Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
More than 150,000 people have died from coronavirus in the UK, according to Guardian analysis.
The latest figures revealed at least one in three recorded Covid-19 deaths have taken place in the past three months, with 54,445 fatalities officially counted on death certificates in the UK since the beginning of 2021. It means one in 445 people have died from the virus since the beginning of the pandemic.
Has a year of video calls made you self-conscious? Don’t turn your camera off: just relax and deploy a few of these beauty tips
Thought we were a nation of narcissists pre-Covid? Well, a global pandemic has taken things to a whole new level. It’s safe to say nobody planned to spend quite so much of the past year staring at their own grainy reflection, but with everything from weddings to work meetings forced online, our bid to stay connected with others has meant being constantly confronted with our own faces.
And not all of us like what we see. There’s a big difference between sharing a carefully filtered selfie on Instagram, and catching yourself slumped in front of the screen during your fourth video chat of the day, the cat cleaning its paws in the background as you stare in horror at your dark circles. What with the unflattering lighting, unforgiving camera angles and the fact that none of us has been inside a salon in months, it’s no wonder we’re sick of the sight of ourselves. But what effect does it have on our self-esteem? And can we do anything to boost it?
Vaccines minister says first booster doses will go to the top four priority groups, which includes care home staff, NHS workers and clinically extremely vulnerable
Northern Ireland’s first minister, Arlene Foster, has received her first dose of Covid-19 vaccine.
The 50-year-old politician was given a shot of AstraZeneca’s vaccine by a GP at Castle Park leisure centre in Lisnaskea in her Co Fermanagh constituency on Saturday morning, according to PA.
There is a really positive community spirit here and across all of our centres in a collective effort to combat Covid-19. I am grateful to all of the wonderful team of medics and volunteers who are making this happen in GP practices and centres across Northern Ireland every day of the week.
Families in Israel are celebrating Passover following a successful vaccine rollout in the country in which more than half of its overall population have received both doses.
Giordana Grego, who immigrated to Israel from Italy, told AP:
For us in Israel, really celebrating the festivity of freedom definitely has a whole different meaning this year after what we experienced. It’s amazing that this year we’re able to celebrate together, also considering that in Italy, everybody is still under lockdown.
Technology companies rallied to apply their expertise as King county went from the US center of the pandemic to one of the country’s lowest death rates
Last year, four days after the first recorded Covid-19 death in the United States was reported in Kirkland, Washington, just east of Seattle, Microsoft leaders jumped into action – recommending that their employees in the area work from home. Two days later, Amazon made a similar declaration.
Combined, their announcements affected more than 100,000 employees in this Pacific north-west tech hub and came days before the Washington state governor’s first major Covid mandate and more than a week before the US president declared an emergency for Covid.
Queensland authorities have released a list of hotspots where Covid-positive people have visited while infectious.
Any individuals who have been in the below locations during the relevant times are considered close contacts and asked to immediately home quarantine (for 14 days), even if you receive a negative result, and complete the contact-tracing self-assessment or call 13HEALTH (13 43 25 84):
Activists in Georgia vowed on Friday to keep up an aggressive campaign to pressure Republicans over their support for the law restricting voting access, saying they were undeterred by its final passage through the legislature.
Beijing wants to silence critics of its treatment of Uighurs. But the impact will be broader
China’s response to criticisms of horrifying human rights violations in Xinjiang is clear and calculated. Its aims are threefold. First, the sanctions imposed upon individuals and institutions in the EU and UK are direct retaliation for those imposed upon China over its treatment of Uighurs. That does not mean they are like-for-like: the EU and UK measures targeted officials responsible for human rights abuses, while these target non-state actors – elected politicians, thinktanks, lawyers and academics – simply for criticising those abuses.
Second, they seek more broadly to deter any criticism over Xinjiang, where Beijing denies any rights violations. Third, they appear to be intended to send a message to the EU, UK and others not to fall in line with the harsher US approach towards China generally. Beijing sees human rights concerns as a pretext for defending western hegemony, pointing to historic and current abuses committed by its critics. But mostly it believes it no longer needs to tolerate challenges.
Discussions are under way in Whitehall about expanding the travel “red list” of countries as ministers face mounting pressure to prevent coronavirus variants undermining the vaccine programme.
The Guardian understands that officials met on Friday to consider the case for taking a tougher approach. British residents and nationals returning from countries on the red list must quarantine in an airport hotel for 10 days at a cost of £1,750, while other arrivals are banned. It remains illegal to go on holiday.
The war of words with the EU over vaccines has escalated as France’s foreign minister claimed Britain will struggle to source second Covid jabs but that Brussels would not be “blackmailed” into exporting doses to solve the problem.
