Kim Kardashian requests compassion for Kanye West’s bipolar disorder

The rapper’s recent string of erratic tweets prompted his wife to comment on his mental health for the first time

Kim Kardashian West has spoken for the first time about her husband Kanye West’s bipolar disorder after he posted and deleted a string of erratic tweets regarding his family life after the launch of his presidential campaign in Charleston, South Carolina, on Monday.

“Those who are close with Kanye know his heart and understand his words sometimes do not align with his intentions,” she wrote on her Instagram Stories.

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Australian trainee doctors distressed after exam postponed by Covid-19 suddenly rescheduled

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.

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Coronavirus Australia live update: doctors call on Morrison to provide national advice on face masks – latest news

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.

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UK must ramp up coronavirus efforts to avoid second wave, scientists warn

Senior scientists say it is ‘critical’ Britain improves capacity to spot and contain outbreaks before winter

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.

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Researchers say blood test can detect cancer years before symptoms

Team based in China develop test that identifies cancers up to four years before signs appear

A blood test can pick up cancers up to four years before symptoms appear, researchers say, in the latest study to raise hopes of early detection.

A team led by researchers in China say the non-invasive blood test – called PanSeer – detects cancer in 95% of individuals who have no symptoms but later receive a diagnosis.

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Are official figures overstating England’s Covid-19 death toll?

PHE figures include deaths of anyone who tested positive, even if it was months ago

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.”

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Matt Hancock hails ‘promising news’ on Oxford University coronavirus vaccine – video

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

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Revealed: NHS denied PPE at height of Covid-19 as supplier prioritised China

Disclosures call into question UK’s reliance on ‘just in time’ logistics during pandemic

The NHS was deprived of large amounts of protective gear at the height of the coronavirus outbreak after a French company contracted to supply millions of masks allegedly prioritised more lucrative deals with deep-pocketed clients including a Chinese state-owned energy company.

A joint investigation by the Guardian and the French news website Mediapart has uncovered evidence suggesting the mask manufacturer Valmy failed to fulfil the terms of a £1.2m contract with the NHS to supply about 7m masks in the event of a pandemic.

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‘Time for a new vision’: violence is a public health issue that requires community driven solutions

Treating violence as a health epidemic can increase safety while decreasing the need for police involvement

In cities across the United States and around the world, millions of people have been protesting to demand alternatives to policing.

In Oakland, California, violence intervention programs in past years have shown there are other ways to address violence in communities than sending in armed police, ways that can quickly be scaled to both save lives and create more equitable treatment of people.

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Coronavirus Australia live update: outbreaks in Batemans Bay and Colac as Victoria hotel quarantine inquiry kicks off – latest news

Investigation into how infection control breaches are believed to have led to a Covid-19 outbreak starts today. Follow all the latest news and updates, live

Neal said the inquiry had received a number of submissions about “what went well, and what went less well” in managing hotel quarantine in Victoria.

He said that, without preempting anything to come in the inquiry, the following issues had arisen for discussion:

Neal said the inquiry, which is not hearing from any witnesses today, will hear evidence “of a scientific and medical nature about what has been understood about the spread of the virus from the hotel quarantine program into the community”.

It will also hear about the impact of the virus in the community, and the “various steps taken by government agencies and public health officials in response to that impact are matters of profound and ongoing significance to this community”.

Understandably, there has been intense community interest and daily commentary in the media about this program. Increasingly over recent weeks there has been growing and understandable community concern about transmission from that program into the general community.

To establish and implement the hotel quarantine program, a range of contractual and other arrangements were entered into between government departments, hotels, a number of private service providers, private security companies, medical services, transport and food providers. It’s anticipated in the course of the inquiry that you will hear from various witnesses that the purposes of the directions and the contractual arrangements entered into was to either eliminate or reduce the public health risk posed by Covid-19 by containing its spread from returned travellers into the community.

As set out in the order in counsel establishing this inquiry, information already available to the inquiry suggests the possibility of a link between many of the cases of coronavirus identified in the Victorian community in the past few weeks and persons who were quarantined under the hotel quarantine program. Comments made by the chief health officer to the media have suggested that it may even be that every case of Covid-19 in Victoria in recent weeks could be sourced to the hotel quarantine program.

