Unfortunately, Mexico is a country of discrimination, even among Mexicans themselves. I was at the Congress when they were discussing the Amnesty Bill. [The Amnesty Bill, passed by the House of Deputies in December 2019, would provide an amnesty to nonviolent offenders, including woman who had abortions or the doctors who performed them, political prisoners, indigenous people who did not receive due process in their language, and in cases of minor theft without battery. Its passage is pending in the Senate.] I tried to explain that someone who has lived comfortably, who had his parents, who had money, and then one day goes out and kills someone is a different case to someone whose environment is violent, and who has to survive. You cant judge them the same.

And thats where the amnesty comes in. What are we going to leave to the younger generations? I decided to get out of the gang world because I didnt want my children to inherit my problems. We need to get rid of the stigma that a person with tattoos or a shaved head is bad, that the dark-skinned person doesnt deserve to sit next to me because Im white.

Look: there is a crisis of power. I have the power to kill someone because I want to, and I do it. There is a crisis of impunity. You see my cell phone; its worth $25,000 pesos and you decide to steal it because you know it wont cost you that much. Why?

Because even if the police catch me, they wont respect the chain of custody. Then theyll take me to the public prosecutor who wont do their job right, and then the judge will see that they didnt follow due process and let me go, even though Im guilty. But what if the police do their job, the prosecutor does theirs, the judge does theirs, and what you thought was going to be cheap winds up costing you a lot.

Go here to read the rest:

The War on Drugs Victimized a Generation. Now We Have to Give Them a Future. - Jacobin magazine

When President Donald Trump declared a national emergency last month, as the coronavirus outbreak worsened, he deployed language familiar and perhaps oddly comforting to many Americans. Designating himself a wartime president, Trump likened the countrys COVID-19 response to the U.S.s mobilization during World War II. Every generation of Americans has been called to make shared sacrifices for the good of the nation, Trump insisted.

This rhetorical maneuver reflected the long American history of declaring war on any conceivable enemy whether physical, abstract, domestic or foreign. But as familiar and ubiquitous as war might be for many Americans, at least figuratively, that same history also shows that it is a poor framework through which to understand complex social problems such as poverty and public-health emergencies like the novel coronavirus or drug addiction.

War has been a permanent condition and the governing metaphor for American life since at least the Second World War. Instead of reining in its military and defense infrastructure at the end of the war and the beginning of what is ironically known as the postwar period the U.S. opted to go in the opposite direction, bolstering the national security state in the hopes of thwarting the perceived Soviet and Communist threat. A massive expansion of federal power, the National Security Act of 1947 formed the skeleton of our modern national defense apparatus. The Act established the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council (NSC), a cabinet-level body that would help formulate military and foreign policy on the presidents behalf.

Get your history fix in one place: sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletter

Drafted and circulated in 1950, the councils NSC-68 report cast the young Cold War in stark, severe terms. It declared that the cold war is in fact a real war in which the survival of the free world is at stake and argued that Americans must be willing to give up some of the benefits which they have come to associate with their freedoms. In other words, though World War II had ended in victory, Americans would continue seeing the world through a wartime lens and indefinitely so.

In many ways, the assumptions underlying NSC-68 would guide U.S. foreign policy through the end of the Cold War and beyond. Even after the collapse of the Soviet Union and thus the end of the Cold War, the U.S. [f]reed from major challengers remained committed to military action, although it often couched these interventions in terms of human rights.

It is therefore no surprise that Americans have long understood challenges far from the battlefield (such as COVID-19) through the lens of war. Beyond the actual experience of war as combat, as historian Michael Sherry has shown, the United States obsession with war has meant imagining many things in terms of it from President Lyndon B. Johnson depicting incidents of urban unrest as a war within our own boundaries to President Richard Nixon declaring a war on cancer in 1971 (as the Vietnam War raged), from LBJs War on Poverty to Pat Buchanans war for the soul of America (i.e., the culture wars) to the interlocking wars on crime and drugs. The band Wilco lamented this war fetish in their 2001 song War on War, in which frontman Jeff Tweedy sings that, in such a conflict, Youre gonna lose.

Americans know war, theologian Stanley Hauerwas notes, and when we are frightened ironically war makes us feel safe. Michael Sherry concurs building on the work of the late historian Marilyn B. Young when he calls the United States a nation deeply wedded to and defined by war, though maddeningly reluctant to admit it.

Still, real war remains distant and abstract for the overwhelming majority of Americans. As scholar Andrew Bacevich indicated in 2011, approximately half of 1 percent of our citizens bear the burden of service and sacrifice meaning 99.5% of Americans are not personally attached to the military or the national security state. The physical and emotional distance separating most Americans from the battlefield allows them to glorify war while knowing nothing of its unspeakable horrors or the sacrifice it entails.

War is destructive, violent and annihilative. But the nations commitment to war (both as reality and metaphor) has a tendency to take other policy approaches off the table. What has been called the troopification of everything generates financial and political support for any activity conducted under the umbrella of war. And so Americas over-reliance on the blunt, imprecise instrument of war hinders its ability to respond to myriad other problems, from public-health emergencies to chronic issues such as hunger. The infrastructure needed to address such concerns doesnt mesh well with war. Its use as a rhetorical and framing device within our present crisis therefore represents a dismal failure of imagination.

Most damningly, perhaps, Americas recent wars whether directed at targets physical, abstract, domestic or foreign have mostly failed. The United States excels at war, Sherry observes, though no longer at winning it. In just the past 50 years or so, the U.S. has failed to win the War in Vietnam, the war on cancer (despite many notable achievements in research and treatment), the War on Poverty (although LBJs campaign slashed poverty rates), the war on crime (which did much to terrorize and imprison poor and working-class black and brown people but little to actually curtail crime), the war on drugs (given the persistent reality of drug addiction) and the seemingly endless global war on terror.

This track record does not bode well for the nations war against COVID-19. We need an efficient, coherent public-health response coordinated by a competent federal government. What we dont need is another war.

Paul M. Renfro is an Assistant Professor of History at Florida State University and the author of Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State (Oxford University Press, 2020).

Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder.

Contact us at editors@time.com.

Visit link:

War Has Been the Governing Metaphor for Decades of American Life. This Pandemic Exposes Its Weaknesses - TIME

In "How to Fix a Drug Scandal," a new four-part Netflix docuseries, documentary filmmaker Erin Lee Carr presents the stories of Massachusetts drug lab chemists Annie Dookhan and Sonja Farak, and how the discovery of their respective misconduct led to the largest mass dismissal of criminal convictions in U.S. history.

Farak had been using the drugs that came through her lab in Amherst, filling out test results while high, while Dookhan had fabricated thousands of test results in her Boston lab, revealing major holes in a neglected legal system designed to streamline the "war on drugs."

Over the last decade, Carr has become something of an expert on the art of true crime. She is a master of dissecting the kinds of stories that seem made for splashy, gossipy rag, pulling at the dominant narratives which are often those easiest to tell and consume, built on familiar tropes and formulas and also, our collective hunger for them.

Carr's documentary, "Thought Crimes: The Case of The Cannibal Cop," dug into the case of Gilberto Valle, an ex-NYPD cop who was convicted of conspiracy to kidnap after his wife found that Valle had spent time detailing plans to kidnap, rape, and cannibalize several women on a number of fetish websites.

In 2017, she released "Mommy Dead and Dearest" about the death of Dee Dee Blanchard at the hands of her daughter Gypsy Rose Blanchard, who was a victim of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, and Gypsy's boyfriend Nicholas Godejohn. Her 2019 documentary "I Love You, Now Die" delved into the death of Conrad Roy, who was prompted via text by his girlfriend, Michelle Carter to kill herself.

Advertisement:

Carr spoke with Salon about the making of "How to Fix a Drug Scandal," how she chooses her documentary subjects, and what it looks like to film with "radical empathy" in mind.

One of the things I really appreciate about your documentaries is that you take stories that are kind of prime for sensational headlines "Thought Crimes," "Mommy Dead and Dearest," "I Love You, Now Die" and you really dig into the people and sometimes policies behind them. How do you determine if a story is one that you want to pursue for a documentary?

This is actually the number onequestion I get asked, because it's very clear in all the work that it's the same person doing it, but they involve different systemic issues. So the easiest way I can explain it is sort of the most straightforward: Is it about a woman? Is there a complicating factor? Are there layers to it which means are there other stories within it? And is it watchable and fun?

And finally, is it going to be hard to get people to watch this?

You know, Sheila Nevins, who I first started making films with, she would talk to me about how this is sort of like television; there's a commercial reality to this in that you don't want to ever make a boring cold open.

You literally have 90 seconds to draw the audience in and they are going to decide if they want to watch it enough just based on that 90 seconds. So like, do your thing.

What drew you to the stories of Sonja Farak and Annie Dookhan?

You know as a sober person, and as an "out"sober person, there was something that so resonated with me about the deception of addiction. You're at work surrounded by all of these substances, and the purest substances the best of the best, you know? I don't think this is a very popular thought, but like, I would have done it. I think it's hearkening back to Adam and Eve. Like if the apple is right there and there are no cameras, you're going to take a bite of the apple.

Some people say they would never do that, that it would never cross their minds to do that, and alright, good for you. But I'm somebody that doesn't feel that way.

So I really wanted to have a series that talks about addiction, talks about temptation, talked about mental health, and continued those conversations in a way where it really looks at all aspects of it. But then you also had so many people that really set issues with the people [Farak and Dookhan's findings] convicted. Like, "They had drugs, they're guilty,"and I don't agree with that either. So it's really understanding it all from a human perspective.

And I think that definitely leads into my next question. You've talked before in interviews about how "radical empathy" is a guiding approach in your filmmaking. How did you practice that in creating "How to Fix a Drug Scandal?"

Well, I think that Annie Dookhan and Sonja Farak and the prosecutors, to some extent, can all be very one-dimensional villains; and I think with Annie Dookhan and Sonja Farak, specifically, I tried to see them as individuals versus villains, and really tried to stratify the line between those things.

I think it's often really about sort of caring about these people and knowing, "I am not a narrative filmmaker right now."I am making films about people's realities, what happened and it has to be thetruth, it has to be second source verified, I cannot make any of this stuff up.

So when I sit with the fact that somebody who's going to watch this and have opinions about Sonja, am I going to be able to sleep at night? Did I do the right thing? Did I three-dimensionalize her?

And I think "radical empathy"has been this phrase that I have carried around with me, but I don't give it to everybody. I did not do that with Larry Nasser, for example. I did not believe in terms of "At the Heart of Gold"that I could humanize him because that would be giving the movie over to him. So that's sort of my internal question with myself. If I have radical empathy, should that not lend itself to everybody? I think I'm sort of figuring that out as a filmmaker and as a human being as I go along.

Well, and I think that ties into how this story was structured. I thought it was interesting how, early in the first episode, we established that we were going to be recreating Sonja Farak's grand jury testimony using unsealed court transcripts. How did you come to the decision to structure the series in that way?

God, Ashlie it was rough. So you're sitting there and you have an entire binder full of grand jury transcripts. They have previously been sealed. They are literally the confession, the core part of this story.

And then you're faced up against the fact that people hate recreations and you cannot get the person who said these things to say any of these things. So my producing partner Will Cohen said, "You can do transcript-on-screen, you can do animation, you can do an actor."At one point, I really wanted Edie Falco to read it because she's out about recovery, and I was like, "That's a great idea."But then it was like, "No, that's not going to work that will be very slotted in."

So I was really having to push myself as a director and be like, "Okay, I need to make these transcripts come alive and the best way to do that is to recreate it, and if I'm going to do that, I'm going to really try to work as seamlessly as possible as getting that inside the narrative without being jarring."

And I remember I was sitting with my family and I was showing them "How to Fix a Drug Scandal,"and they were like, "Wow, it's really crazy that the woman would reenact that,"and my first thought was, "Were they too similar looking?"

But I had wanted it to be sort of seamless; and according to Twitter, according to critics, it's working. It's what you need to get through that story, and I have no apologies for it.

Right, well, and Sonja and Annie's convictions ultimately led to the largest mass dismissal of criminal convictions in U.S. history, which is absolutely staggering. What was it personally like investigating a story that impacted so many people?

It's interesting because as a filmmaker, I knew that thousands of people were impacted by it, and I thought that I would have my pick of who I could talk to; and what I recognized was the opposite. People that had prior drug convictions were incredibly distrustful of the system. Sometimes they would get on the phone, sometimes they would not, and a bunch of times we just ran into this brick wall of them saying, "I just can't do it. I don't trust that this will do anything for me."Stepping away from the filmmaker perspective, it's incredible to see what hell two chemists had wrought.

And to me, it was also really about examining post-release, like when you get out of jail what happens? When you're trying to get your convictions lifted because there's so much ripple effect. Can you apply for food stamps? Can you apply for affordable housing? Can you vote? What does your life look like then? And I think it was about showing all of these things that are sometimes really hard to get audience members to care a ton about.

