Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Millions face devastating hunger if relief efforts are not stepped up in a country ravaged by war, locusts and now Covid-19
Yemen is in danger of an imminent return to devastating levels of hunger and food insecurity, according to new analysis released by UN agencies.
The World Food Programme (WFP), Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and Unicef say that the percentage of the population predicted to face acute food insecurity in southern areas of the country will rise from 25% to 40% by the end of the year.
“I said it’s going away – and it is going away,”a defiant Donald Trump claimed about Covid-19 on 3 April, when about 300,000 cases of the virus had been reported across the country.
At the time, Trump was enjoying a brief surge in approval ratings. But the virus obviously did not go away – more than 3.8m cases have now been reported, and latest polls show that Trump may pay the price for his handling of the crisis in the November elections.
As the coronavirus spreads around the world, there are concerns that it will mutate into a form that is more transmissible, more dangerous or both, potentially making the global health crisis even worse.
What do we know about the way the virus is evolving?
The US federal government has signed a contract with Pfizer for 100 million doses of coronavirus vaccine, once it is approved.
The health and human services secretary, Alex Azar, said on Fox News:
We just signed a contract with global pharmaceutical leader Pfizer to produce 100 million doses of vaccine starting in December of this year with an option to buy a half a billion doses.
Now those would of course have to be safe and effective.
Exclusive: some say it’s ‘unfathomable’ to only have three months to prepare for the Royal Australasian College of Physicians exam amid a heavy pandemic workload
Hundreds of trainee physicians who were told an exam they must pass to be eligible for specialist training would be deferred until 2021 due to Covid-19 are distressed after the Royal Australasian College of Physicians said on Monday the exam will in fact be held in about three months’ time.
The decision will affect around 700-800 physician trainees in Australia and around 100 in New Zealand who are eligible to sit the exam, which involves a written and clinical component.
Gladys Berejiklian says Nine Perfect Strangers cast and crew allowed to isolate at separate location from coronavirus quarantine hotels
The New South Wales premier, Gladys Berejiklian, has said there are “no exemptions” from hotel quarantine for returned travellers despite reports Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban were allowed to isolate at their holiday home in regional NSW.
Media outlets reported on Tuesday that Kidman and Urban, and their two daughters, flew back to Sydney from the United States on a private jet and were allowed to isolate at their home in Sutton Forest ahead of the filming of Kidman’s new mini-series, Nine Perfect Strangers, in August.
Decades of war have resulted in a high demand for prosthetics – and patients are anxious to visit clinics as they finally reopen
Concentration is etched on Hussein’s face as he walks along a scuffed yellow line painted on the floor of the clinic’s rehabilitation room. He’s getting a feel for his new prosthetic.
Hussein lost his left leg below the knee in 1987 when he stepped on a landmine while fishing at Lake Dukan, around 100km (62 miles) east of Erbil in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq. Mines and other unexploded remnants of successive wars litter the landscape, causing new injuries every year. More than half the clinic’s 15,100 patients are amputees. Roughly 4,600 of them lost limbs as a result of conflict – 2,500 of these to landmines.
AMA wants national network of contact tracers; calls for low-risk prisoner release; Port Stephens in NSW on Covid-19 high alert. Follow all the latest news and updates, live
Burney was also asked about the Black Lives Matter march planned for Sydney next Tuesday.
She said both organisers and people who attend the rally need to observe the health advice. Organisers are requiring people to wear masks and remain 1.5m away from each other, as they did at earlier rallies in June.
I will not be telling people who have lost loved ones not to demonstrate. But they have a democratic right to see their local member, to write to their local member and make it very clear what their feelings are.
Labor has been advocating for years that there needs to be justice targets in the new Closing the Gap targets and I understand that’s going to happen. But there is absolutely no way that it is OK that something like 400 people have died in custody since the royal commission and that continues to happen and the incarceration rates of Aboriginal people and Aboriginal young people are completely unacceptable.
Labor’s social affairs spokesperson, Linda Burney, said the new permanent jobseeker rate has to be an amount “where people can live with dignity and children, in particular, are not thrown on to the poverty scrapheap”.
Burney told ABC24:
We have heard that the old Newstart rate, which was $550 a fortnight, was just throwing people into poverty, there was absolutely no way it was an incentive to work.
One of the things that Labor is saying very clearly is we believe that the Government missed an enormous opportunity yesterday and that is to announce a permanent increase in JobSeeker, which Labor and others have been arguing for for a very long time.
The United States is failing to report vital information on Covid-19 that could help track the spread of the disease and prevent the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans, according to the first comprehensive review of the nation’s coronavirus data.
The report, Tracking Covid-19 in the United States, paints a bleak picture of the country’s response to the disease. Five months into the pandemic, the essential intelligence that would allow public health authorities to get to grips with the virus is still not being compiled in usable form.
