| We’re covering countries grappling with how to police lockdowns, a culture of fear for journalists in India and a Manila neighborhood at the center of Rodrigo Duterte’s crackdown. | |  By Melina Delkic | | | Local police clearing out Divisoria, Manila’s largest market district, during a government lockdown. Jes Aznar for The New York Times | | | In Australia, the authorities have threatened people sitting alone drinking coffee with six months of jail; in the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte ordered the police to shoot anyone who “causes commotion” after protesters demanded food. | | | Some police departments are trying to be lenient to avoid stressing out residents in hard times; others are fully cracking down. | | | Context: Severe crackdowns may amplify policing problems that had already existed. Some police forces are decimated by the virus. And countries with more autocratic governments have been quicker to use antagonistic tactics. | | | ■ Layoffs in global tourism are mounting at the rate of one million a day, according to the World Travel & Tourism Council. The industry could lose as much as $2.1 trillion by the end of the year. | | | ■ The leaders of several former Soviet states are playing down the severity of the pandemic, with some promoting folk remedies. The president of Belarus recommends vodka and a sauna. | | | Ravish Kumar, managing editor of NDTV's Hindi news channel, which has come under pressure from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government. Saumya Khandelwal for The New York Times | | | With the coronavirus pandemic, Mr. Modi has grown even more blatant, telling top news executives just before he announced the lockdown on the entire country that they should publish “inspiring and positive stories” about his government's efforts. | | | His ministers have leaned on business leaders to cut off support to independent media, a bulwark for the world’s biggest democracy. Foreign journalists are barred from centers of unrest, or have trouble with visas. | | | Major stories, like those about rights abuses in Jammu and Kashmir, sometimes go uncovered because of fear and a culture of retaliation. | | | Context: The prime minister has tried to use the media to build a cult of personality as the nation’s savior. Senior government officials have put pressure on news outlets to ignore the uglier side of his nationalist party’s campaign to transform India from a religiously diverse and tolerant country into an assertively Hindu one. | | | Quotable: “A large section of the Indian media,” said one leading news anchor in India, “has become a lap dog, not a watchdog.” | | | Hannah Reyes Morales for The New York Times | | | A few years ago, the Market Three slum in Manila was terrorized under President Rodrigo Duterte’s brutal crackdown on drugs and crime. Now, a government plan to overhaul a nearby port threatens to force the residents from their homes and strip them of what little they have left. | | | PAID POST: A MESSAGE FROM CAMPAIGN MONITOR | | TEST: Email Marketing 101: Never Sacrifice Beauty for Simplicity | | A drag-and-drop email builder, a gallery of templates and turnkey designs, personalized customer journeys, and engagement segments. It's everything you need to create stunning, results-driven email campaigns in minutes. And with Campaign Monitor, you have access to it all, along with award-winning support around the clock. It's beautiful email marketing done simply. | | | Learn More | | | | U.S.-Iran: President Trump warned Iran against using its proxy forces to attack U.S. troops, and said his administration had “very good information” that Iran-backed militias were planning more assaults, prompting senior Democrats to caution Mr. Trump against attacking Iran without consulting Congress. | | | Refugees: A European Union court ruled that Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic had violated their obligations as members of the bloc when they refused to take in their fair share of asylum-seekers as Greece and Italy were being overwhelmed at the height of the refugee crisis in 2015. The E.U. authorities made no mention of any penalty. | | | What we’re listening to: This short podcast from Scientific American on what linguists say could be the development of a new accent in a research station in Antarctica. Stephen Hiltner, an editor on the Travel desk, calls it “peculiar and mind-bending.” | | | Cook: You can round out just about any roasted root vegetables with chickpeas and yogurt, which give the dish a luscious creamy texture. | | | Read: Elisabeth Egan makes a beautiful argument for reading aloud to your family, and suggests starting with “The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse,” by Charlie Mackesy. | | | Below is a condensed version of Dr. Fauci’s conversation with Michael Barbaro, edited for clarity. | | | At what point did you realize that the coronavirus was going to be of an entirely different speed and scale than AIDS, Ebola, SARS, H1N1 or swine flu? | | | It became clear to me that we could potentially be dealing with a global catastrophe somewhere in the middle of January, when it was clear that China was seeing not only extremely efficient transmissibility, but also a disturbing degree of morbidity and mortality. | | | Anthoni Fauci at the White House to brief reporters, alongside President Trump and Vice President Pence, on the latest developments in the outbreak. Doug Mills/The New York Times | | | It very much feels like you are a general in this war, in this moment. So what is a typical day like for you? Starting at what I can only assume is some ungodly hour of the morning. | | | You’re right. We are in a war. | | | You get up, there’s a lot of people who need information, which is the reason I’m talking to you right now. There are journalists, there are congressmen, there are governors, there are legislators, there are people in the federal government that constantly need briefing. | | | I also am running a very large institute that’s responsible for making the vaccines and for developing the drugs. So I come in for a couple of hours, get things on the right track here, and then I spend more than half the day at the White House with various meetings. I’m with the vice president for hours at a time. I see the president himself at least an hour a day and maybe more. And then I go back home and I have a thousand things to do. | | | And then you’re lucky if you get to bed before midnight and then you get up at 4 or 5 in the morning. | | | What are some of your biggest focuses now? | | | My biggest concern is that we now have a 30-day extension of the guideline mitigation. And we’ve got to get the American people to really appreciate that. | | | We should be prepared to adequately address the inevitable rebound that you will see once you start pulling back on the restrictions and the mitigations. | | | I had a very interesting conversation just this morning with colleagues from literally all over the world on the weekly telephone conference call that the W.H.O. sponsors. And it was interesting to me that some of the most cogent concerns of people from different countries, I mean all over — European, African, Australian, Canadian — was that we need to make sure we keep our eye on the balance of, if you’re too stringent in things like lockdowns and keeping people under wraps for a long period of time, you may have the unintended consequence of triggering, from an economic and societal standpoint, such a disruption that you get things like poverty and health issues unrelated to the coronavirus. | | | That’s it for this briefing. See you next time. | | Thank you
To Melissa Clark for the recipe and Theodore Kim and Jahaan Singh for rest of the break from the news. You can reach the team at briefing@nytimes.com. | | | Were you sent this briefing by a friend? Sign up here to get the Morning Briefing. | | |
