Covid-19: Trump's bizarre briefing was 'propaganda-laden and off the rails'

Pretty much all the major French dailies are focusing on President Emmanuel Macron’s address to the nation on Monday. The main takeaway is of course that confinement will continue until May 11, after which the country will gradually reopen. "Objective: May", that’s what Libération, the left leaning paper, says. Its editor approves of Macron’s speech as humble and precise, but warns against austerity measures to combat future debt. The right-wing paper Le Figaro welcomes Macron’s speech as "full of empathy and hope", as though the president was looking to rid himself of the image of war general that he presented in earlier speeches.

In the US, there are lots of reactions to Donald Trump’s latest coronavirus briefing, a bizarre briefing in which the president played a White House video showing clips of how proactive he’s been in combating the virus. The Washington Post calls it "propaganda-laden and off the rails". The paper’s cartoonist Tom Toles wonders who is making the decisions right now: President Trump or Candidate Trump, as we see him eager to reopen the US economy, despite the staggering number of Covid-19 cases in the country.

Finally, let’s end with some creative punishment for a group of tourists in India who broke confinement rules. Police made the tourists write out "I did not follow the rules of lockdown, I’m very sorry" 500 times. It’s not the first time police have resorted to unusual punishment. They have also worn coronavirus-shaped helmets to scare rule breakers, made others do squats and threatened to lock some in a room and play Bollywood songs on a loop!