Demonstrators hold a national flag marked with black crosses during a protest demanding President Jair Bolsonaro be impeached, in front of the National Congress in Brasilia, Brazil. Photograph: Eraldo Peres/AP
Demonstrators hold a national flag marked with black crosses during a protest demanding President Jair Bolsonaro be impeached, in front of the National Congress in Brasilia, Brazil. Photograph: Eraldo Peres/AP
EasyJet is to resume a small number of flights in the UK and France on 15 June, with increased safety measures on board including mandatory wearing of face masks, as it returns to the skies after grounding its entire fleet on 30 March.
The airline initially will restart domestic routes in the UK and France where it says there is sufficient customer demand to support profitable flying. Further routes will be added in the following weeks, as and when passenger demand rises and lockdown measures ease further across Europe.
Tokyo’s most senior prosecutor and an ally of the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, is to resign after a weekly magazine revealed he had gambled illegally and ignored official advice on containing the spread of coronavirus, writes Justin McCurry in Tokyo.
Hiromu Kurokawa, head of the Tokyo High Public Prosecutors Office, drew widespread criticism after the Shukan Bunshun claimed he had played mahjong for money with newspaper reporters on 1 May and 13 May, while the capital was in the midst of an ongoing coronavirus state of emergency.
The games reportedly took place at the Tokyo home of an employee of the conservative Sankei Shimbun newspaper. The Kyodo news agency said on Thursday that Kurokawa “intends to step down” over the incident.
Japanese officials have urged people to remain at home, work remotely and socially distance themselves on trips to buy food and medicine or when taking exercise, but to avoid unnecessary outings during the state of emergency.
Kurokawa, 63, could face criminal charges for allegedly wagering money on mahjong. Japan’s criminal code bans most forms of gambling, with publicly organised horse racing, and races involving bicycles, boats and motorbikes the only exceptions in the sports world.
He was recently at the centre of a row over an attempt by Abe’s government to raise the retirement age for prosecutors to 65 – a move critics saw as an attempt to keep Kurokawa on and promote him to the post of prosecutor general when the incumbent retires in July.
The government abandoned the idea following a wave of criticism, including rare interventions from outraged Japanese celebrities.
A meat processing plant in the Netherlands was closed on Wednesday, after 45 of its employees tested positive for the coronavirus.
The Vion slaughterhouse and meat processor in Groenlo, Gelderland was ordered to close, the Dutch food and consumer product safety authority NVWA announced. Less than half of the slaughterhouse’s employees have been tested so far.
It comes after more than 100 people have tested positive for the novel coronavirus at a slaughterhouse in western France, according to regional health authorities (see 03.53).
My thanks to Guardian reader Maurice in the Netherlands for drawing my attention to this.
Here’s a consumer snippet from the UK, which gives a little insight into how the coronavirus lockdown has affected us.
Multinational retailer Marks & Spencer has said that sales of suits and ties are down to “a dribble”, while the top sellers right now are sportswear, sleepwear, jogging pants, hoodies and leggings – at last the working wardrobe we’ve all been longing for.
What customers are buying is “completely different from what it would have been a year ago”, M&S chairman Archie Norman told reporters, after the 136-year-old group published annual results and its response to the pandemic.
One top-selling item has baffled me though: there has been an uptick in the sale of bras. Surely the anti-lockdown purchase? I am yet to pitch my opinion piece about how lockdown achieved the goal bra-burning feminists in the 70s failed to ... but we’ve got time yet. (UPDATE: My thanks to reader Prof Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, who points out that feminists didn’t actually burn bras, this BBC piece tells the story behind that myth.)
Anyway, despite these small boosts, things are looking very difficult for the retailer, which has taken a £145m hit on the unsold clothing piled up in its warehouses and said the huge financial toll of coronavirus would result in a “lost year”.
This is Lexy Topping with you on the global coronavirus live blog from London. I always love hearing from our readers around the world, so please do get in touch with any vignettes or news stories from your part of the globe. I’m on alexandra.topping@theguardian.com and @lexytopping on Twitter. My DMs are open.
That’s it from me, Helen Sullivan for today. Thank you all for following along.
I’m handing over to my colleague Alexandra Topping, who will take you through the next few hours of live news, as the number of confirmed cases worldwide passes 5 million – that’s in a period of roughly five months.
William Haseltine, the groundbreaking cancer, HIV/AIDS and human genome projects researcher, has said the best approach to the pandemic is to manage the disease through careful tracing of infections and strict isolation measures whenever it starts spreading.
He said that while a vaccine could be developed, “I wouldn’t count on it”, and urged people to wear masks, wash hands, clean surfaces and keep a distance.
The United States and other countries has not done enough to “forcibly isolate” people exposed to the virus, Haseltine said, but praised China, South Korea and Taiwan’s efforts to curb infections. Haseltine said the US, Russia and Brazil – which rank first, second and third for infections – have done the worst.
Differing testing rates and definitions (for example excluding cases in aged care homes from national totals), underreporting, and time lags mean that that the true number of infections is certainly higher.
Cases first emerged in Wuhan, China in late December 2019.
The sombre milestone comes after 106,000 new cases were recorded worldwide over the past 24 hours – the most in a single day so far. The increase prompted the World Health Organization to issue a stark warning on Wednesday: the coronavirus pandemic is far from over.
The US has the highest number of confirmed cases worldwide, with 1,551,853.
Sailors aboard the hospital ship USNS Comfort treat patients in the ship’s intensive care unit on 15 April 2020 in New York. Photograph: Scott Bigley/US NAVY/AFP via Getty Images
A 10-minute home saliva test for coronavirus is under development in a deal struck between the billionaire co-founder of online fashion brand BooHoo and a Cambridge-based firm.
The antigen test, which would be available to buy, will look similar to a pregnancy test but will use a saliva sample rather than urine, and is designed to give a result within 10 minutes:
