Bloomberg Hong Kong’s police force is showing signs of attrition with resignations increasing and recruitments declining as the city deals with a coronavirus outbreak after months of sometimes violent anti-government protests. From June last year, when the city’s protests erupted against a China-backed extradition bill, to February a total of 446 police quit the force, an increase of 38% from ...

Bloomberg A 65-year-old malaria drug that hasn’t been proven to work against the new coronavirus appears to have captured the imagination of another president. France’s Emmanuel Macron unexpectedly flew to Marseille and spent more than three hours meeting with Didier Raoult, the researcher whose work has propelled a medicine called hydroxychloroquine from fringe to famous in just three weeks. Raoult’s ...

President Trump’s vengeful dismissal of the intelligence community’s inspector general was part of a relentless campaign — waged even in the midst of the pandemic — against people and institutions that can hold him accountable. Critics often describe Trump as disruptive, erratic and poorly focussed. But in concentrating on these weaknesses, opponents understate Trump’s success in using power aggressively to ...

Few airlines can be entirely confident of their survival right now. Travel restrictions prompted by the new coronavirus have forced carriers to burn rapidly through their cash, with no guarantee of when any semblance of normality will return. The ones in most danger are those that overextended themselves financially before the pandemic. Among the big European carriers, nobody pushed boundaries ...

One lesson of the Covid-19 crisis is that there are some contingencies that nobody can realistically plan for. Whether you’re an airline or the New York City subway system, there’s no rainy-day fund big enough to get through months of revenue falling 90%. Sometimes, the only entity big enough to offer financial relief is the federal government, meaning the vagaries ...

The US government is spending trillions of dollars to support the economy as it works to contain the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic. There hasn’t been much discussion about how all this spending will be paid for, but those talks are coming and they will not be pleasant. To be clear, this level of spending cannot be financed by tax ...

Former Vice President Joe Biden has gone from what political scientist Josh Putnam has called the presumptive presumptive Democratic presidential nominee to being the just plain presumptive Democratic nominee. Bernie Sanders finally saw that there was no realistic chance of winning the nomination, and that dropping out now was the way to maximise his influence. Surely his decision to suspend ...

One well-known British retailer says it has noticed a marked upturn in customers saying “Thank you” to store staff since the start of the Covid-19 crisis. Investors in another — Tesco Plc — will be doing the same after it said it would pay out 635 million pounds ($783 million) in final dividends, taking its distribution for the full year ...

All great economic crises pose two equally important challenges: they drain the liquidity necessary for the functioning of businesses, large and small, and burn up their equity capital, or a substantial part of it. Of the two, the former is the immediate challenge amid the coronavirus-induced lockdowns. Providing liquidity to companies is the top priority to ensure their survival. Yet ...

Bloomberg Apple Inc and Google unveiled a rare partnership to add technology to their smartphone platforms that will alert users if they have come into contact with a person with Covid-19. People must opt in to the system, but it has the potential to monitor about a third of the world’s population. The technology, known as contact-tracing, is designed to ...