But inside the show, you can really see it through Rolando Penate and Rafael Rodriguez.

"How to Fix a Drug Scandal" is now streaming on Netflix.

More:

"I would have done it": Filmmaker on indentifying with the "How to Fix a Drug Scandal" perpetrators - Salon

Lab workers unload filled vials of remdesivir, a drug produced by Gilead Sciences Inc. that scientists from various institutions across the globe are using in test trials as they look at ways to stop the spread of the coronavirus. Photo courtesy of Gilead.

Three weeks into a virus-induced shutdown, as downtown streets remain silent and the economy finds itself teetering on the brink of a steep and sudden recession, a research boom is sweeping through local universities, hospitals and commercial labs. For scientists working nonstop behind the scenes, the race is on to defeat a deadly virus that has brought the whole world to its knees.

Their war has many fronts, but chief among them are testing and treatment, which are seeing a flurry of activity. Stanford University and University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) have ramped up their testing capacity and launched clinical trials at a furious pace. Since the coronavirus pandemic took off, Stanford's epidemiologists have been working with Santa Clara County health officials to model the pandemic's trajectory; its virologists have developed various ways to test for virus; and its medical researchers are now launching clinical trials for promising drugs that have proved effective for fighting Ebola, the flu and Hepatitis D.

Researchers also are collaborating with counterparts in other universities as well as public agencies and private labs to share and scale their breakthroughs.

Private companies also have stepped up, with commercial labs developing tests and distributing drugs that they believe may become critical weapons in the war against COVID-19 and with manufacturers joining the effort to create personal protective equipment, such as masks and face shields, for health care workers.

Thus far in the battle, public health strategies have led the charge, deploying the tactic of social distancing. On Tuesday, Santa Clara County residents received a glimmer of hope: Staying home to help "flatten the curve" appears to be working, even though the number of COVID-19 cases is still expected to climb between now and May 1, Dr. Sara Cody, the county's health official, told the county Board of Supervisors during her April 7 update.

Yet the hopeful news came with another message: Numerous conditions have to be met before officials can relax their social-distancing orders.

The county will need to get to a point where widespread testing for COVID-19 is available and hospitals can safely and effectively treat everyone living in the county.

"We have to at least be able to test everyone who has symptoms," Cody said. "And we also have to have enough testing capacity so that we can test where we think there is some risk of accelerated transmission or there is risk in a particular community. So we've got to have testing capacity."

Testing as defense

While Cody said she is optimistic about the latest data on COVID-19 cases, county, state and federal officials have consistently pointed to testing as a glaring weakness in the collective response to coronavirus. As of Thursday, only 13,360 people in Santa Clara County have been tested for COVID-19, county data show, with 1,442 testing positive a rate of 10.79%. It takes an average of 2.27 days to get a test result, a problem that Dr. Karen Smith of Santa Clara Public Health Department attributed Tuesday to delays at just about every step of the testing process.

Testing, she said, is limited by a shortage of swabs that are used to take samples and by the worldwide shortage of reagent, a key chemical for sample analysis.

That said, where the government has lagged, Stanford has been able to rev up its testing capacity. One of the nation's first coronavirus tests came from Benjamin Pinsky, associate professor of pathology and of infectious diseases at Stanford School of Medicine who has been developing a COVID-19 test since late January and whose team was validating and confirming results throughout February, according to Stanford.

In early March, Stanford's Clinical Virology Laboratory, of which Pinsky is medical director, was capable of conducting 1,000 daily tests, with a turnaround time for results between 36 and 48 hours, according to the university. Now, the lab can now perform 2,000 tests daily, Pinsky told this news organization in an email, and the turnaround time has been cut down to 24 hours.

Pinsky said the team has been able to optimize its workflow and boost production over the past month by validating multiple additional extraction instruments and thermal cyclers machines that amplify DNA segments using a copying process called polymerase chain reaction.

UCSF also has boosted its testing capacity by opening a new lab that can process more than 2,000 samples per day and return results in 24 hours. In early March, when UCSF began testing for COVID-19, it had a capacity to test only 60 to 100 tests daily, according to the university.

On Tuesday, UCSF Health President and CEO Mark R. Laret and UCSF Chancellor Sam Hawgood co-wrote in a letter that it will allow public health officials from the nine Bay Area counties, including San Mateo and Santa Clara, to submit their samples to UCSF for free analysis.

While virology labs at Stanford and UCSF are using the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technique to zoom in on the virus' DNA segments, a research team headed by Eran Bendavid, associate professor of medicine at Stanford, is looking at blood samples for evidence. On April 3 and 4, the team took 2,500 blood samples from volunteers at drive-thru sites in Mountain View, Los Gatos and San Jose. The team used targeted Facebook surveys in an attempt to get a population-representative sample of the county for its experiment.

The goal of the study is to examine the antibodies in the blood sample, a technique known as serology, to gauge the percentage of county residents who are or have been infected with COVID-19. A similar study was concurrently conducted in the Los Angeles area by researchers from University of Southern California.

"We need to understand how widespread the disease actually is," Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University who is involved with the project, said on Saturday morning, as the second day trial was kicking off. "To do that, we need to understand how many people are infected. The current test people use to check whether they have the condition the PCR test it just checks whether you currently have the virus in you. It doesn't check whether you had it and recovered. An antibody test does both."

Stanford Health is also using blood samples to test its employees for COVID-19. On April 6, the serologic test that was developed by Stanford Medicine was launched at the university's medical facilities. While the university is currently only testing health care workers, Stanford Health spokesperson Lisa Kim said Stanford hopes to deploy these tests more broadly within the next two months.

"The test will enable us to determine which health care workers might be at low risk for working with COVID-19 patients, as well as understanding disease prevalence in our communities," Kim said.

Going on the offensive

Just as testing has accelerated, so have medical trials of potentially life-saving drugs. At an April 2 virtual town hall put on by medical leaders at Stanford, Dr. Yvonne Maldonado and Dean of Stanford Medicine Dr. Lloyd Minor, both said that the university's early development of the PCR test has increased the university's capacity to stage trials.

"Because we are one of the first to launch our own PCR test and we hope we'll have serologic testing available in the near future as well it gives us the capacity to monitor patients for not only immediate medical care but clinical trials," Maldonado said.

Two of Stanford's trials involve remdesivir, a drug produced by the Foster City-based company Gilead Sciences, Inc. Scientists from various institutions across the globe, including a team at Stanford Hospital, are examining whether remdesivir can prevent the coronavirus from replicating.

"The RNA virus gets into the cells and uses them as little hotels (to replicate)," said Kari Nadeau, co-investigator and professor of pediatric food allergy, immunology and asthma at the School of Medicine.

With the virus proliferating, some COVID-19 patients' immune systems overreact, causing severe symptoms that lead to death. Researchers hope that limiting the virus' replication will prevent the immune system from becoming overly active.

Gilead announced on April 4 that it has produced 1.5 million doses of remdesivir, enough to treat 140,000 patients. It plans to supply the drug at no charge.

Nadeau's trial began enrolling patients on March 30. Stanford is collaborating with 65 other sites worldwide; the aim is to study the drug's effects on 600 patients.

For the trial, Stanford patients will receive an intravenous dose of the medication daily for 10 days. The researchers will see how the patients do over a 15-day period. Nadeau said they expect to see a difference between the control group and those who receive the drug. They hope the drug will result in fewer people needing ventilators and fewer deaths.

Neera Ahuja, the study's principal investigator and division chief of hospital medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine, said if the evidence is convincing of the drug's effectiveness, and the side effects and adverse reactions pass federal scrutiny, the FDA approval could come within a month.

"That's unheard of in the non-pandemic world," she said.

Stanford is one of many institutions now looking at remdesivir. Among the National Institutes of Health trials of the drug is one involving patients who are on ventilators; another is studying patients with moderate COVID-19 symptoms. A third will compare the results for moderately ill patients who will be given the drug and for people who only receive standard care.

The studies involve dozens of hospitals throughout California, including the VA Palo Alto Health Care System, Stanford Health Care, Kaiser Permanente and the Regional Medical Center in San Jose. Gilead also is involved in studies using remdesivir in China and France.

Stanford is also looking at other drugs, including those that have in the past proved effective in treating other infections. Maldonado said at the April 2 town hall that in addition to its work on remdesivir, Stanford is preparing to move ahead with trials for Lambda, an immunomodulator, and the viral inhibitors Camostat and favipiravir.

"They have been studied in other infections, so we think we can obtain rapid FDA INDs so that we can start doing primarily outpatient trials for these drugs," Maldonado said, referring to "investigational new drug" authorization.

"So if they work in reducing symptoms and perhaps prevent spread by reducing viral shedding from an infected person, then these could be scaled up in the not too distant future. We're hoping those will enroll (patients) pretty quickly."

Prassana Jagganathan, a Stanford infectious disease specialist who is heading the trial on Lambda, said the drug may be able to strengthen the human immune system to better fight COVID-19. Lambda, he said, appears to target cells that are located on the epithelium (outer tissue layer) of respiratory tracts, including areas such as lungs and pharynx. As such it can be particularly suitable for treating patients with COVID-19, which can trigger respiratory failure.

"It's a molecule that we think can actually stimulate and aid antiviral defenses against a multitude of different viruses," Jagganathan said.

While Lambda had not been used to treat respiratory illnesses, another interferon called Alfa had proven effective, he said. The problem with using Alfa to treat COVID-19, Jagganathan said, is that the receptors for Alfa are far more distributed throughout the human body, including in immune cells. Thus, side effects of Alfa include fever or the flu, symptoms that resemble those of COVID-19.

The primary outcome of the randomized clinical trial, which will include 120 participants, is to see how long people are shedding the virus, Jagganathan said.

"We are hypothesizing that the folks who get Lambda will have a shorter duration of virus that we can detect," Jagganathan said.

In addition to drugs, Stanford is experimenting with another promising remedy: the antibodies from patients who have already contracted and recovered from COVID-19. The new experimental therapy program, which Stanford Blood Center announced on April 7, takes blood from the recovered patients, removes the plasma containing the antibodies, and returns the remaining blood components such as red blood cells back to the donor. The antibodies are then given to critically ill COVID-19 patients through a transfusion, the center stated.

The blood center is working with Stanford Medicine in hopes that the antibodies, which are immune proteins that attack pathogens such as viruses, might help lessen the severity of the COVID-19.

Though the use of antibodies to treat COVID-19 patients is in the investigational phase, the technique, also known as passive antibody therapy, dates back as far as the 1890s. And prior outbreaks with other coronaviruses, including the one that caused SARS, showed that neutralizing antibodies were helpful in reducing the effects of the disease.

Likewise, the technique was used in the 2009-2010 H1N1 influenza virus pandemic to reduce patients' respiratory viral load, inflammatory reactions and death, researchers Arturo Casadevall and Liise-anne Pirofski wrote in an article published in The Journal of Clinical Investigation on March 13. It also was used in the 2013 West African Ebola epidemic.

Stanford Blood Center will begin collecting the plasma this week and plans to increase collections in the following weeks as it identifies more donors. The donors must be fully recovered and symptom-free for at least 14 days. If they are only symptom-free for 14 to 28 days, they will be asked to retake a COVID-19 test at no cost. The repeat test must be negative to be eligible to donate.

The process takes about one to two hours using standard blood- and plasma-removal methods. The collections take place at the center's Palo Alto headquarters at 3373 Hillview Ave. in Palo Alto, where special care will be taken by a small team in a dedicated room, according to Dr. Suchi Pandey, the blood center's chief medical officer. (Interested donors can visit stanfordbloodcenter.org/covid19plasma and fill out an intake form.)

Getting enough of the antibodies to treat many patients could take time. Pandey said in an email that there's also no known way to cultivate or increase the amount of plasma in a laboratory, so blood centers and hospitals rely on donors.

"The volume of plasma collected from a donor is based on specific donor parameters such as weight. Depending on the volume of plasma collected, the unit may be divided into separate plasma components, which can be used to treat up to three patients," she said.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently approved use of the antibody treatment by hospitals, initially only for critically ill patients.

It will later be used in clinical trials on patients in different stages of the disease, according to the blood center.

Find comprehensive coverage on the Midpeninsula's response to the new coronavirus by Palo Alto Online, the Mountain View Voice and the Almanac here.

---

Follow the Palo Alto Weekly/Palo Alto Online on Twitter @PaloAltoWeekly and Facebook for breaking news, local events, photos, videos and more.

Read more here:

The war on the virus: Scientists race to develop tests, drugs to stop coronavirus in its tracks - Palo Alto Online

Don Winslow is one of America's most widely read and acclaimed crimewriters. His work has been adapted for major Hollywood movies and TV series.

