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Morning mail: police crackdown, global cases surpass 1m, meditative cooking

<span>Photograph: James Ross/AAP</span>
Photograph: James Ross/AAP

Good morning, this is Richard Parkin bringing you the main stories and must-reads on Friday 3 April.

Coronavirus

The Australian government has scrapped childcare fees to help parents who keep working during the coronavirus crisis, as the prime minister warned the nation to expect at least six months of disruption. Western Australia announced it would shut its border this weekend, and in Newcastle, a man eating a kebab on a public bench has been fined as part of New South Wales and Victoria-wide crackdowns on people being outside their houses without a reasonable excuse. Ratings agency Moodys expects an increase in mortgage defaults across Australia and has forecast home prices will fall, as the pandemic hits the housing market. And on the Australian politics live podcast, Katharine Murphy analyses how the Morrison government has transformed in the face of the coronavirus. Australia’s death toll is now 24.

The number of global cases of Covid-19 has surpassed one million, according to the Johns Hopkins University tally. Globally the official death toll has passed 50,000, with Spain registering its 10,000th death overnight, and Italy approaching 14,000. Asian nations are bracing for a potential second wave of Covid-19 infections, as panicked citizens rush home to beat border closures. Countries like Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong – considered among the most successful in preventing the spread of infections – have seen an uptick in new cases amid growing complacency. The British health minister has set a target of 100,000 tests a day by the end of April, as part of a five-pillar strategy to combat the virus. In Germany, more than 1.1m small businesses have applied for governmental assistance with €1.8bn worth of payments already approved.

More than 6.65m Americans filed for unemployment benefits last week, showing the widespread effect the disease has had on the US economy. Unemployment is believed to have shot to 17% , up from a rate of 3.5% in February. There have been more than 217,000 confirmed cases in the USA, with New York the most severely affected at 84,000, as the national death toll passed 5,000. In Canada, a flight worker has expressed her devastation at being “part of the spread”, warning that best-practice prevention methods may not always be enough.

Australia

State forest in Victoria
The Victorian government has extended five regional forest agreements, which exempt the logging industry from conservation laws. Photograph: Melanie Stetson Freeman/Getty Images

The Victorian state government is facing criticism from wildlife groups for its decision to extend exemptions from conservation laws for the logging industry due to a reduction in timber stocks caused by the summer bushfires.

Smaller regional universities are facing collapse due to plummeting international enrolments, Labor’s Tanya Plibersek has warned, calling on the federal government to put together a package of support for the sector.

An agreement protecting traditional news businesses from digital giants like Facebook and Google could be in place before the end of the year, Australia’s competition regulator has flagged.

The world

Refugees at the Greek port of Piraeus
Refugees at the Greek port of Piraeus in September 2015. That year, EU nations agreed to relocate refugees from Italy and Greece as the two countries struggled with large numbers of arrivals. Photograph: Alkis Konstantinidis/REUTERS

Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic broke European law by failing to accept their share of refugees during the 2015 migration crisis, the EU’s top court has found. The three member states now face considerable fines and further legal action.

Iran’s leadership has responded to allegations from US president Donald Trump that the nation is planning an attack on American troops in Iraq, claiming the nation only ever acts in self-defence and does not act through “proxies”.

Cybersecurity experts have called video conferencing platform Zoom “a privacy disaster”, amid claims the company has mishandled user data. The platform has experienced a 535% rise in daily traffic in the US alone last month.

A 28-year-old first-time Dutch author is the surprise name shortlisted for the Booker prize. Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s novel, The Discomfort of Evening, deals with “the shocks and violence of early youth”. The winner will be announced on 19 May.

Recommended reads

Hugh Grant in Bram Stoker's the White Worm
Hugh Grant plays a toff in camp horror film The Lair of the White Worm, based on the novel by Bram Stoker. Photograph: TCD/Prod.DB/Alamy Stock Photo

He’s the Englishman who constantly finds himself ever-so-charmingly befuddled, but is there more to Hugh Grant’s back catalogue of films? Amid a mini Hugh-naissance, Jenny Valentish uncovers three streamable “and coincidentally rather softcore and Sapphic” curios from his oeuvre of early works.

After the disbelief, the shock, comes a dawning realisation – under coronavirus life will be radically changed, writes Brigid Delaney. “I keep thinking – I’ve got to get home. Home to the friends and the airports, and the cities, home to the restaurants, and the beaches, and home to the art galleries, home to the pubs and live music gigs, home to the friends’ houses, and home to my parents, and home to the bars and the buses and trams. But of course, I can’t. None of us can.”

People who love to cook know about the remedial benefits of food prep. “There’s a satisfaction in turning out a perfect finely diced onion, or hand-whipping egg whites to glossy stiff peaks,” writes Sharnee Rawson. It’s not exactly meditation, but there can be something very relaxing about repetitive, hands on tasks.

Watch

How many people could one harmless trip to the pub infect? In the latest episode of The Frant for Guardian Australia, Jan Fran explains the one message medical experts overwhelmingly agree on in these coronavirus times: stay home.

Sport

Netball bushfire relief charity game
Netball, like other women’s sport in Australia, is facing a battle amid the hiatus caused by the coronavirus. Photograph: Mark Evans/AAP

The coronavirus is ravaging competitions around the world – but will its impact be disproportionately felt by women’s sport? With clubs and competitions in their infancy there’s often little weight of history or power of nostalgia to draw upon, writes Megan Maurice.

After Newcastle United’s decision to furlough its non-first team staff, how are all the Premier League clubs responding to the coronavirus? Guardian Sport take a look at all 20 clubs, and what the immediate future holds for staff.

Media roundup

WA premier Mark McGowan has declared Western Australia its “own country”, writes the West Australian, announcing a “hard border” from midnight Sunday preventing international or Eastern state visitors unless they have specific exemptions. More than 100,000 overseas backpackers on working holiday visas could be forced home, claims the Daily Telegraph, if health officials deem their present living arrangements unsafe. And, a documentary team hoping to examine new leads in the search for the Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine, has won a $50,000 Screen Australia grant, reports the Mercury.

Coming up

Daylight saving ends this weekend. Clocks will go back an hour at 3am on Sunday in NSW, Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania and the ACT.

The ABS will publish its data on retail trade for February, a snapshot of the health of Australia’s retail sector and consumer spending.

And if you’ve read this far …

They say no good deed goes unpunished – and a Scottish brewery’s attempt to help the fight against the coronavirus has been declined, after its home-brewed “punk sanitiser” was turned down by a local hospital for not meeting health standards. But 100,000 bottles in, the good people at BrewDog aren’t giving up.