Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
The UK has announced no deaths from Covid-19 for the first time since July last year.
Official figures showed all four nations of the country recorded no new deaths on Tuesday within 28 days of a positive Covid-19 test and 3,165 new cases of the virus. It means the official UK total number of deaths remains at 127,782, the first time the daily total has not risen since 30 July 2020.
If Dominic Cummings is to be believed, Boris Johnson was so sceptical that Covid-19 was a threat early last year that he was willing to inject himself with the virus that causes the disease on television. But there are actual volunteers – young and healthy people – who elected to be infected with the virus, all in the name of science.
These volunteers lined up to participate in “human challenge trials”, which have long been successfully employed to develop vaccines for diseases from typhoid to cholera.
Most of the UK’s bathing sites were not classified in 2020, however, because Covid-19 restrictions prevented sampling. This meant that out of 640 sites, 457 received no verdict in the rankings, compiled annually by the European Environment Agency and published on Tuesday.
EU forecast to reap extra €50bn per year with UK expected to gain €200m from BP alone
A proposal to be tabled by the US president, Joe Biden, at the upcoming G7 meeting for a 15% global corporate tax rate could reap the EU €50bn (£43bn) a year, and earn the UK nearly €200m extra alone from the British multinational BP, according to research.
Should the tax rate be set higher at 25%, the lowest current rate within the seven largest world economies, the EU would earn nearly €170bn extra a year – more than 50% of current corporate tax revenue and 12% of total health spending in the bloc.
Coronavirus variants are to be named after letters of the Greek alphabet instead of their place of first discovery, the World Health Organization has announced, in a move to avoid stigma.
The WHO has named four variants of concern, known to the public as the UK/Kent (B.1.1.7), South Africa (B.1.351), Brazil (P.1) and India (B.1.617.2) variants. They will now be given the letters Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Delta respectively, to reflect their order of detection, with any new variants following the pattern down the Greek alphabet.
The actor’s turn as a complex, fallible detective has been a privilege to witness, in a murder mystery that kept us guessing right to the profoundly moving end
In interviews, Kate Winslet always said it wasn’t a thriller. And she was right. Yes, Mare of Easttown (Sky Atlantic) began with a murder in a small, bleak Pennsylvania town and Winslet’s police detective Mare Sheehan being called upon to investigate. But it was almost immediately clear that the seven-part drama was setting up to be so much more – and even clearer soon after that it was likely to succeed in all its endeavours.
It was a character study, of how a woman ground down by life after the loss of a son to drugs and suicide, the consequent divorce from her husband and raising of her grandson in the face of a custody battle with his mother (her son’s former girlfriend, rehabbed but fragile) endures.
Boris Johnson has a “moral duty” to immediately start matching each vaccine administered at home with a donated dose to poorer countries across the world, a cross-party group of MPs and peers has said.
Several Tory backbenchers joined the call, which puts further pressure on the prime minister to boost supplies given to developing nations facing a “desperate shortage” of jabs.
Emergency services are seeking a teenager who was seen getting into difficulty in the water
Emergency services were searching the Thames on Monday for a teenage boy who was seen getting into difficulty in the water, hours after the body of a woman was recovered from the river two miles away.
Thames Valley police said on Twitter that officers were at the river between Bourne End, Buckinghamshire, and Cookham, Berkshire on Monday, following a report of a fear-for-welfare incident.
Tens of thousands have yet to apply for post-Brexit residence in countries with 30 June cut-off date
Tens of thousands of British nationals in four EU member states have yet to apply for post-Brexit residence, meaning they risk losing the right to live and work there unless they file their demands within 30 days.
UK citizens living in France, Malta, Luxembourg and Latvia have until 30 June to apply to secure their post-Brexit rights. The Netherlands did have the same deadline, but on Monday extended it to 1 October.
The attractiveness of the armed forces for the far right is as old as British fascism’s earliest incarnations.
During the extreme right’s periodic postwar resurgences, groups such as Oswald Mosley’s Union Movement and later the National Front also coveted recruits from the military’s ranks.
Heralded as “freedom day”, 21 June has been a date circled in the diary by businesses, families and communities alike – a moment when coronavirus restrictions in England are expected to finally end, hopefully in a blaze of summer sunshine.
But new data has revealed that the variant of concern first detected in India, known as B.1.617.2, has continued to spread across England, with samples containing the variant now found from Cornwall to Canterbury, Bury to Bromley.
France has begun restricting non-essential travel from the UK due to concerns over the spread of the coronavirus variant first identified in India.
The regulations were announced last week but came into force from Monday when entry to France from Britain is permitted only for EU nationals, French residents or people travelling for “compelling reasons”. The rules apply to all air, car, ferry and train passengers, and to people who have been vaccinated.
For the UK and elsewhere the pandemic’s end is in sight, but less fortunate parts of the world urgently need help
When Covid-19 began to spread rapidly in January 2020, governments across the world had limited strategies to deal with it. Without a vaccine or proven treatments for the disease, or even access to mass testing, the only choice political leaders faced was taking the least bad option available.
