Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
A trial is likely to go ahead in January to find out whether mixing and matching Covid vaccines gives better protection than two doses of the same one, the head of the British government’s taskforce has said.
The Pfizer/BioNTech Covid jab is an mRNA vaccine. Essentially, mRNA is a molecule used by living cells to turn the gene sequences in DNA into the proteins that are the building blocks of all their fundamental structures. A segment of DNA gets copied (“transcribed”) into a piece of mRNA, which in turn gets “read” by the cell’s tools for synthesising proteins.
First lady’s announcement sparked a slew of Twitter responses including a terse ‘282,345’ from Washington DC journalist David Corn
Melania Trump drew backlash on Monday after announcing that a new tennis pavilion is set to be unveiled on the south grounds of the White House, as coronavirus cases and hospitalizations continue to surge across the country.
“It is my hope that this private space will function as both a place of leisure and gathering for future first families,” the first lady said in a written statement on Monday, which came just weeks before the Trump family turns the White House over to his Democratic rival, Joe Biden, who handily won the 2020 presidential election.
The arrival of the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid vaccine marks the ‘beginning of the end’ of the pandemic, the health secretary said, as hospitals across the country prepare to begin vaccinating the public on 8 December.
About 800,000 doses are expected to be available within the first week, with care home residents and carers, the over-80s and some health workers first to receive the shots
Latest updates: EU’s chief Brexit negotiator says gaps on level playing field, governance and fisheries are still not bridged
RTE’s Europe editor, Tony Connelly, has posted a thread on Twitter with the full comments from Simon Coveney, the Irish foreign minister, this morning.
“Having heard from Michel Barnier this morning, really the news is very downbeat. I would say he is very gloomy, and obviously very cautious about the ability to make progress today.
2/ "There was news last night on some media sources that there was a breakthrough on fishing. That is absolutely not the case from what we’re hearing this morning,” he said.
Mr Coveney said that fisheries, the level playing field and governance remain “very problematic.”
3/ “There really was no progress made yesterday, that’s our understanding and so we’ve got to try to make a breakthrough at some point today, before the two principals, the Commission president and the prime minister speak later on this evening.
4/ “Unfortunately, I’d like to be giving more positive news, but at the moment these negotiations seem stalled, and the barriers to progress are still very much in place.
5/ “We haven’t, through the negotiating teams, found a way to find compromises that can progress these negotiations towards a successful conclusion.
6/ “There is still time. Lunchtime seems a long way away now, given the intensity of these discussions, but that’s where we are, and anyone who is briefing that there are breakthroughs in either of these two big areas...I don’t think is accurate.”
Scott Morrison has written to the clerk of the lower house correcting the record and apologising to the former Labor leader
Scott Morrison has written to the clerk of the House of Representatives correcting the record and apologising to Kevin Rudd after declaring erroneously in question time that the former Labor prime minister had been allowed to leave and re-enter Australia during the pandemic.
The controversy began when Labor on Monday asked Morrison why Tony Abbott and Alexander Downer had been able to leave and re-enter the country multiple times this year “when there are thousands of vulnerable stranded Australians who haven’t been able to get home once?”
Since the Covid-19 outbreak, French care home resident Colette Dupas's contact with her daughters has been limited to talking via video call or through a window. Now, thanks to an inflatable tunnel and two plastic sleeves, the 97-year-old has been able to feel their touch. Made from hermetically sealed plastic film, the 'hug bubble' allows care home residents – isolated from the outside world to avoid catching the virus – to hold hands and embrace their visiting relatives through a sleeve. Once visitors leave, care home employees disinfect the plastic sheet, ready for the next encounter
The number of new Covid-19 infections per day in France is unlikely to fall to a 5,000 target by 15 December as the population is not sufficiently respecting social distancing measures, one of France*s top coronavirus experts said today.
Eric Caumes, head of infectious diseases at Paris hospital La Pitié-Salpêtrière, told LCI television that if the French are not cautious enough over Christmas and year-end holidays, it will lead to a third wave of the virus in mid-January.
It’s back to school today for some New York City schoolchildren, weeks after the schools were closed to in-person learning because of rising Covid-19 infections.
The city’s public school system, which shut down in-person learning earlier this month, will bring back preschool students and children in kindergarten through fifth grade, whose parents chose a mix of in-school and remote learning. Special education students in all grades who have particularly complex needs will be welcomed back starting Thursday.
We have facts now for two straight months of extraordinarily low levels of transmission in our schools, our schools are clearly safer. This is what our health care leaders say. Our schools are safer than pretty much any place else in New York City. So, I really think everyone in the school community can feel secure because so many measures are in place to protect everyone.
The World Health Organization is holding discussions on Monday about the feasibility of trials in which healthy young volunteers are deliberately infected with coronavirus to hasten vaccine development – amid questions over whether they should go ahead given the promising data from the frontrunner vaccine candidates.
Some scientists have reservations about exposing volunteers to a virus for which there is no cure, although there are treatments that can help patients. However, proponents argue that the risks of Covid-19 to the young and healthy are minimal, and the benefits to society are high.
Covid-19 has deepened inequalities between the north and south of England, with little sign of the government’s “levelling up” agenda becoming a reality, a thinktank has warned, in an urgent “wake-up call” to Boris Johnson.
