Thailand’s largely decentralized protest movement and evolving internet landscape will make it tough for the country’s conservative government to mute mounting calls to rein in the country’s powerful monarchy, observers say.Human rights lawyer Anon Nampa broke a decades-long taboo by challenging the king’s powers in public at a pro-democracy protest in the capital, Bangkok, on August 3. At another protest a week later, activists unveiled a bold 10-point plan to reform the monarchy that would, among other things, bar the royal palace from expressing political opinions and repeal a defamation law that can land any critic of the king in jail for up to 15 years.Their demands have ricocheted around the country at student-led protests calling for a new constitution and an end to the government of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-ocha, who led a successful military coup in 2014 and prevailed in an election last year widely seen as rigged. His government has staked much of its reputation on a promise to protect and preserve the monarchy, which many Thais still revere as semi-divine.Young and restlessYounger Thais are less enamored. They make up the bulk of the pro-democracy protesters and see a royal palace playing politics well beyond its constitutional constraints to maintain the status quo.Prayut had warned the protesters to steer clear of criticizing the monarchy back in June and said they “really went too far” after the August 10 rally where activists read out their 10-point reform plan.Since then authorities have arrested more than a dozen activists and charged them with a spate of offenses from sedition to incitement. Anon, the human rights lawyer, was among them.Anon Nampa, left, and Panupong Jadnok, right, two of the leaders of recent anti-government protests, are seen after being granted a bail outside the criminal court in Bangkok, Thailand, Aug. 8, 2020.But David Streckfuss, an independent scholar and author on Thai history and politics, said the arrests are unlikely to stop a movement that seems to lack a clear central leadership.”These people are representatives of a movement, not so much leaders where you can take out the top tier and everything goes quiet,” he told VOA.Now that “the genie is out of the bottle,” Streckfuss added, the government will have to decide whether to try and manage a public debate on the monarchy that has been brewing below the surface for years or to crush it.”I would say that it would require a great deal of suppression at this point to quiet what’s been on a lot of people’s mind for … more than a decade,” he said.The dilemmaThe military has tried to smother dissent before. In the wake of the 2014 coup, Prime Minister Prayut’s junta rounded up hundreds of activists, academics and journalists it saw as threats, with some success.The junta then spent the next five years preparing for the 2019 election to make Thailand at least look something like a democracy again. Streckfuss said Prayut’s rebranded regime may be reluctant to throw all that work away with more mass arrests and will at least think twice before it does. There was also the risk, he added, that a much heavier hand from authorities will backfire by drawing even more people to the protesters’ cause.If the calls for royal reform do continue to grow and spread, they could also spark violence, warned Pavin Chachavalpongpun, an associate professor at Japan’s Kyoto University who studies Thai politics.”I think the government will continue to rely on legal instruments for now. But should the students intensify their protests then there is a possibility of the use of force,” he said. “The students [will] not back down on their demand. So it is a great test of the government’s patience.”Titipol Phakdeewanich, head of the political science faculty at Thailand’s Ubon Ratchathani University, said the arrests won’t stop the reform calls at the protests but may still slow them down. He said security forces recently threatened to sue one of his own students over a Facebook post about the monarchy.Others have already been sued or arrested for posting critical comments or merely sharing news about the king, Maha Vajiralongkorn.”This actually makes students quite scared of the consequence,” Titipol said.A member of Thai right-wing group “Thai Pakdee” (Loyal Thai) holds a picture of King Maha Vajiralongkorn with Queen Suthida attend a rally in support of the government and the monarchy, in Bangkok, Thailand, Aug. 30, 2020. Compared with taking to the streets, though, he still sees the internet as a relative “safe zone” where talk of reforming the monarchy has mushroomed and will prove even tougher to quell.A digital revolutionOn August 24 Facebook acceded to government demands to block access in Thailand to the “Royal Marketplace,” a Facebook account critical of the monarchy with more than one million members set up by Pavin, or face legal action under the country’s Computer Crimes Act. By the end of the month, a new account under a similar name had attracted nearly all the old members back — with access in Thailand.Over the past several months, tens of thousands of Thai have also switched from Twitter to an alternative social media platform, Minds, over reports that Twitter users posting comments criticizing the king were getting visits from police. Twitter’s new privacy policy had as well raised fears that it would be more prone to sharing data with the government.”The government cannot entirely stop this generation to think or to look for alternative sources of information,” Titipol said. “It is not that easy in the 21st century with all kinds of technologies and different platforms of social media.”The spread of encrypted messaging also makes it harder for authorities to track and block accounts selectively, “so the landscape [has] changed,” said Arthit Suriyawongkul, co-founder of the Thai Netizen Network, a digital rights advocacy group.A government could in theory block access to entire platforms, as in China, or the way Thailand itself did with Facebook for a few days after the 2014 coup. But Arthit said the social media giants have become so vital to Thai businesses, and to the government’s own propaganda, that the authorities will hesitate to pull that trigger.Blunt force, he said, “no longer works in the new setting of the internet.” 
