#Cafe Morrison in New Delhi

[enjoydelhilife]

Your Ultimate Delhi Travel Guide: Best Itinerary for First-Time Visitors

Planning a trip to Delhi? You might wonder why it’s so popular. This city has history, culture, and attractions for every traveler. This guide’ll show you the best way to see Delhi for the first time. Delhi is known for pollution and scams, but it’s also rich in history and culture. There are many sights to see, like the Red Fort and Jama Masjid. With the right guide, your trip will be…

[newstfionline]

Headlines

2,000 Free Meals a Night, Seasoned by Silicon Valley Chefs (NYT) Andres Pantoja, an up-and-coming Silicon Valley sous chef, spent his pre-pandemic evenings delicately preparing the $115 plate of lamb chops and deboning the $42 Psari Plaki whole fish at a fashionable restaurant here. It is frantic work serving 200 upscale meals a night. His new gig is proving way more chaotic, though—making thousands of free meals that seem priceless to those being served: the gardeners, janitors, construction workers, housekeepers and others who have seen their meager income dwindle further as the coronavirus ravages the economy. Mr. Pantoja has become part of a large-scale effort to help feed the poorest families in a region with one of the nation’s widest income gaps. Call it tech-to-table, a Silicon Valley effort to feed the hungry engineered by a local Boys and Girls Clubs chapter. Two sites serve more than 2,000 free meals a night, one in East Palo Alto, and the other in Redwood City, where Mr. Pantoja runs the show with exuberance.

Booming stock market, terrible economy (Bloomberg) In the three months since isolation measures were first imposed in a belated effort to slow the spread of Covid-19, the world’s largest economy has become a basket case. One quarter of small businesses and two-fifths of restaurants have closed. Some 1 in 4 American workers is out of a job. At least 40 million people have filed for unemployment. And while the virus has devastated almost every economy it’s touched, individual Americans entered the crisis in an especially vulnerable position. The planet’s wealthiest country is renowned for having one of the weakest social safety nets among developed nations. It is home to more than two-fifths of all millionaires but has the highest poverty rate and the widest wealth gap among its peers. Despite a booming stock market (increasingly disconnected from the reality of everyday people) and robust job growth (largely low-paying service jobs) in recent years, more than 38 million Americans scrape by. The causes of U.S. inequality are well known, but they have jumped to the fore now that the nation is transfixed by disease, recession and outrage.

Pentagon-Trump clash breaks open over military and protests (AP) President Donald Trump is not only drawing criticism from his usual political foes but also facing backtalk from his defense secretary, his former Pentagon chief and a growing number of fellow Republicans. A day after Defense Secretary Mark Esper shot down Trump’s idea of using active-duty troops to quell protests across the United States, retired four-star Gen. John Allen joined the chorus of former military leaders going after the president. And Republican Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski said Esper’s remarks were “overdue” and she didn’t know if she would support Trump in November. Both Trump and Esper also drew stinging, rare public criticism from Trump’s first defense secretary, Jim Mattis, in the most public pushback of Trump’s presidency from the men he put at the helm of the world’s most powerful military. “We must reject any thinking of our cities as a ‘battlespace’ that our uniformed military is called upon to ‘dominate,’” Mattis wrote, referencing quotes by Esper and Trump respectively. “Militarizing our response, as we witnessed in Washington, D.C., sets up a conflict—a false conflict—between the military and civilian society.”

The vulnerable border wall (Washington Post) U.S. Customs and Border Protection has asked contractors for help making President Trump’s border wall more difficult to climb over and cut through, an acknowledgment that the design currently being installed across hundreds of miles of the U.S.-Mexico boundary remains vulnerable. The president has ceased promoting the $15 billion barrier as “impenetrable” in the months since The Washington Post reported smuggling crews have been sawing through new sections of the structure using inexpensive power tools. Records obtained by The Post via the Freedom of Information Act indicate there were 18 breaches in the San Diego area during a single one-month period last fall. some border crossers have fashioned long, improvised ladders out of cheap metal rebar. More athletic border-jumpers have been seen using rope ladders to climb up the wall, sliding down the other side by gripping the bollards like a fireman’s pole.