The north is experiencing levels of unemployment not seen since 1994, with areas put under the strictest tier 3 restrictions among the worst affected, IPPR North said in its annual health-check of the economy of the north of England.
NSW to lift tranche of restrictions while in Victoria it will no longer be compulsory to wear face masks in offices or cafes; federal parliament returns for the final sitting week of 2020 – latest updates
Victoria will begin accepting international flights again from today – a flight from Sri Lanka is about to touch down in Melbourne. All up, there will be about 125 travellers arriving as part of the hotel quarantine program in Victoria today.
There is no longer any private security guards as part of the Victoria program – and any worker has to work exclusively for the Victorian government.
The latest foreign interference laws are also due to pass parliament this week – these ones are the ones looking at agreements with foreign governments that private organisations and state governments have made.
States, Territories and local governments will have three months to handover agreements with foreign governments which @dfat "will carefully and methodically consider against Australia's foreign policy settings" #auspol@Birmo@SBSNewspic.twitter.com/pwT5PtCEta
Donald Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, has tested positive for Covid-19, the president tweeted on Sunday, prompting Arizona to close its legislature after the lawyer visited the state last week.
Batches of the Covid vaccine have begun to arrive in hospitals around the UK, ready for the first jabs on Tuesday in what NHS England’s medical director warned would be the largest and most complex vaccination campaign in the country’s history.
The UK’s record-breaking approval of the vaccine and the rapid start of immunisation against Covid-19 did not mean the end of the pandemic was in sight, said Prof Stephen Powis. It would be a marathon and not a sprint, he said.
Stay-at-home order will stay in place through Christmas after hospital intensive care beds filled almost to capacity
More than 23 million people in Southern California have been placed under the harshest lockdowns in the United States, as Covid-19 cases hit record levels in the country’s most populous state.
The restrictions require people to stay at home and minimise contact with other households. They came into effect at 11.59pm on Sunday (02:59 ET/06:59 GMT) and will remain in place for at least three weeks, covering the Christmas holiday.
Back pain has become rife in lockdown. But that’s not the only reason chiropractors are being hailed as YouTube influencers – there’s a horror movie thrill, too
The man in a waistcoat and jeans stands over a woman who lies face-down on a vinyl bed. He is all hairy arms, and she a mop of dip-dyed hair. He presses one palm on her back; with the other he cups the side of her head and sharply thrusts. Click, crack: her neck twists in a way that necks don’t usually like to be twisted. The woman curses in apparent relief; the man laughs. He is Joseph Cipriano, a chiropractor who is also known as Dr Joe Back Crack or the Y Strap Doc (after his trademark treatment tool) and this video of him adjusting a client with “*EXTREMELY LOUD* chiropractic cracking” has been viewed 19m times.
Cipriano, who has 1.6 million subscribers on YouTube and his own range of “Team Y Strap” and “Make Your Spine Great Again” sweatshirts, is one of what his fellow chiropractors, Doc Manasseh, calls “a new wave of chiropractors globally to have gone viral”. In an age of back pain, chiropractors are the new social media influencers. But why do so many people want to watch them? And is the rise about more than a interest in good spine health?
In the early afternoon of 3 January this year, a small metal box was delivered to the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Centre addressed to virus expert Prof Zhang Yongzhen. Inside, packed in dry ice, were swabs from a patient who was suffering from a novel, occasionally fatal respiratory illness that was sweeping the city of Wuhan. Exactly what was causing terrifying rises in case numbers, medical authorities wanted to know? And how was the disease being spread?
Sick people in northern France occasionally leave garments in healing trees or “arbres à loques” in the hope of a cure, following a tradition that persists since pre-Roman times.
But recently, this tradition has been updated for the coronavirus age.
Donald Trump says his lawyer Rudy Giuliani has tested positive for coronavirus.
.@RudyGiuliani, by far the greatest mayor in the history of NYC, and who has been working tirelessly exposing the most corrupt election (by far!) in the history of the USA, has tested positive for the China Virus. Get better soon Rudy, we will carry on!!!
Singer should have been self-isolating after trip to Egypt when she celebrated birthday at London venue
British singer Rita Ora has apologised after reports emerged that she should have been self-isolating when she celebrated her birthday at a London restaurant last month.
The 30-year-old flew to Egypt in a private jet on 21 November to perform at the five-star W Hotel in Cairo, an appearance for which she was paid a six-figure sum, the Mail on Sunday reported.
Tens of millions of doses of the Covid-19 vaccine manufactured in Belgium will be flown to Britain by military aircraft to avoid delays at ports caused by Brexit, under contingency plans being developed by the government.
Both the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) and senior sources at the Ministry of Defence (MoD) confirmed to the Observer on Saturday that large consignments would be brought in from 1 January by air if road, rail and sea routes were subject to widely expected delays after that date.
Seven years ago, rhinology surgeon Peter Andrews found himself performing an operation that would go on to change the course of his career.
Andrews was operating on a patient who had broken his nose many decades earlier after being struck by a cricket ball. The procedure was delicate: straightening the septum – the thin wall of cartilage that separates the nostrils – and in the process improving his breathing, which had become more laboured in later life.
More than 14m cases recorded with 2,607 deaths on Friday
More lockdowns in California as Arizona and Idaho reel
As US states faced a deadline to place orders for a coronavirus vaccine, California went back into lockdown and federal authorities advised the wearing of masks indoors, new infections reached a record 227,885 on Friday.