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Somali health authorities say the number of maternal checkups and childhood vaccinations have plunged during the pandemic as many people fear catching COVID-19 at clinics and hospitals.  Healthcare workers worry the lack of medical care for pregnant women and children could result in a wave of common diseases that take more victims than COVID-19.  Mohamed Sheikh Nor reports from Mogadishu.Camera: Mohamed Sheikh Nor 
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У близько 40% локомотивного складу прострочений капітальний ремонт, повідомив новий голова правління «Укрзалізниці» Володимир Жмак в телеграмі.

Він нагадав, що на вихідних відбулося загоряння локомотиву на одному з перегонів в Львівський області та загоряння списаного вагону в Маріуполі.

«Наразі досліджуються всі обставини даних випадків. Попередньо аналізуючи причини, я вже можу сказати про прострочення капітального ремонту близько сорока відсотків локомотивного складу, плачевний стан контактного дроту (через пошкодження якого на Львівський залізниці рух потягів зупинився на півтори години), незадовільний фінансовий стан УЗ», – написав Жмак.

«Укрзалізниця» є національним перевізником вантажів та пасажирів. Метою діяльності компанії, як мовиться на її сайті, «є задоволення потреб у безпечних та якісних залізничних перевезеннях, забезпечення ефективного функціонування й розвитку залізничного транспорту, створення умов для підвищення конкурентоспроможності галузі тощо».
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India has passed Brazil as the country with the second-highest number of confirmed coronavirus cases. The health ministry reported a record 90,802 new cases Monday, giving India a total of more than 4.2 million since the outbreak began. India also added 1,016 deaths Monday, pushing its overall toll to 71,642. Brazil reported 14,521 new cases on Sunday, and while it now trails India in terms of overall cases, the country still trails only the United States in terms of deaths with 126,650. The United States leads the world with about 6.3 million confirmed cases and 189,000 deaths. In Australia, officials in the state of Victoria said Monday there were 41 new cases, the lowest single-day increase since late June.Police patrol a street in Melbourne on September 6, 2020 as the state announced an extension to its strict lockdown law while it battles fresh outbreaks of the COVID-19 coronavirus.Victoria has been battling to contain what has been the biggest outbreak in Australia.  Authorities instituted lockdown restrictions in early August, and with the progress seen since then, announced Sunday some relaxation of the rules. Prime Minister Scott Morrison also said Monday that Australia has an agreement in place with CSL to manufacture two coronavirus vaccines, should they prove to be safe and effective in trials. One potential vaccine is being developed by CSL and is set to move into stage two clinical trials later this year. The other vaccine is a joint project between AstraZeneca and Oxford University currently in late-stage trials.  Morrison said Monday that CSL will manufacture that vaccine as well for distribution in Australia, and that he expects 3.8 million doses to be available in January or February 2021. Israel is beginning partial nighttime lockdowns in 40 cities and towns with the country’s highest infection rates.  Schools in those areas will also be closed, and gatherings will be limited to 10 people inside and 20 outdoors. “I know that these restrictions are not easy but in the current situation there is no avoiding them,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement. 
