Your Monday Briefing – The New York Occasions

A contemporary blow to Europe’s open borders

As new variants of the coronavirus are spreading quickly, European international locations equivalent to Germany and Belgium have launched new border restrictions, flying within the face of the free motion that has lengthy been seen as a basic pillar of the European Union.

The European Fee, the E.U. government, has tried to drag international locations again from limiting free motion since March, on the grounds that it had disrupted the bloc’s single market. The consequence has been an ever-shifting patchwork of border guidelines that has sown chaos and never at all times efficiently restricted the virus’s unfold.

However many international locations can not appear to withstand taking again management of their borders. A suggestion by the fee that new restrictions be reversed induced a swift pushback from Germany, at the same time as the brand new guidelines triggered provide chain disruptions and lengthy strains of commuters from Austria and the Czech Republic.

Background: Nations inside the Schengen Space have the specific proper to reintroduce checks at their borders, however they should clear a number of authorized hurdles to take action, and they aren’t meant to retain them over the long run.

Listed here are the newest updates and maps of the pandemic.

In different developments:

• Because the American loss of life toll nears 500,000, extra Individuals have now died of Covid-19 than on the battlefields of World Battle I, World Battle II and the Vietnam Battle mixed. No different nation has counted as many deaths within the pandemic.

• To safe the discharge of an Israeli civilian held in Syria, Israel secretly — and contentiously — agreed to finance a provide of Russian-made Covid-19 vaccines for Damascus.

• Australia started vaccinating its inhabitants in opposition to the coronavirus on Sunday, with Prime Minister Scott Morrison and 19 others getting their pictures. The primary to be vaccinated was an 84-year-old lady who lives in a nursing dwelling.

Myanmar safety forces open fireplace on protesters

Witnesses stated two individuals had been killed and dozens wounded when safety forces on Saturday opened fireplace on protesters within the metropolis of Mandalay, Myanmar. It was the bloodiest day of protests to this point in opposition to the army’s Feb. 1 coup.

The shootings occurred because the authorities had been making an attempt to drive staff again to their jobs at an area shipyard. The work stoppage there in protest of the ouster of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s civilian chief, has paralyzed river transport on the Irrawaddy, the nation’s most essential industrial waterway, in keeping with Radio Free Asia.

Particulars: The authorities used water cannons, rubber bullets, tear fuel, slingshots and dwell ammunition to interrupt up the gang. Not less than 40 individuals had been wounded, in keeping with medics.

Within the Israeli election, a possibility for Arabs

Accelerated by Israel’s election marketing campaign, two developments are converging: On the one hand, Arab politicians and voters more and more imagine that to enhance the lives of Arabs in Israel, they should search energy inside the system as a substitute of exerting stress from the surface.

Individually, mainstream Israeli events are realizing they should entice Arab voters to win a really shut election — and a few are prepared to work with Arab events as potential coalition companions.

Each developments are born extra of political pragmatism than dogma. However whereas the second has the potential to present Arab voters actual energy, it may backfire and cut up the Arab vote, in the end decreasing the numbers of Arab lawmakers within the subsequent Parliament.

Context: Arab politicians and voters haven’t shed all their discomfort with Zionism and Israeli insurance policies within the occupied territories. However there’s a rising realization that issues the Arab group in Israel faces — gang violence, poverty and discrimination in entry to housing and land — is not going to be solved with out Arab politicians shaping coverage on the highest degree.

Najiba Hussaini, who died in a Taliban suicide bombing in Kabul in 2017, was a decided, extremely achieved scholar, who landed a prestigious job in Afghanistan’s Ministry of Mines and Petroleum.

Right now, her reminiscence lives on on the Najiba Hussaini Memorial Library, within the Afghan metropolis of Nili, as a logo of the progress made towards gender equality and entry to training in Afghanistan. As of 2018, as many as 3.5 million women had been enrolled at school within the nation and one-third of its academics had been girls.

However amid negotiations between the Afghan authorities and the Taliban, many fear {that a} peace deal may imply that the progress Afghan girls have remodeled the previous twenty years will probably be misplaced.

Right here’s what else is occurring

Aleksei Navalny: A Russian court docket has cleared the way in which for the potential switch of the opposition chief to a penal colony, the newest step by the authorities to silence the nation’s most vocal critic of President Vladimir Putin.

Libya weapons: Erik Prince, the previous head of the safety agency Blackwater Worldwide and a supporter of former President Donald Trump, violated a United Nations arms embargo on Libya by sending weapons to a militia commander who was making an attempt to overthrow the federal government in Tripoli, in keeping with U.N. investigators. He has denied any wrongdoing.

Venezuela: Thousands and thousands of ladies within the troubled South American nation are now not capable of finding or afford contraception. The state of affairs has pushed many into unplanned pregnancies or unlawful abortions at a time after they can barely feed the kids they’ve.

ISIS: Frenchwomen who joined the Islamic State and are actually held in squalid detention camps in Syria have gone on a starvation strike to protest France’s refusal to deliver them again.

Snapshot: Above, Novak Djokovic received his third straight Australian Open title. His victory over the fourth-ranked Daniil Medvedev gave him his 18th profession Grand Slam title. Naomi Osaka beat Jennifer Brady for her fourth Grand Slam title.

Cephalopod sensing: An octopus’s arms can sense and reply to mild — even when the octopus can not see it with the eyes on its head, in keeping with a research printed this month in The Journal of Experimental Biology.

Bollywood: More and more, new Hindi productions are exhibiting moms, and ladies over all, as full and complicated human beings — not melodramatic aspect characters, however outspoken, impartial leads who’re in command of their very own fates.

What we’re studying: The U.S. might expertise a beautiful summer season this yr — even when the pandemic is just not but behind us, writes the well being journalist James Hamblin on this lengthy learn from The Atlantic.

Now, a break from the information

Prepare dinner: This shrimp étouffée attracts inspiration from Cajun and Creole cuisines.

Pay attention: Radio drama, particularly from its golden age within the Nineteen Thirties by means of the ’50s, is now freely obtainable, due to the web. Listed here are six reveals to take pleasure in.

Do: Many moms have felt obliged to place themselves final throughout the pandemic. However making time for self-care might offer you what it is advisable to carry on going.

Restore your sense of self. At Dwelling has our full assortment of concepts on what to learn, prepare dinner, watch, and do whereas staying protected at dwelling.

And now for the Again Story on …

Taking inventory of 500,000 deaths

A graphic on Sunday’s entrance web page of The New York Occasions depicts the totality of Covid’s devastation in the USA. From afar, the graphic seems to be like a blur of grey, however up shut it reveals one thing a lot darker: near 500,000 particular person dots, every representing a single life misplaced to the coronavirus.

This isn’t the primary time The Occasions’s designers have used the entrance web page to symbolize the dimensions of the pandemic’s toll. When Covid-19 deaths in the USA reached 100,000 final Might, the web page was full of names of these misplaced — almost a thousand of them, simply 1 % of the nation’s deaths then.

And as that quantity approached 200,000, the lead {photograph} on the web page confirmed the yard of an artist in Texas who had crammed his garden with a small flag for each life misplaced to the virus in his state.

However that is the primary time the entrance web page has depicted all of the U.S. fatalities. “I feel a part of this system, which is sweet, is that it overwhelms you — as a result of it ought to,” stated Lazaro Gamio, a graphics editor at The Occasions.

That’s it for this briefing. See you on Tuesday.

— Natasha

Thanks
To Theodore Kim and Jahaan Singh for the break from the information. You possibly can attain the crew at briefing@nytimes.com.

P.S.
• We’re listening to “The Day by day.” Our newest episode is on youngsters and Covid.
• Right here’s our Mini Crossword, and a clue: What mild travels in (5 letters). Yow will discover all our puzzles right here.
• Claire Cain Miller, a reporter who labored on our sequence on working moms, “The Primal Scream,” spoke to NPR concerning the toll of the pandemic on girls.