"But Matilda's story is particularly remarkable because she resisted what was expected of a black woman in the US South in the years after emancipation," Dr Durkin says. "She didn't get married. "Instead, she had a decades-long common-law marriage with a white German-born man, with whom she had 14 children."

The couple's relationship was "astonishing" for its era, she says, crossing boundaries of race, class, religion and social expectation.

In her 70s, Matilda set out on another journey, travelling for 15 miles on dirt roads to a county courthouse to make a claim for compensation for her enslavement.By then, she was one of a small number of surviving slaves from Africa who seem to have made contact with each other.

The army has been deployed to deep clean hospitals and other facilities as well as some 900 nursing homes, where at least 1,517 deaths have reportedly been recorded.

Meanwhile, the health ministry said some 9,000 rapid diagnostic tests imported from China through a Spanish company had proved defective. It said the kits had European approval and their use had been suspended.

In Italy, the head of the National Health Institute, Silvio Brusafero, said the numbers suggested the rate of new cases was "slowing down", showing that the strict measures implemented across the country were "having their effects".

In a letter to state governors on Thursday, Mr Trump said his team plans to release federal social distancing guidelines that may advise some regions to loosen restrictions.

He said the "new guidelines" would create low, medium and high risk zones that would allow the government to advise on "maintaining, increasing, or relaxing social distancing and other mitigation measures they have put in place".

On 16 March, he set a 15-day period to slow down the spread of Covid-19 by urging all Americans to drastically scale back their public interactions. But those guidelines were voluntary and did not amount to a national order.

Ten days ago, D.O.C.C.S. closed all its prisons to visitors—with the exception of non-contact legal visits—and issued each prisoner five postage stamps, two electronic messages, and one free phone call per week.

It’s nearly impossible to provide infection control in these settings,”

“If you wanted to set up a situation that would promote rapid transmission of a respiratory virus, you would say prison: it’s close quarters, unsanitary, individuals in frequent contact.”

“All programs have been cancelled except the Soap Shop,”

Earlier this month, about a week after New York reported its first case of COVID-19, and when stores were beginning to run out of toilet paper and hand sanitizer, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that incarcerated workers had begun producing a state-branded hand sanitizer, called NYS Clean.

The soap shop is part of Corcraft, a state entity that pays workers between sixteen and sixty-five cents per hour,

When I asked D.O.C.C.S. about preparations for the coronavirus, a spokesperson told me that every facility has an emergency control plan, and that state prisons were used to dealing with infectious diseases,

On Friday, I summarized my reporting for Gregg Gonsalves, the epidemiologist, and asked him whether he considered the prison system’s preparations sufficient. “You have a gaping wound and you’re giving a Band-Aid,” he replied. Although the U.S. as a whole may be able to flatten the curve of the outbreak through social distancing, Gonsalves said, he expected to see in prisons, jails, and immigration detention centers a largely “uncontrolled, unflattened curve,”

Economists now expect the US economy to fall into a recession in the second quarter, before staging a comeback later in the year after the spread of the virus slows.

The humanitarian crisis could culminate in an unparalleled health crisis when COVID-19 reaches Syria's northwest

The Early Warning and Alert Response Network (EWARN), the only disease surveillance group operating in this part of Syria, says that between 40 and 70% of the population could get infected, based on global transmission rates.

In all of opposition-held Syria, only one doctor and one device can carry out tests for the virus.

"The delay in supplying test kits to northwest Syria does not imply any favoring of one side of the conflict over the other, as some may choose to interpret it," Brennan says."We are busting our guts to make sure everything is ready,"

Even in government-controlled parts of Syria, capacity for testing remains low. The country has reported only five confirmed cases, but experts expect a bigger spread.

All of Syria is considered by the WHO to be a very high risk country in the event of the pandemic's outbreak.  It has the largest population of internally displaced people in the world and its war has dealt a major blow to its health sector.

In his handling of the coronavirus outbreak, Johnson has sought refuge in the classic Churchillian mix of defiance and confidence, previously reassuring the nation it will “get through this” even if “many more families are going to lose loved ones.”

Even among members of Parliament belonging to his Conservative Party and to advisers close to Johnson that I spoke with, there have been clear signs of tension over his handling of the crisis.

According to Seamus Heaney, the Nobel Prize–winning poet who produced his own translation of Beowulf in 1999, the juxtaposition of youthful vigor and skills eroded by time jumps out at the reader as the hero struggles to fight off the dragon: Beowulf was foiled of a glorious victory. The glittering sword, infallible before that day, failed when he unsheathed it, as it never should have. This is the reality now facing Johnson and other global leaders.

The rules almost certainly mean that the United States is still greatly understating the number of people nationwide who are sick with COVID-19, experts say. There are more than 1,800 discovered coronavirus cases in the United States, but estimates of the outbreak using statistical and genetic models suggest that thousands of people are already sick.

