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UK coronavirus death toll hits 31,241 after rise of 626

Britain's coronavirus death toll has passed 31,000 after a rise of 626.




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Donald Trump donor to represent Joe Biden assault accuser Tara Reade

Tara Reade, the woman who has accused US Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden of assault, will be legally represented by a donor for President Donald Trump.




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Government misses coronavirus testing target for sixth day running

The Government has missed its testing target of 100,000 coronavirus tests a day by the end of April for the sixth day running.




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Plans to ramp up rail services to start next Monday, claims Union

Plans to ramp up rail services have been brought forward by a week and will start from next Monday, a union is claiming.




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McDonald's Drive-Thru 'made for social distancing' and are safe to reopen, says Environment Secretary George Eustice

Drive-thru restaurants such as McDonald's are "made for social distancing", Environment Secretary George Eustice has said.




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UK weather forecast: Brits set to bask in glorious sunshine as temperatures soar to scorching 26C

The UK is set to bask in glorious sunshine on Saturday with temperatures forecast to hit 26C (78.8F).




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UK Coronavirus LIVE: Britain 'not out of the woods' with outbreak as death toll passes 31,000

The UK is "not out of the woods" and will live with coronavirus for some time as the death toll passes 31,000, Environment Secretary George Eustice has said.




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Downing Street says JustGiving will want to 'reflect' on '£300K fee' for Captain Tom Moore's fundraiser

Downing Street has said JustGiving will want to "reflect" on fees taken for processing Captain Tom Moore's £32 million fundraiser for NHS charities.




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UK weather forecast: Stay at home warning as temperatures set to soar to 26C

Britain is set for another day of sunshine, with temperatures expected to soar to 26C before cooler weather tomorrow.




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Arrivals in UK airports and sea ports 'to enter enforced quarantine for two weeks'

One trade body said the quarantine period would have a devastating impact on the UK aviation industry and wider economy




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Cosham street party accused of breaching social distancing rules live on TV




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Travel, garden centres and schools - how could the UK's lockdown be eased?

Boris Johnson will reveal on Sunday the Government's "road map" on how it will lift restrictions during the coronavirus pandemic, in what is expected to be a "modest" easing of lockdown.




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'Dedicated and loving' nurse dies five weeks after being put on ventilator

A "dedicated and loving" nurse with coronavirus has tragically died five weeks after first being placed on a ventilator.




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Government fails to hit Matt Hancock's 100,000 testing target for seventh day in a row




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UK coronavirus LIVE: Boris Johnson's lockdown easing 'will be in line with Wales' as official death toll rises above 31,500




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UK coronavirus death toll among Covid-19 hospital patients rises by 256




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Official UK coronavirus death toll rises by 346 to 31,587

The UK's official coronavirus death toll has risen by 346 to 31,587.




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Focaccia, the choose-your-own-adventure flatbread, is ideal for lockdown baking

Sourdough has exploded in popularity during lockdown, but focaccia is experiencing its own modest rise




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Axl Rose calls U.S. treasury secretary ‘officially an a——‘ in Twitter fight

The lead singer of U.S. rock band Guns N' Roses and U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin have engaged in an escalating social-media exchange that's gone viral




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Elon Musk and Grimes can’t seem to agree on the pronunciation of baby X Æ A-12’s name

Is the Æ supposed to sound like 'eye' or 'ash'? We're just as confused too





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Seinfeld stand-up special suffers from a pandemic of bad timing, says Chris Knight

Comedian takes on air travel, restaurants, ball games and other pastimes of the distant past that was 2019








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'Stood up for liberty and common sense'! Guess where Sen. Ted Cruz got a haircut today [video]









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The Tie That Binds These Grandparents In Isolation? TikTok

NPR's reporter in Nairobi finds his parents connecting with his kids through TikTok. Formerly the realm of Gen Z, the app's now a family board game where Grandma and Grandpa reveal their silly selves.




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Karissa Sanbonmatsu: What Can Epigenetics Tell Us About Sex And Gender?

We're used to thinking of DNA as a rigid blueprint. Karissa Sanbonmatsu researches how our environment affects the way DNA expresses itself—especially when it comes to sex and gender.









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China’s new spacecraft—which resembles a Crew Dragon—just landed

China now has a capsule potentially capable of returning from the Moon.




