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The protests that left much of the world in a haze of tear gas last year were slowed by a pandemic – until the death of George Floyd sparked a global uprising against police brutality and racial inequality. From Hong Kong to Khartoum, Baghdad to Beirut, Gaza to Paris and Caracas to Santiago, people took to the streets in 2019 for the pursuits of freedom, sovereignty or simply a life less shackled by hardship while few prospered. It seemed as if the streets were agitated everywhere but the United States. Now, after the death of Floyd, a black man in Minneapolis who died in police custody when a white officer pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck for several minutes, protests rage around the globe. Police or military brutality and racism are universal dynamics that are experienced in many societies. The very nature of a protest suggests a fervent desire for change, the need to right a perceived historic injustice. It’s a means to an end. But to what end? Depending on the government the activists are demanding change from, the results can be varied. Demonstrations were held last week in solidarity with American protesters, but Floyd’s death also had resonance and reverberations far beyond U.S. shores because of those lives lost closer to home in similar circumstances. As the coronavirus crisis eased in China, protesters in Hong Kong, the semi-autonomous territory, began to emerge again. And Beijing moved swiftly to quash the movement that caused unrest for months last year, enacting a national security law that would effectively end the existence of one country, two systems. A democratic government that is amenable to the changes may enact legislation, or a change of leadership can be forced at the ballot box. An authoritarian regime, however, does not often bend. Protesting against dictatorship can be a life-or-death struggle which may even require activists to make a deal with the country’s military. Confronting tyranny can also backfire, the result a more dictatorial leader or a ruinous civil war. Here’s a look at some of the key protests of recent decades and what they achieved or failed. American Civil Rights The protests that erupted across a scarred U.S. landscape last week had the unusual characteristic of being largely leaderless and are still evolving, though the Black Lives Matter movement was focal. During the critical era of the 1950s and ’60s, Martin Luther King Jr., who led the 250,000 strong March on Washington in 1963, and Malcolm X were colossal 20th century figures, representing two different tracks: mass non-violent protest and getting favorable outcomes “by any means necessary.” The Civil Rights Acts, initiated by the Kennedy administration, and Voting Rights Act were passed by the Johnson administration, which was sympathetic to tackling endemic racism in the nation. These were key inflection points. But social injustice and the Vietnam War continued to dominate the American decade and beyond, reaching a crescendo of civil unrest in 1968 which has been echoed in 2020.FILE – In this Aug. 28, 1963 file photo, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. acknowledges the crowd at the Lincoln Memorial for his “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington.Democrats in Congress are proposing an overhaul of police procedures and accountability, but like so much in Washington this has been snagged by partisanship. Key Democrats, including presumptive presidential nominee Joe Biden, are also distancing themselves from liberal calls to “defund the police” as President Donald Trump and his Republican allies blast the proposal. The iron curtain falls Revolution was in the air in Eastern Europe in 1989, powered by a flowering of civil resistance to overthrow Communist rule. One-by-one, countries fell in a reverse-domino effect — Washington had always been concerned about the dominoes falling in the Soviet Union’s favor. The final Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, laid the groundwork for this tectonic shift. The Berlin Wall fell and one-party rule was swept aside in East Germany, Poland and other states once cast as being behind the Iron Curtain, mostly bloodlessly — the exception being in Romania where the tyranny of Nicolae Ceausescu and his family was ended by a firing squad on Christmas Day. This period also included a “Velvet Revolution” in Czechoslovakia, which was the historical antidote to the Prague Spring, a period of liberalization in embracing “communism with a human face” that was ruthlessly crushed by more than half a million Soviet-led Warsaw Pact troops in 1968. The Arab Spring and the current redux It was two decades before the world witnessed another wave of protests consume an entire region. This one was the first to be captured on a new digital platform, social media. After decades of dictatorship and kleptocracy, the Arab World became intoxicated by the heady mix of possibility and immediacy. And rulers did fall: in Egypt, Yemen, Libya and Tunisia in 2011. But only the latter transitioned to a democratic next chapter. Egypt now lives under even more authoritarian rule, where all dissent is extinguished, and thousands languish in prison. Yemen and Libya have been torn to shreds by conflict and humanitarian catastrophe. Syria exploded quickly from an uprising against the Assad dynasty to ruinous civil war which still continues with more than half million dead and millions displaced. In neighboring Lebanon and in Iraq, civil protests erupted last October against ruling elites. Lebanon is suffering a confluence of crises as it lurches on the cusp of national bankruptcy. In Iraq, too, where protesters had been killed in scores, the health care system is not equipped to deal with COVID-19 and the loss of oil revenue is hitting hard. Protests seem likely to reignite in both places. The spirit of 2019 and 2020 Sudan captured much of what civil disobedience and protest can achieve — as well its painful cost with many killed and systemic rapes — as the fragile transition to a new era continues. The protest movement succeeded in ousting a longtime military strongman who faces genocide and war crimes charges. President Omar al-Bashir was toppled in April 2019, forcing the creation of a joint civilian-military ruling “sovereign council.” But the civilians are struggling to assert authority in the face of the military’s power. Hong Kong’s protests, which began one year ago this week, seemed to embody all the facets of democratic aspiration: But the clear intent of President of Xi Jinping and the overwhelming might of China’s People’s Liberation Army makes it ever more likely that the territory will be under Beijing rule much sooner than 2047 as agreed upon. The landmark 1997 agreement in which the British colony was formally handed over to China, had stipulated things would remain unchanged for 50 years. 
