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August polls were seen as a key test of the reformist agenda of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed.
A woman wearing a face mask, runs in front of a truck spraying disinfectant on the street as part of measures to prevent the potential spread of COVID-19 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia [Tiksa Negeri/Reuters]
Ethiopia has postponed parliamentary and presidential elections scheduled for August due to the coronavirus outbreak, the electoral commission has announced.
The August polls had been seen as a key test of the reformist agenda of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed in what was once one of the continent's most repressive nations.
"Because of issues related to the coronavirus, the board has decided it can't conduct the election as planned... so it has decided to void that calendar and suspend all activities," the poll body said in a statement on Tuesday.
It said a new date would be given "when the pandemic is over".
Jawar Mohammed, a leading opposition politician, told AFP news agency that a new calendar "cannot be done by the ruling party alone".
Ethiopia has recorded 25 cases of COVID-19 and federal and regional officials have introduced a range of measures intended to curb its spread, including banning large gatherings and restricting travel.
These measures would have prevented the timely completion of activities like voter registration and the recruitment and training of observers, the election commission said.
Ethiopia is Africa's second-most populous nation. When Abiy took power in 2018, he promised to liberalise the state-run economy and introduced reforms that saw thousands of political prisoners released.
He had promised to hold free and fair elections in August when his party would have faced a stiff challenge from many ethnically-based parties newly emboldened by his reforms.
Saudi Arabia has asked Muslims to wait until there is more clarity about the coronavirus pandemicbefore planning to attend the annual Hajjpilgrimage, the Minister for Hajj and Umrah said on state TV on Tuesday.
Earlier this month, Saudi Arabia suspended the year-round Umrah pilgrimage over fears of the new coronavirus spreading to Islam's holiest cities, an unprecedented move that raised uncertainty over the annual Hajj.
Some 2.5 million pilgrims from around the world usually flock to Mecca and Medina cities for the week-long ritual scheduled to begin in late July. The pilgrimage is also a significant source of income for the kingdom.
"Saudi Arabia is fully ready to serve pilgrims and Umrah seekers," Minister Mohammed Saleh Benten told the state-run Al-Ekhbariya television.
"But under the current circumstances, as we are talking about the global pandemic... the kingdom is keen to protect the health of Muslims and citizens and so we have asked our brother Muslims in all countries to wait before doing [Hajj] contracts until the situation is clear."
Besides suspending Umrah pilgrimage, Saudi Arabia has also halted all international passenger flights indefinitely and last week blocked entry and exit to several cities, including Mecca and Medina.
Pilgrimage is big business for Saudi Arabia and the backbone of plans to expand visitor numbers under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's ambitious economic reform agenda.
Cancelling the Hajj would be unprecedented in modern times, but curbing attendance from high-risk areas has happened before, including in recent years during the Ebola outbreak.
To date, the kingdom has reported just over 1,500 confirmed coronavirus cases and 10 deaths. Globally, more than 825,000 people have been infected with over 40,000 deaths recorded.
Previous epidemics
Disease outbreaks have regularly been a concern surrounding the Hajj, required of all able-bodied Muslims once in their life, especially as pilgrims come from all over the world.
The earliest recorded outbreak came in 632 as pilgrims fought off malaria. A cholera outbreak in 1821 killed an estimated 20,000 pilgrims. Another cholera outbreak in 1865 killed 15,000 pilgrims and then spread worldwide.
More recently, Saudi Arabia faced danger from a related coronavirus that caused Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS). A faltering response allowed the virus to kill several hundred people and spread across the region.
The kingdom increased its public health measures in 2012 and 2013, though no outbreak occurred.
A 13-year-old boy who tested positive for coronavirus has died, King's College Hospital Trust in London said.
A spokesman for the trust said the boy's death had been referred to the coroner but gave no further details.
It comes as the biggest daily increase in the number of people who have died with coronavirus in the UK - 381 - was reported.
As of 17:00 BST on Monday, the number of UK deaths linked to the virus was 1,789.
"Sadly, a 13-year old boy who tested positive for Covid-19 has passed away, and our thoughts and condolences are with the family at this time," King's College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust said.
"The death has been referred to the coroner and no further comment will be made."
Earlier, NHS England said that a 19-year-old had died after testing positive for the virus. At that stage, the teenager was believed to be England's youngest death linked to coronavirus.
Meanwhile, Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove described the latest rise in UK deaths as "deeply shocking" during the government's daily briefing.