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Hall of Famer Lou Brock, who became baseball’s premier base stealer as he helped make the St. Louis Cardinals one of the sport’s dominant teams of the 1960s, died on Sunday at the age of 81. “Our hearts are broken,” the Cardinals said in a tweet. “Lou Brock was an amazing player and outstanding person.” Brock, who was born in Arkansas in 1939 and grew up in Louisiana, was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1985 in his first year of eligibility. Hitting, defense and speed on the bases made Brock one of the most notable and popular players of the Cardinals, a team with a rich baseball history. He stole 118 bases in 1974, a single-season major league record until Rickey Henderson of the Oakland Athletics stole 130 in 1982. In 1977, Brock broke the legendary Ty Cobb’s mark for most steals in a career, a record that had stood for 49 years. That record was also eventually broken by Henderson in 1991. Brock led the National League in steals eight times and is still its career stolen-bases leader. He retired at age 40 in 1979 after 19 seasons, 16-1/2 of them with the Cardinals. With Brock as leadoff hitter and left fielder, the Cardinals won the World Series in 1964 and 1967. They also reached the Series in 1968 but lost. Brock’s career got off to a mediocre start with the Chicago Cubs in 1961 but turned around in the middle of the 1964 season when the Cardinals acquired him in a trade for pitcher Ernie Broglio in the hopes of adding speed to their lineup. Brock joined a team that was in sixth place, despite having stars such as pitcher Bob Gibson, a future Hall of Famer, along with Tim McCarver, Curt Flood and Ken Boyer, who would be named the National League’s most valuable player that season. Helped by Brock’s hitting and base stealing, they ended up winning the league championship on the last day of the season and defeated the New York Yankees in the World Series. The trade for Brock, which had initially stirred doubts among some Cardinals players, is widely considered one of the most one-sided in baseball history. With Brock as the catalyst, the Cardinals beat the Boston Red Sox to win another World Series championship in 1967 but lost to the Detroit Tigers the next season. Brock batted over .300 in eight seasons and finished his career with 3,023 hits and 938 steals. In 1978, the National League announced that the award it gives to the stolen-base leader each season would be named after Brock, and the Cardinals in 1979 retired his No. 20 jersey. “Lou was among the game’s most exciting players,” Major League Commissioner Rob Manfred said in a statement, adding that “he will be deeply missed.” During his career, Brock popularized what became known as the “brockabrella” – a small umbrella worn as a hat to help baseball fans get through rainy games. In later life, Brock battled serious health ailments, including diabetes and cancer. His lower left leg was amputated in 2015, but that did not stop him from throwing out the first pitch at the Cardinals’ first home game the next season, wearing a prosthetic leg. The Cardinals announced in April 2017 that Brock was being treated for multiple myeloma, a blood cancer. After months of treatment, Brock said several months later that his doctor told him he was cancer free.  
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A guy walks into a bar, which still isn’t allowed in Texas.But Jeff Brightwell owns this bar.Two months into an indefinite shutdown, he’s just checking on the place — the tables six feet apart, the “Covid 19 House Rules” sign instructing drinkers not to mingle. All the safeguards that didn’t keep the doors open, because Dot’s Hop House & Cocktail Courtyard is a bar under Texas law. And bars, in a pandemic? “Really not good,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s infectious disease expert, told Congress in June.But some governors are warming up to the idea of opening bars again. Thousands of bars forced to close after massive virus outbreaks swept across the U.S. this summer could be starting to see a glimmer of hope as cases drop off and the political will for continuing lockdowns fades. For some states, it is a gamble worth trying, only a few months after a rush to reopen bars in May and June ended in disaster.”Our governor waved the magic wand, put us out of business and offered us nothing,” said Brightwell, whose Dallas bar typically employs around 50 people. He says his industry has been scapegoated.Bars remain under full closure orders in more than a half-dozen states, including hard-hit ones like Texas but also Connecticut, which has one of the nation’s lowest positivity rates. And even in states already letting bars operate, restrictions vary from one county to the next. The rules can tighten or loosen abruptly, reflecting the unease among governors.Arkansas has one of the highest infection levels in the U.S. and is letting bars operate at partial capacity. Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson’s defense: No spread has been linked to bars.Experts say outbreaks nationwide have proved otherwise. Even in recent weeks, new outbreaks tied to college students returning to campus have resulted in bars shutting down again from Alabama to Iowa, undermining confidence that the time is right.Still, governors are looking for a way. California began letting some bars in a few small counties reopen, though not in cities where the vast majority of the population lives. Next might be Florida, where bars have been closed since June and Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, a top ally of President Donald Trump, has mused whether bar closings even work since restaurants are serving alcohol anyway.”Everything’s open except the nightclubs and the pubs, and that’s something we’re going to address,” DeSantis said