| We’re covering coronavirus flare-ups in China and the U.S., how tech giants are angling to get bigger and the crisis in the U.S. police. | | | Preparing coronavirus testing on Sunday near a market in Beijing that appears to be the source of a new outbreak. Noel Celis/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images | | | Of the 38 locally transmitted cases, 36 were in Beijing, where the authorities are conducting mass testing at a vast seafood and produce market with 10,000 workers, which appears to be the main source of a new outbreak. Beijing had gone eight weeks without a single locally transmitted case until a total of seven were detected on Thursday and Friday. | | | In the United States, which has the world’s largest caseload, the daily number of new cases is climbing in 22 states, shifting from what had been downward trajectories in many of those places. | | | A hospital in Kabul for Covid-19 patients set up with help from Japan. Jawad Jalali/EPA, via Shutterstock | | | Afghanistan’s health system, largely dependent on foreign aid, is being overwhelmed by the pandemic. The official numbers are seen as an indication of a looming catastrophe amid a war with the Taliban. | | | The Health Ministry said on Sunday that about 55 percent of the roughly 1,200 coronavirus tests conducted in the previous 24 hours had been positive, bringing the official number of cases to about 25,000. The known death toll stands just below 500. | | | Afghans’s rising desperation was recently made clear in the rush to a Kabul herbal clinic that was offering “a vaccine.” Tests found that the vaccine, in the form of drops, contained several types of opiates — opium, morphine, papaverine, codeine — mixed with herbs. The herbalist shut down the clinic and left the city. | | | In Brazil: President Jair Bolsonaro has startled the medical community with his claim of a miracle drug — hydroxychloroquine — for Covid-19. Brazil has recorded more fatalities than any country other than the United States, and its daily death toll is now the world’s highest. | | | The global economy is reeling from a pandemic-induced recession, but tech’s largest companies — providing ever more essential online services — are wildly profitable and flush with billions of dollars. | | | Details: Facebook announced its largest investment in an outside business in April, a $5.7 billion stake in the Indian telecommunications company Reliance Jio. Last month, Facebook bought the search engine and database company Giphy for an estimated $400 million. And, it recently announced that it had invested in Gojek, a “super app” in Southeast Asia. | | | Analysis: The growth is only likely to add to the worries of lawmakers and regulators in Washington and Europe. European Union officials are preparing antitrust charges against Amazon, accusing the company of using its e-commerce dominance to box out smaller rivals, while Britain has begun an inquiry into Facebook’s purchase of Giphy. | | | Fred Tanneau/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images | | | Mr. Dylan, a Nobel laureate, is 79, but said he’s not thinking about his own mortality: “I think about the death of the human race. The long, strange trip of the naked ape.” | | | 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 | | | | Libya mass killings: At least eight mass graves have been discovered near Tripoli, prompting the United Nations to call for an investigation into possible war crimes and offering a grim reminder of the atrocities on all sides of the country’s chaotic war, including lawless militias that behave with impunity. | | | Europe’s far-right: Thousands of people rallied against police brutality and racism in European cities over the weekend, but far-right demonstrators also emerged in large groups for the first time — particularly in London — leading to sometimes violent confrontations. Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain denounced far-right attacks on the police as “racist thuggery.” | | | Bollywood death: Sushant Singh Rajput, 34, a prominent actor, was found dead in his home in Mumbai on Sunday. The Mumbai police said the actor died by suicide. | | | Adam Dean for The New York Times | | | Snapshot: Above, a spirit house in Bangkok. Such structures are common throughout Thailand, Myanmar and Cambodia, although the architecture differs by country. “If you take care of the spirits,” said one builder, “they will take care of you.” | | | What we’re looking at: The latest cover of The New Yorker, for which the artist Kadir Nelson created both a powerful image and a lesson on the history of violence against black people in America. | | | David Malosh for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. | | | Watch: Spike Lee’s “Da 5 Bloods” is a “long, anguished, funny, violent excursion into a hidden chamber of the nation’s heart of darkness” that “isn’t like anything else,” according to our critic A.O. Scott. | | | Read: “The Art of Her Deal” brings Melania Trump into slightly better focus. Written by Mary Jordan, a reporter with The Washington Post, the book details new information about this unconventional first lady and her influence on President Trump. | | | Our full At Home collection has lots more ideas on what to read, cook, watch and do to make time spent safely at home more fun. | | | Protesters confront a police officer on Sunday in Atlanta, Georgia. Joshua Rashaad McFadden for The New York Times | | | Since 2013, the Black Lives Matter movement has made police violence a pressing issue and its members have sought to make the police more accountable for misconduct. The killing of George Floyd in police custody shows how far the U.S. has to go. | | | You’ve tracked police killings and nonfatal shootings around the country. What have researchers found? | | | Sam Sinyangwe, a founder of We the Protesters, which created a database that maps police killings, and Campaign Zero, a policy platform to end police violence: In 2013, when the Black Lives Matter protests began, we didn’t have the data to understand what policy interventions could address the problem of police violence. Now we do, and the data nationwide show that about 1,000 people were killed by the police in 2019, which is about the same number killed each year going back to 2013. The overall numbers haven’t gone down. That’s because in suburban and rural areas, police killings are rising. | | | But if you look at the 30 largest cities, police shootings have dropped about 30 percent, and some cities have seen larger drops. In some of these cities, like Chicago and Los Angeles, activists with Black Lives Matter and other groups have done a lot of work to push for de-escalation, stricter use-of-force policies and greater accountability. | | | What else does it take to prevent more of these deaths? | | | J. Scott Thomson, who served as the police chief in Camden, N.J., from 2008 to 2019 and was the president of the Police Executive Research Forum from 2015 to 2019: Within a Police Department, culture eats policy for breakfast. You can have a perfectly worded policy, but it’s meaningless if it just exists on paper. | | | At the Police Executive Research Forum, we released a survey in 2016 that found that agencies spend a median of 58 hours on training for recruits on how to use a gun and 49 hours on defensive tactics, but they spend about only eight hours on de-escalation and crisis intervention. | | | To change the culture around the use of force, you have to have continuous training, systems of accountability and consequences. | | | What do you want to see happen next? | | | Alicia Garza, the principal of Black Futures Lab who helped coin the phrase #BlackLivesMatter and helped found the Black Lives Matter Global Network: Most immediate, we need accountability for the death of George Floyd. | | | Increasing the charges to second-degree murder for Derek Chauvin, and also charging the other three officers involved, was really important. Most of the time, there is unrest, and then there is a quick move to convene a grand jury, and people think there is no way that they couldn’t hold these officers accountable. | | | Time and time again, as in the cases of Mike Brown and Eric Garner, grand juries have decided not to indict. So the elemental first step is to show that law and order applies equally to the police. | | | That’s it for this briefing. See you next time. | | Thank you
To Melissa Clark for the recipe, and to Theodore Kim and Jahaan Singh for the 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. | | |