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One of Copenhagen Zoo’s giant pandas escaped from its enclosure early Monday and roamed the park before staff were able to sedate it and bring it back. Xing Er, a 7-year-old male who arrived at the zoo last year, was seen on surveillance video breaking out of the newly built, 160 million-kroner ($24.2 million) Panda House that also houses female panda Mao Sun. Zoo spokesman Bengt Holst said that on the video staff could see how “the male panda crawls up a metal pole, which is studded with three rows of electrical wires … and then crawls out into the garden.” He said the park now was looking at making changes to security around the enclosure “to ensure that it does not happen again. ” Zoo staff reacted “quickly and efficiently,” the animal was corned and sedated with a dart without being harmed, he said. Monday’s incident happened before the animal park opened to the public. “It doesn’t change the fact that we want to avoid that kind of situation in the future,” Holst said. The enclosure to house the pandas from China’s southwestern city of Chengdu, was inaugurated by Queen Margrethe and other dignitaries in April 2019. Beijing lends out pandas as a sign of goodwill. Any cubs born during the 15-year loan period are considered China’s property.   
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The European Union’s top diplomat said Tuesday that since the United States has already withdrawn from an international agreement curbing Iran’s nuclear ambitions, it can’t now use its former membership of the pact to try to impose a permanent arms embargo on the Islamic Republic.
The accord, which Iran signed with the U.S., Britain, Germany, France, China and Russia in 2015, has been unraveling since President Donald Trump pulled Washington out in 2018 and reinstated sanctions designed to cripple Tehran under what the U.S. called a “maximum pressure” campaign.  
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Kelly Craft have said that extending a permanent U.N. backed arms embargo against Iran is now a top priority for Washington.
But speaking to reporters Tuesday after talks with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell insisted that since the U.S. has pulled out of the nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, it can no longer claim to have a role in it.
“The United States has withdrawn from the JCPOA, and now they cannot claim that they are still part of the JCPOA in order to deal with this issue from the JCPOA agreement. They withdraw. It’s clear. They withdraw,” Borrell said.
On Monday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov accused the Trump administration of unleashing a politically motivated campaign against Iran and he called for “universal condemnation” of the U.S. attempt to get the U.N. Security Council to impose a permanent arms embargo.
The EU sees the nuclear deal as a key pillar of regional and world security and has struggled to keep the pact alive despite U.S. pressure. Borrell is tasked with supervising the way the pact is applied and to help resolve disputes between the parties.
