Escargots are traditional hors d’oeuvre at end-of-year celebrations that account for 70% of business
For France’s heliciculteurs, or snail farmers, 2020 was a desperately sluggish year.
With seasonal festivities all but cancelled, Christmas markets called off, a lack of tourists and restaurants shut down because of the coronavirus crisis, business has slowed to, well, a snail’s pace.
Continue reading...When Japanese and International Olympic Committee officials finally accepted defeat in March and postponed the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, there was general agreement that a one-year wait would give the world ample time to overcome the coronavirus pandemic.
The delayed Olympics, the then prime minister Shinzo Abe said, would be an opportunity to pay tribute to the human spirit in overcoming the world’s biggest public health crisis for a century.
Continue reading...Guardian photographer Chris Thomond lives in Manchester and spent most of the year under strict lockdown measures while travelling on assignment around the north of England’s coronavirus hotspots photographing life during the pandemic. He looks back on his year
Early on during the pandemic I’d seen a short film from the Philippines and read an extended blog from northern Italy, both featuring photographers dressed in hazmat suits, toting cameras housed beneath protective covers. Embedded with paramedics as they dealt with seriously ill patients, my fellow photojournalists sensitively showed doctors in sweltering emergency hospital pop-up units or portrayed intimate moments as spouses and other terrified family members bid farewell to their loved ones as they were stretchered from their homes, some for the last time.
Over the following weeks I was drawn to the frequent updates of the legendary photographer Peter Turnley’s remarkable black-and-white street portraits from New York (and later Paris, his adopted home). They showed exhausted medical staff outside trauma centres, lonely subway travellers, homeless wanderers and an assortment of essential workers and normal residents who were just about holding things together. The biggest city in the US rapidly became one of the centres of the outbreak and suffered a correspondingly large death toll. Turnley showed immense bravery to walk the streets each day and his empathic approach towards subjects rewarded him as he witnessed tender moments which he skilfully captured for history.
Continue reading...The new year has been welcomed in parts of the world with mostly muted celebrations as coronavirus lockdowns and curfews quashed large gatherings. Sydney's famed fireworks display played out to a largely empty harbour, while Vietnam's success tackling Covid-19 saw large crowds meet in Hanoi. In Europe, Paris's famed streets were empty as the clock struck midnight, while Berlin's ban on fireworks was ignored by some. In London, Big Ben chimed at the start of 2021, just one hour after the same bells marked the UK's exit from the EU
Boy, 13, killed in Italy and fires across Berlin as people respond to public fireworks bans by letting them off at home
Banned from setting off fireworks in much of their city, some Berliners instead tried to launch them from their homes on New Year’s Eve, leading to dozens of fires across the German capital.
By six minutes after midnight, the Berlin fire service had been called to 18 fires, with more following. No one was initially reported seriously injured.
Continue reading...Boris Johnson largely ignores Brexit in new year message to focus on toll of Covid and ‘the grimness of 2020’
Four years, 27 weeks and two days after a referendum that split the country almost down the middle, the UK left the EU’s orbit on Thursday night in a departure that was notably low key, and marked by warnings of likely disruption to come.
In a sometimes sombre new year message, Boris Johnson largely ignored Brexit, an outcome he arguably shaped more than any other politician, to focus instead on the toll of Covid-19 and what he called “the grimness of 2020”.
Continue reading...Rod Phillips steps down as finance minister of Canada’s most populous province, adding to pressure on the premier, Doug Ford
The finance minister for Canada’s most populous province has resigned after going on a Caribbean vacation during the pandemic and apparently trying to hide the fact by sending social media posts showing him in a sweater before a fireplace.
Ontario’s premier, Doug Ford, said on Thursday he had accepted Rod Phillips’s resignation as minister hours after Phillips returned home from a more than two-week stay on the island of St Barts despite government guidelines urging people to avoid non-essential travel.
Continue reading...Latest updates: only 2.8 million Americans inoculated when target was 20 million by end of 2020; UK reports nearly 1,000 further deaths
France’s health minister, Olivier Véran, has said the country will open Covid-19 vaccination centres in cities before the start of February, amid growing criticism the programme is rolling out too slowly.
Véran said on Twitter the government had decided to “speed up protection of priority public”, meaning medical workers aged over 50 would get a vaccine from Monday.
Just under half of all major hospital trusts in England have more Covid-19 patients than at the peak of the first wave of the virus, latest figures show.
Some 64 out of 140 acute NHS trusts were recording a higher number of Covid-19 patients at 8am on 30 December than at any point between mid-March and the end of May.
Continue reading...Ministers criticised after fewer than 100 people receive jab in first three days of vaccination programme
The French government has been accused of pandering to anti-vaxxers after figures showed only a few hundred people have received a jab several days after the country’s vaccine programme began.
Health officials said France is setting out for “a marathon, not a sprint” and that they are going slowly, in part, because of high levels of public scepticism about the vaccine.
Continue reading...Twenty-six residents have died and 85 more have tested positive for coronavirus since visit in Mol
At least 26 residents of a Belgian retirement home have died since a visit by a volunteer dressed as Saint Nicholas who has since tested positive for Covid-19.