In his bestselling books "The Cartel" (2015), "The Force" (2017), and "The Border" (2019), Winslow has taken the mystery, action, grittiness, moral dilemmas, and authenticity that typifies the best of crime fiction as a genre and combined it with epic storytelling and complex characters against the backdrop of America's failed war on drugs.

Winslow's new book "Broken" is a collection of six short novels focusingon the tragedies and triumphs, and day-to-day lives of people cops, bounty hunters, drug addicts, drug dealers, detectives, their loved ones, friends, and community who are criminals, those trying to stop them, and the human rubble left along America's "criminal highway."

Winslow is also a very outspoken truth-teller about the criminality, cruelty and inhumanity of Donald Trump and his regime.

In theconversation below, Winslow explains how Donald Trump embodies everything wrong with American masculinityand shares his observation thatthe coronavirus pandemic is a perfect metaphor for the pain and harm being caused to the American people and the world by Trump and his movement.

Advertisement:

Winslow also reflects on the obligations of the artist in a time of crisis and why he has chosen to be so vocal about Trump and his regime's many crimes against human decency and democracy.

You can also listen to my conversation with Don Winslowon my podcast "The Truth Report"or through the player embedded below.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Could you have imagined all that has happened with Donald Trump being president? If it was fiction no reasonable person wouldbelieve it.

No, you can't make this up. It's the problem with writing fiction right now. Every day you get up, and the headlines have outpaced anything you could reasonably imagine. It's discouraging. To me the coronavirus feels like the physical manifestation of some sort of metaphysical infection that we have had during the last three years at least with Donald Trump and this situation. Now Trump and all that has come from him feels almost feels like it's finally physically manifestedin the form of the virus. Now we have to see how we are all going to get through this intact.

America issick society. The sickness is so omnipresentthat too many people have become used to it as being "normal."Your description of the coronavirus as being both physical and metaphysical is such a perfect encapsulation of the Age of Trump.

I'm really beginning to come to that conclusion. It feels like in a weird way that we must get through the coronavirus in order to get past it and what it represents. It is all like the fever breaking and you go through the sweats and the shakes and the bones hurting and all that comes with getting through the illness.

And there is of course the surreal aspect of it all, with Trump's religious leaders telling people to lick the floors of churches to prove that the virus does not exist, or still telling the congregation to come to church and then they inevitably get sick from the coronavirus. Trump leads a cult. It is all a manifestation of how sick American society really is.

The first thing I do in the mornings is I usually look at five or six newspapers online. For the last few days, I almost haven't wanted to. I almost have to force myself to follow my routine. Each day's headlines are always worse than yesterday's. And then we read this ridiculous stuff about peoplelicking the floors of churches and other madness, and then one has to ask themselves, "Is this who we are as a people? As Americans? What is going on?"

In terms of a narrative and the traditional Western storytelling form, there is no climax with the Age of Trump. There is no end, just one horrible thing after another without pause. One must wonder what that lack of closure is doing to the emotional and intellectual lives of the American people.

In my trilogy about America's drug wars I intentionally abandoned the three-act structure in exchange for a five-act structure, which is the classic structure of tragedy. That is what this moment feels like to me. It is a tragedy.

A person cannot continue to support Donald Trump and still be an introspective and decent human being. To support Donald Trump is to abandon being a human being who actually thinks deeply about right and wrong. To support Donald Trump is to be a party to and support all the horrible and cruel things he does.

I don't want to just recite the whole "Greatest Generation" trope about World War II but I live in a very rural area, and it's mostly Republicans. I'm the Democrat who gets sent out to talk to my Republican neighbors when a school bond issue or some related matter comes up.

For some reason they like me. I can tell them, "Hey, we need to get these school bonds funded." They respect me, and we can work together. I have never had an issue with the 70- and 80-year-olds. They are rock-ribbed, conservative ranchers who wear cowboy hats and boots. They get it. If I go to them and I say, "Hey, we need this.I need you to vote this way because the kids need this for their educations," then they are on board. It is the 50- and 60-year-olds who are not supportive. Their response is, "Yeah, if it was good enough for me, it's good enough for them." I tell them, "That's funny because your own dad doesn't think so."

Would you even be able to properly write Donald Trump as a character in one of your books?

I don't think so. But he appears in another form in a book of mine called "The Border."But really it is impossible to write a parody of a parody. It just can't be done. Here's this guy Donald Trump in the midst of this coronavirus crisis with people dying, worried, and scared. What does Trump talk about? How it cost him billions of dollars to become president. What? Gilbert and Sullivan couldn't write lyrics for this guy. So no, I'll take a pass on it. Thank you.

We fiction writers are all struggling right now about how to write anything about and in this era. Our stories for the most part are set right now. We have to describe this moment in this era somehow. It is very difficult to do. As a writer it is easy to find yourself wandering into sarcasm, which means there will be more irony than you might otherwise want.

In America we truly are living a caricature of reality with Trump as president. What type of art do you think this moment is going to produce?

I don't think anyone's going to write anything really good about it this moment for another 10 years. We need perspective on it. I don't think that there's much in terms of novels anyway or films that are going to be done because it is so very immediate. Everything that is happening is simply too close. We also don't know the truth and all the facts about what Donald Trump has done. That reflects a broader problem with contemporary culture:with the 24/7 news cycle everything is so fast. The first story is usually wrong. To fully grapple with Donald Trump and that has happened and is happening needs time. We will also need more time before anything approaching art is made in response to Trump and this moment.

What is the obligation of the artist in a time of crisis?

I do not think that there's a responsibility to speak out. Let me just stick with my own genre. I think it's perfectly okay to write what is just a good suspense novel that entertains people and maybe to a certain extent informs the reader. That is perfectly appropriate. I kind of got into speaking about politics simply because of what I was writing about. I never intended to be a political person and I never intended to be terribly outspoken. Frankly, it goes against my personality. My inclinations tend towards being an introvert.

But in the 22 years of doing my drug trilogy, I felt that if I didn't speak out then I was almost being some type of voyeur on the genuine suffering of the people being hurt by the drug wars.

If I knew, which I do, that the war on drugs is both futile and counterproductive and wrong, then at a certain point it was incumbent on me to step outside of the novel and say it. If I knew that Trump's wall along the U.S.-Mexico border was a cruel travesty in terms of solving the heroin epidemic, the opioid crisis, then at some point I needed to step outside of saying it in a novel and say it in public. That was necessary for me to do but I don't think it is necessarily a responsibility that every artist has.

I was thinking about the border wall and how Trump and Stephen Miller and other people who share their values talk about nonwhite migrants, refugees, and immigrants. Driven by bigotry and racism, itis very easy for some people to disparage and hate people that they never met and don't know.

It frustrates me terribly when I hear people from the Northeast claim to be experts on the border, and they've maybe come down for an hour or two and gotten the standard tour. I live very close to the border. I know the people who live here. They're my friends. They're my neighbors. They went to school with my kid. We're on committees together. They're, for the most part, really fine people. It infuriates me when I hear Donald Trump call them "rapists" and "murderers" and blame them for bringing diseases into the country, including the coronavirus.

I believe that very few people, regardless of their political persuasion, could physically, in person, see somebody suffering or dying in person and not do something to help them. That's on the micro level. On the macro level though, we talk about "illegal immigrants" and "wetbacks" and use other such language and then it is very easy for people to become indifferent and cruel.

I wrote "The Border" to get beneath the headlines in these discussions about immigration. Let's live with an immigrant, albeit through fiction, for a few hundred pages. Let's not talk about the opioid crisis. Let's live with a young woman who is a heroin addict. Let's live with a cop on that beat. Let's try to see what is happening from that individual level. That makes a huge difference. To be able to do that is one of the great opportunities provided by fiction as a genre because we can create a story in our heads and hearts and then bring the reader close that world and feelings.

There are many ways to create that type of connection with the reader. The technique that I choose is to see life through the eyes of the people in my stories. And that does require a certain amount of empathy. It requires sitting down and talking to people. It really requires sitting down and listening to people which is something by the way that we as writers need to remind ourselves to do.

As human beings we share a common humanity. While fortunately I have not suffered in the way that the people in "The Border" or my other books have suffered because of the war on drugs, we do all have common human experiences. We've all suffered loss,we've all suffered fear, we've all felt hope, we've all felt disappointment, and I think that we can relate on those levels.

One of the throughlines in your books are questions of masculinity and violence, and the relationships that men have with one another as fathers, sons, brothers, and comrades. When I see Donald Trump, I don't see a "bad man" ora real tough guy. I see a man pretending to be tough, a wannabe mafia boss.

All the real tough guys I know are either dead or in jail. Very often these Hollywood wannabe tough guys have made a gangster movie andthey think they are the character in real life. They are not. Donald Trump wants to be a badass and clearly is not. Growing up, my intuition is that Donald Trump didn't have any friends or other people to tell him that, "Hey, you're being a jerk." It appears that Donald Trump did not have anyone to help define him as a person and help him learn boundaries and correct behavior.

Trump's wannabe tough guy swagger and machismo bullying and posturing is part of his appeal. Again, it reveals a sickness in American society. Specifically, a crisis in American masculinity.

Much of this is in fact a crisis in masculinity. Donald Trump represents most of what I don't like about men. Donald Trump represents men at our worst with all that macho posturing and other nonsense.

In the research for your books you have encountered some real bad men, legitimately tough and dangerous people. What were they like?

They are each different. They remind me of the famous Tolstoy observation that, "All happy families are the same, and all unhappy families are different."That is true of the real bad guys.

I have sat across a table from multiple murderers who can be as charming as anyone you've ever had dinner with, and yet you look in their eyes and you definitely see it. Others are just cold businesspeople. To them, violence is unfortunate but necessary. Others are very quiet. Those ones are the really serious guys. Some are sociopaths or psychopaths and others are just muted. What you typically don't see though with these types of real bad men is the macho posturing because they have no need to do it.

As the clich goes, is all writing therapeutic?

No. Not for me. That's not the deal that I have with the reader. The reader doesn't care and shouldn't care about Don Winslow's feelings. The purpose of my books is not for me to bare my soul. The purpose of my books is hopefully to tell a really good story in a good way and to maybe give people some information that they didn't have. I also hope that after finishing one of my books that the readers see the world in a different way than they had before.

How did writing become your vocation?

I've always wanted to be a writer. I felt that ways since I was a little kid. I grew up around great storytellers. My dad was a sailor and one of the great raconteurs of all time. He and his buddies had seen the world and could tell such amazing stories.

I used to sit, literally, at their feet hiding under the table. They'd pretend not to know I was there while they're drinking beer and telling great old stories. And the stories got better every year. My mom was a librarian, so I grew up around books. My dad was a tremendous reader, so I always thought thatI wanted to read and write for a living. But at some point, we often experience a crisis of confidence. I remember thinking to myself, that "No.I am not good enough to write for a living. I don't have the talent to do that." I needed to make a living, so I did that by trying to do things that were more interesting as opposed to less interesting and I was lucky enough to get some of those gigs.

I remember this vividly. I was in Africa on a safari photographic safaris to be clear sick with dysentery and a malaria relapse and thinking to myself, "You better do this thing,man.You better just stop thinking about it, stop talking about it and really do it."And I'd heard Joseph Wambaugh say that when he was a Los Angeles homicide cop which he was for many years he really wanted to be a writer. So, he decided to write 10 pages a day. I said to myself, "Well, I can't write 10 but I can do five." I did it every day for the next three years until I had my first book. All the other things I did for money were just ways of evading what I really wanted to do which is to be a professional writer.

More:

Author Don Winslow: Trump's administration feels like it's "manifested itself" as the coronavirus - Salon

Sonja Farak, one of the lab workers depicted in Netflix's "How to Fix a Drug Scandal." | Courtesy of Netflix

The content streaming juggernaut Netflix has once again premiered a series that may help viewers forget about the current coronavirus troubles of the world while simultaneously reminding us of the systemic problems that helped deliver us to this moment in time. The docu-series How to Fix a Drug Scandal was added to the platform this month, giving a glimpse into the ever-present problems of the so-called war on drugs through an expos of the largely ignored drug laboratory chemists who ultimately help determine the fate of those charged with narcotics possession.

Through the stories of lab chemists Sonja Farak and Annie Dookhanand the scandals their actions contributed to creatingthe program sheds a light on the inequality that characterizes the justice system when it comes to drug use and possession. It will ultimately leave viewers a bit more enlightened and perhaps a lot more frustrated by the truths the series tells.

The program was produced by Alex Gibney (The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley) and directed by Erin Lee Carr (Dirty Money). The four-part series focuses on the misconduct of lab chemists Farak and Dookhan that sets off a chain of events affecting government officials, lawyers, and thousands of inmates. The two workers become symbols of a larger systemic problem within the judicial system concerning how people are persecuted under the law regarding drug possession.

