Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
As the number of coronavirus deaths worldwide looked set to pass a million within days, Rio de Janeiro delayed its annual Carnival parade for the first time in a century because of Brazil’s continued vulnerability in the pandemic.
The global death toll passed 980,000 on Friday, according to the Johns Hopkins University tracker. With the number of deaths confirmed daily averaging more than 5,000, it looks likely the toll will pass 1 million within days. There are 32m cases worldwide.
Brazilian investigation found company was one of several that secretly worked with 1964-85 military government
The German carmaker Volkswagen has agreed to pay millions in compensation to former employees in Brazil who were persecuted during the country’s military dictatorship.
The arm-wrestle underscores Brazil’s bitter political rupture over a leader critics consider an abomination and supporters a corruption-busting champion
A giant image of Jair Bolsonaro stared down from billboards in the Brazilian town of Ourinhos. “We believe in God and we value the family,” its slogan proclaimed.
But within days of being erected, local dissidents had taken spray cans to the hoardings, dousing Brazil’s nationalist leader with black paint and using their graffiti to declare him a fascist.
Follow live as Jair Bolsonaro, Donald Trump, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin – among others – deliver video messages
...and we have photos of Xi Jinping’s background:
Some more analysis, this time from our diplomatic editor, Patrick Wintour, on Turkey’s talk:
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan used his general assembly address to set out Turkey’s bitter objections to its exclusion from the East Mediterranean, but said he was ready to resume talks bound by international law to address their contested maritime claims in the eastern Mediterranean and Aegean. By his recent rhetorical standards, the speech was one of Erdoğan’s mildest.
The first wave of coronavirus swept through a world unprepared. Authorities struggled to test for the disease, and didn’t know how to slow the spread of Covid-19.
Lockdowns brought the virus under temporary control in some places, including the UK, buying a window for the revival of education and the economy, and time to prepare for future waves that epidemiologists said were almost inevitable.
The region has seen some of the longest lockdowns in the world but experts are urging countries not to reopen too soon
The scene in Rio de Janeiro was as though much of 2020 had never happened.
The beaches at Ipanema and Copacabana heaved with visitors, the white sand obscured by bronzed bodies, sun loungers and parasols, as locals enjoyed the blistering 38C heat.
An Israeli cabinet minister, who heads an ultra-orthodox Jewish party in Benjamin Netanyahu’s conservative coalition, has tendered his resignation in protest at a looming coronavirus lockdown. Housing minister Yaakov Litzman argued the restrictions would unfairly impede religious celebrations of Jewish holidays.
The rules - the most extensive Israel will have imposed since a lockdown that ran from late March to early May - are expected to go into effect on Friday, the Jewish new year Rosh Hashana, and span into the Yom Kippur fast day on 27 September.
This wrongs and scorns hundreds of thousands of citizens. Where were you until now? Why have the Jewish holidays become a convenient address for tackling the coronavirus...?
We have to move on, to make the decisions necessary for Israel in the coronavirus era, and that is what we will do in this session.
India has reported 94,372 new cases of the novel coronavirus on Sunday, taking total cases past 4.7 million.
The daily increase was down on the record global spike in the previous 24 hours of 97,570 new cases and came after three days of recording more than 95,000 new cases. Infections have been growing faster in India than anywhere in the world.
Record-breaking wildfires are threatening thousands of acres of one of the most biologically diverse areas on the planet, Brazil's Pantanal region.
'Sometimes we are a bit frustrated, but we try to have hope and to rescue the few animals we can,' said 26-year-old vet Karen Ribeiro at one of the shelters, where rescue units and volunteers are bringing in animals including jaguars for evacuation
Rieli Franciscato struck in chest as he approached indigenous group he was seeking to shield
A Brazilian government official and expert on isolated Amazon tribes was killed by an arrow as he approached an indigenous group he was seeking to shield.
Rieli Franciscato, 56, spent his career in the government’s indigenous affairs agency, Funai, working to set up reservations to protect uncontacted tribes.
Brazil’s former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has accused Jair Bolsonaro of turning the coronavirus pandemic into a “weapon of mass destruction” in a high-profile intervention some have seen as the start of an attempted political comeback.
In a wide-ranging video manifesto – which allies, adversaries and analysts took as a signal Lula would seek to challenge Brazil’s far-right leader in the next presidential election – the leftist condemned Bolsonaro’s handling of a crisis that has killed more than 127,000 Brazilians.