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10 of the best novels set in Italy – that will take you there

Elena Ferrante’s Naples, Umberto Eco’s medieval mysteries, EM Forster’s Tuscany … Italy comes alive through these great books
10 of the best novels about France

Long before Covid-19, there were always bad things in the press about Italy: corruption, mafia, bureaucracy. But, whenever I went, life seemed to work out even so. People may be poor but they still sit in the sun, drink and chat; music and culture are a birthright; the right seems in the ascendant but on the ground it feels blessed with far-seeing idealists – it has almost four times as much land under organic cultivation as the UK, for example. For now, my remedy to the withdrawal symptoms I feel is to visit via the written word. Many writers have set books in Italy – I was sorry to leave out Martin Amis’s The Pregnant Widow (Calabria), and Ali Smith’s How to be Both (Ferrara) – but here are my top 10 romanze italiane.

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Fifty Shades of Sligo: Normal People poses a challenge for Irish tourism

The travel industry has sifted through the BBC show’s many sex scenes to showcase shots of Ireland’s landscape

Promoting Ireland as a tourism destination used to be straightforward – just showcase the bucolic landscape and put a slogan on the end – but that was before Normal People turned a chunk of the Atlantic coast into Fifty Shades of Sligo.

The television adaptation of Sally Rooney’s novel features beautiful shots of Sligo’s beaches and mountains, plus Trinity College Dublin, but there is also sex. Lots of sex.

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Swarm Technologies chooses Momentus and SpaceX to launch constellation of tiny satellites

Swarm Technologies has struck an agreement with California-based Momentus for the launch of a dozen telecommunication satellites, each the size of a slice of bread, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in December. The December rideshare mission is the first of a series that Momentum plans to execute for Swarm, continuing into 2021 and 2022. Swarm plans to have 150 satellites launched over the next couple of years for a communication network in low Earth orbit. The first 12 SpaceBee satellites covered by the agreement announced today will be deployed into orbit from the Falcon 9. The inch-thick satellites fit… Read More





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Nature crisis: 'Insect apocalypse' more complicated than thought

The health of insect populations globally is far more varied than previous research suggested.





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Software tools for mining COVID-19 research studies go viral among scientists

One month after the debut of the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset, or CORD-19, the database of coronavirus-related research papers has doubled in size – and has given rise to more than a dozen software tools to channel the hundreds of studies that are being published every day about the pandemic. In a roundup published on the ArXiv preprint server this week, researchers from Seattle's Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Microsoft Research and other partners in the project say CORD-19's collection has risen from about 28,000 papers to more than 52,000. Every day, several hundred more papers are being published, in… Read More





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Hubble telescope's Universe revealed in 3D

New techniques are being used to transform images from Hubble into spectacular 3D visualisations.





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Nasa space lasers track melting of Earth's ice sheets

US space agency satellites follow the melting trends in Antarctica and Greenland over 16 years.





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Bill Gates says the world will need 7 billion vaccine doses to end COVID-19 pandemic

Bill Gates has been big on vaccines since before the start of the coronavirus pandemic, but in a new blog posting, the Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist says the only way to end the pandemic for good is to offer a vaccine to almost all of the planet's 7 billion inhabitants. That's big. "We've never delivered something to every corner of the world before," Gates notes. It's especially big considering that a vaccine hasn't yet been approved for widespread use, and that it may take as long as a year to 18 months to win approval and start distribution. Some… Read More





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ICESat-2 laser-scanning satellite tracks how billions of tons of polar ice are lost

A satellite mission that bounces laser light off the ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland has found that hundreds of billions of tons' worth of ice are being lost every year due to Earth's changing climate. Scientists involved in NASA's ICESat-2 project report in the journal Science that the net loss of ice from those regions has been responsible for 0.55 inches of sea level rise since 2003. That's slightly less than a third of the total amount of sea level rise observed in the world's oceans over that time. To track how the ice sheets are changing, the ICESat-2… Read More





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NASA and SpaceX get set to make history with landmark spaceflight during pandemic

Everything is in readiness for the first mission to send humans into orbit from U.S. soil since NASA retired the space shuttle fleet in 2011 – from the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule that will take two astronauts to the International Space Station, to the parachutes that will bring them back down gently to an Atlantic Ocean splashdown, to the masks that NASA's ground team will wear in Mission Control. The fact that the launch is coming in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic has added a weird and somewhat wistful twist to the history-making event. "That certainly is disappointing," NASA… Read More