Farak was a drug lab expert in Amherst, Mass., who also happened to be a drug addict that used the substances she was supposed to test. She often conducted drug analysis while under the influence of these substances. A good chunk of the documentary takes a deeper look into her trial and the impact on those convicted of crimes based on her drug testing.

Dookhan was a chemist at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health lab who admitted to falsifying evidence affecting close to 34,000 cases. While the series takes a look at the lives of these women and what may have driven them to the actions they took, it is the response of the Attorney Generals office and government officials that gets to the real crux of the story on what happens when, instead of addressing systemic shortcomings, leadership buckles down in obstruction and cover-ups in order to fix the scandal rather than the system.

Government officials wanted to treat Farak and Dookhan as outliers who made bad decisions that were isolated instances. What the documentary unveils through interviews with lawyers and public officials, however, is that Farak and Dookhan are products of an environment that doesnt care much for its lab workers and doesnt concern itself with proper vettingbecause it cares more about conviction results than quality of work.

This is what makes up a majority of the series, as defense lawyers fight to get their clients, who are serving time based on the compromised testings of Farak and Dookhan, some sense of justice in the face of law enforcements refusal to take another look at their cases.

This is not a flashy series with the quick jump cuts and comedic irony interlaced within the story that you sometimes find when documentaries try to appeal to mainstream audiences. What you get instead is a program that relies heavily on direct-to-camera interviews, archival footage, re-created court testimonies, and the journey to some sort of semblance of justice. Its a riveting story that doesnt actually need a lot of bells and whistles, but for those wanting a more fast-paced exploration, you may find this series lacking.

The lack of tantalizing action may also relate to the fact that when people think about the war on drugs, (a drug prohibition campaign led by the United States federal government with the proclaimed aim of reducing illegal drug use and importation into the country), we often think about law enforcement, lawyers, and those persecuted. Rarely receiving any attention at all are the lab chemists who test the evidence and testify in court about their findings, something that plays a major role in convicting those being charged. It isnt a glamorous job with loads of television shows glorifying it in pop culture, but it is perhaps the most important aspect of the whole process that ultimately leads to the statistics concerning who ends up in prison thanks to this so-called war.

With that understanding, it would seem a given that lab chemists are workers who earn livable wages and that they are properly vetted and background-checked, since they have power to imprison so many. We learn in the documentary, however, that this is not the case at all.

We also learn in the documentary that, depending on your race and status, presumed innocence until proven guilty is a privilege not afforded to all.

In watching the program, viewers may become frustrated at the willful ignorance of government officials in not holding themselves accountable for the problems their negligence caused. Viewers may also become enraged at the fact that certain personalities in this tale end up with happier endings while others (read: working class people of color) have a harder time getting such second chances. It is a documentary filled with events that will have audiences discussing the intersectionality of race, class, and gender when it comes to the criminal justice system.

Drug laws and harsh sentencing has resulted in detrimental effects to communities of color. Studies have shown that people of color, particularly Black and Latino, experience more discrimination at every stage of the criminal justice system than their white counterparts, and are more likely to be stopped, arrested, convicted, sentenced, and chained with lifelong criminal records. Nearly 80% of people in federal prison and 60% of people in state prison for drug offenses are Black or Latino.

Research has also shown that prosecutors are two times as likely to pursue a mandatory minimum sentence for Black people compared to white people charged with the same offense.

This has lasting effects, as one in 13 Black people of voting age are disenfranchised by felony convictions that deny them their right to vote.

In the series, you only see a few glimpses of the nearly 50,000 people Dookhan and Farak helped to convict with their testimonies and compromised tests, but they serve as a dreadful reminder of the much bigger problem of inequality and bias in the criminal justice system.

At just close to four hours of television, the documentary only scratches the surface about the topic. How to Fix a Drug Scandal should make viewers angry about systemic injustice and government cover-ups, and hopefully that anger fuels more calls for progressive change.

Originally posted here:

Netflix's 'How to Fix a Drug Scandal' will anger you, and rightly so - People's World

For all those who love to paint, sketch, sculpt, or put their senses to any form of figurative canvas and create magical pieces of art, how often do you feel the need to turn to music for inspiration? Or do you prefer listening to music while doing your artsy thing? On today's Pandemic Playlist, we have chosen five songs that will inspire your creativity or just simply help you relax while you make your art.

'Thinking Of A Place' comes as one of the harder tracks on today's playlist, albeit the song is still a slow jam by nature. Like most of The War On Drugs songs, think Bob Dylan, heartland rock, blues, and synth all splashed together and you will come close to imagining what 'Thinking Of A Place' sounds like. The dreamy track will send you floating, drifting, and fading in a richly recorded slow rock number that goes down as the only song with vocals on our list. Without being too influential on your own unique artistic creation, 'Thinking Of A Place' could easily enter onto a road trip playlist, could inspire your beach vacation fantasies, or appeal as a track suitable for a long late drive through some quiet urban nightlife. But like the title, 'Thinking Of A Place' suggests whatever location you find beautiful.

The most gentle, most unfluctuating, or in a closer description, the most ambient track on our list, 'Weightless', with its fitting title, makes you feel exactly that. A wavey synth continuously contracts and dilates over a barely audible thump at a heart-beat tempo as the beat until, close to two minutes in on the 8-minute track, a sort of wind-chime tune plays on a mallet instrument. Gradual layers of instruments are woven in with changes that are so subtle, you may not even notice unless you pay attention. 'Weightless' comes as a perfect song to play in the background while you work on your art.

How can we make a playlist about relaxation and all things pleasing for your artwork inspiration without including some silky smooth jazz, right? Well, Pat Martino's 'Dreamsville' may just be the silkiest, smoothest of jazz numbers you've heard. With warm, intimate guitar rhythms that yield to no rules other than to comfort and relax you while you craft, 'Dreamsville' is full of beautiful guitar work that is an art to pull off itself. An ever-so-soft organ plays as the backup to the guitar and we understand that this minimalistic jazz piece uses few instruments as its heroes, but they do shine as heroes nonetheless. The song is sure to relax even those who don't like jazz, but lovers of the genre will probably want to snatch this up.

Listen to 'Dreamsville' here.

In case you haven't noticed, we have gone for a bit of variety on today's playlist. Alan Stivell's sprightly Celtic number 'Suite Des Montagnes' creates abstract mental imagery in its own right. For hardcore heavy metal fans, you may dip your fingers into ethnic-charged rock tunes every so often, but this track lets you enjoy a style of music that metal frequently gets inspiration from. 'Suite Des Montagnes' draws from some of the most primitive Celtic roots with a Celtic harp and low whistle as its musical weapons playing out in peppy, free-spirited melodies, and will certainly beckon the imaginations of an aspiring artist.

Listen to 'Suite Des Montagnes' here.

Another ambient tune, albeit more melodic than the previously listed Marconi Union song, 'Younger', comes as one of many truly rich and utterly beautiful Tony Anderson tracks (probably all suitable for this playlist). 'Younger' presents a bittersweet tune that tenderly slides between melancholy and hope. It may be hard to pin whether it is more one than the other of those two feelings, but that may be what Anderson had in mind when crafting this musical piece of art. The piano accentuates at just the right moments as the lead instrument with background trills and triplets while rich sweeping atmospheric instruments expand in this near-celestially-touched song. A dreamy piece of music that would be highly enjoyable to listen to while working on your art.

Pandemic Playlist is a daily list of songs that will keep you entertained instead of feeling drained while you're isolated at home. Look out for a fresh selection of great tunes from MEAWW to refresh your mood every day!

Read the original post:

Pandemic Playlist: From War on Drugs to Alan Stivell, the top 5 songs that will inspire creativity - MEAWW

How to Fix a Drug Scandal documents the riveting details about how a criminal justice travesty unfolded in Massachusetts, and how important a dogged defense attorney was in righting the wrongs that were done.

Two Massachusetts drug lab technicians Sonja Farak and Annie Dookhan were caught tainting evidence inseparate drug labs in different but equally shocking ways.Farak was getting high off the confiscated drugs police sent her way before replacing the evidence with fake drugs. Meanwhile, Dookhan wasnt even testing her drugs at all; she just claimed everything sent her way tested positive so that she could apparently be thought of as a prolific worker.

The two ultimately both went to prison for their tampering.

However, as the docuseries shows, their crimes were not self-contained. The drug testing the techniciansmishandled was used to convict tens of thousands of defendants on drug charges. While state prosecutors attempted to minimize what the two drug technicians did, several lawyers put up a fight for their convicted clients.

Luke Ryan is the main lawyer featured in the docuseries.He representedRolando Penate and Rafael Rodriguez, both who were sent to prison because of drug lab certificates that Farak signed. Ryan didnt think their drug convictions were fair nor the thousands of other convictionsbased on drug certificates from the two technicians and fought against the state of Massachusetts.

I really wanted this piece to show how important attorneys are, Erin Lee Carr, the filmmaker behind the docuseries, told Oxygen.com. Lawyers are incredibly crucial in maintaining any sort of levity inside the criminal justice system.

Justice runs in Ryans blood. He grew up in Massachusetts as thegrandson of a judge and also the son of a judge.

I think the air I breathed growing up, particularly due to my father, was kind of filled with this kind of sense of certain rights and wrongs, he told Oxgyen.com, adding that his father impressed upon him that the state can yield a lot of power against an individual.

Whenever I see a complaint and it says United States or Massachusetts versus, it feels like a miscommunication, like youre no longer a part of us, he said. I feel like my job is to bring them back into the community somehow and anytime anyone is accused of a crime theres a dark cloud gathers above them and itjust is there until the case is over.

Ryan didnt start off as a lawyer. Instead, he spent much of his younger years living the same lifestyle as many of his clients.

I took very few sober breaths in college, he told Rolling Stone in 2018. My best friend killed himself when I was 16. From that point on, I didnt have a drugs-and-alcohol problem as much as a drugs-and-alcohol solution.

By age 26, he cleaned up his act and got involved with a church-ministry group that was woke to racial justice. Through the group, he realized that white privilege kept him from becoming a convict a sentiment he still feels, he toldRolling Stone,

I'd like to say there but for the grace of God, go I' but Ithink it's morethere but for the grace of privileges I received due to my race and socioeconomic status, go I, he said. I was permitted to have this kind of sowing of wild oats stage in life that so many of my clients are not given so I think, in addition to having empathy, theres a debt that I feel.

I have an opportunity to live a certain kind of life and if I dont use it to advocate on behalf of people who are doing things similar to what Idid, that would be a misuse of a life experience, he said.

He enrolled in Western New England Law at age 30, and after graduating magna cum laude began working for a small firm where he could work for the underprivileged. His work led to him being named Lawyer of the Year by Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly in 2017.

As the docuseries showed, Ryanwas not satisfied with the attorney general offices claimthat Farak only began using drugs six months before her 2013 arrest. He began digging around and made requests to the Massachusetts Attorney Generals office for more documents, which were initially blocked. He learned later that some in the officethought of him as a pest. When he finally got his hands on the documents, they described him as a nuisance who they should avoid giving evidence to.

Eventually, his relentless digging paid off. He discovered that Faraks drug use went as far back as 2005 and that the attorney generals office allegedly tried to bury that by withholding evidence.

He claimed that the offices former attorneys Kris Foster and Anne Kaczmarek engaged in prosecutorial misconduct and he took them to court. A Supreme Judicial Court decided in 2017 that both Foster and Kaczmarek committed "fraud upon the court, the Boston Herald reported at the time.

As a result of that finding, in 2017 more than20,000 of the convictions that were worked on by Dookhan were dismissed. In 2018, all of Fayaks cases were also dismissed including the convictions of Ryan's clients. In all, about 35,000 criminal convictions were thrown out. It became the largest dismissal in American history.

While Ryan was not the only person that helped the dismissal happen, Carr told Oxygen.com that she doesnt think it would have happened as fast as it did without his fighting.

I think it would have maybe eventually gotten there with the ACLU, she said. I just dont know if the Farak dismissals would have happened as well.

Ryan said he understands that a docuseries cannot include everything but told Oxygen.com he found it important to note that defense attorney Rebecca Jacobstein, who was included briefly in the docuseries, played a pivotal role in the dismissals.

Ryan called her an unsung hero who really framed what happened as a fraud on the court.

As the docuseries noted at its conclusion, he has filed a civil suit seeking damages for the wrongful conviction of Penate. He told Oxygen.com that while he filed the suit in 2017, it is still in the discovery phase.

Its been a slog, he said.

He said he continues to defend other clients as well.

As for the docuseries he said, I think it started a lot of important conversations about things that I care very deeply about so thats extremely gratifying and Ithink it was an extremely well made film. I hope it leads to some systemic change.

Ryan has no pending criminal cases with the attorney generals office and hasn't had to work with them since, he said.Rather than other prosecutors regarding him as a pest going forward, he said he hopes his work has served as a cautionary tale for prosecutors.

