 Hello and welcome to the International Daily Roundup by People's Dispatch, where we bring you some of the major news developments from across the world, our headlines. UN body proposes global debt relief mechanism for developing economies, where WHO wants a possible doubling of malaria deaths in Africa, the US Congress passes fourth stimulus package worth half a trillion dollars, and Israel continues its violent raids and repressions in the West Bank. We begin with our COVID-19 update, as of today afternoon the total number of reported infections stands at 2.74 million, and close to 1.8 million of these cases are still active. The number of deaths due to COVID-19 is over 191,000, while the number of those critically ill stands at 58,700. The UN Permanent Body on Trade has proposed a global debt relief plan to help developing countries cope with the economic crisis caused by the pandemic. In a report, released by the UN Conference on Trade and Development, or UNECTAD, it was suggested that developing countries require substantial debt relief to avoid a disaster. The report pointed out that close to two-thirds of 3.4 trillion US dollars in global external debt is held by high-income economies. On the other hand, external debt in middle and low-income economies constitutes a minority of the global figure. At the same time, most developing countries have to dedicate a large share of their resources in servicing this debt, and will be crisis-stricken for the fiscal year of 2020. The UN body suggested a major restructuring of these loans and even standstills on debt repayments. It also suggested the formation of a global debt authority to restructure loans for developing countries. Debt restructuring in pardons have been a long-standing demand from developing countries. The economic fallout to the pandemic that has caused capital flight and a sudden rise in unemployment has reignited these demands. Recently, a debt-freeze proposal was discussed in a G20 meeting which was strongly opposed by finance firms. On the eve of World Malaria Day on April 25, the World Health Organization's Africa Region head warned governments to not ignore other diseases at the time of the COVID-19 pandemic. Quoting a study, she warned that malaria deaths in the continent could double to 76,900 this year if governments fail to implement the preventive measures in their respective countries. According to the previous World Malaria Report in 2018, the world recorded a total of 213 million cases of malaria with more than 400,000 deaths. Sub-Saharan Africa alone accounted for 93% of total cases and 94% of all deaths. The public health infrastructure in most of these countries is already weak and beyond the reach of the masses due to poverty and widespread privatization of existing facilities. Most of these countries have shifted their focus to combating the COVID-19 pandemic. It is already speculated that in case a large-scale COVID-19 outbreak takes place in these countries, they will not be able to prevent a disaster unless massive external help is provided. The United States Congress has passed a new coronavirus stimulus package worth close to half a trillion US dollars. The package, estimated to cost around $484 billion, is the fourth such aid package to have been approved by the Congress. It was passed with near-unanimous support in the Senate on Tuesday and in the House of Representatives yesterday. The stimulus package is aimed at offering support to small businesses with 310 billion to be distributed under the Paycheck Protection Program as loans for small businesses so that they can pay their employees. The rest of the package will go as funds for hospitals and for expanding testing capabilities for COVID-19. The new relief package was necessitated after the earlier package of $394 billion ran out in less than two weeks. The US, which is the worst affected country with the pandemic, has nearly 887,000 cases and 50,000 deaths. The economic fallout to the pandemic has hit the country hard after over 26 million people have filed for unemployment support in over a month. In simultaneous raids in the early hours of Thursday, Israeli forces kidnapped and arrested as many as 14 Palestinians including a former prisoner. The Israeli soldiers also clashed with Palestinian youths at some places as they were trying to resist the violent raids. The soldiers responded by attacking these people with stun grenades, tear gas and rubber coated bullets. According to reports, the Israelis raided the northern district of Jenin in the northern area of the West Bank, abducting two Palestinians from the Arab town, a similar rate to place in Tulkarem where a former Palestinian prisoner was apprehended. On a more hopeful note, Chelsea Manning has released her first message to her supporters since her release from prison. In a tweet, she is posing with a friend in New York, the epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak in the US. In the post, she thanked her followers for all the love and support and stated that she is volunteering to collect protective gear for healthcare workers on the front lines of the fight against COVID-19. This is the first update her supporters have received after her reported suicide attempt while in prison in March. Shortly after the suicide attempt, she was released from prison on judicial orders. Manning has served nearly a year in prison for refusing to testify in the federal investigation against WikiLeaks. She was also charged a hefty fine of up to $1,000 a day as part of the sanctions imposed by a federal