recently.In Texas, where 3 in 4 of the state’s 13,400 deaths blamed on COVID-19 have occurred since July, the infection rate has dipped below the 10% positivity rate that Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has set as one criteria for letting bars back in business. He has teased that an another announcement about next steps in reopening could come early as this week, which won’t come soon enough for the right wing of his party, which for months has blasted him over the lockdowns and a statewide mask mandate.The decision is dicey for governors who, pressure from bar owners aside, have faced less blowback from keeping bars shut than other sectors. Polls showed about half of Americans favored requiring bars and restaurants to close when cases surged, and experts say the risks of bars are by now proven — the combination of cozy spaces, loud music forcing people to lean in close and rounds of drinks relaxing even the best intentions to social distance.Videos of crowded clubs have made bars symbols of rowdy rule-breakers, the ones ruining a return to normal for the rest of us.”It’s way too soon. And it’s going to be too soon until we have a vaccine,” said Esmeralda Guajardo, the public health administrator in Cameron County on the Texas border, where hard-partying booze cruises on South Padre Island this summer drew fury from local officials.For months, bar owners have protested outside state capitols, sued their governors and even sold alcohol in open defiance of closing orders. None have led to bars reopening any sooner. Hundreds in Texas have ramped up kitchens in order to legally operate as restaurants.It hasn’t spared thousands of bars from ruin. More than 5,400 bars nationwide went dark in July, according to Yelp, which tracks the status of businesses on their website. More than 40% were permanent closures.Mark McClellan, former head of the Food and Drug Administration who has been advising Abbott on Texas’ reopening, said the first reopening of bars in Texas was too soon, but he can see a case to be made that waiting for a vaccine is too long.”This is part of our economy and there are jobs at stake,” he said. “It’s hard to reopen dance clubs and night clubs for similar kinds of reasons. If we’re going to try it, we need to learn what went wrong from the June reopening.”McClellan said more enforcement of rules at bars is one step. Last month, some Texas bars hired a lobbying group and pledged to screen the temperature of every patron at the door, a step that would go further than restaurants.”I’ve been to restaurants and seen my customers,” said Greg Barrineau, who runs two bars in San Antonio called Drink Texas. “They haven’t stopped drinking.”
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British Prime Minister Boris Johnson talked tough on Sunday ahead of a crucial round of post-Brexit trade talks with the European Union, saying Britain could walk away from the talks within weeks and insisting that a no-deal exit would be a “good outcome for the U.K.”With talks deadlocked, Johnson said an agreement would only be possible if EU negotiators are prepared to “rethink their current positions.”The EU, in turn, accuses Britain of failing to negotiate seriously.Britain left the now 27-nation EU on Jan. 31, 3½ years after the country narrowly voted to end more than four decades of membership. That political departure will be followed by an economic break when an 11-month transition period ends on Dec. 31 and the U.K. leaves the EU’s single market and customs union.Without a deal, the new year will bring tariffs and other economic barriers between the U.K. and the bloc, its biggest trading partner. Johnson said the country would “prosper mightily” even if Britain had “a trading arrangement with the EU like Australia’s” — the U.K. government’s preferred description of a no-deal Brexit.British chief negotiator David Frost and his counterpart Michel Barnier are to meet in London starting Tuesday for the eighth round of negotiations.The key sticking points are access for European boats to U.K. fishing waters and state aid to industries. The EU is determined to ensure a “level playing field” for competition so British firms can’t undercut the bloc’s environmental or workplace standards or pump public money into U.K. industries.Britain accuses the bloc of making demands that it has not imposed on other countries it has free trade deals with, such as Canada.Frost told the Mail on Sunday newspaper that Britain was “not going to compromise on the fundamentals of having control over our own laws.””We are not going to accept level playing field provisions that lock us in to the way the EU do things,” he said.The EU says a deal has to be struck before November to allow time for parliamentary approval and legal vetting before the transition period expires.Johnson gave an even shorter deadline, saying an agreement needed to be sealed by an EU summit scheduled for Oct. 15.”If we can’t agree by then, then I do not see that there will be a free trade agreement between us, and we should both accept that and move on,” he said.Barnier said last week he was “worried and disappointed” by the lack of progress and said the U.K. had not “engaged constructively.”Without a deal, British freight firms have warned there could be logjams at ports and supplies of key goods in Britain could be “severely disrupted” starting Jan. 1.French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said Sunday that talks were “not going well” and dismissed British attempts to drive a wedge between EU nations on issues such as fishing. Le Drian said the 27 nations remained united.”We would prefer a deal, but a deal on the basis of our mandate,” he told France Inter radio. “There is room for action, but the whole package, including the fishing package, needs to be taken up in order to avoid a ‘no deal.'”