The CDC guidelines—which do not carry legal force—allow for testing a wider array of patients than is currently allowed under many state-level rules. Under guidelines updated earlier this week, the agency noted that “priorities for testing” may include severely ill hospitalized patients with no other diagnosis; symptomatic adults who are older or who have a complicating factor, such as heart disease or a suppressed immune system; and any patient who had close contact with a “suspect or laboratory-confirmed” COVID-19 patient.

But the guidelines may also keep doctors from understanding the “local epidemiology”—that is, the extent of the coronavirus’s spread—in their own region.

Most state guidelines do not apply to tests conducted by private laboratory firms that do routine medical testing, such as Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp. Those firms say they can test 5,000 people a day, combined, but they take three to four days to deliver results, compared with 24 hours for a state public-health or on-site hospital lab test.

What’s happening here, in this country, was avoidable. Nearly every flaw in America’s response to the virus has one source: America did not test enough people for COVID-19.

If there is one thing about the novel coronavirus that you must understand, it’s that it is a firecracker with a long fuse. Here is what the explosion looks like: Every six days, the number of people infected by the disease doubles

Every six days that the country did not test, every six days that it did not act, the number of infected Americans doubled.

“If you don’t know where the disease is early in the epidemic, you have no hope of containing it,” Bhadelia said. “Even now, [testing is] that Achilles’ heel; it’s the crack that is making its way throughout our entire response.”

Testing should have answered the all-important question in any pandemic: How many people are sick right now? Had the nation known that, the systems that were put into place over years of pandemic planning could have powered on, protecting millions of Americans and containing the illness.

An invisible fuse sets off this burst of disease. If someone is infected with the coronavirus on Monday, she may start being contagious and infecting other people by Wednesday. But she may not start showing symptoms until Friday—meaning that she was spreading the virus before she even knew she had it. And in some cases, infected people take 14 days to start showing symptoms.

the CDC hit a disastrous roadblock, as it began to send test kits to public-health labs across the country. Two of the test’s reagents were fine, in most cases, but a third chemical initially deemed necessary for the test simply did not work. For the time being, every test for COVID-19 would have to be conducted by the CDC.As the CDC struggled to find a solution, other laboratories tried to bring their own tests online. They found themselves hamstrung by the FDA, which, though it repeatedly loosened the rules, could not move as fast as the coronavirus.

No one at the federal level was moving fast enough to actually deal with the looming disaster.

On February 26, the CDC confirmed what should have been clear much earlier: Community transmission in the United States had begun. The coronavirus was now spreading among Americans who had not traveled abroad or known a confirmed case. At least 60 people in the country now had the virus, according to the CDC’s totals at the time—and, as researchers and analysts soon realized, the true number was almost certainly much higher.

By the end of February, the disease had not only established itself in the United States. It had been circulating for close to six weeks. Seattle, on March 1, found itself in the same position as Wuhan did on January 1, with a growing coronavirus outbreak that was on the verge of exploding.

February was our chance to get this right. We lost that entire month. And we now live in a new era of work stoppages, overwhelmed hospitals, dead elders, and a wrecked economy.

Beyond the 2020 horizon, trade arrangements between many African countries and a fully-Brexited UK are also set to remain the same under a number of "continuity agreements". These basically say that the trade conditions (tariffs, quotas, standards and so on) remain the same as they are currently between a number of African countries and trading blocs and the EU.

Outside the big EU gang, the UK, technically, has less negotiating clout. That could mean that the African countries that trade with the UK may be able to squeeze out slightly more preferential terms in negotiations. Perhaps.

Flowers are one of Kenya's biggest exports and foreign currency earners. The industry is also a major employer, providing 100,000 people with direct work and around two million indirectly.

As far as African companies are concerned, the post-Brexit world will depend very much on the nature of their business with both the EU and the UK. "Companies that depend heavily on EU-related preferences in the UK market need to keep a watchful eye on developments in Europe; and on negotiations between the UK and their own country on future arrangements," says Matthew Stern at DNA Economics in Pretoria.

"Every step forward for women, is a step forward for humanity as a whole," he said.

Mars won't just be a harsh environment for humans, but the fungi as well. The fungi will need cyanobacteria to survive. Cyanobacteria uses solar energy to convert dioxide and water in oxygen and food.

Huge crowds were present to witness the rare sermon, with President Hassan Rouhani in the front row alongside parliament speaker Ali Larijani. The last time Khamenei presided over Friday prayers was in 2012 to mark the 33rd anniversary of the Islamic Revolution.

They come at a pivotal time for Iran, after vigils to mourn those who died in the Ukraine International Airlines crash quickly turned into mass anti-government demonstrations, with calls for Khamenei to step down and for those responsible for downing the plane to be prosecuted.

Iran's military initially denied shooting down the plane before admitting to it several days later, saying the plane was "accidentally hit by human error." Khamenei expressed his condolences to the families of the victims, but said foreign press had tried to deceive Iranians over the crash.