SpaceX and Nasa launched the Crew Dragon spacecraft at 8:22pm UK time. This is the second attempt to send two astronauts to the Internatational Space Station after a weather postponement on Wednesday Launch is the first time a private company has sent astronauts to space, the first crewed launch from US soil since 2011 and the first crewed launch in Nasa's Commercial Crew programme.

Germany should tread carefully as it eases lockdown restrictions to keep its coronavirus reproduction rate in a sweet spot that protects health while minimising economic damage, researchers have warned.

Keeping the country’s R rate between around 0.6 and 0.75 provides the safest balance between hammering output and risking a new outburst of infections, said researchers at the ifo Institute – one of Germany’s biggest think-tanks – and the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI).

“The strategy of prudent, step-by-step relaxation is preferable not only in terms of health policy but also economically,” said ifo President Clemens Fuest and HZI’s Michael Meyer-Hermann. “If policymakers allow more economic activity in the short term, our simulation analyses show that this extends the restrictions phase to such a degree that the overall costs increase.”

Based on Germany’s situation on April 20, researchers said epidemiological and economic calculations...

“It is a race, yes. But it's not a race against the other guys. It's a race against the virus disappearing, and against time,” Professor Hill, 61, told the Telegraph from his university laboratory, long emptied by the lockdown.

“We said earlier in the year that there was an 80 per cent chance of developing an effective vaccine by September.

“But at the moment, there’s a 50 per cent chance that we get no result at all.

“We’re in the bizarre position of wanting Covid to stay, at least for a little while. But cases are declining."

At the Downing Street press conference on May 17, Business Secretary Alok Sharma suggested half the UK population could be given the jab this autumn, should it prove effective.

But Prof Hill said success was far from guaranteed, and warned against “over-promising”.

“I wouldn’t book a holiday in October on the back of these announcements, put it that way,” he said.

“The number keeps going up. Thirty...

No?10 said the reports were “inaccurate”. Additionally Mr Cummings is understood to have told Number 10 that the claims that he returned north after April 13 as “totally false”.

In another developing row, Durham Constabulary tonight said Mr Cummings' father had spoken to officers on the phone.

The police statement said: “During that conversation, Mr Cummings’ father confirmed that his son had travelled with his family from London to the North-East and was self-isolating in part of the property.

“Durham Constabulary deemed that no further action was required. However, the officer did provide advice in relation to security issue.”  

Number 10 had previously said that the police had not spoken to Mr Cummings or his family, with a spokesman saying: “At no stage was he or his family spoken to by the police about this matter, as is being reported.”

Senior Downing Street sources also made clear that Mr Cummings would continue...

The indirect impact is equally cataclysmic. Parents of younger children cannot work at all, Zoom or no Zoom. Millions of others are house-bound: they cannot travel to shops or factories or hospitals or warehouses. Our economy depends on childcare and schooling for parents to be able to operate, especially with grandparents in confinement. The costs in terms of unemployment will be horrific. Hundreds of thousands of lives will be ruined.

The real critique of the Government’s plans is that they are too modest, given the dramatic decline in new infections, especially outside care homes: Labour should be arguing that schools should be reopening faster. Why isn’t Sadiq Khan, the London mayor, pointing out that his R-rate has collapsed to almost zero, demanding that all schools in the capital be released from lockdown to allow the city he supposedly cares about to start to recover? Instead, the Left, once again, has allied itself with the barons...

The indirect impact is equally cataclysmic. Parents of younger children cannot work at all, Zoom or no Zoom. Millions of others are house-bound: they cannot travel to shops or factories or hospitals or warehouses. Our economy depends on childcare and schooling for parents to be able to operate, especially with grandparents in confinement. The costs in terms of unemployment will be horrific. Hundreds of thousands of lives will be ruined.

The real critique of the Government’s plans is that they are too modest, given the dramatic decline in new infections, especially outside care homes: Labour should be arguing that schools should be reopening faster. Why isn’t Sadiq Khan, the London mayor, pointing out that his R-rate has collapsed to almost zero, demanding that all schools in the capital be released from lockdown to allow the city he supposedly cares about to start to recover? Instead, the Left, once again, has allied itself with the barons...

High Speed 2 is "badly off course" and it is unclear that the firm building the £100 billion rail line has the necessary "skills and capability", according to a damning report by the Parliament's most influential committee.

The Public Accounts Committee accuses the Department for Transport (DfT)  of withholding information about HS2's spiralling costs, as its members said they were "unconvinced" that the budget would not rise further.

In a highly critical report, MPs on the committee suggest that Bernadette Kelly, the department's most senior official, may have broken the civil service code, after her "failure to explicitly inform the committee of the programme’s delays and overspend", when questioned about the project in Parliament.

The report will fuel calls for the scheme to be scrapped, with critics insisting the money should be directed to services such as superfast broadband, after the Covid-19 pandemic...

Britain is heading for an Eighties-style unemployment crisis with up to half the workforce braced for a hit to incomes, a top Bank of England official has warned.

Andy Haldane, its chief economist, said more than half of the nation’s 33-million-strong workforce was already unemployed, furloughed or working shorter hours as a result of the Covid-19 shutdown.

He said: “The very reason I got into economics and the reason I got into public policy was because of the scarring experience of the early Eighties unemployment which peaked at three and a bit million – and we’re going back to that, basically.

“Those fears are going to be cast over a much wider cohort of the workforce, maybe as much as half of them. We need to find a way of reabsorbing all of that labour as quickly as possible in good jobs.”

Cafes, pubs and restaurants would be allowed to sell food and drink from street stalls within weeks and small church weddings could take place from July, under plans being considered by ministers to gradually ease the lockdown.