judge. By the end of her term, she had accumulated up to $265,000 in fines. A fundraising campaign immediately after her release to help her pay the fine met the full amount at less than a day. On April 25th, I'm going to be joining up with the party for Socialism and Liberation and many others to protest, to have a car protest demanding that the United States government cancel the rents and mortgage payments for millions of working people all over this country. The United States has 22 million people who just applied for unemployment in just one month. We had 570,000 people who applied for unemployment in just this month in Massachusetts. The government continues to bail out Wall Street, continues to bail out these large, multi-million and multi-billion dollar financial institutions while the people continue to suffer and plunge deeper into poverty. All of the rental payments during the duration of this pandemic must be canceled, must be waived. And not just for renters, but also for homeowners, their mortgage payments should just be canceled during the duration of this pandemic and also for small businesses and small landlords. Because small landlords, even though they're landlords, many of them can't go 3 or 4 months without any income and if they don't pay their mortgage, that means their tenants are also going to be evicted when that home is foreclosed. So we're focusing on the issue of housing because this is the urgent issue among many other urgent issues with the rent and the mortgages being due in just another week. In order to beat this pandemic, we need to physically distance, but we can't physically distance if we don't have a home. Organizers across Boston have successfully secured an eviction moratorium, which is a huge success for the people of Massachusetts. But under this current legislation, people will still be expected to pay rent. For those who have lost their source of income because of the pandemic, this simply means an accumulation of debt. Those who can't pay now will be forced to pay later. But we don't need an accumulation of debt or simply a deferment of evictions. We need an entire cancellation of rents. We know that for workers, the money lost during this pandemic will not simply reappear after all of this is over. And that's why it's important to cancel the rents to ensure that during a global crisis, our homes are protected over the right to profit from them. We believe that the United States of America is entering a new era of class struggle, a new era of class struggle that will last far beyond when this pandemic ends. Of course, the class war is always ongoing. It's the differences that it's usually just the working class that's taking all the licks while the capitalist class is doing all the beating. We believe a new period of class struggle is on the verge of opening up, and you can already see it with the heroic struggles of Amazon workers, of grocery workers, the wildcat strikes that are taking place. And in fact, this is just the tip of the iceberg for what is to come. And so people, of course, are thinking first and foremost about their health. But the public health crisis is in and of itself a reflection of a class war. I'm here in Elmhurst, where the hospitals and the clinics have long been under service. They've always been in capacity, where the community here is largely immigrant workers who had no access to preventive care, no access to insurance. And so for a long time, Elmhurst Hospital has been a very difficult place to go, and now it's completely stretched past capacity. There's a huge housing crisis in this neighborhood, which you don't see when you walk outside. You don't see it because immigrant communities are largely living five, six, seven to an apartment that's supposed to have two or three people. Living rooms are being rented out for whole families to stay in. So how in a community like that? In these kinds of social conditions, is it possible to practice social distance? It's not possible. So the housing crisis and the public health crisis are going together, and if people end up evicted or foreclosed during this crisis, that means they're going to be outside, and that means they're going to be at risk. In the food pantries, the food lines, the people waiting four to six hours from their cars in long lines stretching many blocks in San Antonio and Detroit and Minneapolis, all over the place waiting for one box of food or one bag of food. And to think that when those workers, and whether they have a job right now or not, they're workers, when those workers go home, they have to essentially be rationing every single meal, and they're not working, and it's not because they've chosen to not work. They're not working because the government has told them for public health reasons, they have to stay home. So just wrap your head around the absurdity of this, that the government is telling people they cannot work, they should not work, telling businesses to close down, and yet all of your bills are still going to be due? Doesn't the government have an obligation if it's going to shut down basically the whole economy to make sure that people are not going hungry, are not going to be evicted at the end of this? This is a very elementary and simple program that we're putting forward here of cancelling the rents and cancelling the mortgages. That's all we have in this episode of the International Daily Roundup. To know more about these stories, visit our website peoplesispatch.org and follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Thanks for watching.