Jean-Yves Le Drian, a close political ally of the French president, Emmanuel Macron, claimed that the UK’s success had been built on driving forward with first jabs without having secured the second doses necessary for full vaccination.
It was billed as the vaccine to deliver the world from Covid. But over the last six months, AstraZeneca – whose jab was designed to save thousands of lives for no profit – has found itself stumbling along an extraordinarily rocky road, facing accusations over the efficacy, supply and side-effects of its vaccine from all quarters, and being kicked about like a political football.
This week, AstraZeneca faced unprecedented public criticism in the US from a high-level scientific body claiming the British-Swedish company massaged the data from its long-awaited trial there. And in Italy, military police entered a factory on behalf of the European commission investigating allegations of 29m hidden doses, said to be intended for shipment to the UK. The commission, which is demanding AstraZeneca supplies more jabs to Europe, meanwhile drew up regulations which could block vaccine exports to the UK.
A French monastery in the heart of Burgundy has launched an emergency online sale to get rid of thousands of its artisanal cheeses, which are languishing in its cellars as Covid-19 keeps buyers away.
The Cîteaux Abbey, just south of Dijon, birthplace of the Cistercian Catholic order, usually sells its raw-milk, semi-soft discs only to restaurants or visitors to its on-site shop. But a drop in demand since the coronavirus crisis erupted last year has left the abbey’s 19 Trappist monks with 4,000 cheeses too many, a 2.8-tonne problem.
Rising cases of coronavirus in Africa threaten to overrun fragile healthcare systems and test the continent’s much-touted resilience to the disease, according to the World Health Organization’s regional office for the continent.
The global health body stated that infections were on the rise in at least 12 countries in Africa including Cameroon, Ethiopia, Kenya and Guinea.
UK prime minister Boris Johnson and US president Joe Biden have discussed the rollout of the Covid-19 vaccine in a call on Friday, PA reports.
A Downing Street spokesman said: “The leaders discussed the fight against coronavirus and updated each other on their countries’ vaccine rollouts. The Prime Minister stressed that global access to vaccines will be key to defeating the pandemic.
“The Prime Minister and president agreed that combatting climate change will be a crucial component of building back better from the pandemic.”
Lebanon’s private sector helps speed up the country’s vaccination program by importing at least 1m doses of the Russian-made Sputnik V vaccines to aid the reopening of businesses.
The first shipment of 50,000 doses of Sputnik V arrived on Friday, making the country one of the few nations whose private sector is boosting its Covid-19 rollout.
Jacques Sarraf, a Lebanese businessman and head of the Lebanese Russian Business Council, said he hopes the Russian vaccines help safely reopen businesses around the country.
“Our first target will be private companies, factories, banks, and this is important to reactivate institutions,” he told The Associated Press in an interview.
This month Gibraltar’s health minister snapped a photo from her first dinner out in months, showing two glasses of red wine sitting prominently on the table and a face mask cast off in the background. “Operation freedom begins,” tweeted Samantha Sacramento alongside the photo.
Operation Freedom, the name given to Gibraltar’s vaccination programme, is now closing in on its target: in the coming days the British overseas territory will become one of the first places in the world where every willing resident over the age of 16 has been fully vaccinated.
The tourism sector in Wales can begin to reopen from Saturday as the country’s stay-local rule is lifted, but only for Welsh residents.
Organised outdoor activities and sports for children and under-18s will also be able to take place and up to six people from two different households can meet and exercise outdoors and in private gardens.
Ursula von der Leyen has said the EU is transparent and open, and welcomes other countries to be transparent with their exports.
Speaking at a virtual summit, she said contracts should be fulfilled before exporting vaccines and should keep reciprocity, which needs to be transparent so supply chains stay intact.
The president of the European commission said companies that honour their contracts are important to the vaccine programme, both in Europe and worldwide.
EU leaders backed “global value chains” rather than support Brussels in using new powers to block Covid jab exports to highly vaccinated countries, despite being told that 21m doses had been sent to the UK.
At a virtual summit, attended briefly by Joe Biden, the European commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, highlighted the large shipments sent over the Channel, amounting to two-thirds of the jabs given in the UK.
‘I want to talk about milk,’ begins Charles Walker. ‘I am going to walk around London with a pint of milk on my person, because that pint will represent my protest.’ In a convoluted speech, he concludes that unless you cherish freedoms, you will lose them. ‘Unless you fight for freedoms, every day they end up being taken away from you’
Concern is mounting among health experts that France is not doing enough to curb a rise in coronavirus infections, particularly among younger people, as a third wave fuelled by the B117 variant first detected in the UK accelerates across Europe.
Announcing 45,000 new Covid-19 cases in the past 24 hours, the French health minister, Olivier Véran, on Thursday banned outdoor gatherings of more than six people and added three more départements, including the area around Lyon, to 16 already placed under tougher mobility restrictions.