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On this last Sunday of 2019, I wish every Hong Kong citizen a warm, peaceful and hopeful year 2020.

A New Year holds welcome promises of a fresh start and a new beginning. The New Year is also traditionally a time for planning, greeting, reminiscing as well as some soul and heart searching.

I believe that many of you would share my feeling that the year 2019 has been a year of unremitting shocks and turbulence to our community and our economy. Indeed, it has been a severely testing time for all in Hong Kong.

It all began with the introduction into the Legislative Council of the bill to amend the Fugitive Offenders Ordinance in April. Responding to strong public sentiment, the Government suspended all work on the bill in mid-June and declared its death in early July. On September 4, the Chief Executive announced the bill's withdrawal. This was done on October 23 when the Legislative Council resumed normal business.

Despite this, the public protests which began as largely peaceful and orderly marches in June soon got out of control. Unprecedented violence and reckless destruction became the norm. Radical protesters attacked police officers as well as police stations and facilities with petrol bombs, iron bars, bricks and chemicals. Some even used high-tension slingshots, bows and arrows. During the past six months or so, over 2,600 people were injured in the social unrest, including over 500 police officers.

Meanwhile, public infrastructure and transport including a cumulative total of 85 heavy rail stations and 62 light rail stations, as well as countless shops, restaurants and shopping malls had been repeatedly vandalised. More so, nearly 21,000 square metres of paving blocks from footpaths were ripped up and used as weapons to attack Police. Over 52,000 metres of roadside railing were removed and 740 sets of traffic lights destroyed.

Last month, masked protesters battered the Hung Hom Cross-Harbour Tunnel, shutting it down for two full weeks. This vital city artery normally carries 110,000 vehicles a day, accounting for some 43% of the daily cross-harbour vehicular flow. It took a total of 800 government staff and contractor's workers some 100 hours to carry out emergency repair round-the-clock before the tunnel could be reopened. At the same time, nearby Polytechnic University was overrun by radical protesters. The same happened to the Chinese University.

Apart from recklessly damaging our universities, violent protesters turned the two campuses into arsenals on a frightening scale. When the last of the protesters finally left the universities, Police seized altogether nearly 8,000 petrol bombs plus numerous explosives, hundreds of bottles of corrosive liquid and weapons of all sorts.

This level of premeditated and organised destruction and violence could hardly be tolerated in any country or economy that upholds the rule of law. Hong Kong, I am proud to say, is among those economies that believe passionately in the primacy of rule of law. It safeguards our economy, our community, our families and our way of life.

In fact, the rule of law is among Hong Kong's much cherished core values, alongside our fiercely independent judiciary, clean government, level playing field for business and enviable freedoms. These freedoms, as enshrined in the Basic Law and the Hong Kong Bill of Rights Ordinance, include freedom of speech, of the press and free flow of information; freedom of association and assembly; free trade and free port; free flow of capital; freely convertible currency; freedom of religious belief and free education. We have also been the freest economy in the world continuously for 25 years. The unique "one country, two systems" formula has been functioning well and we enjoy the best of both worlds.

Despite the recent social unrest which has affected our economy and labour market, Hong Kong's institutional strengths remain robust and intact. Our fundamentals stay sound and strong. We still enjoy a high rating in various areas by international think tanks and agencies. Allow me to say that whilst Hong Kong may not have the full semblance of Western democracy, we do enjoy for a very long time the full substance of real freedom which underpins Hong Kong's success.

Over the past six months, most of the requests for public meetings, processions and protests were given the greenlight by Police. During these public events, be it small or large, Police had dutifully facilitated and ensured the safety of protesters and other road users. When the requests were not approved, it was generally a decision made in the hopes of preventing violence, ensuring peace and public order, as our society has every right to expect of its police and its government.

On November 24, we witnessed a peaceful and orderly District Council Election with a record high turnout and voting rates. My colleagues and I are looking forward to working with all new District Council members. We also look forward to expanding our dialogue with the community. While we will continue to engage different sectors of society through our usual channels, the Government will broaden and rejuvenate our communication with the public. Less than two weeks ago and after the one by the Chief Executive in September, my Principal Official colleagues have started a dialogue with the public through Facebook live. You will certainly see more of us listening and responding to people's views and concerns on these and other communication channels in the coming year.

We are also establishing an Independent Review Committee comprising experts and community leaders. The committee will look into the causes and full circumstances of the social unrest and probe into Hong Kong's deep-seated social conflicts, from affordable housing, land supply, wealth gap, upward social mobility and opportunities for our young people to social justice. The committee will recommend ways to address the real and long-entrenched community concerns that underlie the discord.

Meanwhile, our economy is inevitably affected by the twin blows of social unrest and the trade dispute between the United States and the Mainland. Businesses and people of Hong Kong are yearning for the restoration of peace and order soonest possible, and the recovery of our economy.

In response, the Government has launched four rounds of relief measures since August. These added up to more than $25 billion. A number of the measures which will benefit grassroots families and small and medium enterprises will be implemented at the beginning of the New Year.