My hope is that people begin to see that there is real danger for withholding evidence, he told Oxygen.com.

Furthermore, Ryan said he hopes that the docuseries and other conversations will lead to the end of Americas war on drugs.

When we come out on the other side of this [coronavirus]pandemic, we are going to have to make some choices about how we dig ourselves out of this hole," he said. "This war on drugs is a luxury we are no longer going to be able to afford due to the incredible economic resources devoted to it and the human cost as well."

Read the original:

Who Is Luke Ryan, The Persistent Defense Attorney In 'How To Fix A Drug Scandal'? - Oxygen

An old drug is getting a lot of new attention around the world: chloroquine.

In the United States, President Donald Trump has talked about the drug's potential for treating the novel coronavirus, though there'slittle evidence. Primarily used to treat malaria, lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, chloroquine'slink to COVID-19 has prompted a global rush on the drug and led to shortages.

But the clamor for the drug leaves leading scientists alarmed. The hopeful claims are unsubstantiated at this point, they say, even as scientists rush to set up trials to catch the research up to the hype.

Related:Trump's medical advice triggers run onmalariadrugs in Mexico

The race for chloroquine is far from new. This remedy and its natural derivative, the cinchona plant, have defined world powers and symbolized hope for cures to destructive diseases for centuries.

There are such clear parallels between what is happening now and what happened in the 17th century, said Fiammetta Rocco, author of "The Miraculous Fever-Tree," referring to a malaria pandemic that hit Italy especially hard in the 1600s.

Many thought the illness, with its spiked fevers and shaking chills, came from noxious fumes. Instead, it was the parasite-carrying mosquitoes populating Romes many marshes that spread the disease. Malaria Italian for bad air killed the Pope in 1623. The Vatican shut down, and 10 of 55 cardinals died, said Rocco, who is also a culture correspondent for The Economist.

Related:Climate change will make animal-borne diseases more challenging

Looking for a treatment for the disease, priests from the Jesuit Roman Catholic order set out on a scientific expedition and mission, traveling as far as the Andean region of South America. It was there that they found the cinchona plant.

You have to imagine ... these huge, sort of botanical creations through which very little light even passes into the ground, theyre so huge, said Rohan Deb Roy, a historian at the University of Reading in the UK and author of "Malarial Subjects."

The Jesuit missionaries and Spanish conquistadors first observed how locals used the bark of the plant or fever bark to treat malarial fevers,Deb Roy said. They then brought it back to Europe.

Whatever cured malaria should be understood not just as a medicine, but also as a military weapon, Deb Roy said.

Malaria could kill more soldiers than bullets during war, and being able to fend off the disease became key to maintaining European colonies overseas.

The cure for malaria would be then seen as a tool of empire, Deb Roy said, enabling soldiers to survive in these sort of unpredictable tropical colonial landscapes, which otherwise would be impossible for them.

That led to a race among rising industrial powers to grow their own cinchona to lessen their dependency on Spain's monopoly over the plant in the Americas. The Netherlands ultimately succeeded in the territory of Java, present-day Indonesia.

But how the bark actually worked remained a mystery until 1823, when two French researchers discovered the compound that made the bark effective against malaria: quinine.

Related:Lessons from Singapore and how it handled SARS

Quinine became the basis for many antimalarial drugs, though it took scientists another century to create a synthetic variation that would allow labs to manufacture the drug without any dependency on natural plants. Those research efforts picked up around World War I, when malaria posed a threat to all sides, including US soldiers training in the South.

We often forget now that malaria was all over the place. All up through the Mississippi Valley there was malaria, said Leo Slater, a chemist and author of "War and Disease: Biomedical Research on Malaria in the Twentieth Century."

In the early 20th century, the natural version of quinine from grinding the cinchona bark was still the essential weapon against the malaria parasite. But when Japan took control of the Dutch East Indies during World War II, that natural supply was halted.

When they do this, they cut off the rest of the world from the supply of quinine just as the war is coming, Slater said.

The US significantly ramped up its own anti-malarial efforts during the war.

They developed a large program, the largest of its kind and a model for post-war biomedicine to look for new drugs, Slater said. But the centerpiece of it was to test more than 14,000 compounds against malaria in one form or another.

In the rush to arm US soldiers with anti-malaria medication, the military narrowed in on Atabrine, a drug that was effective, but incredibly toxic, causing soldiers intense nausea.

They didnt want to take it, said Karen Masterson, a professor at Stony Brook University and author of "The Malaria Project: The US Governments Secret Mission to Find a Miracle Cure." They were so resistant to it that the chain of command demanded that their unit commander put the pill in their mouth, close their jaw, and watch their Adam's apple go up and down and swallow it.

Related:Coronavirus most challenging crisis sinceWorld War II, UN says

During the war, Germany under Adolf Hitler had also put significant efforts into malaria research, including testing drugs on people in state hospitals, prisons and concentration camps, Masterson said. (The US also used non-consenting patients as test subjects in malaria drug experiments.)

By the end of the war, the US turned to a drug more tolerable than Atabrine. It had been developed, but not pursued, by German company Bayer, which had been pivotal in modern pharmaceutical practices and malaria drug experiments. The Bayer drug had also been used in experiments by a French doctor on residents of a German-occupied compound, Masterson said.

That drug was chloroquine.

By the late 1940s and '50s, chloroquine became one of the miracle drugs, said chemist Slater.

As the world entered a new era of peace, this miracle drug was promoted by the newly formed World Health Organization to help people across the world prevent and treat malaria.

Though chloroquine rose to fame quickly, its success didnt last long, said Masterson. The so-called miracle drug was so widely promoted that malaria parasites developed a resistance, creating even more challenges in some communities where malaria was already endemic.

Its not a perfect drug, its not a magic bullet, Masterson said.

Now, more than 50 years later, chloroquine, and its close relative, hydroxychloroquine, are in the spotlight again, as the world searches for a weapon against the new coronavirus threat.

I'm not at all surprised that such a significant and major drug that is chloroquine is back in the news in the context of a global pandemic, Deb Roy said.

COVID-19: The latest from The World

Today, chloroquine still has important medical uses, but it can have serious side effects even death for some. In the fog of a fast moving pandemic, no one knows yet whether its actually useful against COVID-19.

Still, chloroquine the product of magic plants, dead popes, and desperate hopes has again come to represent a glimmer of light for some leaders today.

But Masterson cautioned that it represents something else, too.

To me its a symbol of false hope, she said.

Read more here:

The chloroquine chronicles: A history of the drug that conquered the world - PRI

The Philippine governments response was remarkable when reports circulated online that the Health Department had instructed a Manila hospital to stop counting Covid-19 deaths. As quick as lightning, it immediately announced that all hospitals and health centers are mandated to report on consultations and/or admissions of all Covid-related cases. Health reports are made on national television every day and include the number of Covid patients, recoveries and deaths caused by the virus. These reports have become important to the public. Everyone has become interested in the story behind the numbers. Who died? Where did the patient contract the virus? Who recovered? With 335 deaths so far, Filipinos have treated the coronavirus as the angel or bringer of death. In one day, I heard the expression death is just around the corner more than10 times. While it is understandable to arm oneself with facts during this pandemic, one must not forget the number of deaths in President Rodrigo Dutertes war on drugs. According to a Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency report, 4,948 suspected drug users and dealers died in police operations from July 1, 2016, to Sept. 30, 2018. The number does not include killings caused by unidentified gunmen. Before Covid-19 menaced the Philippines, figures were up by 10 percent in January 2020, according to the same report. Moreover, the Philippine National Police reported in 2019 that there had been 22,983 drug-related deaths since the war on drugs began. More than 90 percent of these deaths remain unresolved. There are complainants but no suspects have been arrested. The figures are jaw-dropping. Offhand, the 335 deaths caused by Covid-19 are no matchfor the drug wars casualty figures. Facts show that nature is not the primary killer of mankind. Man still poses a greater threat to his own kind than a virus. But what is interesting is that society seems to care more about Covid-19 deaths than extrajudicial killings. Is this because only the poor are being shot in cold blood while the rich are spared? Both the government and the public are now very keen on data gathering and reporting. But the same level of diligence with regard to reporting the exact number of deaths in the administrations drug war is lacking. There are certainly no televised reports and daily counting of whohas been killed in the drug war. There are also no public announcements nor a national clamor to investigate the killings. Perhaps nobody cares anymore. Or perhaps society has chosen not to care. Philippine society has become callous to reports about extrajudicial killings. The killings have become ordinary news, so ordinary newspapers do not print them on the front page anymore. What is worse is the bias the majority have developed. Many had jumped to conclude that the victims were killed because they were addicts and drug pushers. Death has become the very proof and indication of guiltin an alleged crime rather than evidence. The present pandemic brings out the best and the worst in humanity. While it may teach society to fight for survival, it can also cause societal amnesia. Yes, Philippine society is suffering from a societal amnesia the inability or intentional refusal to confront a dark past that needs resolution in the present. We, as a nation, have simply brushed the killings aside by pretending they have never existed. We have created what Philippine sociologist Randy David described as necessary fiction. David believed that it is possible for a people or individuals to remember something even if they have not experienced it. Or, alternatively, individuals can develop amnesia or experience psychological disorientation due to severe injury, David wrote in one of his columns. Has the war on drugs become a massacre too much for Philippine society to endure that it chooses to forget rather than to confront it? The coronavirus is indeed the great equalizer. But sadly, the governments war on drugs is not an equalizer at all. It chooses. It discriminates the rich from the poor. It knows borders. Thousands living below the poverty line have been killed. And the killings happen in dilapidated shanties, not in exclusive and rich villages or subdivisions. Thus, either in a pandemic like Covid-19 or in Dutertes drug war, the poor are always on the losing side. Joseph Peter Calleja is a lawyer and editor of Bayard Philippines. He is also a member of the Lay-Religious Alliance of the Assumptionists. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official editorial position of UCANews.

Read more:

The poor always on the losing side - UCAN

This article is inThe Spectators May 2020 US edition.Subscribe here to get yours.

We are told that were in this together by people who can afford to wait out the epidemic in the way the aristocrats of old retreated to their estates when the plague arrived in the city. It is more accurate to say that we are, as this editions cover puts it, together, alone. The coronavirus has revealed that people today can live in connected solitude, as Sam Leith describes. It has never been easier to retreat from society if you have the money. But it has never been more vital to sustain real-world connections. We may feel atomized but the truth is we can no more insulate ourselves entirely from other people than we can from the economic effects of an unprecedented shutdown.

It is customary for politicians to declare war on poverty, on drugs, on terrorism but for once, this talk has been justified. The military responded with its customary professionalism and diligence. Almost overnight, the US Navys hospital ship Comfort appeared in New York Harbor and the US Army Corps of Engineers turned the Javits Center into a 3,000-bed field hospital. The federal system, however, has adapted less quickly and ably. Political grandstanding and bickering between governors have hampered a coordinated response and heightened public alarm.

Business has responded with an efficiency that would be more heartening were the boom in home delivery not accompanied by price hikes and the exploitation of those doing the delivering. The COVID-19 epidemic has exposed the ugly underbelly of globalization, as Christopher Caldwell describes. The creation of jobs at a time when unemployment has reached Depression levels almost overnight is imperative. But it will not excuse the existence of a permanent gig economy underclass.

The food supply chain has not broken, but the lines at food banks are growing. After the mass hoarding of toilet paper, our common symbol of the paper-thin layer between civilization and barbarism, the shelves are stocked. But more and more Americans are struggling to afford the basics. Even before COVID-19, nearly half of Americans held no savings at all. The Trump administrations $1,200 subvention to citizens is a drop in the swelling ocean of debt. Total lockdown is a luxury that we can no longer afford.

Some businesses have been sharp to adapt: Titos Vodka, for instance, is now producing hand sanitizer. But General Motors had to be shamed by the Defense Production Act before it would switch to producing ventilators. The president claimed that GM, a company bailed out by the Obama administration, had been stalling over cost. If so, GM was hardly alone. Only when the hospitals in New York City were at risk of overflowing did health insurers waive out-of-pocket costs for all COVID-19 treatment. Harvard University, insulated by its endowment, did not guarantee the wages of its sub-contracted cleaning, security and catering workers until pressured to do so. United Airlines waited for the stimulus bill to pass (with $50 billion for airlines) before telling workers to expect job cuts. Car manufacturers, health insurers, airlines and the Ivy League are habitual beneficiaries of direct and indirect government support. Their contempt for the common taxpayer has never been clearer.

No failure of commission was more shameful than that of the state and local administrators who failed to stock up on masks, gowns, gloves and other personal protective equipment (PPE). This, like the outsourcing of medical supply chains, reflects a disorder of domestic priorities. So does the failure of the Obama and Trump administrations to restock federal stores of masks after the H1N1 (swine flu) epidemic of 2009, and the Trump administrations disbanding of the NSCs global health unit.