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Marriage.  In these socially distanced times, even the ceremony itself can’t always bring couples – and their families – together.  In Africa, some digitally savvy couples are finding virtual workarounds to get them to the altar, including weddings where the bride and groom are thousands of kilometers apart.  VOA’s Anita Powell spoke to one African couple who solidified their bond while in two different countries, and brings us this story of love, longing and celebration from Johannesburg.VIDEOGRAPHER: Zaheer Cassim
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U.S. President Donald Trump on Sunday assailed U.S. news media accounts that in 2018 he belittled American World War I casualties while skipping a centenary commemoration of the end of the war on a rainy day at a cemetery outside Paris.“The Democrats, together with the corrupt Fake News Media, have launched a massive Disinformation Campaign the likes of which has never been seen before,” the U.S. leader claimed on Twitter. “They will say anything, like their recent lies about me and the Military, and hope that it sticks….” The Democrats, together with the corrupt Fake News Media, have launched a massive Disinformation Campaign the likes of which has never been seen before. They will say anything, like their recent lies about me and the Military, and hope that it sticks… But #MAGA gets it!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 6, 2020The Atlantic magazine reported late last week that the U.S. leader rejected going to the World War I cemetery at Aisne-Marne in part because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain. The account, based on four anonymous sources, said that Trump commented to senior staff aides on the morning of the November event, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.”  On the same trip, the magazine said, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 U.S. Marines who lost their lives during the Belleau Wood battle as “suckers” for getting killed.  The Republican Trump, facing a difficult re-election contest November 3 against his Democratic opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, immediately rejected the Atlantic’s account of his comments. But several other U.S. news outlets have subsequently confirmed from their own unnamed sources that Trump was uninterested in attending Aisne-Marne event. He did attend a separate commemoration of allied war dead the following day.The White House said at the time that Trump called off the visit to the Aisne-Marne cemetery because the foul weather would have made it dangerous for him to make a helicopter flight there. His chief of staff at the time, retired Marine Corps Gen. John Kelly, attended the ceremony after traveling there by motorcade. During a Friday news conference, Trump said he “called home, I spoke to my wife (first lady Melania Trump) and I said ‘I hate this. I came here to go to that ceremony.’ And to the one that was the following day which I did go to. I said I feel terribly. And that was the end of it.” Fact checkers, however, said Trump couldn’t have “called home” to Washington to talk to his wife because she was in Paris accompanying him on the trip and that night, they had dinner with French President Emmanuel Macron. After the Atlantic article appeared online, Biden attacked Trump. “If what is written in The Atlantic is true, it’s disgusting,” Biden said. “And it affirms what most of us believe to be true: that Donald Trump is not fit to do the job of president, to be the commander in chief.”  Robert Wilkie, Trump’s veterans affairs chief, told CNN on Sunday that he had never heard Trump belittle military service or the country’s war dead. “I’m looking at the Donald Trump I know,” Wilkie said. “I’ve watched this president sign letters of condolences” written to families of those killed in action. 
