CHINA: Beijing’s National People’s Congress, delayed since March, opens on Friday as the government of President Xi Jinping lashes out at those who blame China for aiding the spread of the coronavirus pandemic.

On Monday, President Donald Trump announced he may permanently freeze U.S. funding to the World Health Organization and reconsider its membership unless the WHO enacts reforms.

With record gusts from Cyclone Amphan bearing down on India and Bangladesh, humanitarian aid workers saw a triple threat coming to life before their eyes: The strongest cyclone ever recorded in the Bay of Bengal was about to overwhelm years of a chronic refugee crisis—that weeks of coronavirus spread had already compounded.

“Our worst fears have been confirmed,” said Dipankar Datta, Oxfam’s country director in Bangladesh.

The super cyclone that hit the coastal regions of India and Bangladesh on Wednesday flooded farmlands, tore down homes, and cut electricity and communication access. Officials confirmed 10 deaths in Bangladesh, 12 in India’s West Bengal state, and two in India’s Odisha state.

Winds of up to 105 mph and heavy rainfall battered coastal regions of India and Bangladesh as Cyclone Amphan made landfall on Wednesday. More than 448,000 people in India fled their homes, while Bangladeshi authorities relocated 2.4 million people. Amphan is the first super cyclone in the region since 1999.

About a month ago, Juwon Olorunnipa, a Nigerian musician, lay on his bed in a high-rise building in east London thinking COVID-19 would kill him. In an isolation center in Lagos, the commercial capital of Nigeria, Oluwaseun Osowobi was putting together a succession plan for her nonprofit organization in case she died.

BRITAIN: In 1940, during the Blitz, 14-year-old Princess Elizabeth spoke to the nation by radio, giving a “message of sympathy” to British children evacuated from London to escape nightly bombings. On Sunday, the 93-year-old Queen Elizabeth again spoke to the nation at “an increasingly challenging time,” bolstering her subjects as the U.K. suffered its deadliest day with COVID-19.

In states across Nigeria, about 5 million Christians turned out on the streets on Feb. 2 to march, pray, sing worship songs, and hold banners saying, “All souls are precious to God” and “We demand justice for this genocide.” The participants responded to a call from the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) to stage the “prayer walk” in response to radical Islamic murders of Christians.