 Hello and welcome to International Daily, round up by People's Dispatch, where we bring you some of the major news developments from across the world. Our headlines, protests in the US continue, second person killed in police firing, protests held across Palestine and Israel over killing of disabled man by security forces, believing an action body announces new dates for presidential polls, Singapore to build new dormitories for migrants after months of discriminatory containment policy, and South African teachers union approach courts against government plans to reopen schools. We began with a protest in the US against police killings and racism. The second death from police firing was reported from New York as protesters are being attacked in different parts of the country by the police. Late on Tuesday night, one man was killed by NYPD officers in Brooklyn. Witnesses have reported that the police fired indiscriminate rounds of shots at the man without provocation, while the police claimed that he was armed. This is the second confirmed case of a police killing since the beginning of the protests. The previous one was from Louisville on June 1st, when the police opened fire at protesters. There are at least four more cases of deaths due to gunfire, where the perpetrators are yet to be confirmed. In the capital of Texas, Austin, the police reportedly shot two civilians in the head with what is being described as less lethal munition. Of the two people shot in Austin, one is a 20-year-old black man and the other is a 16-year-old who is in critical care and being tested for neurological damage. Police in different cities have opened fire at protesters usually with rubber-coated bullets and wounded dozens. Many have complained of being shot in their heads with such rounds of bullets. There have been at least two cases of people losing their eyesight. In many places, the police have targeted reporters and journalists. Amid the violent suppression, President Donald Trump on June 1st heightened the tension by threatening city and state administrations with military deployment if they did not contain the protests. Characterizing the country-wide protests for justice as riots, Trump in his speech said that he would push for states to make use of the National Guard, a federal reserve force to deal with the protests. Currently, close to 20,000 armed guardsmen have been deployed in at least 26 states. This is one of the largest deployments of armed forces domestically in US history. We move on to COVID-19 news. The Singaporean government announced on June 1st a plan to rehabilitate thousands of workers from crowded dormitories to new state-run facilities. The move comes after nearly two months of the COVID-19 pandemic raging in these dormitories. The rehabilitation seeks to reduce density among the 45 dormitories across the city. These dormitories house over 200,000 workers. Many of these dormitories are extremely crowded with no upper limit to occupants inside a single room. An average of at least a dozen of these inmates are cramped into one room with single bathroom. As for the COVID-19 outbreak spread in Singapore, a number of those affected were migrant workers who largely hail from South Asian countries like India and Bangladesh. Of the nearly 36,000 reported cases in the city-state, more than 30,000 of them came from these dormitories. Singapore had also deployed a discriminatory policy of sealing the dormitories with any suspected cases inside without any facility for isolation or social distancing. This only exacerbated the spread with more than 90% of the new cases within the city emerging from the dormitories from mid-April. The new rehabilitation policy still falls grossly short of reverting the conditions. The new accommodation will cap the minimum inmate occupancy at 10 per room down from the current average of 12 and only increases the per capita living space of the inhabitants from 4.5 square feet to 6 square feet. In our in-focus section, we talk to Newspix Pravir Purkayasa and the COVID-19 situation in India. Pravir, thank you so much for joining us. So could we first talk about the current situation regarding how the disease has been progressing? Because we do know that India was under a very strict lockdown for quite some time and now the lockdown is slowly being eased. But we do see that the number of cases continues to rise at a very steady rate. Well, let's look at the big figures first. If we see that when we started the lockdown, we have about roughly about 600 cases. Now, of course, the actual cases might have been larger. But now, as you have said, we have already reached 207,000 cases. And more important than that, the daily numbers is roughly at the moment around 9,000. If you take the world quote-unquote rankings, if you will. So India at the moment is the seventh highest number of total cases. But if you look at the daily rise, then you will see India is jointly third with Russia, both having something like 8,900 cases per day or roughly 9,000 cases per day, only behind United States and Brazil. So if you look at these figures, the Indian figures really look a little worrying, mainly because if you see that the lockdown has not really effectively been able to stop the epidemic, the epidemic is still growing. And even the Indian Council of Medical Research has said that we are likely to see the peak. We are far from the peak at this moment. We're likely to see the peak a couple of months, three months down the line. So we are really looking at an accelerating number in terms of acceleration in terms of numbers, not in terms of percentage of people getting the disease, but in terms of the new infections that we are seeing. But our figures, the base figures now are so large, 200,000 and more, that these obviously are quite large in terms of the global figures. So this is where we are. And if we look at the doubling rate at the moment in India, I'll go to the figures that take us in comparison to the global figures. If you look at the India figures, then you will see India figures at the moment are roughly around 200,000. But this figure, when did it, was it half of this? That means what is the doubling rate? We'll find it double roughly in the last 14 days. That means India's doubling rate, which is the key figure we should take in the epidemic, is still at a rate which is pretty high. If we look at other countries which are having similar doubling rates, one is Brazil. And all others, apart from Mexico, Mexico is a little lower than India. All others like the United States, Italy, Iran, for instance, even UK, all of them seems to have