Businesses that hold licences to have tables and chairs at the front of their premises are to be allowed to set up market-style stalls instead, as part of a bid to begin reviving high streets before pubs and eateries can begin opening their doors to customers, potentially in the summer.

Boris Johnson is also understood to favour proposals to temporarily relax Sunday trading laws to help boost the economy and allow more time for key workers to shop while social distancing is in place.

Separately, following talks with faith leaders including The Most Rev Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Ephraim Mirvis, the Chief Rabbi, on Friday, the Government is drawing up plans to allow small weddings...

Blood-thinning drugs can help save Covid-19 patients' lives, leading British doctors have found, raising hopes of a major breakthrough in the race to find a treatment for the deadly virus.

London specialists made the breakthrough after discovering coronavirus triggered potentially deadly blood clots in every seriously ill patient they tested using pioneering scanning technology.

The Telegraph understands that NHS England is set to issue hospitals with fresh guidance on blood thinning, which is likely to eventually lead to carefully administered higher doses for the critically ill.

Professor Peter Openshaw, who sits on the Government's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) sub-group on clinical information, said that an "unprecedented amount of collaboration" between scientists had revealed "a really quite extraordinary story about a virus about which we hitherto knew nothing".

Specialists at Royal Brompton Hospital’s severe...

Blood-thinning drugs can help save Covid-19 patients' lives, leading British doctors have found, raising hopes of a major breakthrough in the race to find a treatment for the deadly virus.

London specialists made the breakthrough after discovering coronavirus triggered potentially deadly blood clots in every seriously ill patient they tested using pioneering scanning technology.

The Telegraph understands that NHS England is set to issue hospitals with fresh guidance on blood thinning, which is likely to eventually lead to carefully administered higher doses for the critically ill.

Professor Peter Openshaw, who sits on the Government's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) sub-group on clinical information, said that an "unprecedented amount of collaboration" between scientists had revealed "a really quite extraordinary story about a virus about which we hitherto knew nothing".

Specialists at Royal Brompton Hospital’s severe...

One should give the Left its due: it never lets a good crisis go to waste. The virus has trashed the public finances, so the answer from the “experts” must be, yes, you guessed it, taxing what is left of the economy until the pips squeak.

The outrageous ideas being floated by HM’s supposedly impartial Treasury – in reality intellectually identikit, social-democratic apparatchiks – include a repudiation of the Tory manifesto, a wealth and property levy, higher VAT, income tax and corporation tax and just about every other one of the modern liberal?Left’s wet dreams, repackaged neatly in a box stamped “Covid”.

As Antonio Gramsci, one of the Left’s most influential thinkers, put it in his Prison Notebooks: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Lockdown, the greatest recession since 1706, a deficit of up to £516...

One should give the Left its due: it never lets a good crisis go to waste. The virus has trashed the public finances, so the answer from the “experts” must be, yes, you guessed it, taxing what is left of the economy until the pips squeak.

The outrageous ideas being floated by HM’s supposedly impartial Treasury – in reality intellectually identikit, social-democratic apparatchiks – include a repudiation of the Tory manifesto, a wealth and property levy, higher VAT, income tax and corporation tax and just about every other one of the modern liberal?Left’s wet dreams, repackaged neatly in a box stamped “Covid”.

As Antonio Gramsci, one of the Left’s most influential thinkers, put it in his Prison Notebooks: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Lockdown, the greatest recession since 1706, a deficit of up to £516...

The effectiveness of the Government's initial instructions for people to "stay at home, protect the NHS and save lives" is crystallised in the new slogan drawn up for the second phase of the response to Covid-19, which is focused on controlling the virus while gradually easing some restrictions.

By asking the UK to "stay alert, control the virus, save lives", Downing Street drops the core messages to remain indoors and protect the health service - instructions that resulted in far greater numbers of people than expected staying at home.

The messaging forms part of the balancing act on which Boris Johnson will now embark, as he attempts to encourage workers to return to offices and factories where they can safely do so, to help gradually "unlock" the economy after a nationwide lockdown lasting for almost two months.

To succeed, the Government must persuade staff that it is safe to return to work, and so the instruction to "stay alert" will apply as much...

The effectiveness of the Government's initial instructions for people to "stay at home, protect the NHS and save lives" is crystallised in the new slogan drawn up for the second phase of the response to Covid-19, which is focused on controlling the virus while gradually easing some restrictions.

By asking the UK to "stay alert, control the virus, save lives", Downing Street drops the core messages to remain indoors and protect the health service - instructions that resulted in far greater numbers of people than expected staying at home.

The messaging forms part of the balancing act on which Boris Johnson will now embark, as he attempts to encourage workers to return to offices and factories where they can safely do so, to help gradually "unlock" the economy after a nationwide lockdown lasting for almost two months.

To succeed, the Government must persuade staff that it is safe to return to work, and so the instruction to "stay alert" will apply as much...

The effectiveness of the Government's initial instructions for people to "stay at home, protect the NHS and save lives" is crystallised in the new slogan drawn up for the second phase of the response to Covid-19, which is focused on controlling the virus while gradually easing some restrictions.

By asking the UK to "stay alert, control the virus, save lives", Downing Street drops the core messages to remain indoors and protect the health service - instructions that resulted in far greater numbers of people than expected staying at home.

The messaging forms part of the balancing act on which Boris Johnson will now embark, as he attempts to encourage workers to return to offices and factories where they can safely do so, to help gradually "unlock" the economy after a nationwide lockdown lasting for almost two months.

To succeed, the Government must persuade staff that it is safe to return to work, and so the instruction to "stay alert" will apply as much...