The deaths at the Hemelrijck home in Mol, near Antwerp, have prompted the local municipality to criticise the “completely irresponsible” organisers of the festive visit, although the cause of the infection is not yet certain.
Continue reading...Yolanda Coar was 40 when she died of Covid-19 in August this year in Augusta, Georgia. She was also a nurse manager, and one of nearly 3,000 frontline workers who have died in the US fighting this virus, according to an exclusive investigation by the Guardian and Kaiser Health News.
The Guardian has profiled hundreds of healthcare workers in a year-long project. Read their stories here
Continue reading...Wang Fan is a young craft beer brewer in Wuhan. When his city became the first in the world to enter lockdown, he volunteered to help support other residents, and documented the sudden and strict pandemic rules over that harsh winter. One year later, Wuhan is getting back to normality, and Wang Fan is even releasing a special beer to mark the recovery. He and other young people reflect on trying to get their lives back on track while much of the rest of the world struggles with the virus
People in tier 4 areas must stay at home and not meet up with other households
Millions more people in areas including Greater Manchester and the north-east have now joined nearly 24 million who were already under the strictest tier 4 restrictions in England, amid a surge in Covid-19 cases and alarm about a new strain of coronavirus spreading rapidly.
Continue reading...A photographer tells us what she learned from her two young sons while photographing them during the pandemic
December marks the 10th month of the Covid-19 pandemic. For a child this can feel like their entire life with no end in sight. For my two sons, nine-year-old Joey and eight-year-old Jackson, the initial transformation from normal to “new normal” did not exactly start out smoothly but turned out to be an unexpected gift.
Continue reading...Coronavirus, conflict and cuts to UN funding are increasing the risks of food insecurity and acute malnutrition in 2021
The government has promised £47m in extra emergency aid for 2021 as it becomes clear that the coming year will see a dramatic rise in people struggling for food.
The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office said on Wednesday it will provide more aid for food, water, hygiene and shelter in 11 countries, including £8m to Africa’s Sahel region, where the UN has warned of catastrophic hunger.
Continue reading...People urged to stay home as investigation continues into source of Croydon cluster in Sydney and cases in Melbourne. Follow all the latest news and updates, live
Let’s return to those comments from NSW police regarding Tony Abbott’s exercise in the northern zone of the northern beaches.
Abbott’s most recent declaration to parliament (before his defeat in 2019) showed he lived in Forestville, which is classed as being in the southern zone of the northern beaches.
The New South Wales Labor leader, Jodi McKay, has called on Gladys Berejiklian to stop crowds from attending the cricket Test at the SCG, and urged her to make masks mandatory in certain settings:
Why are we now progressing with a crowd at the cricket? ... It just doesn’t make sense to me.
I’m urging the premier to make sure the cricket goes ahead ... but there is a general feeling there should not be people at the cricket.
I think it’s important that if masks can reduce the risk of transmission, that we’re doing everything we can.
Continue reading...Lockdowns and curfews curtail celebrations, with limited exceptions, after year most would prefer to forget
In Sydney the fireworks soared into the sky above the Opera House, but the harbour below was empty. In New York, Times Square will be mostly deserted. No light show illuminated Beijing from the top of the TV tower.
With revelry around the world curtailed by lockdowns and curfews imposed to stem the spread of Covid-19, the lions of London’s Trafalgar Square will be barricaded off, and there will be no crowds in St Peter’s Square and no one diving into the Tiber in Rome.
Continue reading...As China’s leadership celebrates national triumph over virus, some residents want an investigation into the start of the pandemic
Jianghan Road in Wuhan throngs with shoppers and strollers bundled up against the late December freeze. Bells ring out on the hour from the landmark Hankou Customs House where the road terminates near the wide banks of the Yangtze River.
Restaurants along the city’s main pedestrian thoroughfare are packed, even on an icy weekday night, and resound with loud conversation.
Continue reading...In this remarkable year, our stories are at risk of being locked away on phones and floating, forgotten, in the digital ether
In the process of removing the final vestiges of my things from my parents’ house this year I find a letter from my nana – Big Nana (because she was tall), not Little Nana (who wasn’t) – written in her familiar curly script.
“Last Sunday I went to D’s 80th birthday luncheon – an exciting collection of old has-beens! One old lady said how dreadful she looked these days standing in front of the bathroom mirror (naked). Nearly all of us joined in with tales of horror – including some of the men! Surprising what a few sherrys [sic] can do.”
Continue reading...Ontario premier Doug Ford under pressure after he admits knowing about Rod Phillips’s trip for weeks
Ontario premier Doug Ford is under pressure after admitting that he has known for weeks that his finance minister – who faked social media posts to conceal his location – had ignored a coronavirus lockdown to go on holiday in the Caribbean.
Posts on Rod Phillips’s social media accounts suggested that he remained home over Christmas, but it emerged on Tuesday that the minister flew to the island of St Barts in mid-December – despite his own government’s advice to avoid non-essential travel.
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