Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
British-Iranian dual national will not have to return to prison until at least 20 May
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s temporary release from Evin prison in Tehran has been extended by a minimum of a month as Iran continues to battle its coronavirus outbreak.
The British-Iranian dual national was told on Tuesday about the development, which confirmed a general statement about the extension of prisoners’ furlough made by the Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, on Sunday. She was due to return to prison this weekend.
The UK’s Covid-19 crisis has reached the blame phase, with Boris Johnson, ministers, civil servants and scientists coming under criticism that they underestimated the threat, were slow to act and are bungling the country’s response amid a wave of deaths.
Dozens of patients with Covid-19 have been turned away from the NHS Nightingale hospital in London because it has too few nurses to treat them, the Guardian can reveal.
Epidemics of infectious diseases behave in different ways but the 1918 influenza pandemic that killed more than 50 million people is regarded as a key example of a pandemic that occurred in multiple waves, with the latter more severe than the first. It has been replicated – albeit more mildly – in subsequent flu pandemics.
Matt Hancock, the health secretary, has announced that he is making £20m available to an Oxford team to accelerate trials for a coronavirus vaccine that will be trialled on people from Thursday.
Like many people around the country, I stand on my front doorstep at 8pm every Thursday to clap for carers during the Covid-19 pandemic. Yet when I did so for the first time last month, not knowing for sure if my neighbours would join me, I realised I knew little of the people for whom I was clapping.
Who are the nurses, doctors, cleaners, clerks, porters, researchers and consultants on whom so many lives depend?
Coronavirus ‘potentially catastrophic’ for nations already suffering food insecurity caused by famine, migration and unemployment
The warning from the World Food Programme (WFP) that an extra 265 million people could be pushed into acute food insecurity by Covid-19, almost doubling last year’s total, is based on a complex combination of factors.
WFP’s latest warning underlines the increasing concern among experts in the field that for many the biggest impact will not be the disease, but the hunger hanging off its coat tails.
The royal family’s Twitter account has posted private behind-the-scenes footage of the Queen as a childin tribute for her 94th birthday.
It showed her as a toddler in a push-chair, and playing with sister Princess Margaret as a child. She is seen learning to ride, gardening with her mother, and dancing onboard a yacht.
Brazil’s President Bolsonaro has described coronavirus as a “little flu” and resisted lockdown measures even as the death toll rises. But in Rio’s poorest favelas, where people live in overcrowded conditions and lack proper sanitation, they are bracing for the worst. Buba Aguiar is an activist in Acari who is taking matters into her own hands, soliciting online donations to buy food parcels and basic coronavirus kit - soap, masks - for her neighbours who cannot afford to stop working and stay at home. As Acari records its first coronavirus death, we follow Buba through a typical day fighting to help her community in the face of government inaction.
Tuesday, 3 November is the date set by federal government for the 2020 US presidential elections, but amid the pandemic this has been called into question.
America has the world's highest number of coronavirus-related deaths, with many states struggling to contain the outbreak; primary contests have been disrupted, conventions delayed and the two candidates, Donald Trump and Joe Biden, have both been prevented from holding rallies.
Could Trump delay the vote, and if so what would that mean for 2021? The Guardian's Adam Gabbatt explains
The impact of the coronavirus crisis could ripple through every layer of our social fabric.
We want to hear what you are concerned about, hopeful for, or even looking forward to in a changed future, for a Guardian video series in which we will discuss how life may be different. What are the best things about our society that should be protected for future generations, and where can we see a need for change?
Transit workers in New York City are afraid to go back to work after 68 employees have died from coronavirus, and say authorities could have done more to protect them.
'They want to call us heroes now, but how can you call up heroes when you didn't give your heroes proper equipment to fight this,' said conductor Tramell Thompson.
Ruby Princess crew members clapped and cheered from their balconies as the first of their workmates finally began to disembark the troubled cruise ship in New South Wales to fly home.
At least 49 crew members from six countries disembarked from the ship, which has been docked at Port Kembla for more than two weeks following a Covid-19 outbreak. NSW Police has said more crew members will disembark in coming days, but hundreds will remain on board and return with the ship to its port of origin.
The Ruby Princess initially docked in Sydney in March, when the ship's passengers and some crew disembarked.It has since been linked to at least 21 deaths and hundreds of coronavirus cases across Australia
Of the approximately 7,000 calls relating to family violence made to Victoria police in the past month, 14% have related to Covid-19, the state’s deputy police commissioner, Shane Patton, said on Tuesday.
When police attended those incidents they were told by the alleged victim or alleged perpetrator that having to stay at home together had exacerbated animosity. Patton said that while there had not been an increase recorded in the number of assaults, police were preparing for such an outcome, and had already experienced an increase in reporting by third parties.
Morning all. I am running the live blog this morning, so please do get in touch if you would like to share any news tips of information with me this morning. Your thoughts, comments and insight are always very welcome. Thanks in advance.
UK job vacancies dived in the three months to March as the labour market contracted in the face of the coronavirus, official statisticians have revealed.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said the number of job vacancies plunged by 52,000 to 795,000 for the quarter.
It said the manufacturing and retail sectors reported the largest decline in hiring over the period.
The ONS also revealed that growth in the number of people on British companies’ payrolls slowed to 0.8% in March from 1.1% in February, according to preliminary tax data.
Economists also revealed on Tuesday that unemployment increased by 22,000 to 1.36 million in the three months to February, before Covid-19 gripped the UK.
Meanwhile, employment for the quarter to February jumped by 352,000 against the same period last year, rising to a record high of 33.07 million. It said this was heavily driven by a jump in the number of women in work, which rose by 318,000 to a record high of 15.73 million.
That coronavirus is colour blind and respects no borders is true enough, although far from being the great equaliser, it forces the poor to bear the brunt. And given the prominent role played by experts in epidemiology who speak in a universalising language of objective science and mathematical curves, attempts at containing or mitigating the spread of Covid-19 sound similar around the world.
Yet the responses differ significantly from country to country, even among richer countries; shaped by historical legacies, political culture and social mores. The Swedish historian Sverker Sörlin, himself a Covid-19 survivor, noted in a recent article that there was never just one global pandemic but many, each shaped by its own national logic. Sörlin was building on William H McNeill and his classic Plagues and Peoplesfrom 1976, in which McNeill tried to show that epidemics mirrored each affected society. There is not a universal biological enemy waging war, these global viruses strike societies, as much as the individuals within them.
Milan is to introduce one of Europe’s most ambitious schemes reallocating street space from cars to cycling and walking, in response to the coronavirus crisis.
The northern Italian city and surrounding Lombardy region are among Europe’s most polluted, and have also been especially hard hit by the Covid-19 outbreak.
At least 131 people have died from malaria in Zimbabwe in a new outbreak, adding pressure to a country already struggling to deal with Covid-19.
The fatalities occurred in 201 outbreaks recorded across the country, according to the Ministry of Health. Meanwhile Zimbabwe’s lockdown has been extended by two weeks to prevent the spread of coronavirus.