Coronavirus Threatens Rural India (Foreign Policy) For two months, epidemiologists and journalists have wondered why countries in South Asia hadn’t recorded more coronavirus cases. But the latest data seems to suggest they haven’t flattened the curve—they’re just behind it. On Thursday, India recorded more than 9,000 new infections, placing it seventh in the list of countries with the most cases. With a growing ratio of tests returning positive, experts estimate India is weeks and maybe even months away from a peak. But predictions remain fuzzy. Perhaps the most concerning news is that migrant workers who left India’s big cities to return to their home states after the hastily announced lockdown on March 24 brought the coronavirus with them. Of the 3,872 new cases recorded after June 1 in the state of Bihar, 71 percent were linked to people who returned in May. A rural outbreak is especially worrying because India’s health care problems—chiefly low numbers of hospital beds, doctors, and nurses—are worst in its villages, which are often remote and where literacy rates tend to be lowest. A rapid spread of the virus in rural areas could be especially difficult to track, let alone contain.

Make it in India (Foreign Policy) India launched a $6.65 billion plan to boost electronics manufacturing this week. New Delhi plans to offer global smartphone makers hefty incentives to manufacture in India—a move that would allow it to compete with China for post-pandemic jobs as companies diversify their supply chains.

Sri Lankan cafe owner feeds and shelters stranded tourists (AP) The tourists came to see the magical waterfalls and mountain views of the lowland jungle and rainforest. But then the pandemic hit, and they were stranded in Sri Lanka. When flights were canceled and the airports shut down, Darshana Ratnayake came to the rescue. Ratnayake, a cafe owner in Ella, a former colonial hill station in Sri Lankan tea country, organized free food and shelter for dozens of stranded tourists. “We were totally blown away,” said Alex Degmetich, a 31-year-old American cruise line entertainment director. “It’s pretty remarkable,” he said. “Coming from Western society, where nothing is really given to us and we have to pay for everything which is fine. But here, locals providing us—tourists—free food and accommodation, is really humbling.”

HK protesters commemorate Tiananmen deaths (NYT) Tens of thousands of people, candles in hand, gathered in a park and other locations across Hong Kong on Thursday to commemorate China’s massacre of pro-democracy protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square 31 years ago, defying the city’s first ban on the vigil, ostensibly declared over the coronavirus pandemic. Shouting pro-democracy slogans, protesters drowned out announcements warning that gatherings of more than eight are illegal in the park and ignored nearby police.

Covid-19 spurs single Japanese to look for love (Economist) Since the pandemic broke out, more Japanese singles have been on the hunt for spouses. Sunmarie, a match-making agency, reported a 30% rise in inquiries in April compared with the year before. Both Sunmarie and o-net, a rival agency, have tried to adapt to the times, offering an online rendezvous service since early April, when the government began curbing gatherings in much of the country. lmo, another firm, offers drive-through meetings, in which singletons can introduce themselves from their cars, in the empty car parks of wedding halls. Cooped up in their homes alone for an extended period, singles are getting lonely—hence the surge in business for match-makers, explains Amano Kanako of nli Research Institute, a think-tank. With covid-19 dominating the news, lonely hearts are also increasingly anxious about the future: they want a partner with whom to face the unknown. “Those who vaguely thought about getting married one day are realising that the time is now,” says Kobayashi Jun of Seikei University. This marks the reversal of a long trend. Marriage has been in decline for decades. More than 1m couples tied the knot each year in the early 1970s, but only 583,000 did last year.

Off the lawn! (Foreign Policy) An Australian man has made global headlines for his response to Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s media appearance outside his house at a new housing development. The homeowner, who has not been identified, came out of his house in Googong, New South Wales, as Morrison was being interviewed to firmly tell the Australian leader and the media scrum to get off his lawn. The outburst may have been due to the political nature of Morrison’s presence, but was more likely the dramatics of a protective gardener. “Hey guys, I’ve just reseeded that,” the man shouted before he closed his front door.

The Taliban’s leader has COVID-19 (Foreign Policy) The supreme leader of the Afghan Taliban, Mullah Haibatullah Akhunzada, is gravely ill with the coronavirus. But things may be more serious. While there has been no official confirmation, Taliban figures in Pakistan say they believe Akhunzada has already died. “Nearly all the Taliban leadership in Doha has the bug,” one official said.

UN says eastern Congo fighting has killed 1,300 civilians (AP) Various conflicts involving armed groups and government forces in Congo have killed more than 1,300 civilians in the past eight months and violence has surged in recent weeks in eastern provinces, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said Friday. Michelle Bachelet said some incidents may amount to crimes against humanity or war crimes, with armed groups committing massacres and security forces also responsible for grave human rights violations.