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Readers visiting websites for Al-Etejah TV, a satellite television channel affiliated with Iraq’s Kataib Hezbollah (KH), find an unusual English-language message instead of the group’s propaganda material.“This website has been seized,” reads the bold message placed on a red background atop two logos for the U.S. Department of Commerce.The U.S. seizure of two domain names, “Aletejahtv.com” and “Aletejahtv.org,” last Wednesday represented the latest move by Washington against the radical Iran proxy group in cyberspace.In 2009, the U.S. designated KH a terror group “for threatening the peace and stability of Iraq” and attacking the U.S. interests in the country.“Once again we see designated foreign terrorist organizations turning to the internet to push their message and recruit followers for their violent causes,” said John Demers, assistant attorney general for national security, in a statement published by the Department of Justice Wednesday.“We will continue to fight terror recruitment and propaganda efforts in the digital world, as we do elsewhere,” he added.Some observers say it remains uncertain how effective the latest U.S. move against KH can be, given the group’s ability to regenerate propaganda content through other online platforms.VOA confirmed that the station’s programing was still available for Iraqis to access on TV and social media websites such as YouTube on Friday.“Removing a domain name for an Iran propaganda outlet or a militia propaganda outlet is a weak reaction,” said Bilal Wahab, an Iraq expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, adding that KH and its leaders continued to enjoy access to a large audience on social media and local television channels in Iraq.Responding to requests from the U.S. government, social media giants such as Twitter and Facebook have regularly removed terror and extremist content online.After an earlier temporary restriction, Twitter in June permanently suspended an account for Qais Khazali, a pro-Iran Iraqi militia leader, that had several hundred thousand followers.But some KH leaders including its spokesman, Abu Ali al-Askari, continue to have active Twitter accounts.“This is a disruptive cyber operation that will cause them a headache for sure,” said Dilshad Othman, a Washington-based cyber security expert, adding that KH could possibly register its website with a domain such as Iran-owned dot IR (.ir) to remain outside U.S. legal control.It is not the first time that the U.S. government targeted websites belonging to pro-Iran militias. When it seized KH’s main website last year, the group sought to find alternative avenues.“Rather than abandoning the internet, KH has simply moved into other areas of the internet that are less well policed than dot com websites,” Evan F. Kohlmann, a New York based counterterrorism expert who formerly worked for the FBI, told VOA.He added that the group continues to enjoy “a flourishing presence” on encrypted platforms such as Telegram. The cloud-based chat service has also for years been a major home for the Islamic State and other banned groups.KH’s founding leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis was killed in January in a U.S drone strike that targeted and killed Iran’s powerful military general Qassem Soleimani.Mehdi Jedinia contributed to this story from Washington
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Bruges mayor Dirk De fauw first realized something was desperately wrong with European tourism when on a brisk March morning he crossed the Burg square in front of the Gothic city hall and there was nothing but silence.“There are always people. Always,” De fauw said. That morning?“Nothing. Nobody is on that large square” at the heart of one of Europe’s most picturesque cities, he said.Six months later, as Europe’s meanest tourist summer season in history is starting to draw to a close, COVID-19 is yet to loosen its suffocating grip on the continent.If anything the pandemic might tighten it over the coming months, with losses piling up in the tens of billions of euros across the 27-nation European Union, and the continent’s vaunted government support and social security system under increasing strain to prop up the sector.The upheaval so far, the bloc’s executive European Commission said, shows that “revenue losses during the first half of 2020 for hotels, restaurants, tour operators, long distance train operators and airlines were roughly 85-90%.” No country has been exempt in an area spanning from Greece’s beaches to the trattorias in Rome and the museums of Paris.And even now, the European Commission told The Associated Press, “bookings for September and October remain abnormally low,” as dire as 10% of capacity in Bruges. It dents hopes that a brief uptick in business in July would be a harbinger of something more permanent. Over the summer, though, came fresh spikes in COVID-19 contamination, new restrictive measures and regional color codes that spelled disaster for local tourism when they turn red.It left the European tourism industry relying on hope more than anything else. It was all evident on a late summer’s day in Bruges, when usually throngs of American and Asian tourists should have been mixing with Europeans along the cobblestone streets below gabled houses to help boost the annual visit numbers to over 8 million in the city of 110,000.“The swans have it all to themselves,” muttered Michiel Michielsens as he slowed his boat behind a bank of swans who gracefully obstructed a quick passage on the canals. On a normal day — not like the one when he had 114 customers instead of 1,200 — tourists instead of birds would rule the waters. Now a boat could be seen showing a single couple around while normally 40 people fit in one.For tourists who can live with wearing masks for hours, there are some advantages. In Bruges, it extends to the city’s famed museums where the medieval Flemish Primitives take center stage. Instead of craning over other tourists flashing smartphones, any visitor could now be alone for minutes on end to study in detail one of Jan Van Eyck’s most famous pictures “Our Lady with the Child Jesus, St. George, St. Donaas and canon van der Paele.”All this is bittersweet to museum officials though. Across Europe, just about all have had to close for months early this year, and the outlook is bleak. Attendance has now slumped to a quarter of what it was in 2019 at Bruges museums. But during the uptick in July “we had 50%.”“So it’s declining gradually. Every month we see the numbers declining,” said Jonathan Nowakowski, the business director of Bruges Museums. “I can tell you that we’re looking at losses of 3.4 to 4 million euros this year,” all happening despite expectations being high in a Van Eyck memorial year with special exhibits.“We had we thought we would have had huge numbers of visitors,” he said.It all quickly trickles down to hotels, restaurants, shops and the survival of families. For those who own the building it is more manageable than for those who rent a building, since often those monthly payments must continue to come. With reservations down for the next months, some hotels will just close down, knowing the costs will never match up to the puny revenue. Others are using the low winter rates in summer.A great many put staff on temporary unemployment, and they acknowledge government aid has been a help. But they fear that will whittle down soon despite the 750-billion-euro recovery fund that EU recently agreed to.“In the next few months, we will see a lot of places that will go bankrupt. A lot of people will be unemployed,” said Luc Broes, co-owner of the hotel-restaurant Duc de Bourgogne, which overlooks a canal.Social protection, he said, only goes so far.“We also have to pay our rent for the building. We also have to pay all the staff. We have to pay the insurances. We have to — we are not protected. In the moment we can’t pay anymore, we will go bankrupt as well,” Broes said. Despite the 19th-century novel “Bruges-La-Morte” (“Bruges, the Dead City”) that turned the city into a metaphor of melancholy and decay, there is a steadfast conviction that people can turn this around — that tourism will survive.It is a feeling felt through much of the bloc and a special EU summit is already planned for early October on how to reinvigorate and reform tourism in general.Unsure how long the pandemic will last, Bruges has already decided to forego any blockbuster exhibits. Instead, it will center on local artists who have been hart hit financially by the pandemic. It includes a photographer tasked to show the solitude that COVID-19 has spawned in the city.“They get funds. They get paid, They can survive, and we can offer the visitors something new, something inspiring without having all the logistical difficulties that corona(virus) brings,” Nowakowski said.The question of whether there will be more lockdowns, nationwide restrictions or limits on international travel still haunts everyone.Renowned chocolatier Dominique Persoone was lucky to survive on a big local fan base so he could do without the big cruise ship crowds that come and buy his chocolates from his shop, in the shadows of the cathedral.“The hardest thing is that you don’t know what the future will bring. We don’t know how it’s gonna be in September, October, when the real chocolate season starts. Then it’s Halloween, Santa Claus, Christmas.”Now, winter and more uncertainty beckons.“We thought we were safe and we had a wonderful life. And, now, this is happening,” Persoone said. 
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At least 90 people were arrested in Hong Kong Sunday during protests against the postponement of legislative elections. The elections, originally scheduled to be held Sunday, are one of the few times Hong Kong residents get to cast ballots. China’s hand-picked Hong Kong leader, Carrie Lam, announced in late July that the city’s election would be postponed for a year, because of the coronavirus pandemic. Hong Kong Postpones Elections By a Year, Citing Coronavirus Critics say government fears devastating defeat at polls The move was widely seen as a blow to the pro-democracy camp, which was widely expected to do well in the election. Riot police shot rounds of pepper balls at protesters Sunday, Reuters reported. Hong Kong police wrote in a Facebook post that 90 people had been arrested, mainly for gathering illegally. Though smaller and less frequent than in 2019, protests for democracy and independent in Hong Kong have continued despite concerns about the coronavirus pandemic, particularly after China passed a new security law in June, further diminishing rights of the semi-autonomous city. 
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