These relief measures would not solve our economic problems. Yet, they could help businesses and people of Hong Kong stay afloat while we strive to heal our divided community and battered economy.

There are deep-seated issues that we must acknowledge and resolve if we are to end the prolonged social unrest that has shaken the familiar Hong Kong which we all love and cherish. We must be patient and perseverant in helping our city to heal, one step at a time.

The past six months have been tough for us, but we will soldier on. Hong Kong is a remarkably resilient and resourceful international city with a strong can-do spirit. We have a New Year waiting for us. We have new and expanded channels of communication opened up for us. We expect the first report of the Independent Police Complaints Council to come out soon. And we have research and concrete recommendations of the Independent Review Committee ahead of us. Working together, I am confident that we can rebuild, reclaim and rejuvenate the remarkably resilient spirit of Hong Kong.

On this note, I wish all of you a New Year blessed with peace, harmony and goodwill.

Chief Secretary Matthew Cheung gave these remarks on RTHK's "Letter to Hong Kong" programme aired on December 29.

Sue McLaughlin
Oct 1, 2010; 23:272-277
Special Report

Shani V. Davis
Aug 1, 2011; 24:148-153
Feature Article/Vitamin D in African Americans

(DGIST (Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology)) A drug-loaded microrobotic needle effectively targets and remains attached to cancerous tissue in lab experiments without needing continuous application of a magnetic field, allowing more precise drug delivery. The details were published by researchers at DGIST's Microrobot Research Center in Korea and colleagues in the journal Advanced Healthcare Materials.

Neoantimycins are anticancer compounds of 15-membered ring antimycin-type depsipeptides. They are biosynthesized by a hybrid multimodular protein complex of nonribosomal peptide synthetase (NRPS) and polyketide synthase (PKS), typically from the starting precursor 3-formamidosalicylate. Examining fermentation extracts of Streptomyces conglobatus, here we discovered four new neoantimycin analogs, unantimycins B–E, in which 3-formamidosalicylates are replaced by an unusual 3-hydroxybenzoate (3-HBA) moiety. Unantimycins B–E exhibited levels of anticancer activities similar to those of the chemotherapeutic drug cisplatin in human lung cancer, colorectal cancer, and melanoma cells. Notably, they mostly displayed no significant toxicity toward noncancerous cells, unlike the serious toxicities generally reported for antimycin-type natural products. Using site-directed mutagenesis and heterologous expression, we found that unantimycin productions are correlated with the activity of a chorismatase homolog, the nat-hyg5 gene, from a type I PKS gene cluster. Biochemical analysis confirmed that the catalytic activity of Nat-hyg5 generates 3-HBA from chorismate. Finally, we achieved selective production of unantimycins B and C by engineering a chassis host. On the basis of these findings, we propose that unantimycin biosynthesis is directed by the neoantimycin-producing NRPS–PKS complex and initiated with the starter unit of 3-HBA. The elucidation of the biosynthetic unantimycin pathway reported here paves the way to improve the yield of these compounds for evaluation in oncotherapeutic applications.

β-1,3-d-Glucan is a ubiquitous glucose polymer produced by plants, bacteria, and most fungi. It has been used as a diagnostic tool in patients with invasive mycoses via a highly-sensitive reagent consisting of the blood coagulation system of horseshoe crab. However, no method is currently available for measuring β-1,6-glucan, another primary β-glucan structure of fungal polysaccharides. Herein, we describe the development of an economical and highly-sensitive and specific assay for β-1,6-glucan using a modified recombinant endo-β-1,6-glucanase having diminished glucan hydrolase activity. The purified β-1,6-glucanase derivative bound to the β-1,6-glucan pustulan with a KD of 16.4 nm. We validated the specificity of this β-1,6-glucan probe by demonstrating its ability to detect cell wall β-1,6-glucan from both yeast and hyphal forms of the opportunistic fungal pathogen Candida albicans, without any detectable binding to glucan lacking the long β-1,6-glucan branch. We developed a sandwich ELISA-like assay with a low limit of quantification for pustulan (1.5 pg/ml), and we successfully employed this assay in the quantification of extracellular β-1,6-glucan released by >250 patient-derived strains of different Candida species (including Candida auris) in culture supernatant in vitro. We also used this assay to measure β-1,6-glucan in vivo in the serum and in several organs in a mouse model of systemic candidiasis. Our work describes a reliable method for β-1,6-glucan detection, which may prove useful for the diagnosis of invasive fungal infections.

(University of Cambridge) Parents should not feel pressured to make their young children undertake structured learning or achieve specific tasks, particularly during lockdown. A new study of children under the age of two has found that parents who take a more flexible approach to their child's learning can - for children who were easy babies - minimise behavioural problems during toddlerhood.

(Impact Journals LLC) Volume 11, Issue 18 of @Oncotarget Clinical implications of chromatin accessibility assessed by ATAC-seq profiling in human cancers especially in a large patient cohort is largely unknown.

