New Delhi: The novel coronavirus pandemic continues to devastate several countries across the world — the latest count is 74,59,741 cases and more than 419,041 deaths.
China’s top leadership is in disagreement about the right way to treat street-stall owners in the country and a single incident of massacre in Nigeria killed more people in the country than the pandemic. Meanwhile, Greece has an elaborate plan to restart tourism and how favelas in Brazil are fighting the coronavirus as government fails to help them.
ThePrint brings you the most important global stories on the coronavirus pandemic and why they matter.
China’s street stall debate puts Xi and Li at odds
In a rare show of internal Chinese disagreement, President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang disagree over the treatment of street-stall owners, reports the Nikkei Asian Review.
“In the 1980s and 1990s, street stalls were the first signs that a market economy was emerging in a country where inefficient publicly owned companies had long held sway. Today, street stalls are back in the spotlight, this time as the topic of a heated debate among the Chinese leadership,” notes the report.
On 1 June, it says, Premier Keqiang went to Yantai and inspected some street stalls there. He praised the stall owners in the port city of Shandong Province, and declared the “street-stall economy” to be an “important source of jobs” and “part of China’s vitality”, the report notes.
Meanwhile, “President Xi Jinping’s regime has cracked down on stalls as part of efforts to maintain security and strengthen governance. Li’s public endorsement of the street vendors is seen as a policy reversal.”
Massacre in Borno state claimed more lives than Covid did in entire Nigeria
In less than two hours, gunmen from Boko Haram killed more people during a massacre in Nigeria’s Borno state than the pandemic has in the entire country, reports the Washington Post.
“As Africa’s most populous nation battles an Islamist insurgency and the coronavirus at the same time, Nigerians living at the heart of the trouble fear the public-health response is eclipsing efforts to fight the extremist threat,” says the report.
“Boko Haram, which has killed more than 30,000 people since 2009, hasn’t stopped staging regular attacks and stealing livestock in the country’s northeast during the pandemic,” it adds.
US Federal Reserve predicts no rate increases until 2022
The US Federal Reserve chair Jeremy Powell has said there would be no rate increases until 2022, which is seen as an indication that the US and the global economy are going to remain in recovery mode until then, reports the Financial Times.
“In a policy statement that was mostly unchanged compared with April, the Federal Open Market Committee said it was “committed to using its full range of tools to support the US economy in this challenging time” and would keep interest rates close to zero until it was “confident that the economy has weathered recent events,” says the report.
Ignored by govt, Brazil’s favelas organise own pandemic fight
As Brazil’s poor have been the worst hit by the coronavirus pandemic, the government has struggled to provide them any aid in times of such need. In response, the country’s poor, mostly living in favelas, have created their own programme to fight virus and mitigate its economic fallout, reports the Washington Post.
“Just weeks ago, Laryssa da Silva didn’t know where her next meal would come from. Now the 24-year-old single mother is responsible for making sure the 70 families who live on her street survive Brazil’s coronavirus outbreak. Da Silva is one of 400 new “street presidents” in Paraisópolis, responsible for helping her neighbors in São Paulo’s largest slum secure food, aid and health care,” notes the report.
“The program, created as cases in Latin America’s largest country began to explode, is one of many solutions the people of Brazil’s low-income favelas have found to bypass a divided government response to a worsening health crisis. Community leaders in some of the country’s hardest-hit neighborhoods are hiring their own ambulances, creating unemployment funds and even building independent databases to track cases and deaths,” it adds.
Greece’s elaborate plan to bring tourists back
Greece with just over 3,000 cases has been relatively less affected by the coronavirus pandemic, and has now come up with an elaborate plan to get back tourists, one of the key sources of revenue for the country, reports the BBC.
“In a bid to get the sector moving, the government has put together an ambitious plan aimed at attracting tourists while keeping coronavirus cases low. The government is easing strict rules, and the tourism sector is preparing to open up. The Acropolis reopened in early May, followed a few weeks later by bars and restaurants. From mid-June, hotels will resume operations, and airlines will gradually restore international flights,” explains the report.
How easy it would be for a traveller to enter Greece would depend on the country they are coming from, which would take into account the scale of the pandemic in that country.
“Once travellers reach their destination, they will encounter rules that the government — in consultation with epidemiologists — has been busy putting in place. Rules for hotels, which take the form of a 17-page action plan issued by the Tourism Ministry, allow them to operate at capacity but contain multiple requirements covering all aspects of operations,” the report adds.
After a jump in suicides, mental health in focus in China
In post-lockdown China, there is increasing focus on mental health after a reported increase in the number of suicides, reports Reuters.
“The heightened post-lockdown anxiety has become a matter of central government concern as domestic media report a spate of suicides by young people. It has also led to unprecedented measures by schools and local governments to focus on student mental health — a topic that like suicide has often been taboo in Chinese society,” says the report.
Trump to return to campaign trail, with possibly no social distancing norms
On 19 June, the US President Donald Trump is set to hold his first electoral rally since the pandemic spread across the country, as polls indicate his key rival Democrat Joe Biden is taking a significant lead, reports the New York Times.
The rally will be held in Tulsa in Oklahoma, “a deep-red state Mr. Trump won four years ago by 36 percentage points”, says the report.
However, there are rising fears as Trump’s campaign officials are unlikely to put any social distancing rules for rally attendees or require them to wear a mask, notes the report.
US-China Cold War is not taking place in Africa
As talks of an emerging US-China “cold war” take hold across the world, there are few signs of it in Africa, where Beijing has used the pandemic to enhance its reputation, argues the Financial Times’ Africa editor David Pilling.
“One might have thought that this pandemic would blunt any enthusiasm for China. After all, a virus that originated in Wuhan, even if it was spread to Africa mostly by Europeans, has laid economies to waste from Algeria to Zimbabwe. The ensuing recession has helped expose the huge financial obligations to Beijing, which now holds about a fifth of all African debt. Ben Igbakpa, a member of Nigeria’s national assembly, has called for an investigation into Chinese loans, which he says were concluded in secrecy and carry “neo-colonial proclivities,” he writes.
What else we are reading:
Ukraine’s backlog of babies born to surrogates begins to ease: New York Times
Nigerian minister calls for action on ‘alarming’ increase in rapes during coronavirus lockdown: Reuters
If Trump attacks China’s currency, all Asia will suffer: Nikkei Asian Review
OECD warns of deepest economic scars in peacetime for a century: Financial Times