Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Ursula von der Leyen has reassured EU leaders she will ban coronavirus vaccines from leaving the EU if suppliers such as AstraZeneca fail to deliver again, as she faced questions over her handling of shortages.
The European commission president’s pledge at a virtual summit came as leaders issued a statement promising to “accelerate the provision of vaccines”, with just 8% of the adult population having received a jab compared with 27% in the UK.
Actor describes being helped with lines and learning by repetition at event for the Vision Foundation
Dame Judi Dench has spoken of her determination to carry on working despite sight loss, even if that means using friends to learn lines and being gently told to stop delivering speeches to the proscenium arch rather than her fellow actors.
Dench described how she copes with deteriorating eyesight – the challenges, the unexpected advantages and the funny side – at an online event on Thursday with Stephen Fry and Hayley Mills for the Vision Foundation, the London sight loss charity.
When you emerge relatively unscathed in a devastated world, there is a risk of being out of step, of lacking empathy
Most mornings, as soon I wake, I retrieve some voice messages left overnight on WhatsApp. Sent from friends in the Northern hemisphere, they are missives from the pandemic, a granular account of what daily life is like in lockdown over there.
For almost a year now, various friends and I record and send audio messages back and forth that contain the sort of ephemera that seems too slight and unimportant for email but satisfying to listen to in the morning as I have my first coffee.
Law would widen strict rules in country where thousands suffer complications from unsafe terminations
A bill to liberalise Malawi’s abortion laws will be debated by MPs today in the face of opposition from faith groups.
If passed, the termination of pregnancy bill would allow abortions when a woman’s mental or physical health is in danger, in cases of rape and incest, and when there are serious foetal abnormalities.
Gwyneth Paltrow has been urged to stop spreading misinformation by the medical director of NHS England after she suggested long Covid could be treated with “intuitive fasting”, herbal cocktails and regular visits to an “infrared sauna”.
The Hollywood star, who markets unproven new age potions on her Goop website, wrote on her latest blogpost that she caught Covid-19 early and had since suffered “long-tail fatigue and brain fog”.
The UK government has always said there will be no compulsory Covid vaccination. It is only nervously dipping a toe in the waters of the vaccine passport issue, which could have implications for those who do not have one. But some employers appear prepared to dive straight in. “No jab, no job,” says Charlie Mullins, who runs Pimlico Plumbers. He wants to be able to tell his customers they have nothing to fear from a visit to fix their leaking pipes.
Care homes are understandably thinking hard about it too. They have vulnerable people to protect and the families on the outside will be more than anxious to know that an elderly mum or dad is being looked after by somebody who is fully vaccinated. Barchester Healthcare, the second-biggest care home provider in the UK, has spelled it out to its 17,000 staff that if they do not get vaccinated even though they are eligible, there will be no more shifts for them from the end of April, said the chief executive, Dr Pete Calveley.
Covax has delivered its first Covid-19 vaccine doses to Ghana as part of a programme to ensure equitable distribution to poorer countries. Anne-Claire Dufay, of Unicef, said it was ‘an historic moment’.
Covax aims to distribute enough vaccines over the next six months to inoculate 3% of the population of 145 countries and tens of millions more by the end of the year
The number of people doing their business alfresco has shot up. But what else can you do when nature calls and there aren’t any public loos?
Name: Wild toileting.
Age: Dates back to Homo erectus. Urinating and defecating are part of the human condition – “I shit, therefore I am” (“Coshito, ergo sum”), as Descartes almost said – and were undomesticated until the Mesopotamians invented toilets almost 4,500 years ago.
Appearance: Don’t even think about it.
Is there a lot of it about? According to the Lulworth Estate, which manages Durdle Door and the surrounding coastline in Dorset, far too much. It says it saw a huge increase in “wild toileting” when lockdown was lifted last summer. It is calling on Boris Johnson to make responsible tourism a priority when travel restrictions ease this spring.
Covax has delivered its first Covid-19 vaccine doses in a milestone for the ambitious programme that seeks to offset “vaccine nationalism” by wealthy countries and ensure poor ones do not wait years to start inoculating people.
An aircraft carrying 600,000 doses of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine landed in Accra, the capital of Ghana, on Wednesday, where jabs will be administered to frontline health workers on Tuesday. Vaccine doses will arrive on Friday in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, and will be given from Monday.
Adam Bandt also says he has had it confirmed by Simon Birmingham that the staffer alleged to have raped Brittany Higgins was listed on the attorney-general’s lobbyist register
We got another piece of the information today and that shows is that the individual in question has actually been a lobbyist and the Attorney General lobbyist register which raises questions about how it is that someone who has been sacked from a position in the Government for what the Government says was a security breach but we suspect something more, and that is allowed to start operating as a lobbyist and all the privileges that gives.