(Center for Genomic Regulation) An analysis of 13,000 tumours highlights two previously overlooked genes as potential new therapeutic targets for cancer treatment. Researchers also identify potential new therapeutic targets for male infertility. Both findings are the result of the most comprehensive evolutionary analysis of RNA modification proteins to date, published today in the journal Genome Biology.

(European Society for Medical Oncology) A study of 4,532 men in the Veneto region of Italy has found that those who were being treated for prostate cancer with androgen-deprivation therapies (ADT) were less likely to develop the coronavirus COVID-19 and, if they were infected, the disease was less severe. The study is published in Annals of Oncology.

(Wiley) A recent Psycho-Oncology analysis of published studies found that few cancer survivors received financial information support from healthcare facilities during their initial treatment, even though cancer-related financial toxicity has multiple impacts on survivors' health and quality of life.

(Wiley) Heart failure and cancer are conditions with a number of shared characteristics. A new study published in the Journal of Internal Medicine found that in patients with heart failure, several known tumor markers can also be indicators of heart failure severity and progression.

(Luxembourg Institute of Health) Scientists at the Department of Infection and Immunity of the Luxembourg Institute of Health (LIH) revealed a novel mechanism through which the immune system controls autoimmunity and cancer. In the special focus of the researchers were regulatory T cells -- a type of white blood cells that act as a brake on the immune system.

(Walter and Eliza Hall Institute) The anti-cancer medicine venetoclax could improve the current therapy for estrogen receptor-positive (ER+) breast cancer - the most common form of breast cancer in Australia - according to preclinical studies led by Walter and Eliza Hall Institute researchers. The promising preclinical results for this 'triple therapy' have underpinned a phase 1 clinical trial in Melbourne, Australia, that is combining venetoclax with hormone therapy and CDK4/6 inhibitors in patients with ER+ breast cancer.

(JAMA Network) Death certificate data were used to compare the rate of opioid-related deaths in the US among cancer survivors with that of the general population from 2006 through 2016. Whether opioid-associated deaths in cancer survivors, who are often prescribed opioids for cancer-related pain, are rising at the same rate as in the general population is unknown.

(JAMA Network) The considerations and challenges affecting the palliative care specialty and delivery of palliative care in the COVID-19 era, as well as potential solutions, are discussed in this Viewpoint.

(JAMA Network) This essay discusses similarities between a doctor's experiences with diagnoses of cancer and COVID-19.

(Carnegie Mellon University) A new study developed a model of regulation in which the probability of a stricter standard being enacted increased with the proportion of firms in an industry that could meet the standard. The study found that regulations that consider the proportion of firms that can meet the new standard can motivate the development of a new green technology more effectively than regulations that do not consider this factor.

(Moscow Research and Practical Clinical Center for Diagnostics and Telemedicine Technologies) Researchers of the Moscow Diagnostics and Telemedicine Center collected a dataset that includes more than a thousand sets of chest CT scans of patients with imaging finding of COVID-19. As of today, it is the largest completely anonymized database of CT studies, which has no analogues in Russia or in the world. It is available for download and can be used for developing services based on artificial intelligence technologies.

(Bentham Science Publishers) Using a nationally representative sample, the researchers explored racial/ethnic variation in the link between educational attainment and heart disease among American adults.

(American Marketing Association) Nonprofits may better meet their missions by learning to effectively employ the entirety of the marketing mix to attract individuals to available donation opportunities.

(Michigan Medicine - University of Michigan) Now, as hospitals across the country start to return to doing non-emergency operations that keep their beds full and their books balanced, they need to think carefully about what resources each of those procedures will need as the pandemic continues. A new guide could help them prioritize and plan. Created by poring over seven years' worth of data from 17 common operations in dozens of hospitals, it's available for free for any hospital to use.

(The Institute of Medical Science, The University of Tokyo) Understanding the principles of cancer evolution is important in designing a therapeutic strategy. A research group at The Institute of Medical Science, The University of Tokyo (IMSUT) announced a new simulation model that describes various modes of cancer evolution in a unified manner.

(JAMA Network) This randomized clinical trial looked at the effect of a face-aging mobile app on daily sunscreen use and other skin protection among teens in Brazil. Selfies of students were altered to show UV effects on their future faces and shown to their class, accompanied by information about sun protection. Reducing UV exposure in children and adolescents is important because of the increased risk of skin cancer with cumulative UV exposure and sunburns early in life.

(University of Johannesburg) Fly ash generated by coal-fired power stations is a global environmental headache, creating groundwater and air pollution from vast landfills and ash dams. The waste product can be repurposed into geopolymer concrete, such as precast heat-cured structural elements for buildings. However, a critical durability problem has been low resistance to extreme alkali attack. UJ researchers found that high temperature heat-treatment at 200 degrees Celsius can halve this harmful mechanism in fly ash geopolymer concretes.