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Turkish police on Monday detained two journalists for questioning as part of an investigation into alleged “political and military espionage,” the state-run Anadolu Agency said.The two journalists — Ismail Dukel, the Ankara representative of TELE1 television channel, and Muyesser Yildiz of the OdaTV news website — were being questioned by anti-terrorism police, the agency reported.OdaTV said Yildiz, who has reported on military issues, was detained following a raid on her home. Police searched her house and confiscated electronic material, the website reported.Last month, authorities charged seven journalists — including two OdaTV editors and a reporter — with violating laws governing the intelligence agency, for stories on the death of an intelligence officer who was reportedly killed in Libya. The journalists will go on trial later this month.The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists ranks Turkey among the top jailers of journalists worldwide, alongside China and Saudi Arabia.As many as 85 journalists and other media workers are currently in jail under Turkey’s broad anti-terrorism laws, according to the Turkish Journalists Syndicate, including many who were detained in a crackdown following a 2016 coup attempt.Turkey maintains that the journalists are prosecuted for criminal acts and not for their journalistic work.Separately, prosecutors issued warrants to detain 149 people — most of them former police officers — for alleged links to a network led by U.S.-based Muslim cleric, Fethullah Gulen.Anadolu Agency said 74 people, including six former police chiefs, were being sought by prosecutors in the western province of Balikesir, 42 were sought be authorities in northwestern Bursa province while 33 of the suspects were detained in Gaziantep, near the border with Syria.Turkey blames Gulen’s network for the failed 2016 coup. About 77,000 people have been arrested and around 130,000 others, including military personnel, have been dismissed from state jobs in the ongoing crackdown on Gulen’s network.Gulen, who has been in self-imposed exile in the U.S. since 1999, denies involvement in the coup attempt, which killed about 250 people and injured around 2,000 others.
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With France confined to fight the virus, a video circulated online in April showing a young man lying on the bloody ground next to two police officers — and quickly set off protests in struggling neighborhoods around the Paris region.
Sometime before, the man had been on a motorcycle. Then, he crashed into a suddenly opened police car door. Whether the door was opened on purpose or not is unclear, but what was clear was the anger the video sparked. A protest that night in the town of Villeneuve-la-Garenne led to others in a dozen Paris suburbs and similar neighborhoods around France in the ensuing days.  
The relationship between police and marginalized residents of France’s low-income neighborhoods, many of whom are Arab or black and trace their roots to former French colonies, has long been tense. Safety measures intended to curb the spread of COVID-19 further empowered police — but also empowered community activists using apps or online sleuthing to track and challenge what they see as an abuse of police power.  
George Floyd’s death in the U.S. has resonated especially loudly in places like Villeneuve, one of many banlieues, or suburbs, where poverty and minority populations are concentrated in France. Floyd-related protests against police violence and racial injustice have been held around France, and more are planned for Tuesday evening.
In a pivotal moment for modern France, rioting engulfed the country for three weeks in 2005 after two boys who were running from police, Zyed and Bouna, were electrocuted while hiding in an electric generator in the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois. A state of emergency was declared and almost 3,000 people were arrested.
Despite billions of euros in government improvement programs for the banlieues since 2005, tensions with police persist, and the deaths of other young men periodically rekindles anger. Protesters marching in solidarity with Floyd notably called for justice for Adama Traore, whose death in police custody in 2016 is still under investigation.
“The anger (in those neighborhoods) is so present and police impunity so frustrating that we don’t need much for it to blow up,” said Ilyes Ramdani, editor-in-chief of the Bondy Blog, which was founded in 2005 to tell the stories of young black and Arab French people in the banlieues.
Under France’s strictest virus lockdown measures, from March 17-May 11, the government restricted people’s movements to a kilometer (half-mile) around their homes and required that anyone leaving their homes carry a signed paper stating why. Punishments included fines starting at 135 euros (about $150), or even prison.
On the first day punishments were doled out, 10% of the fines given in the entire country were given in the region of Seine-Saint-Denis on Paris’ northern edge, where unemployment is twice the national average, almost one person out of three is an immigrant, and many others are the descendants of immigrants.
Government officials defended the fines as necessary to fight the virus in a region with especially high infection rates.
But police union leader Yves Lefebvre lamented that the lockdown measures “again made the police a repressive tool.”
“Public services have deserted these neighborhoods,” and police are the only presence left, which “necessarily leads to confrontation,” he said.
Lefebvre, general secretary for Unité SGP Police-Force Ouvrière union, said trust has been broken because “police only enter those neighborhoods to restore order.”
The Villeneuve incident is being investigated by prosecutors and by the French state police watchdog agency, which said it received 166 citizen reports of problematic police behavior and seven formal complaints of police abuse during the 54 days of France’s coronavirus lockdown.
 
Under pressure to act, Interior Minister Christophe Castaner pledged Monday to ban police chokeholds and said more officers will be equipped with cameras to help ensure that identity checks don’t lead to discrimination against minorities.
Frustrated activists are taking matters into their own hands.  
At the start of the lockdown, Sihame Assbague, an anti-racial profiling activist and journalist, started to collect reports of police harassment, citing “a multiplication of police violence videos on social media.”
She’s cross-referencing and verifying about 40 cases, most of them from videos she’s received. “I don’t expect much from the state or public authorities, but what I know is they respect strength. That’s why it’s important to organize,” she said.