We now need to know whether or not as a lobbyist this alleged rapist has been coming back and having meetings with ministers, ministerial staff, departmental officials because not only would they be incredibly inappropriate but it was staff in a situation they may be having to meet with someone that the Government knows has serious questions about them, is now an alleged rapist, coming back into the building and potentially having meetings.
Adam Bandt is also asked about a doctor being able to administer the Pfizer vaccine, without receiving the required training (the government had to correct the record, after originally being advised that the doctor had received the necessary training)
I guess I want to know why and how this situation could happen. It is concerning. I am a supporter of people getting vaccines. I got mine earlier this week as a show of my support.
I was asked by health authorities to do that and I said I would happily do it because I think it is important and I think the vaccination program and the role it needs to occur in a way that people have confidence in and I am very concerned about anything that could undermine confidence in the rollout and that is my main concern.
French researchers have developed a coronavirus test that they say delivers results three times faster than rapid lateral flow antigen tests with – according to initial trial data – almost the same accuracy as more reliable, but slower, PCR tests.
The electrochemical test, which uses nanobodies taken from the camelid group of animals, returns a result within 10 minutes and, in an early test of 300 samples, proved 90% as accurate as a PCR test for both positive and negative results. It is being developed by scientists at Lille and Marseille universities and from the French national scientific research centre CNRS.
Amid California’s slow Covid-19 vaccine rollout, millions of essential workers in high-exposure jobs are still waiting to get the life-saving doses, with many uncertain when or how they will get access.
Just before Alex Godfrey’s grandmother died from dementia, she snapped back to lucidity and regaled him with stories of her youth. Could moments like this teach us more about the workings of the brain?
It was the red jelly that did it. It was Christmas 1999 in Rapid City, South Dakota, and Ward Porterfield, 83, was in a nursing home. He had been diagnosed with dementia three years earlier; he was confused and disoriented and eventually he no longer recognised his daughter, Kay. “When I went in,” she says of her later visits, “he didn’t know me at all.” That Christmas, he refused to eat. “Finally I just told them: ‘Bring him jello, he likes jello. Red jello.’ And he looked at me, really deeply, and said: ‘So. I suppose the jello’s gonna be my last meal. You’re gonna try to starve me, eh?’ That was like: ‘What’s going on here?’”
Her surprise wasn’t just at his coherence, but that the tone of this reply was undeniably her father’s dry humour. Later that night, nurses told Kay, when children visited to sing carols, tears streamed down Ward’s face. Kay becomes emotional recounting it. “Don’t cry,” a nurse told him. Ward looked at her. “If you were in my position, you’d cry too,” he said. “These are the last Christmas carols I’ll ever hear.”
Chinese officials did “little” in terms of epidemiological investigations into the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic in Wuhan in the first eight months after the outbreak, according to an internal World Health Organization document seen by the Guardian.
The internal WHO travel report summary, dated 10 August 2020, also said the team who met Chinese counterparts as part of a mission to help find the origins of the virus received scant new information at that time, and were not given any documents or written data during extensive discussions with Chinese officials.
Vaccinating children and teens could be key to stifling the pandemic, experts have said, as clinical trials begin to test Covid-19 vaccines in young people.
While Covid-19 is associated with a considerably lower burden of morbidity and mortality in young people, and there is evidence that children may be less likely to acquire the infection, the role of children in transmission is unclear, according to the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health.
It’s another for the ‘always look at the bright side’ file.
From AAP:
The Morrison government has released the findings of an investigation that the environment minister, Sussan Ley, ordered into her own department over the export of rare and endangered Australian parrots to Germany.
The investigation was prompted by a 2018 investigation by Guardian Australia’s Lisa Cox and Berlin bureau chief Philip Oltermann.
When Boris Johnson stands at the dispatch box on Monday to deliver his roadmap for easing Covid restrictions for what he hopes will be the final time, there is likely to be a sigh of relief from his scientific advisers who will have won the most recent battle.
Johnson is now gearing up for the next tussle, which will be with his MPs. There is a truce with the cabinet.
Social contact with loved ones will take precedence over the reopening of shops and hospitality when Boris Johnson sets out his roadmap for lifting restrictions in England on Monday, with school sports and family picnics offered as a trade-off for a longer closure of retail and restaurants.
Johnson will order the reopening of all schools on 8 March and pledge that two families or a group of six friends will be allowed to meet outdoors three weeks later, the Guardian understands.
The drug regulator says a group of doctors is being investigated for promoting hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for the virus, against all scientific evidence
Trust the experts, we are told. Believe the science. But what happens when it is a group of eminent doctors who are behind the misinformation – and they back their claims with a superficially convincing bevy of peer-reviewed academic journal articles?
These are the questions raised by the existence of the Covid Medical Network – a company run by three Melbourne doctors that has been promoting the use of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for Covid-19 in defiance of the public health authorities, the World Health Organization and most expert medical opinion.