flattened. They have a question of flattening their curves, as we talk about this. But the three countries whose curves are still rising, Brazil, clear, India, clear, and at the moment Mexico too. But Russia has more or less starting to flatten its curves. US has also started to flatten its curves. And the countries which have flattened their curves are Italy, France, Germany, Iran. Now, one may say, well, India is a relatively poor country. But if we look at Malaysia, these are the figures we have been showing from day one, is that Malaysia started a little ahead of India at higher figures for some time. But after that, you can see how well it has been able to flatten the curve. And that's something which is really striking. If we come to the states in India, then only state which has done reasonably well in this period, and even now it's facing an upsurge, is Kerala. And this recent upsurge in Kerala is, of course, because of a large number of migrants who have come from other states already infected. And Kerala is dealing with that at the moment. But even otherwise, if you look at the figures, you will see Kerala is the only state which controls numbers earlier, and is still able to provide that degree of isolation support that we need. Now, ICMR and Government of India has been talking about avoided deaths. I think that's a bogus concept, because you don't avoid deaths through a long term. You only postpone it. The real key issue where India has been paying is what is called mitigation figures. And mitigation really means the ability to cut down your infections, new infections which are taking place through contact tracing, testing on a much larger scale, and of course, isolating the people who test positive. And all this counts. India is actually in a bad position. Apart from Kerala, we have not been successful so much in contact tracing. Our numbers are rising, because our testing is still low. In some of the states, the testing figures are really low. And we therefore do not know what the infections really are. And suddenly, we get overwhelmed by new numbers. And at the moment, we still have some capacity in the hospitals to admit new patients. But if the figures double in 14 days, for example, or 15 days, 16 days, even if there's a bit of slowing down to 20 days, aren't the Indian hospitals in a position to face this influx which might take place? I think that's probably not what we've succeeded in doing. And if we look at what has happened, particularly in the last two weeks, not just because of the partial lifting of the lockdown, but because the huge number of migrants returning home and mainly because they couldn't provide support for them in the cities, I think we have ourselves created conditions of spreading this epidemic to all corners of the country. And that's not a good situation to be in. In our next story, multiple protests occurred across the occupied Palestinian territories as well as in Israel on June 2 over the killing of a disabled man, Ead Halak. 32-year-old Halak was shot over 10 times by the Israeli police on May 30 while running from a police checkpoint. Protests were reported from occupied East Jerusalem and a number of cities and towns in Palestine, as well as cities in Israel, including Tel Aviv. Protesters were seen chanting slogans such as Palestinian Lives Matter, which is inspired by the ongoing protests in the U.S. against police killings. According to the U.S. in 2019 alone, at least 132 unarmed Palestinians were killed by Israeli security forces. Around 20 Palestinians have already been killed so far in 2020. In the meanwhile, Israeli forces have conducted a massive crackdown on Palestinian territories. 23 Palestinians were arrested on a Monday from different parts of the occupied West Bank in East Jerusalem. According to the Palestinian Prisoner Society, those arrested include two former prisoners and two minors. The number of arrests by Israel has increased in the last couple of weeks. Monday was the second time in less than a month when mass arrests were conducted. It is speculated that the rise in the number of arrests has something to do with Israel's proposed annexation of the illegal settlements in the West Bank and the Jordan Valley. Moving on to Bolivia, the country's supreme electoral court of the TSC, which is under direct control of the coup-installed President Johnny Nanez, has announced a date for the next general election on Tuesday. The general election is scheduled for September 6th. The new date is way beyond the August 3rd deadline stipulated in the 2020 General Election's postponement law. Nevertheless, all political parties agreed to postpone the date due to the ongoing pandemic. On June 1st, the TSC reached a pre-agreement with various presidential candidates to ensure necessary time to guarantee safe voting conditions. Former Bolivian President Evo Morales of the Movement Towards Socialism Party, who was overthrown in the coup last year, welcomed the decision. Morales appealed to the Bolivians to vote for MAS presidential candidates and re-establish democracy in the country. MAS has nominated Luis Arce and David Chagahuanca as the party's presidential and vice presidential candidates. All the latest opinion polls on voter intention, which were carried out in the first quarter of the year, indicated that the MAS party candidates were the most preferred. And finally, the 27,000 strong Educators Union of South Africa or EUSA has sought judicial intervention against the government's decision to reopen schools. EUSA filed an urgent application with the Pretoria High Court against the decision to reopen schools from June 9th. Responding to the appeal, the Minister for Basic Education appeared for the first hearing on the matter on Tuesday. However, the presiding judge postponed the matter till June 9th, stating that the minister was not ready to proceed and needed time to familiarize herself with the matter. The original plan, as announced by the Education Minister, was to start reopening schools from June 1st. However, after opposition by most of the unions, followed by protests from parents on Monday, the Education Minister postponed the reopening to June 9th. Nevertheless, the union remains concerned that the adequate preparations to operate under the COVID-19 pandemic will not be completed by this date. The union has also complained that the minister has not given enough evidence to support the department's claim that all necessary arrangements have been made to make schooling safe. That's all we have in this episode of the International Daily Roundup. 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