Donald Trump campaigned in 2016 against globalization and its discontents: outsourcing, strategic dependency on China, the political classs abandonment of American workers and American security. Like George W. Bush and Barack Obama, Trump finds his presidency redefined by unforeseen disaster. COVID-19 is a reckoning for the United States, and for the Trump presidency in particular.

COVID-19 is a vindication of those who, like Trump, advocate for strong borders and economic independence. Perhaps less comfortably for the president and his supporters, the response to COVID-19 is also a repudiation of those who have demonized Hispanic immigrants as criminals and cultural fifth columnists. The public servants who have sustained hospitals and civic order, and the workers who have delivered luxuries to our doorsteps, are disproportionately migrants.

Trump was also elected to break up the cozy corporatism of Washington DC and private capital. The present danger has, however, forced the president to become the inadvertent sponsor of forces he once opposed and technologies he once distrusted. The Congressional stimulus was rushed through quickly and is in significant part an Obama-style bailout. The administration has turned to Google as a public information channel. The militarization of civilian life, a malign side effect of the war on terror, is being furthered by necessity, and so is the digital snooping and surveillance that accompanies it.

As Paul Wood says, the crisis will not be the last challenge of its kind. Though the symptoms of COVID-19 are beginning to lift, the body politic still requires urgent treatment. The lockdown must be lifted as far as possible, and the lessons learned as quickly as possible. It is imperative that Americans be allowed to work. But restoring the fabric of society also means restoring trust between institutions and the people they are supposed to serve.

This article is inThe Spectators May 2020 US edition.Subscribe here to get yours.

Read the rest here:

EDITORIAL: After the lockdown, the breakdown - The Spectator USA

MANILA, PhilippinesPhilippines President Rodrigo Duterte is bringing his uniquely brutal brand of leadership to combating the coronavirus.

On March 24, police in San Isidro forced alleged curfew violators to sit under the sun, and the local governments Facebook page posted a photo of them, saying, Everyone violating the curfew will be placed here. (Such treatment is legally classified as torture under the Anti-Torture Act of 2009.) A few days earlier, officials in Santa Cruz, Laguna province, locked five youths inside a dog cage for the same violation. Further reports emerged of police beatings and shootings around the country. Anyone out at the wrong time will be shot, you sons of bitches, said a police officer on a radio report on March 26.

And on April 1, Duterte delivered an impromptu national address with a short and clear message: My orders to the police and military if there is trouble or the situation arises where your life is on the line, shoot them dead, he announced. Understand? Dead. Ill send you to the grave. Dont test the government. In his warning, Duterte called out the human rights group Kadamay, which he accused of instigating a protest against the governments lockdown.

The speech followed weeks of criticism of the governments handling of the coronavirus pandemic. Two days later, a 63-year-old farmer was shot dead in Mindanao after reportedly refusing to wear a face mask. The police reported that the man had been drunk and attacked the health workers and the police with a scythe.

The incident was met with public outcry, with some Filipino citizens calling for Duterte to be ousted. Even his traditional base of supporters criticized the move. When you have a government that prioritizes the mobilization of military and police force to respond to a health crisis, you cant help but see the lack of sight in their priorities, said Matthew Jzac Kintanar, a student active in online protests against the Duterte government from his home in Mindanao in the southern Philippines. The government should prioritize mass testing, aggressive contact tracing, protection of front-liners, and economic support for all individuals, but instead we get threats.

Dutertes shoot-to-kill order is just one escalation in his increasing assertion of authority that is all too reminiscent of the presidents crackdown on illegal narcotics, which has seen more than 20,000 suspected drug offenders killed in three years, according to human rights organizations. The government has put the number of dead at about 6,000. The United Nations has called for an investigation into that crackdown.

Carlos Conde, a researcher at Human Rights Watch Philippines, said that beyond mistreatment at the hands of the authorities, the arrests have been counterproductive in reducing the spread of the coronavirus. The most worrisome aspect of tens of thousands of arrests is that they are thrown into crowded jails and holding areas, which completely eliminates the possibility of social distancing, he said.

What is happening in the Philippines has evoked new concerns about rising authoritarianism during the coronavirus pandemic. On April 1, in a statement, a group of 13 European Union member states said they are deeply concerned about the use of emergency measures to tackle the coronavirus outbreak, fearing that some powers could threaten democracy and fundamental rights. This came after Hungarys parliament granted Prime Minister Viktor Orban sweeping new powers, and other states are considering similar measures.

But Duterte has been particularly blunt and brutal in his response. First came the Enhanced Community Quarantine, which placed Manila and the entire island of Luzon on lockdown on March 16, suspending domestic and international travel. Businesses were shuttered, with the exception of supermarkets and pharmacies, and police, military, and local government officials enforced a strict 8 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew.

On March 21, the presidents office asked Congress to grant special powers to Duterte allowing him to take over privately owned utilities and businesses to address the effects of COVID-19.

After having his request refused, Duterte signed the three-month-long Bayanihan to Heal as One Act on March 25, granting him 30 powers including the ability to take over private medical facilities and public transportation, and giving him greater control of the executive branch, including government-owned and controlled corporations.

Lawyers have criticized the measure, insisting existing laws already offer the president such powers and emphasizing that it did not address the root cause of the health crisis due to Dutertes lack of a comprehensive plan against the outbreak.

Meanwhile, the law punishes those violating restrictions with up to two months imprisonment or fines up to 1 million Philippine pesos, about $20,000. These punishments extend to individuals or groups found to be creating or spreading false information regarding the coronavirus crisis. The National Union of Journalists, a local press group, said that the provision makes the government the arbiter of what is true or false and will end up criminalizing free speech.

Politicians in the Philippines are equally defiant. Filipino Sen. Leila de Lima, who has been in prison since 2017 for allegedly violating the drug trafficking law, is no stranger to arbitrary authoritarianism.

I personally experienced being the victim of the weaponization of the law to silence democratic dissent, a useful tool in the Tyrants Toolbox, she said in a prison interview with Foreign Policy. De Lima said that there have been more arrests of curfew and quarantine violators (at least 17,000) than mass testings (3,000). People are dying because governments are more concerned about retaining control and power, rather than protecting and serving and we are now one hungry mob away from a dictatorship, she said.

Nor does Dutertes approach appear to be working well.The Department of Health has recorded 5,660 confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus in the Philippines as of April 16, a leap from just three reported cases on March 2. The Philippines has the highest number of cumulative coronavirus cases in Southeast Asia as of April 15, according to the World Health Organization, followed by Indonesia and Malaysia. In the region, the Philippines has the second-highest number of deaths, 362, and the second-lowest recovery rate, just 435.The Philippines also has among the highest percentage of total COVID-19 fatalities among health care professionals in the world. The country has conducted the fewer tests than most other nations, 38,103 for a population of 109 million, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University,

Other types of punishments are also highly demeaning. On April 5, three members of the LGBTQI+ community in Pandacaqui, Pampanga, were ordered to kiss each other and do a sexy dance in front of a minor,Rappler reported, as punishment for violating the curfew, and the incident was streamed live on Facebook by the barangay captain, the highest elected official in the village. An anti-discrimination bill that would have penalized this type of behavior has languished in Congress for nearly four years.

Another Facebook live post shows detainees in Pandacaqui forced to sign bail papers with sweat, while being threatened with paddling.

Perhaps the most notorious incident to date concerns a protest by residents in Sitio San Roque, Quezon City, who were asking for food aid on April 1. Twenty-one people were arrested with bail set at 15,000 pesos (almost $300) each. With 80 percent of San Roque earning minimum wage around 500 pesos a day and most residents unable to work during the lockdown, such a fee is impossible for many.

Human rights organizations and labor groups have expressed outrage and indignation at the violent arrests. The Asia Pacific Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines called for the release of the 21 protesters, who, as of April 6 were still in police custody. The Philippine authorities should urgently investigate reports of barangay (village) officials committing abuses, said Amnesty International Philippines on April 8. And the labor group Bukluran ng Manggagawang Pilipino said, to arrest hungry and desperate people is a new low for this administration.

As a result of such brutality, the tide of public sentiment is beginning to turn. Over the past two weeks, the hashtags #StopTheAttacks, #BasicSocialServicesforthePoor and #MassTestingNowPH circulated on social media. A growing sentiment among the Philippine public is that the more the Duterte administration focuses on heavy-handed, militaristic responses, the less attention is directed toward health solutions. People are waiting for the government to deliver on its promises of assistance for health workers and emergency cash aid for 18 million low-income families of which more than 1.5 million have lost all sources of income.

The International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines said the crisis will increasingly take a heavy toll on the poor. We support the efforts of empowered peoples movement in the Philippines to make the Duterte government accountable for: every poor persons life lost due to denial of health care services and protection from Covid-19; every front-liners who died and are at risk due to the massive shortage of adequate facilities and equipment, the coalition wrote in a statement.

Eliza Romero is the coordinator at the Malaya Movement, a U.S.-based alliance to advance democracy and human rights in the Philippines. She said that her organization supports the increasing protests demanding the release of the San Roque residents and condemning the governments response to the coronavirus.

The shoot-to-kill order will just encourage more extrajudicial killings and vigilantism, Romero said. It will give private citizens and barangay captains impunity to commit more human rights violations with the protection of the law while normalizing carnage.

The forum Kalusugan, Hindi Diktadura! (Health, Not Dictatorship!) organized an online rally with speakers from advocacy organizations on April 1. They pushed a social media rally spreading the hashtags #DUTERTERESIGN and #OUSTDUTERTENOW, and the message Solusyong medical, hindi militar (Medical solutions, not military), which began trending on Twitter.

Amid the governments militarist approach, Filipinos have taken the situation into their own hands; citizen-led relief operations, information campaigns, and donation drives are providing hundreds of community-driven solutions to a faltering government response. They call it the Citizens Urgent Response to End Covid-19 (CURE COVID), an initiative made up of various organizations and sectors such as the National Union of Students of the Philippines that were active in calling for the release of the 21 San Roque residents.

Dutertes order is made more dangerous by the culture of impunity created by his administration. State forces will not hesitate to pull the trigger because they know that they have the support of the president, said Jandeil Roperos, the deputy secretary-general of the student group.

Filipinos are wary of dictator-like actions, which hark back to the notorious Marcos years before the 1986 People Power Revolution. The fact that the Philippines was already under a state of de facto martial law long before the enhanced community quarantine is testament to Dutertes Marcosian tactics, Roperos said. His war on drugs, the extrajudicial killings, the political persecutions, and red-tagging of activists and critics are a few examples of these tactics and proof that democracy is endangered. The whole country held its breath when he asked for more powers precisely because of him being hell-bent on recreating Marcoss dictatorship.

Filipinos have been pushing back against the system that oppresses them for a long time. The recent dissent against Dutertes incompetence has contributed to the growing social unrest. Dutertes fall from power, if he fails to change trajectories, is inevitable.

This pandemic gives him more leeway to abuse rights and endanger democracy, Conde, the Human Rights Watch researcher, added. The martial-law like atmosphere, the clampdown on criticism, coupled with past actions against the media and critics, all make a democratic slide possible.

More than three decades ago, it was the much-acclaimed People Power that ultimately toppled the Marcos dictatorship in February 1986 as hundreds of thousands of Filipinos rose up to challenge the president.

And if Duterte is not careful, history may repeat itself, said the student protester Kintanar: This pandemic has brought out the absolute worst of this government. People are tired, angry, and fed up at how we are being treated. Filipinos have shown the world peoples power. We have ousted two presidents before. Im sure that if the need arises, we will not hesitate to do it again.

The rest is here:

Duterte Issues 'Shoot Them Dead' Order for Violators of the Coronavirus Restrictions - Foreign Policy

We all have that one show we become evangelists for.

That show is must see TV for you, but youre incredulous that it somehow winds up in the Ill get to it when I get to it wing of so many other peoples queues.

Right now, that show for me is Black Monday.

When the show premiered last year on Showtime, critics were a bit torn. Season one currently has a 56% rating on Rotten Tomatoes with reviews basically calling it unfocused and not the cathartic takedown of Wall Street that they may have been expecting.

But thats exactly why I loved it.

With the very real stock market crash of 1987 (aka Black Monday) as its backdrop, the show paints a fictional story of the people and motives who caused it, namely Mo Monroe (Don Cheadle) and his trading firm the Jammer Group. What starts as a get-rich-quick scheme devolves into a shell game of figuring out whos screwing over whom.

Although the web of secret motives (and secret lives) can make season one seem a bit formless, half the fun of the show is watching how all the loose threads are eventually woven togetherand they do, indeed, come together. And no, this isnt a takedown of the people in power playing fast and loose with innocent lives, because these arent your typical people in power on Wall Street. The Jammer Group is run by Mo, a black man; Dawn (Regina Hall), a black woman; and Blair and Keith (Andrew Rannells and Paul Scheer), both closeted gay men.