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North Lanarkshire Covid-19 outbreak at NHS contact-tracing centre

Local cases confirmed by Sitel, the US firm that runs the affected site in Scotland

Health officials are investigating a cluster of Covid-19 cases at a call centre in Scotland that carries out contact tracing for the NHS.

US firm Sitel confirmed on Sunday that its call centre in Motherwell, North Lanarkshire has suffered a “local outbreak” of infections.

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Test and trace failures risk exponential case growth in England, official warns

Blackburn with Darwen’s public health director says only half those at risk in north-west being contacted

Failures of the government’s test-and-trace system are risking an exponential growth of coronavirus in hotspots across England, a director of public health has warned.

Dominic Harrison, the director of public health in Blackburn with Darwen, said the national tracing system was only managing to reach half of those who had been in close contact with a coronavirus patient in towns with high infection rates in the north-west.

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What happens when flu meets Covid-19?

How seasonal viruses interact with the coronavirus is unknown – it may lessen or sharpen the pandemic – so flu vaccinations are vital

Optimists had hoped Covid-19 might not withstand the blistering heat of a British summer. However those hopes have faded: the virus staged a recent resurgence in Iran amid actual blistering temperatures, and has had no trouble persisting in sultry Singapore.

But what happens to Covid-19, and us, when the rain and chill – and flu and sniffles – of autumn set in? Especially, how will the annual winter flu epidemic play out amid a Covid-19 pandemic?

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Coronavirus Victoria: three more deaths and 363 new cases reported as masks made mandatory in Melbourne

Daniel Andrews’s announcement on face coverings comes as state tries to control a second wave of Covid-19

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Victoria has recorded 363 new Covid-19 cases and three more people have died as premier Daniel Andrews announced face masks will be made mandatory across Melbourne as the state attempts to control a second-wave outbreak of the virus.

At a press conference on Sunday, Andrews appeared wearing a face mask and said residents in metropolitan Melbourne and the Mitchell shire would be required to wear “masks or face coverings”, including bandannas or scarves in public from midnight on Wednesday.

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Daily updates on English Covid-19 deaths paused amid accuracy concerns

Government confirms PHE set no cut-off between time of testing and date of death

Daily updates on the coronavirus death toll in England have been paused amid growing concern that the numbers could have been exaggerated.

A message on the government’s website on Saturday said: “Currently the daily deaths measure counts all people who have tested positive for coronavirus and since died, with no cut-off between time of testing and date of death.

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Coronavirus Australia: Victoria records three more Covid-19 deaths and 217 new cases as PM postpones parliament

Australia’s acting chief medical officer warns people in Sydney are not taking precautions ‘as seriously’ as in Melbourne

Victoria has recorded 217 new cases of Covid-19 and three more deaths, as the prime minister, Scott Morrison, announced parliament would be postponed due to the health risks of MPs travelling to Canberra from Melbourne and south-western Sydney.

Victoria’s chief health officer, Brett Sutton, described the 217 cases as “a relief” following a record 428 new cases announced on Friday, and a then-record 317 new cases on Thursday.

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How prepared is Boris Johnson for a winter resurgence of coronavirus?

The prime minister says he is hoping for the best but planning for the worst. We look at key areas of concern

Boris Johnson’s approach to a winter wave of Covid-19 is to hope for the best but plan for the worst, he said on Friday. The worst-case scenario was spelled out earlier in the week by the Academy of Medical Sciences: as many as 120,000 hospital patients dead. Avoiding that will depend on the state of preparations in many areas.

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UK government orders halt to Randox Covid-19 tests over safety issues

Care homes and members of public told to immediately stop using kits produced by firm

Care homes and members of the public have been instructed by the government to immediately stop using coronavirus testing kits produced by a healthcare firm after safety problems were discovered.

Randox was awarded a £133m contract in March to produce the testing kits for England, Wales and Northern Ireland without any other firms being given the opportunity to bid for the work.

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Russian state-sponsored hackers target Covid-19 vaccine researchers

UK National Cyber Security Centre says drug firms and research groups being targeted by group known as APT29

Russian state-sponsored hackers are targeting UK, US and Canadian organisations involved in developing a coronavirus vaccine, according to British security officials.

The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) said drug companies and research groups were being targeted by a group known as APT29, which was “almost certainly” part of the Kremlin’s intelligence services.

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