Trump, who has been boasting about the country’s coronavirus testing for months, was right in saying that the US has dramatically ramped up testing and is now testing a higher proportion of citizens than many other countries.
The US secretary of state Mike Pompeo launched an extraordinary attack on the World Health Organization during a private meeting in the UK, accusing it of being in the pocket of China and responsible for “dead Britons” who passed away during the pandemic.
Pompeo told those present that he believed the WHO was “political not a science-based organisation” and accused its current director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus of being too close to Beijing.
Joe Biden, in a scathing speech in his campaign to become the next US president, said Donald Trump had ‘quit’ on US citizens and did not care about America.
In a speech on his plan for the economy, in which he promised to expand access to preschool for working families, directly linking the need for affordable childcare to America’s economic recovery, Biden said Trump was not taking the public health crisis seriously.
Britain must ramp up its capacity to spot and contain coronavirus outbreaks if it is to avoid a potentially devastating second wave of infections this winter, senior scientists have warned.
The next two months are “critical” for building a more effective test-and-trace system and ensuring that local outbreak teams are ready to handle the resurgence of infections that is feared as temperatures fall, the experts told the Lords science committee.
EU leaders have reached an agreement on a €750bn coronavirus recovery fund and long-term spending plans after more than four days of debate at the bloc’s longest summit in nearly two decades. EU states will jointly borrow debt to be disbursed through grants on an unprecedented scale, in the face of an economic downturn not seen since the Great Depression. The leaders say the new plan will also put the EU's climate objectives at the forefront of policies for the first time in its history
Axios-Ipsos poll shows 31% believe true number is smaller
US has nearly 4m cases and more than 140,000 deaths
Skepticism is growing in the United States about the accuracy of publicly reported numbers for Covid-19 deaths, according to Axios-Ipsos polling published on Tuesday.
Opponents of lockdown holding Jews increasingly responsible for spread of virus
A leader of Germany’s Jewish community has expressed alarm at the spread of antisemitic conspiracy theories relating to coronavirus in the country, including attempts to downplay the Holocaust.
Josef Schuster, the president of the Central Council of Jews, said Jews were increasingly being held collectively responsible for the spread of the virus and compared the situation to narratives around the plague in the Middle Ages.
Matt Hancock has announced an urgent review into how Public Health England (PHE) counts Covid-19 deaths after discovering what appeared to be a serious issue in how rates are calculated.
Following the health secretary’s move on Friday, Yoon K Loke and Carl Heneghan, of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford University, wrote in a blogpost: “It seems that PHE regularly looks for people on the NHS database who have ever tested positive, and simply checks to see if they are still alive or not. PHE does not appear to consider how long ago the Covid test result was, nor whether the person has been successfully treated in hospital and discharged to the community.”
Rules allowing up to 22 hours of solitary confinement for young offenders could continue, in move lawyers say is ‘very concerning’
The Ministry of Justice has said that new rules that allow youth detention facilities to hold children in solitary confinement for up to 22 hours a day to prevent the spread of Covid-19 could remain in place for two years despite lockdown measures being relaxed for the rest of the UK.
Lawyers have told the Guardian that time out of cells and access to education are still being severely curtailed in many facilities across the country.
Euro rises as heads of state finally thrash out agreement on day five
EU leaders have reached a historic agreement on a €750bn coronavirus pandemic recovery fund and their long-term spending plans following days of acrimonious debate at the bloc’s longest summit in nearly two decades.
As the meeting reached its fifth day, the 27 exhausted heads of state and government finally gave their seal of approval to a plan for the EU to jointly borrow debt to be disbursed through grants on an unprecedented scale, in the face of an economic downturn not seen since the Great Depression.
A group of Rohingya refugees who survived a treacherous journey at sea now face caning and seven months in jail after they were convicted under the immigration act in Malaysia, where activists have warned of an alarming rise in xenophobia and inhumane treatment of the migrants.
Hundreds of arrests and a sharp rise in hate speech have shocked refugees and migrants who had seen Malaysia as a welcoming country, particularly for Muslims, despite not being signed up to the 1951 refugee convention.
Donald Trump has announced his daily US coronavirus briefings will resume and that wearing face masks were “patriotic” as European leaders agreed a huge coronavirus rescue plan and Australia announced it was scaling back economic support as one of its states battles a growing Covid-19 outbreak.
Having almost entirely avoided wearing a mask in public during the pandemic, the US president tweeted that “many people say it is Patriotic to wear a face mask when you can’t socially distance”. The post came with a photo of the president in a mask, possibly taken at his visit about 10 days ago to the Walter Reed military hospital outside Washington.