To be sure, they all make terrible and morally bankrupt decisions. However, there are deeper motives to their actions that are intrinsically linked to their marginalization. Its not right, but its far more emotionally compelling than just greed is good.

Season one ended on a bit of a cliffhanger with Mo going on the run, and questions abound as to how the Jammer Group would benefit from the crash they purposefully caused that wouldve made me tune in regardless. However, now that were halfway through season two, I can confidently say this is my favorite show on television right now.

Heres why I think it should become yours, too.

Whether a pure artistic decision or a budgetary one, bottle episodes make great televisionif done correctly. With the action focused on a limited set of characters in a confined setting, the normal arc of the series has time to stretch, and what writers choose to fill that extra time can yield impactful results.

Case in point, season twos third episode: Idiot Inside.

The majority of the episode takes place in a bank where Mo and Keith are looking to make a deal with the top drug cartel in Miami. As the tension elevates in the back room where negotiations are taking place, theres also an increasing sense of dread in the lobby out front. Were introduced to several nonregular characters who, as the episode progresses, arent who or what they seem, in both good and terrible ways. The episode ends with a crucial turning point in Mo and Keiths relationshipnot to mention an epic shootout. Idiot Inside makes perfect use of the isolated setting to advance the principal story while simultaneously taking a break from it too. The whole episode was like a mashup of Black Monday, Scarface, and Dog Day Afternoon in the best possible way.

The best way to describe Black Monday is a dark farce. No matter how outlandish the scenario or dialogue might be, theres always moments of grounded clarity that balance out the overall tone of the show: the flashbacks to Mos days as a Black Panther (and the betrayal that set him on the path we see him on now), Mo and Dawns tumultuous relationship rooted in her being undervalued as a woman, Keith coming to terms with his sexuality, and so forth. Having laid that solid groundwork with its characters, season two earned the right to dial up the farce just a bit without going completely off the rails, as in that musical number in episode five, Violent Crooks and Cooks of Books.

After the bank deal goes south, Keith is hauled off to prison. The show couldve played it straight, a few fish-out-of-water jokes here, maybe a dropped-the-bar-of-soap joke there. But the writers took the opportunity to make a statement on white-collar crimes and the racial disparity in punishment with a barbershop-quartet-style number welcoming Keith to the white (collar) side of prison.

To me, this is camp and farce done right: It fits within the heightened world the show created for itself while drilling issues such as Ronald Reagans war on drugs and all the racial biases associated with it.

In season one, Black Monday solidly revolves around Mo. A compelling character, to be sure. But once he flees at the end of the finale, season two picks up with a renewed focus on Dawn, who is truly the heart (and brains) of the show. Her storyline best exemplifies what I mentioned earlier: Atypical power players playing the same crooked game as everyone else.

But unlike Mo and Blair, who basically turn into two more boys in the boys club, Dawn, for better or worse, was never blindsided by the excesses that access can bring. That gender and racial inequality is what keeps her grounded and focused enough to become the true architect of the plan that caused Black Monday in season one (even through Blair gets credit for it). In season two, we get a closer look at how that lack of valuation motivates her furthereven to the point of an ethical crisis within her own community.

Much like how The Leftovers became less about Kevin (Justin Theroux) and more about Nora (Carrie Coon)yet another show I have evangelized and will always evangelizeBlack Monday season two gives the much-deserved spotlight to the shows most empathic character as she claws and manipulates her way past the boys to get whats hers.

Read more:

Why 'Black Monday' is the show you need to be bingeing right now - Fast Company

Politics. Marijuana. Science. COVID-19.

Lets start with the first. Bernie Sanders has dropped out of the presidential race. Though he plans to remain on the ballots of the remaining primary states, hes effectively suspended his campaign.

Joe Biden, in response, promptly extended an impassioned 800-word olive branch to Senator Sanders and his supporters, recognizing both for shaping important political dialogue. Issues which had been given little attention or little hope of ever passing are now at the center of the political debate, Biden wrote. Income inequality, universal health care, climate change, free college, relieving students from the crushing debt of student loans. These are just a few of the issues Bernie and his supporters have given life to.

Biden took it one step further and committing to include Bernie and his ideals as part of his administration stating, Ill be reaching out to you. You will be heard by me. As you say: Not me, Us.

At the same time, legions of devout Bernie supporters dubbed Bernie Bros remain doubtful any radical platform adoption will take form. All this has set the stage for what could be a powerfully unifying shift were Biden to reconsider his current stance on federal marijuana legalization, which remains an illicit drug at the federal level despite being medically legalized by 33 states, of which 11 also allowing for adult-use consumption.

Senator Bernie Sanders has pledged to use his power as president to legalize cannabis via executive order within his first 100 days on the job, should he be elected. His plan was unveiled at 4:20 PM EST last October, and includes plans to vacate and expunge all past marijuana-related convictions in his platform proposal by creating an independent clemency board removed from the Department of Justice and placed in the White House.

A big part of his marijuana plan includes reinvestment it into the marginalized, largely minority, communities hit hardest by the War on Drugs, provisioning that "federal funding will be provided to states and cities to partner with organizations that can help develop and operate the expungement determination process."

Sanders plan would allot $50 billion in tax revenue generated from the sale of legal marijuana and for these equalizing and reparation measures, $20 billion of which would be used to "provide grants to entrepreneurs of color who continue to face discrimination in access to capital." Three additional $10 billion sums would be apportioned to funds or grants that aid businesses or communities disproportionately impacted by the War on Drugs.

Keeping Big Pharma and Big Tobacco from dominating a newly opened marijuana market is another essential part of Bernies federal legal marijuana approach. Companies who have formerly created cancer-causing products or have been found guilty of deceptive marketing would be banned from the industry, as would tobacco and cigarette.

To prevent marijuana market oligopolies taking form as they have in some already legal states (most notably Florida and California), market share and franchise caps will be put in place to prevent profiteering and consolidation under the Senators plan. [A]s we move toward the legalization of marijuana, I dont want large corporations profiting, he said in an interview on Showtimes Desus & Mero.

Last November, the former vice president replied to a town hall question that although he supports allowing states to determine their own marijuana policies, he is unconvinced on the science recognizing the plants relationship to other drugs. "The truth of the matter is, there has not been nearly enough evidence acquired as to whether or not it's a gateway drug," he declared.

Though Biden opposes legalization on the federal level, he has declared that anyone incarcerated for marijuana should be released and have their criminal records expunged of any marijuana charges. Biden also supports removing marijuana from the list of Schedule I drugs where it sits out-of-place alongside a motley of drugs deemed to have zero medicinal value. He proposes moving it to the Schedule II category, making the plant more easily accessible to research.

See Also: Will COVID-19 Cause The US Government To Finally Treat Cannabis As A Medicine?

While thats not nearly full federal legalization, it would be significantly more progressive than the decades-old laws marijuana finds itself trapped by today. It also illustrates some semblance of reason; no one truly believes marijuana belongs in the same drug classification as heroin, and Biden would be the first president to acknowledge and enable the medicinal value of marijuana.

But he can go a step further, and more modern, well-studied marijuana advocates can lead him there. Research already exists that correlations between marijuana and other drug use have been weakened by studies that show quite the opposite. Cannabis access has been found to be associated with reduced rates of opioid use and abuse, opioid-related hospitalizations, opioid-related traffic fatalities, opioid-related drug treatment admissions, and opioid-related overdose deaths.

A 2020 study by the Journal of Palliative Medicine found that the addition of medical marijuana to cancer patients' palliative (pain reductive) care regimen withstood the development of tolerance and reduced the rate of opioid use, over a significantly longer follow-up period than patients solely utilizing opioids. Another 2020 study found a significant reduction in opioid consumption for pain following traumatic injury when supplemented with oral synthetic THC, while opioid consumption was unchanged for controls.

Gateway Drug, it can be reliably argued, is more dated political rallying cry than modern thoughtful analysis. The marijuana research is there, Joe Biden just needs credible exposure to it.

We have been terribly and systematically misled for nearly 70 years in the United States, and I apologize for my own role in that, CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Sanjay Gupta said of marijuana in a globally-broadcast confession nearly seven years ago. It was a 180-degree about-face from the op-ed he wrote for Time Magazine in 2009 entitled Why I Would Vote No On Pot.

For the first time, Dr. Gupta had been exposed to the medicinal properties of cannabis, and in what would become a timeless story with rippling effects, it was a little girl who got him there.

Charlotte Figi became the nations arguably greatest exposure to the benefits of CBD oil after using it to control the constant seizures experienced from her severe Dravet syndrome at age 5. The Colorado girl experienced up to 300 grand mal seizures per week and used a wheelchair, before using CBD drastically reduced her rate of seizures.

Dr. Guptas interviews with Charlottes family, cannabis researchers, and caretakers led him on an unchartered journey to more closely examine the possibilities of cannabis as a medicine. His findings were brought to a national and global audience in a way no other medical marijuana cases had been before, igniting a momentous push toward medical marijuana reform.

On March 26, 2020, her mother, Paige Figi, wrote on Facebook that all five family members were sick with "fevers, pains, coughs" and were "struggling to breathe," before taking Charlotte to the hospital. A COVID-19 test came back negative and Charlotte was discharged from the hospital after a few days.

Two days later, she suffered another seizure, resulting in respiratory failure and cardiac arrest. On April 7, 2020, Charlotte passed at age 13.

Her death was first announced by the group co-founded by her mother through the Realm of Caring Foundation, an organization she chartered to empowering individuals, medical professionals, and the community through research-based education on hemp, CBD, medical marijuana, and THC.

"Charlotte is no longer suffering. She is seizure-free forever, Paige Figi wrote on her Facebook page. Thank you so much for all of your love."

Charlottes story brings it all together: the imperative for scientific thought and consideration in political policy for both marijuana and COVID-19. The countrys partisan split regarding the relevance and dependence on science to make informed, data-driven health and wellness political decisions will play a key factor in Novembers presidential election.

Charlotte Figi exemplifies the importance of foundationally sound policymaking. By immersing himself more deeply into marijuana research, Biden can firmly demonstrate his commitment to leading a science-first presidency one very different than what exists today.

This is Dr. Sanjay Guptas tribute to the life of Charlotte Figi:

Weve already seen Joe Biden shift to the left before. Earlier this year he pivoted to include the Sanders-championed proposal of free college and university education in his platform, announcing a policy to make public colleges and universities tuition-free for all students whose family incomes are below $125,000.

See Also: Nothing Silly About Psilly From Mushrooms And Its Medicinal Properties

On April 9, 2020, the former vice president proposed lowering the age eligibility for Medicare from 65 to 60 and eliminating student debt for some lower-income families. Both are issues that make up the foundation of the Sanders platform.

A shift in his marijuana thinking would be much sharper, but perhaps even politically safer.

According to apoll from the Pew Research Center 78% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents say marijuana should be legal.At the same time, 66% of Americans favor legalization, and more than 90% support enabling physicians to prescribe medical cannabis to patients, according to an April 2018 poll from Quinnipiac University.

At the same time, a new survey conducted by IBD/TIPP, found just 34% of independent voters believe Trump is handling the COVID-19 pandemic well, surging support for Biden among those voters, 47 percent to 41 percent, respectively.

This kind of pivot could set the tone for enabling so many other things, as well, including:

Each of these will be desperately needed in the eventual wake of this COVID-19 crisis. If there were ever an ideal time for marijuana to help invigorate the U.S. economy its soon to come.

Most of all, federal marijuana legalization would be a unifying, bold move.

The desire for bold moves is what Bernie supporters are driven by, and this is one that cannabis scientists, cancer researchers, struggling farmers, poor municipalities, and tax-burdened cannabis businesses are all eager for as well.

Illustration: Andre Bourque / Image: Dreamstime.com

Andre Bourque is a cannabis industry connector, executive advisor to several cannabis companies, brand strategy advisor, and a cannabis industry analyst. In addition to Benzinga, Andres articles have been featured in Forbes, The Huffington Post,Entrepreneur.com, Yahoo Finance, CIO Magazine & ComputerWorld.

You can connect with him at @socialmktgfella onLinkedIn,Twitter, andInstagram.

The preceding article is from one of our external contributors. It does not represent the opinion of Benzinga and has not been edited.

2020 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.

Continue reading here:

From Charlotte To Science: Why Now Is Prime Time For Biden To Embrace Bernie's Marijuana Legalization Plan - Benzinga

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gretchen Whitmer reacts after declaring victory in Detroit, Mich., November 6, 2018.(Jeff Kowalsky/Reuters)We should be preserving our laws and our freedom in times of crisis.

Its reasonable to assume that the vast majority of Americans process news and data, and calculate that self-quarantining, wearing masks, and social distancing make sense for themselves, their families, and the country. Free people act out of self-preservation, but they shouldnt be coerced to act through the authoritarian whims of the state. Yet this is exactly whats happening.