There were four approaches that different governments took during the beginning of the pandemic. China, New Zealand, Vietnam and Thailand chose to eliminate the virusat the cost of stopping international travel. Singapore, Hong Kong and South Korea suppressed the virus through rigorous testing, tracing and isolating while avoiding harsh lockdowns. Sweden allowed the virus to spread through the population before realising health systems could not cope with an influx of Covid-19 patients. Meanwhile, European countries includingEngland and Francecontrolled the virus through a cycle of lockdown measures while keeping borders largely open. This resembled a holding pattern for a plane running out of fuel: people grew tired of continual restrictions, the economy suffered and Covid-19 was never fully suppressed.
Moves to relocate hundreds of Afghans who worked for the British military and government will be accelerated owing to fears for their safety as foreign forces prepare to leave the country. More than 3,000 Afghans, including their relatives, are expected to settle in the UK. The defence secretary, Ben Wallace, said it was ‘the right thing to do’, adding that ‘they sacrificed a lot to look after us and now we’re going to do the same’
China today re-imposed anti-coronavirus travel controls on its southern province of Guangdong, announcing anyone leaving the populous region must be tested for the virus following a spike in infections that has alarmed authorities, the Associated Press reports. .
Guangdong, which borders Hong Kong, recorded 20 new confirmed cases, all contracted locally, in the 24 hours through to midnight yesterday.
Guangdong’s numbers are low compared with many places in the world, but the rise has rattled Chinese leaders who thought they had the disease under control.
Hello, this is Haroon Siddique. I’ll be updating the blog for the next few hours.
Burkina Faso, one of several countries in Africa that has yet to launch a Covid-19 vaccination campaign, received its first shipment under the global vaccine-sharing scheme Covax yesterday, Reuters reports, citing the country’s health ministry.
The 115,200 AstraZeneca doses were flown into the airport of the capital Ouagadougou and were welcomed by a local delegation led by health minister Charlemagne Ouedraogo.
“In a few weeks other vaccines will probably arrive to supplement what we have,” Ouedraogo said.
Government will step up scheme saving interpreters and others from reprisals as international troops leave
Moves to relocate to the UK hundreds of Afghans who worked for the British military and government will reportedly be accelerated as foreign forces leave the country.
The Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy was launched this year, allowing the Afghans, who mostly worked as interpreters, to settle in Britain. More than 1,400 Afghans and their families have already relocated to the UK, and hundreds more received funding for education and training.
Campaigners want urgent action to save neglected and vandalised graves in West Norwood Cemetery
Its beautiful Grade II* listed monuments were erected in memory of leading members of the Greek community in 19th-century London, but the graves in West Norwood cemetery are now in a dire state of neglect – with one decaying casket recently photographed covered in a thick layer of pigeon droppings, with a limb protruding.
Lambeth council, which compulsorily purchased the cemetery more than 50 years ago, recently withdrew security to save money and campaigners are calling for urgent action to protect listed monuments from ruin.
Scientists have warned ministers that a third wave of coronavirus may have already begun in Britain, casting doubt on plans in England to lift all lockdown restrictions in three weeks’ time.
Experts cautioned that any rise in coronavirus hospital admissions could leave the NHS struggling to cope as it battles to clear the huge backlog in non-Covid cases.
Jasmin Hartin was arrested near to location of body with ‘what appeared to be blood on her arms’
The partner of the son of Lord Ashcroft, a Conservative party donor and former treasurer, is being questioned in Belize over the killing of a police officer.
Jasmine Hartin was arrested on Friday following the discovery of the body of Supt Henry Jemmott on a pier in the resort town of San Pedro.
South Korea will get 1m doses of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine this week mainly to inoculate military personnel, after the United States almost doubled a pledge made earlier this month, prime minister Kim Boo-kyum said on Sunday.
South Korea has reported a lower death toll than many comparable developed countries from Covid-19, but the government has come under criticism for a comparatively slow rollout of vaccines, Reuters reports. Less than 11% of its 52 million people have so far received a first dose.
On care homes, UK vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi today defended the government approach.
Boris Johnson’s former aide Dominic Cummings claimed the health secretary, Matt Hancock, had lied to the prime minister over tests being carried out on those discharged into care homes – a charge denied by Hancock.
Matt Hancock was very much focused on delivery, I think it’s worth putting this in context … in the sense that in the eye of the storm, we were only able to do 2,000 tests a day. The diagnostics industry was almost non-existent in the UK.
We can sit here and sort of argue the toss about asymptomatic transmission … and when we really knew about that.
The whole point is you use every resource available to you, to the best of your ability, to save and to protect as many people as possible.
When the inquiry is held, and we will look at all these things in detail, we will of course examine where we could do better.
But to say that we didn’t deal with them to the best of our capability, with the resources that were available to us, is a mistake, is wrong.