air, especially with the Mets.

I was at Citi Field a lot.

What Rooks was best known for at SNY, and where she spread her wings as a precursor to her current B/R position, was with her podcast Timeout With Taylor Rooks. She also produced and booked talent for the show, which was also filmed for the networks YouTube page.

On Timeout, Rooks was able to bring on an impressive array of guests for a regional cable channel, including Dwyane Wade, Meek Mill and, most famously, former New York Knicks forward Michael Beasley.

The two famously argued about how much brainpower humans are really capable of using. The exchange, and the podcast, went viral.

We were arguing over something that wasnt even real, Rooks said. It was a ridiculous moment.

It was also a learning experience for the young host, who became more aware of how online narratives really work. Every viral moment, she realized, lacks all of the context necessary to completely judge a situation.

When that came out, a part of me felt a little bad for him, Rooks said. Because if you watch the whole entire thing, the jokes were about him smoking. If you listen to the whole thing, hes a great human being. You have to be cognizant whenever you do any social media moment, of what the viral thing will feel like to that person.

As an interviewer, your goal is to create something lasting, Rooks said, and thats what she did with Beasley. They even played a clip of it during his Knicks tribute video at Madison Square Garden, though its unclear why there was a tribute video for Beasley in the first place.

NEW YORK, NEW YORK - JANUARY 29: Taylor Rooks speaks onstage during the PUMA SS20 Women's Event on ... [+] January 29, 2020 in New York City. (Photo by Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for PUMA)

People in high places began to take notice of Rooks podcasting prowess, especially Dylan MacNamara, Bleacher Reports senior director of talent.

They said this is something that can be sustainable as a show, Rooks said We want to create this show. And we figured out a way to make it work.

She came over in September, 2018 specifically to launch Take It There. Rooks was able to bring on prolific guests in Season One that included Liverpool megastar Mo Salah, Damian Lillard, Ja Morant, Saquon Barkley and Jimmy Butler. And they know when they come on her show, she said, theyre going to get questions that they may not like.

Im gonna ask stuff you probably are maybe uncomfortable with but people wanna know, Rooks said. But theyre fine with doing that because they know itll be in a way that isnt coming from a place of judgment. Its coming from a place of understanding. And theyre aware of that. And I think it definitely helps knowing that youre stepping into a space where you can say something you wanna say.

DeMar DeRozan said on Rooks' show that he was the "sacrificial lamb" in Toronto. Photo by Abbie ... [+] Parr/Getty Images

Thats how she was able to book DeMar DeRozan for the Season One finale, where she asked the questions on everyones minds after Kawhi Leonard led the Toronto Raptors to the 2019 NBA title.

I looked at DeMar and said, how come the Raptors won with Kawhi and not you? Because thats what everyone wanted to know, she said. And I think he appreciated me asking that because he wanted to answer it. That led to a very viral moment, with DeMar saying I was the sacrificial lamb.

Their interview for the show was the first time theyd ever had a conversation, and that Rooks has gained a reputation among players as a go-to spot for candid exchanges.

I could tell he wanted to talk, she said. I could tell people were talking about him so much.

The two episodes Rooks is most excited for in Season Two are Chris Paul and Kevin Durant, because viewers will see them in ways they havent experienced before. She and Durant have known each other for eight years now, and first met at the 2012 All-Star weekend in Orlando.

Rooks was a 19-year-old student at Illinois, and wasnt able to get any questions in with the then-Oklahoma City Thunder forward at the media scrum. When she asked him for a couple of minutes of his time afterward, Durant rebuffed his handlers and said yes.

He just wanted to help me, Rooks said. At that time in your career, youre hearing a lot of nos. But if someone says yes, its something you absolutely remember. And just because of that, we have been friends ever since.

Kevin Durant is making progress as he rehabs from a torn Achilles he famously sustained during last ... [+] year's NBA Finals. Photo by Mike Stobe/Getty Images

With his burner accounts and Twitter clapbacks, Durant can come off as mean, angry or petty at times. Rooks said their interview shows different sides of the Brooklyn Nets superstar.

Hes smiling, joking, reading his old embarrassing tweets, she said. Theres some really nice, human moments in a way you dont really see KD.

Now in a nice groove at Bleacher Report, Rooks is doing what shes always wanted to do, long unfiltered talks with some of sports biggest names.

Theyve given me this platform that is just unthinkable, she said. What Im doing is what I wanna do, talking to people in a longform setting and really adding to the conversation.

See more here:
Bleacher Reports Taylor Rooks Discusses Take It There Season Two, Friendship With Kevin Durant - Forbes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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