There has been lots of pounding of keyboards over the power grabs of authoritarians in Central and Eastern Europe. Rightly so. Yet right here, politicians act as if a health crisis gives them license to lord over the most private activities of America people in ways that are wholly inconsistent with the spirit and letter of the Constitution.

Im not even talking about national political and media elites who, after fueling years of hysteria over the coming Republican dictatorship, now demand Donald Trump dominate state actions. Im talking about local governments.

Under what imperious conception of governance does Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer believe it is within her power to unilaterally ban garden stores from selling fruit or vegetable plants and seeds? What business is it of Vermont or Howard County, Ind., to dictate that Walmart, Costco, or Target stop selling non-essential items, such as electronics or clothing? Vermont has 628 cases of coronavirus as of this writing. Is that the magic number authorizing the governor to ban people from buying seeds for their gardens?

Maybe a family needs new pajamas for their young kids because theyre stuck a new town. Or maybe mom needs a remote hard drive to help her work remotely. Or maybe dad just likes apples. Whatever the case, its absolutely none of your mayors business.

It makes sense for places like Washington, D.C., Virginia, and Maryland to ban large, avoidable gatherings. But it is an astonishing abuse of power to issue stay-at-home orders, enforced by criminal law, empowering police to harass and fine individuals for nothing more than taking a walk.

The criminalization of movement ends with ten Philly cops dragging a passenger off a bus for not wearing a face mask. It ends with local Brighton, Colo., cops handcuffing a father in front of his family for playing T-ball with his daughter in an empty park. It ends with three Massachusetts men being arrested, and facing the possibility of 90 days in jail, for crossing state lines and golfing a sport built for social distancing in Rhode Island.

There is no reason to close public parks, where Americans can maintain social distance while getting some air or space for their mental and physical well-being or maybe see a grandchild from afar. In California, surfers, who stay far away from each other, are banned from going in the water. Elsewhere, hikers are banned from roaming the millions of acres in national parks. Millions of lower-income and urban-dwelling Americans dont have the luxury of backyards, and there is absolutely no reason to inhibit their movement, either.

Two days before Easter, Louisville, Ky., mayor Greg Fischer attempted to unilaterally ban drive-in church services for the most holy day in Christianity. Its one thing if people are purposely and openly undermining public health. The constitutional right to assemble peacefully and protest or practice your religion, however, is not inoperable in presence of a viral pandemic.

Would-be petty tyrants, such as Dallas judge Clay Jenkins, who implores residences to rat out neighbors who sell cigarettes for putting profits over public health, forgets that we are not ruled by him, and that he is merely our temporary servant.

But its important and necessary, say the experts. Great. Convince us. Most polls show that 80-something percent of Americans will stay home for the rest of this month even if lockdowns are lifted.

The question of how many lives would be lost if we didnt shut down economy is a vital one, but it is not the only one. There is an array of factors that goes into these decisions. One of them should be preserving our laws and our freedom in times of crisis.

Reality check, writes Bethany Allen-Ebrahimianin Axios, Citywide quarantines, travel restrictions and obsessive public health checks arent authoritarian. Theyre the kind of total mobilization that happens during major national crises such as war, regardless of the system of government.

This position, often repeated, is utter nonsense. For one thing, we arent at war. There are no coronavirus spies and no coronavirus sabotage. Affixing war to societal problems the war on drugs being the most obvious example is typically a justification for expanding state power. Also, authoritarianism isnt defined as strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom except when there is a pandemic. Your declarative sentences and forceful feelings do not transform the meaning of either authoritarianism or freedom. Though if we dump our principles every time theres a crisis, they might as well.

See the original post:

Coronavirus Authoritarianism Is Getting Out of Hand - National Review

Tiffany Hsiaos focus on small Chinese companies gives her an unique view as to how Chinas domestic economy is faring as the country tries to recover from the Covid-19 pandemic. That perspective has also helped the Matthews Asia fund manager build a resilient portfolio in the face of the pandemicand before that, the trade war.

Taiwanese-born Hsiao grew up in Silicon Valley, where she watched her father help reinvent a calculator company and build the worlds first laptop computer using Intels 386 CPUan early lesson on the power of innovation. Hsiao has used that in hunting stocks for the Matthews China Small Companies fund (ticker: MCSMX). The $200 million fund has beaten 99% of its peers over her five-year tenure as lead manager. The funds 18% gain this year has trounced peers again, as well as the Chinese market and the S&P 500 index.

Barrons spoke with Hsiao to get her views on how Chinese consumers and businesses are recovering after the country eased restrictions, the risk of a second wave of outbreaks, and why the portfolio has been so resistant to a black swan development that has rattled markets. Heres a condensed version of our discussion.

Barrons: China is a couple of months ahead in dealing with this pandemic. The Chinese market had its biggest drop in early February, before the global market tanked on Feb. 20, and is still holding up. What has helped its resilience?

Tiffany Hsiao: Confidence. There are a couple layers: Within China, theres confidence the disease is controllable. They have so much in resourcesthey can make five million masks per city when they ask people to work togetherso they are confident they have the medical supplies and people working together. And because of how swift and effective the [containment] was, people are not worried about job security. We cant say that about the U.S. or Europe. Everyone at the companies we own is back at work.

Market Data Center: EMEA and Asia

And if you look at demographics, the largest cohort [of investors] is millennials. When they see a correction, they are going to participate because that is not their nest egg. They are still building it and have the ability to capture the falling knife, whereas in the U.S. and Europe, investors are depending on that money in the next 10 years.

What about Chinas lack of transparency and attempts to muffle early warnings, like from Dr. Li Wenliang, who eventually died?

When this virus first broke out, the Chinese governments response was not transparent. But in the past, you would see very draconian measures to suppress freedom of speech. This time, they let people vent their frustrations. People were creating art pieces out of that doctors picture and posting on WeChat and mourning his death. The Chinese government publicly apologized [for its treatment of Li]that in itself instilled confidence.

It was an unfortunate event, but the response from the government was so different than what we had seen before that people had a lot more confidence in the government after that, especially after they saw the virus spread outside of Chinas borders.

Barrons wants to know your thoughts on the market, the economy, and how coronavirus is impacting your investments. Results will be published along with our biannual Big Money Poll of institutional investors. Poll closes at midnight on Apr. 20. Have your say here

Are you worried about a second wave of infections?

People on the ground are not fearful. The government has put in place very cautious, but reasonable, polices around public health. Any person who returns from overseas has to self-quarantine for 14 days. They give you electronic bracelets as you enter, and track you. That type of policy broadcast to the people gives them confidence that the government is doing its job, so they can safely go do theirs.

In terms of valuation, the Chinese onshore equity markets have not corrected much since the Covid-19 outbreak. There is risk that if a second infection shuts down the economy for longer, valuations could become even more stretched in the near term.

Small businesses are hurting in the U.S. How are they doing in China?

[Chinas] stimulus has been very measured, such as a deferred social security tax and local tax rebates. On top of that, a lot of the more wealthy parts of the economythe landownersvoluntarily offered two months of free rent and no collections on debt. Here in San Francisco, a lot of restaurants are going out of business because landlords refuse to do that.

How has consumer or corporate behavior changed?

We are a heavy investor in software, including China Youzan (8083.Hong Kong), which is the equivalent of Shopify, and helps mom-and-pops sell anything. As soon as everyone shut down, their users went through the roof, as companies tried to go from bricks-and-mortar to online. China is very dynamic. Small- to medium-size-business owners are very nimble. And theres still demand: People still need to eat and have kids entertained with educational programming. Their basic needs havent changed; they just need a different way to get it.

People are also embracing the digital economy even more. The e-commerce adoption rate is already much higher than in the U.S., with about 25% of retail sales done online compared with 11% in the U.S. In the past, people just ordered clothes or electronics and now are ordering groceries. During the crisis, they are also having kids educated online. We own Koolearn Technology Holding (1797.Hong Kong), an online education company that was ready with content and had teachers trained.

Have any trends been derailed?

Travel is a very large part of consumer discretionary spending. The Chinese love to go overseasand now they cant. And as we emerge from this crisis, there is a fear of racism, so [travel] will [continue to] be impacted.

Theres also some time shifting: Real estate transactions were down a lot in the first quarter, but theyre starting to bounce back in cities like Nanjing. The line to go see [a new listing] was wrapped around the building. Theres pent-up demand.

How will a recession in the U.S. or Europe affect Chinas recovery?

We need to see a more effective response globally to provide a stronger backdrop for China to recover. This was supposed to be a great growth year: A lot of businesses were holding back their checkbooks for three years, [waiting] for a resolution to the trade war to deploy the capital.

What concerns you at this point?

Policy missteps as the Chinese government tries to gauge the severity of unemployment. The situation is fluid, since many workers are still in process of returning to their normal jobs. However, if countries outside of China continue to suffer from Covid-19, then those jobs may not be waiting for workers as they return.

Some natural Darwinism to clean the economy of inefficient businesses is not a bad thing, but we need supportive policies to redirect those displaced into other productive industries. From a stock perspective, the stronger surviving companies will gain market share faster.

How do you invest around that?

We stress-test every company through all types of scenarios. When you are investing in a country as big as China, something will always go wrong. I call them black ducks [instead of swans] because they are not as rare as you think. If its not this virus, its going to be a natural disaster or something else.

We want the highest return on capital possible. To do that, we tilt toward asset-light companies that dont have much balance-sheet risk. Our companies never depended on [debt], and their products are intellectual-property driven and can be used digitally and remotely. So weve been very insulated, especially year to date.

China was trying to become more self-sufficient as tensions with the U.S. escalated. Has that been derailed by the latest crisis?

The self-sufficiency theme is alive and well. When the government was thinking about how to stimulate the economy, that was the first area it looked atinvesting more in semiconductors, biotech, and software. The chairman of our largest position, Silergy (6415.Taiwan), the largest analog semiconductor company in China, told me the company will grow revenue 20% to 30% unhindered, because the areas they invest in are the areas the government wants to speed up5G infrastructure, health-care equipment, and data centersas more people work from home and embrace the digital economy.

Chip companies have seen disruptions during this crisis. What about Silergy?

If you need 2,000 components, then youll have disruption. But a lot of the products they are making need 200 to 300 components that they can source domestically. We are very careful and have very limited exposure to the heavy industrial supply chain, because there will be a lot of disruption.

Health care makes up 20% of your portfolio. What is the draw?

Part of it is my constant paranoia that something is going to go wrong, so half [of the allocation] pertains to basic stuff like vaccinesincluding CanSino Biologics (6185.Hong Kong), which is doing clinical trials in Seattle for a coronavirus vaccine medical waste, and companies trying to develop strong health-care infrastructure to keep 1.4 billion people healthy so it doesnt turn into a social problem.

And the other half?

Its focused on human DNA; 99.9% is similar, but that small difference results in Caucasian and Asians having very different critical-illness disease types, especially with cancer. In Asia, the more prevalent cancer types are of the liver and stomach, whereas those are designated by U.S. Food and Drug Administration as orphan diseases, with fewer than 200,000 new diagnoses in the U.S., compared with 1.2 million new diagnoses of liver and gastric cancers in China.

In the past, China relied on the Western world for medical advances and newer therapies. But as the drugs become more DNA-based, you need to come up with drugs that fit the Asian DNA better, so we focus on scientists who earned their stripes at Western companies and start their own businesses, like Innovent Biologics (IVBXF), whose management is top-notch talent from global drugmakers like Roche, Applied Genetic Technologies, and Eli Lilly. Its a top oncology biopharma company that focuses on drugs for Asias prevalent cancer indications and has a very strong pipeline of innovative, novel therapies in addition to blockbuster drugs.

The crisis has raised concerns about liquidity, as some markets have seized up. Have you encountered any problems?

Chinese small-caps comprise the worlds largest small-cap asset class. It surpassed the U.S. two years ago in terms of liquidity, number of stocks listed, and total market cap listed. If you are worried about liquidity, Chinese small-caps are much more liquid than the U.S.and have done much better year to date.

What happens if tensions between the U.S. and China escalate again?

A third of our portfolio are trade war beneficiariescompanies that help China turn self-sufficient. The other two-thirds are steady compounderscompanies that make soy sauce, education companies, and property managementand are not going to be affected if theres a trade war. If you hit [companies] with a couple of black swans and you still need to buy them, those are the kinds of companies we want to own.

Thanks, Tiffany.

Corrections & Amplifications The Matthews China Small Companies fund has gained 18% so far this year. An earlier version of the article listed the 3-year average return instead of the year-to-date figure.

Write to Reshma Kapadia at reshma.kapadia@barrons.com

See the original post here:

Chinas Small Companies Are Beating Almost Every Market. Here Are The Best Sectors. - Barron's