"Now is absolutely not the time for people to imagine there can be any relaxation or slackening" of lockdown measures, he said
Scientists have been amazed at the public's response to help digitise the UK's old rainfall records.
Handwritten numbers on documents dating back 200 years are being transferred to a spreadsheet format so that computers can analyse past weather patterns.
The volunteers blitzed their way through rain gauge data from the 1950s, 40s and 30s in just four days.
Project leader Prof Ed Hawkins had suggested the work might be a good way for people to use self-isolation time.
"It's been incredible. I thought we might get this far after three or four weeks, not three or four days," he told BBC News.
"We've had almost 12,000 volunteers sign up. They're now working on the 1920s and I'm racing to get the 1910s ready for them."
The volunteers powered through the 1950s, 40s and 30s. The chart above records the rainfall data available now across these decades. Two million data points. Grey lines denote months for which there is still no data, perhaps because a weather station had yet to start measuring rainfall or indeed had terminated the collection effort. The stronger blues to the right are simply a reflection of the stations' locations - in the wetter parts of Scotland and Wales!
If you want to take part in the Rainfall Rescue Project, click here.
Its aim is to recover all the entries on the so-called "10 Year Rainfall Sheets".
These are the 65,000 pieces of paper in the UK Met Office archives that contain the monthly and decadal rainfall totals at thousands of weather stations across the country.
Buried in this mass of data is information that can inform flood and drought planning, but only if its scribbled numbers can be made computer-friendly.
The Met Office has had every sheet scanned, from the 1950s back to the 1820s (60s onwards are already digitised).
Volunteers who visit the Rainfall Rescue Project website are presented with these documents, one after another, and asked to transfer their numbers into a series of boxes.
Prof Hawkins has run a number of similar schemes in the past and is always asked why optical character recognition (OCR) software is not used. But such programs, he says, still can't achieve the accuracy of humans.
The numerals "1" and "7" can look very similar across handwriting styles; likewise a "3" and an "8".
"This tabulated numerical data is a particular challenge, I think, and no-one that we've spoken to yet - and they've been some pretty big companies; the likes of IBM and Google - has really cracked this," the Reading University professor of climate science explained.
"We're getting four volunteers to do every number, and by doing that we can get to over 99% accuracy. I'm sure OCR will improve but right now it can't match what our volunteers do."
How different can the weather be from one August to the next? The rescued data from the 1950s shows one year had a very dry summer that was followed a year later by very wet conditions.
Those volunteers have been sharing anecdotes on the project website's forum.
Rain-gauge records for the royal residences - Buckingham Palace, Balmoral and Sandringham - have been transferred.
People have taken delight in the notes added to the sheets by the original recorders.
There are stories of data being interrupted by trampling animals, and of children throwing stones at gauges. On one sheet from 1948, the abbot says his monastery's time series was interrupted because the gauge had a bullet hole in it and needed repair.
"The volunteers have got really involved with it and started picking out interesting things themselves; they've started discussing months which are either really wet or really dry," said Prof Hawkins.
"They went through 1938 and found the April of that year was exceptionally dry. Lots of places had zero rain for the entire month."
The importance of recovering old weather records can't be overstated.
It's only by putting the present in the context of the past that we can plan properly for the future.
It's only by having dense historic data that we will capture the full range of possibilities in terms of flood and drought frequency, and magnitude, for example.
If you want to take part in the Rainfall Rescue Project, click here.
Image copyrightUK MET OFFICEImage captionAn example of a 10 Year Rainfall Sheet: The rain gauge data for Sandringham House during the WWII
![A woman wearing a face mask, runs in front of a truck spraying disinfectant on the street as part of measures to prevent the potential spread of COVID-19 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia [Tiksa Negeri/Reuters]](https://www.aljazeera.com/mritems/imagecache/mbdxxlarge/mritems/Images/2020/3/31/8e19080a676143358d85e1835cd91284_18.jpg "Ethiopia postpones August elections due to coronavirus")
![Saudi Arabia has already suspended the smaller, year-round Umrah pilgrimage until further notice [File: Ganoo Essa/Reuters]](https://www.aljazeera.com/mritems/imagecache/mbdxxlarge/mritems/Images/2020/3/20/e3cc5eedd7b94d668f38273d9ac1dc38_18.jpg "Saudi tells Muslims to wait on Hajj plans amid coronavirus crisis")