India has surpassed Brazil to become the country with the second highest number of coronavirus cases, as the virus continues to spread through the country of 1.3 billion at the fastest rate of anywhere in the world.
India recorded more than 90,000 cases overnight, bringing the number of infections in the country past 4.2 million and overtaking Brazil, which with 4.1 million cases had been the second worst-affected country for several months.
India has recorded a global one-day record of more than 90,000 positive coronavirus cases, taking the country past Brazil as the second most infected country in the world, with 4.2m confirmed cases.
On Sunday India recorded 90,802 new cases and 1,016 deaths. The worst affected state continues to be Maharashtra, home to the financial capital, Mumbai. It has had nearly a quarter of the country’s total infections, and on Sunday it reported a record 23,350 new cases.
Greece recorded has recorded the first coronavirus case in the overcrowded migrant camp of Moria on the island of Lesbos, two migration ministry officials said on Wednesday.
A 40-year old asylum seeker has tested positive for the virus and had been put in isolation, one of the officials told Reuters. Authorities were trying to trace the people he had been in contact with, the official said.
I am now handing over the blog to the very capable Amy Walker. Thank you for reading and please do keep us updated on all coronavirus-related tips and stories.
Brazil’s Covid-19 death toll appears to be easing for the first time since May, data shows, a sign the Latin American country could be descending from a long infection plateau that has seen it suffer the world’s second-worst outbreak after the United States, Reuters reports.
With nearly 4 million confirmed cases, the virus has killed over 120,000 people in Brazil. But the level of average daily deaths dropped below 900 per day last week - the lowest in three and a half months and below the rate of both the United States and India, according to a Reuters tally.
Researchers at Imperial College London also calculate that the transmission rate in Brazil, at which each person infected with the coronavirus infects another person, is now below 1, the level required for new infections to slow.
The vast rainforest is experiencing a repeat of last year’s devastating blazes and critics say Bolsonaro bears ultimate responsibility
Jair Bolsonaro smiles down from a propaganda billboard at the entrance to this scruffy Amazon outpost, welcoming travelers to his “route to development”.
But 20 months into Bolsonaro’s presidency – and a year after a devastating outbreak of Amazon fires caused global outrage – the fires are back, and many fear Brazil’s leader is instead steering his country towards environmental ruin.
The vast rainforest is experiencing a repeat of last year’s devastating fires and critics say Bolsonaro bears ultimate responsibility
Jair Bolsonaro smiles down from a propaganda billboard at the entrance to this scruffy Amazon outpost, welcoming travelers to his “route to development”.
But 20 months into Bolsonaro’s presidency – and a year after a devastating outbreak of Amazon fires caused global outrage – the fires are back, and many fear Brazil’s leader is instead steering his country towards environmental ruin.
Visitors will have to show test results to enter Fernando de Noronha, which has so far suffered no coronavirus deaths
One of Brazil’s most celebrated tourist destinations, the paradisiacal archipelago of Fernando de Noronha, has announced it is reopening to outsiders – as long as they have had Covid-19.
Tourists have been banned from the Unesco World Heritage site, which Charles Darwin visited in 1832, since late March when the pandemic forced many parts of Brazil into partial shutdown.
Singer-turned politician known as Flordelis was alleged ringleader of lurid family plot to kill husband, including poisoning him
A gospel-singing Brazilian congresswoman has been accused of masterminding the “barbaric” murder of her preacher husband after at least six failed or aborted attempts to kill him with poison or in staged robberies.
Anderson do Carmo was 42 when he was shot dead in June 2019 as he returned to the home he shared with the church crooner-turned-politician Flordelis dos Santos de Souza.
Response came after Brazil’s president was asked a question about mystery payments to his wife
The Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro has told a journalist he would like to “smash their face in” after being questioned over reports of a series of mystery payments into his wife’s bank account by a former police officer with alleged links to the Rio de Janeiro underworld.
Reports in the Brazilian media have claimed that between 2011 and 2017 at least 89,000 reais (about £12,000) were paid into the account of Brazil’s first lady, Michelle Bolsonaro.
The world should be able to rein in the coronavirus pandemic in less than two years, the World Health Organization has said, as South Korea reported the most daily infections since early March and expanded social distancing measures across the country.
The WHO’s chief, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, struck a partly optimistic note when he drew comparisons between the Covid-19 pandemic and the with the 1918 flu pandemic, saying technology could help end the spread.