Amal Bentounsi, whose brother Amine was shot in the back and killed by the police in 2012, founded a group to support families of victims and provide legal help to bring abusive police to court. The officer who killed her brother was sentenced to a five-year suspended prison sentence — a rare legal victory for families like hers.
In March, Bentounsi and three other families launched an app called Emergency-Police Violence designed to record abuses.
“The idea is for people to develop the habit of filming, not to make buzz, but to create a tool for citizens to contradict the police’s version of events and dissuade police who will be filmed” from abusing their authority, Bentounsi said.  
Users can record arrests live, and the videos are directly uploaded onto the app’s server so they can be salvaged if the phone is seized or broken.
Since March, the app has been downloaded more than 30,000 times.  
Their group wants to encourage people to press charges, even if chances of conviction are slim, Bentounsi said. The government says numbers of police abuses “aren’t big enough for it to be an issue. We want to change that. Because if there are no charges, there are no statistics.”
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Construction workers in Paris dangled from ropes and used saws to cut through the charred tangled remains of metal scaffolding as they resumed restoration work on Notre Dame cathedral. Fire nearly destroyed the centuries-old structure in April 2019. The coronavirus outbreak suspended work rebuilding the church in March.Huge towers of metal scaffolding erected before the fire — as part of a renovation — melted into a maze of tubes and pipes and must be cut away before any more work on the building can continue — 40,000 pieces of metal weighing as much as 200 tons must be carefully lifted out, which is expected to take three months.  Workers prepare to remove damaged scaffolding elements from the remains of the damaged roof of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, June 8, 2020“It’s a bit like open-heart surgery because we are in the middle of the cathedral between the transept and its heart, precisely where the spire crashed,” Christophe Rousselot said. He heads a charity collecting funds to help pay for the restoration.  The fire burned through the roof and destroyed the spire, but the main bell towers, walls, and most of the ceiling survived as well as many of the relics inside the church. Engineers cannot enter the cathedral to inspect its vaults until the fused scaffolding is removed. Once the scaffolding is gone, a temporary roof will be put up and the restoration work will begin. French President Emmanuel Macron has said he hopes the cathedral will be restored and ready for visitors again by 2024, when Paris hosts the Summer Olympics.  
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The U.S. Department of Justice issued a formal request to question Britain’s Prince Andrew as part of the government’s ongoing investigation into possible co-conspirators of convicted sex offender, Jeffrey Epstein, according to a law enforcement official.The formal action comes after federal prosecutors alleged that Andrew, known as the Duke of York, failed to respond to earlier Justice Department inquiries about his friendship with Epstein, who was found dead of an apparent suicide while in jail last August awaiting charges of sex trafficking and sexual abuse.In November, Queen Elizabeth’s second son stepped down from public duties due to the scandal over his friendship with Epstein and allegations that he had sexual encounters with a 17-year-old girl about 20 years ago.Investigators have not accused Andrew of any wrongdoing, and he has said that he would help “any appropriate law enforcement agency with their investigations if required.”FILE – This March 28, 2017, file photo, provided by the New York State Sex Offender Registry, shows Jeffrey Epstein.Andrew has denied having sex with Virginia Roberts Giuffre. She alleges Epstein forced her to have sex with the prince and that the encounters happened in London, New York and the U.S. Virgin Islands.Despite the pledge to cooperate, in March, U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman said the prince had provided “zero cooperation” to the FBI and “shut the door on voluntary cooperation.” Berman said his office is “considering its options.”Andrew’s lawyers hit back at these claims Monday, suggesting that U.S. prosecutors were seeking publicity rather than the royal’s cooperation.”The Duke of York has on at least three occasions this year offered his assistance as a witness to the DOJ,” said Blackfords, the London-based law firm representing Andrew, in a statement.”Unfortunately, the DOJ has reacted to the first two offers by breaching their own confidentiality rules and claiming that the Duke has offered zero cooperation. In doing so, they are perhaps seeking publicity rather than accepting the assistance proffered,” the statement said.The request, initiated by federal prosecutors in the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s office, is part of a mutual legal assistance treaty (MLAT) request, an agreement to gather and exchange information in criminal investigations between two counties, submitted to Britain’s Home Office, according to the source.If the MLAT request is approved, U.S. prosecutors could potentially force Andrew to go to court to provide evidence under oath.Prosecutors have vowed to continue the investigation, bringing renewed attention to several prominent people in Epstein’s orbit, including Andrew and socialite Ghislaine Maxwell.Maxwell faces several lawsuits and has denied all allegations against her.  
