Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
On a typical July day, restaurateur Paul Wedgwood would see hundreds of people with wheelie suitcases – airline tags still attached – walking past the window of his restaurant on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile. This Thursday, he has seen just two. “We would normally look outside and you wouldn’t be able to see any tarmac – now it’s bare,” he said. “It’s just a ghost town.”
Like other British cities which usually attract high numbers of international tourists throughout the summer, Edinburgh is quiet, and businesses are suffering. August’s festival had already been cancelled when news came last week that December’s Hogmanay party will not go ahead as usual.
It has been a startling week for those following Britain’s response to the pandemic. Roundly derided for the lateness of its lockdown and its bungled testing programmes, the UK was the unexpected recipient of a sudden bout of lavish praise for its scientists’ efforts to combat the d isease.
“The Brits are on course to save the world,” wrote leading US economist Tyler Cowen in Bloomberg Opinion, while the journal Science quoted leading international scientists who have heaped praise on British researchers’ anti-Covid work.
One-size-fits-all approach for sector puts not-for-profits in jeopardy, union warns
The not-for-profit early childcare education sector is struggling to pay up to $9,000 for deep cleaning each time a Covid-19 case is identified, while federal government transition payments may not be enough to keep the sector afloat as parents pull their children out of the system.
The United Workers Union’s director for early childhood education, Helen Gibbons, said the one-size-fits-all approach towards the early childcare sector needed a rethink or the community risked losing not-for-profit childcare centres, which comprise just under half of the sector.
A spokeswoman for the Spanish government declined to comment on the reported quarantine measures, instead referring the Guardian to comments made on Friday by the foreign minister, Arancha González Laya.
Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, has said that people returning to any part of the UK from Spain will have to quarantine from midnight.
“Spain will be removed from the list of countries exempt from quarantine requirements due to an increased number of cases of coronavirus (Covid-19) in the last few days,” Scotland’s government said in a statement.
Having reviewed the latest data earlier today, @scotgov is also reimposing 14 day quarantine for travellers returning from Spain. This reinforces the point that these matters are subject to change at short notice & so my advice is to be cautious about non essential foreign travel https://t.co/9xSnyFCv77
For Benjamin Netanyahu it wasn’t a bad spring this year, considering the previous 12 months.
The prime minister managed, somehow, to continue his treasured run as Israel’s longest-serving leader, despite a scandalous corruption indictment, three national elections that almost ousted him, and a menacing party primary. Having been sworn back into power – his fifth term – in May, the 70-year-old politician won global praise for a swift lockdown, with Israel cited as a textbook example of how to handle a pandemic.
David Connell and his wife Margaret were separated for weeks in Italy after catching coronavirus on the Costa Luminosa. For days, David didn’t know if his wife had survived
‘I didn’t know if she was alive’: Australian couple separated overseas when Covid-19 hit cruise ship
‘I didn’t know if she was alive’: the Australian couple split apart as Covid-19 tore through their cruise ship
David Connell had to pack his wife Margaret’s luggage quickly. She was sick, lying on the cabin’s bed, conscious but barely.
Her knitting and a book were already in her bag, he threw in some essentials and put both their phones in his pocket for safekeeping. They were headed from their cruise ship to a hospital in Italy, which on 22 March was one of the countries most heavily infected by Covid-19.
Three professors at the University of Southampton school of medicine have this week made a “major breakthrough” in the treatment of coronavirus patients and become paper millionaires at the same time.
Almost two decades ago professors Ratko Djukanovic, Stephen Holgate and Donna Davies discovered that people with asthma and chronic lung disease lacked a protein called interferon beta, which helps fight off the common cold. They worked out that patients’ defences against viral infection could be boosted if the missing protein were replaced.
Less than a month ago, Australia was the envy of much of the world. With daily new coronavirus cases in the single digits, it was feted as part of a group of “first mover” nations - countries like Taiwan, Singapore and New Zealand that acted decisively to quash coronavirus.
In mid-June, after three months of tight restrictions and differing levels of lockdown, life was not quite back to normal, but as politicians liked to stress, it was almost Covid-normal.
Boris Johnson has said people opposed to vaccinations are “nuts” as he promotes an expanded programme of flu jabs that ministers hope will ease pressure on the NHS if there is a second wave of coronavirus this winter.
Visiting a doctors’ surgery in London on Friday, the prime minister said to staff: “There’s all these anti-vaxxers now. They are nuts, they are nuts.”
US infectious diseases expert Anthony Fauci has thrown out the first pitch at a Nationals-Yankees game, and it didn’t go amazingly well, but it did lead to some okay Covid-19 jokes:
The US surpassed 4m coronavirus cases on Thursday, after more than 1,100 new Covid-19-related deaths were reported in a single day on Wednesday for the first time since late May.
As states continue to dial back reopening efforts, nearly every metric for tracking the outbreak has shown a worsening spread. The US politicians volunteering other people’s lives to fight Covid-19Read more
Brazil has registered an additional 1,156 deaths over the last 24 hours and another 55,891 confirmed cases, the health ministry has said. The South American nation has now registered 85,238 deaths and 2,343,366 total confirmed cases.
Footage of Niagara Falls tour boats highlights the stark differences in physical distancing between Canadian and US-managed companies.
The Canadian tour company Hornblower Niagara Cruises’s ships can carry up to 700 people but Ontario’s strict rules have permitted them to carry only six passengers at a time.
The cost of preventing further pandemics over the next decade by protecting wildlife and forests would equate to just 2% of the estimated financial damage caused by Covid-19, according to a new analysis.
Two new viruses a year had spilled from their wildlife hosts into humans over the last century, the researchers said, with the growing destruction of nature meaning the risk today is higher than ever.
A diplomacy shaped around self-serving tittle-tattle now risks lives and undermines America’s standing in the world
The campaign by the Trump administration against the World Health Organization has often seemed faintly preposterous.
Over the months of the coronavirus pandemic its untruths and hyperbole have been dismissed by many as iterations of Trumpspeak, whose main purpose has been to distract from the US’s catastrophic response to Covid-19, which has claimed almost 140,000 lives and devastated the economy.
The BBC reports that the coronavirus pandemic has pushed South Korea into a recession, with the country seeing a 2.9% fall in GDP:
South Korea has fallen into recession as the country reels from the impact of the coronavirus pandemic.
Asia’s fourth-largest economy saw gross domestic product (GDP) fall by a worse-than-expected 2.9% in year-on-year terms, the steepest decline since 1998.
China plans to provide a $1bn loan to make its coronavirus vaccine accessible for countries across Latin America and the Caribbean, the Mexican foreign ministry said on Wednesday, Reuters reports.
Mexico’s foreign ministry said in a statement that China had made the pledge in a virtual meeting between ministers from some Latin American and Caribbean countries.
Bolivia’s plan to hold elections in September is increasingly in doubt amid rising coronavirus deaths, and reports that police have recovered the bodies of hundreds of suspected Covid-19 victims.
In the past five days, a special police unit had found 420 bodies in streets, vehicles and homes in the capital, La Paz, and in Bolivia’s biggest city, Santa Cruz, authorities said on Tuesday. Between 80% and 90% of them are believed to have had the virus.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
The health secretary, Matt Hancock, has welcomed the 'promising news' on Oxford University's coronavirus vaccine.
Researchers working on the experimental vaccine said it was safe and generated a strong immune response in the people who volunteered to help trial it, raising hopes it could contribute to ending the pandemic.
'Very encouraging news. We have already ordered 100m doses of this vaccine, should it succeed,' Hancock said