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‘Black Lives Matter’ protestors took to the streets of European cities again at the weekend in solidarity with demonstrations in the United States, which were triggered by the death of 46-year-old black man George Floyd two weeks ago in Minneapolis. The protestors in Britain, and in other European cities, have tapped into deep-rooted anger over a perceived lack of understanding of their countries’ colonial histories, as Henry Ridgwell reports from London.Camera: Henry Ridgwell  Produced by: Jason Godman
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The World Health Organization says it still believes the spread of the coronavirus from people without symptoms is “rare,” despite warnings from numerous experts worldwide that such transmission is more frequent and likely explains why the pandemic has been so hard to contain.
 
Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO’s technical lead on COVID-19 said at a press briefing on Monday that many countries are reporting cases of spread from people who are asymptomatic, or those with no clinical symptoms. But when questioned in more detail about these cases, Van Kerkhove said many of them turn out to have mild disease, or unusual symptoms.
 
Although health officials in countries including Britain, the U.S. and elsewhere have warned that COVID-19 is spreading from people without symptoms, WHO has maintained that this type of spread is not a driver of the pandemic and is probably accounts for about 6% of spread, at most. Numerous studies have suggested that the virus is spreading from people without symptoms, but many of those are either anecdotal reports or based on modeling.
 
Van Kerkhove said that based on data from countries, when people with no symptoms of COVID-19 are tracked over a long period to see if they spread the disease, there are very few cases of spread.
 
“We are constantly looking at this data and we’re trying to get more information from countries to truly answer this question,” she said. “It still appears to be rare that asymptomatic individuals actually transmit onward.”
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Eurocrats admit they are breathing a sigh of relief that Britain is out of the European Union. If it had still been a member, they would face an even trickier prospect of persuading the fractious bloc to agree a politically ambitious pandemic economic recovery plan to lift flagging economic fortunes.   Even without Britain, a proposal that would see $850 billion of grants and loans being splashed around is facing strong resistance from some north and central European states.    The EU is heading for yet another fight, one that may well set the bloc on the path of closer political and fiscal union but risks stirring up a renewed populist backlash as disruptive as the one spawned by the 2015 migration crisis.    Jacques Delors, a former European Commission president, has warned that lack of EU solidarity poses “a mortal danger to the European Union.”   The European Union has weathered crisis before — from the eurozone bailouts after the 2008 global financial crash to the unruly migration crisis and an ill-tempered Brexit, but some fear the coronavirus could be even more destructive as it sets neighbor against neighbor.   Italy, a flashpoint   It is not often that the likes of Nigel Farage, Britain’s arch-Brexiter, and the pro-EU philanthropist George Soros, agree, but last month they did with both arguing that the pandemic and its political and economic impact risks breaking up the bloc with public opinion towards the EU turning increasingly sour in southern European countries.   In an interview with the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf, Soros said: “I am particularly concerned about Italy. What would be left of Europe without Italy? Italy used to be the most pro-European country.”    FILE – Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage along with other MEPs wave British flags ahead of a vote on the Withdrawal Agreement at the European Parliament in Brussels, Belgium January 29, 2020.Farage said on his London show radio show, “I am truly astonished for the first time in my life to find that I am in total agreement with George Soros.” Farage has long argued that Italy is the most likely country to follow Britain out of the EU. Many Italians feel they were abandoned by their European partners, who declined requests for medical equipment and economic aid when the pandemic unfolded in February and March, overwhelming hospitals in the north of Italy.    Italians are also affronted about their country being singled out as its neighbors start lifting travel restrictions and open up their borders for tourists and travelers. Many EU countries are requiring anyone returning from an Italian holiday to quarantine for 14 days, even though Italy is now recording low number of new coronavirus cases.    That has infuriated Italian ministers. Last week, Italy’s interior minister Luigi Di Maio warned in a Facebook post: “If anyone thinks they can treat us like a leper colony, then they should know that we will not stand for it.” He added: “We do not accept blacklists.”   FILE – A man with a face mask and a child with an EU flag are seen at an event to garner more support for Italy during the coronavirus pandemic, in front of the Italian embassy in Berlin, Germany, April 22, 2020.Polls are reflecting a dramatic shift in public opinion in Italy towards the EU. According to one survey by the pollster Tecné, 42% of Italians want to leave the EU, up from 26% in November 2018. Eurocrats are drawing some comfort from the fact that a quarter of those ready to leave now would be prepared to remain in the bloc, if Europe approved economic measures that help Italy.   Saving wrecked economies Eurocrats hope to do so. On June 19, the heads of the bloc’s national governments will meet in Brussels to thrash out a joint response to the economic havoc the pandemic has left in its wake. The European Commission has warned the EU economy would likely shrink by 7.5% this year  — much worse than the 2009 contraction of around 4.5%. “The EU economy will experience a recession of historic proportions,” the commission cautioned after weeks of economic shutdowns because of the coronavirus.   FILE: German Chancellor Angela Merkel holds a joint video news conference with French President Emmanuel Macron in Berlin, Germany, May 18, 2020.Last month, France and Germany gave added impetus to a plan that would see the bloc take a step towards mutualizing debt. Under the proposal, grants and loans being envisaged to help member states weather a recession would come from money borrowed from capital markets funded by future EU taxes.    Two thirds of the money would be distributed as grants that do not have to be paid back by the individual states that receive them.  The other third would be offered as loans. The proposal has been greeted by some as Europe’s Hamiltonian moment and is being compared to the 1790 deal between U.S. founding fathers Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, who agreed that the newly formed U.S. federal government would assume the outstanding debts of the individual states, creating a single fiscal union.   The money being proposed is “small change in an era when politicians and central bankers conjure up trillions almost daily,” says Anatole Kaletsky, chief economist at Gavekal Dragonomics, a financial services company, and a former columnist at the Financial Times. “If adopted, the proposal might be remembered as the moment when Europe became a genuine political federation,” he said.   Writing for Project Syndicate, a site that publishes commentary, Kaletsky said the plan would see the EU “issue bonds in its own name and guaranteed by its own revenues, instead of using funds raised by national governments, whether acting together or separately.” It would also mean the bloc’s taking a major step towards a fiscal federation because to “guarantee and service hundreds of billions of euros of new borrowing on its own account, the EU will require more tax revenue than it now receives.”   It would have to levy new taxes of its own, in addition to the customs duties and a small share of national sales taxes it already receives.   Not in this together But there is strong resistance to the plan from a group of four northern states — Austria, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Sweden — which are opposed to the scheme and are unhappy with the idea of grants, wanting any financial aid paid back and only offered contingent on borrowing nations’ promising economic reform.   Some central European countries, notably Hungary and Poland, are also dissatisfied, fearing that they will be short-changed and that Italy, France and Spain, the three European countries hardest hit by the virus, will receive the lion’s share of the grant money. They note all three have bigger economies than they do.    Far from bringing Europe together in solidarity, the pandemic and its economic impact risk deepening fissures in a bloc already split over foreign, defense and migration policies. Economic inequality between member states is likely to increase.    The clash over the economic recovery plan is coinciding with mounting fears that the 27-member bloc’s single market fraying with richer members doling out huge amounts of state aid and subsidies to support their pandemic-struck businesses, giving them a competitive edge over rivals in poorer countries, struggling neighbors, mainly in the south, who cannot match the subsidies.   That will aggravate the endemic imbalance within the eurozone between creditor countries in the north and debtor countries in the south, which the economic recovery plan will not correct. An uneven recovery across the bloc risks fueling populist anger and anti-EU sentiment.   FILE – Italian premier Giuseppe Conte informs the Senate on coronavirus situation, in Rome, March 26, 2020.Ill-natured squabbling has prompted warnings from Italian Prime Minister  Giuseppe Conte that the EU project itself could be placed in jeopardy unless the rich northern states are more generous in helping those in the south. Dutch claims that the ailing south has only itself to blame for its economic woes prompted outrage recently from Portugal’s prime minister, António Costa, who called the charge “disgusting.”    While the recovery package, if approved, may help to take the sting out of anti-EU populism in Italy, it could trigger a backlash northern states, like the Netherlands and Germany, say analysts.  The say the pandemic hit as Europe was already worried about long-term trends.   The continent’s population is graying with birth rates declining. The slow pace of technological innovation, compared to Asia, had already slowed economic growth before the virus appeared.    National rivalries are coming to the fore. Governments now are worried that much like after the 2008 financial crash, their businesses will become the target of hostile foreign takeovers.  After 2008, Greek ports were bought by China and Gulf states grabbed a string of European banks. 
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