We’ve fired up a brand new global coronavirus blog at the link below – join me there for the latest: In England, regional flare-ups of coronavirus cases after rules are eased will be tackled with “local lockdowns”, the health secretary has said. Matt Hancock told the No 10 daily press briefing the ability to tighten restrictions in individual regions would be part of the NHS test, track and trace system, which is due to expand on 1 June. According to the government’s road map for easing lockdown restrictions, this could lead to local schools, businesses or workplaces being closed in areas with high prevalence of infection. Hancock said: “We will have local lockdowns in future where there are flare-ups and we have a system we are putting in place with a combination of Public Health England and the new joint biosecurity centre, along with the local directors of public health who play an absolutely crucial role in the decision-making in the system, to make sure if there is a local flare-up there is a local lockdown. “And so local lockdowns will be part of the future system that we put in place as part of the NHS test-and-trace system.” The government’s road map for easing lockdown restrictions has set out how the joint biosecurity centre would have a “response function” that could address local spikes in infections, in partnership with local public health agencies, and impose restrictions. The Trump campaign has responded to Twitter adding fact checks to the president’s false tweets about mail-in voting. “We always knew that Silicon Valley would pull out all the stops to obstruct and interfere with President Trump getting his message through to voters,” Trump 2020 campaign manager Brad Parscale said. “There are many reasons the Trump campaign pulled all our advertising from Twitter months ago, and their clear political bias is one of them.“ It is important to note here that Twitter Inc. banned political ads in October 2019 — necessitating that the Trump campaign pull all its advertising from Twitter months ago. In these extraordinary times, the Guardian’s editorial independence has never been more important. Because no one sets our agenda, or edits our editor, we can keep delivering quality, trustworthy, fact-checked journalism each and every day. Free from commercial or political bias, we can report fearlessly on world events and challenge those in power. Your support protects the Guardian’s independence. We believe every one of us deserves equal access to accurate news and calm explanation. No matter how unpredictable the future feels, we will remain with you, delivering high quality news so we can all make critical decisions about our lives, health and security – based on fact, not fiction. Support the Guardian from as little as $1 – and it only takes a minute. Thank you. Twitter labels Trump"s false claims with warning for first time Here is the full story on Twitter labelling Trump’s false claims with a warning for the first time. The Guardian’s Julia Carrie Wong reports from San Francisco with Sam Levine in New York: Twitter for the first time took action against a series of tweets by Donald Trump, labeling them with a warning sign and providing a link to further information. Since ascending to the US presidency, Trump has used his Twitter account to threaten a world leader with war, amplify racist misinformation by British hate figures and, as recently as Tuesday morning, spread a lie about the 2001 death of a congressional aide in order to smear a cable news pundit. Throughout it all, Twitter has remained steadfast in its refusal to censor the head of state, even going so far as to write a new policy to allow itself to leave up tweets by “world leaders” that violate its rules. The company’s decision on Tuesday afternoon to affix labels to a series of Trump tweets about California’s election planning is a result of a new policy debuted on 11 May. They were applied – hours after the tweets initially went out – because Trump’s tweets violated Twitter’s “civic integrity policy”, a company spokeswoman confirmed, which bars users from “manipulating or interfering in elections or other civic processes”, such as by posting misleading information that could dissuade people from participating in an election. Twitter has added a fact-check warning to the bottom of a tweet by US President Donald Trump. Trump tweeted: “There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent. Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed. The Governor of California is sending Ballots to millions of people, anyone.....” Bellow the tweet there is now a link with the warning text “Get the facts about mail-in ballots”: On Sunday Trump suggested that supporters of mail-in voting were using the coronavirus outbreak to pull off a “scam”. Dan McGarry in Port Vila and Tess Newton Cain have this briefing for the Guardian on how the coronavirus has developed in the Pacific this week: The total number of cases of Covid-19 infection across the region stands at 292, an increase of 15 since last week, the majority of which were in Guam. The economic toll of the coronavirus pandemic looms larger and larger in the region as fears of widespread infection subside. This week, Fiji Airways delivered termination letters to 758 staff, including all of its cabin crews. Covid-19 was cited as the cause. Staff will be asked to reapply for their positions should they become open again. In Tonga, the prime minister has recommended that parliamentarians take a 20% pay cut due to the massive budget hole facing the country. ‘Bring our boys back home’: rugby team from Tonga trapped in New Zealand due to Covid-19Read more The virus crisis is fuelling a drive by many Pacific island countries to reduce their reliance on tourism, replacing it with output from other sectors, including the creative economy. Hello, Helen Sullivan joining you now. As always, please do get in touch on Twitter @helenrsullivan or via email: helen.sullivan[at]theguardian.com. Comments, tips, news from your part of the world, and fun all welcome. Brazilian nurse Rusia Goes gave birth while unconscious and breathing through a ventilator tube in April as she suffered severe Covid-19 symptoms. It would be nearly a month before the 42-year-old was reunited with her newborn daughter. She has told Reuters: Only God knows how much I missed that little one, who had been inside me, and all of a sudden was taken out because of all of this. Goes is one of at least 374,000 Brazilians infected by the virus, now the world’s second-biggest outbreak after the United States. Over 23,000 people have died. While she normally works as a nurse in a neonatal intensive care unit, Goes stayed home once the pandemic started. But her husband Ednaldo Goes suspects he may have transmitted the virus to her as he continued to go out to work and shop for the family. When Rusia Goes checked into a Rio de Janeiro hospital with shortness of breath and other Covid-19 symptoms, she was just beginning the eighth month of her pregnancy. Doctors recommended a premature birth by cesarean section to better treat the mother’s condition. The baby tested negative for the virus and was isolated from Goes, who was transferred to another hospital as her condition worsened. She said the battle with the respiratory disease was hard and “very painful,” but slowly she was able to recover. She first met her daughter Luisa virtually, via a video link to her husband and the baby in another hospital. Goes was finally released from the hospital after two weeks and first met her daughter in person on 20 May – some 26 days after giving birth. Masked medical staff gathered with balloons and applauded as Goes left the hospital with her baby in her arms. “To hold her to my chest was so emotional,” she said. Michigan’s governor Gretchen Whitmer has come under fire as allegations arise that her husband has been trying to flout her strict shutdown rules – in what she says was a “failed attempt at humour”. Affectionately nicknamed “Big Gretch”, Whitmer was thrust into the spotlight this year as her state battled one of the highest Covid-19 rates with one of the strictest lockdown policies in the country. But while Whitmer’s strict stay-at-home order has been effective at flattening the curve in Michigan, it has also drawn strong criticism from conservatives and Democrats alike. The UK prime minister Boris Johnson has discussed the pandemic with the UN’s secretary general António Guterres and the director of the World Health Organization Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Downing Street says. On both calls, the prime minister set out the UK’s support for the international effort to defeat coronavirus and for the work of the UN and WHO in helping to coordinate the global response. The prime minister and Dr Tedros agreed on the importance of an independent investigation into the origins of the coronavirus outbreak, so we can learn lessons to prevent future pandemics. The prime minister also confirmed he will participate via video message in the UN’s upcoming Financing For Development in the Era of Covid-19 event to map out an equitable, green recovery from this crisis. Both Dr Tedros and Secretary-General Guterres reiterated their support for the UK-hosted Global Vaccine Summit on 4 June, which will raise vital funds to save the lives of millions of children worldwide. Officials have discovered dozens of unlicensed retirement homes in northern Mexico, raising fears that so far undetected coronavirus clusters may emerge in the thinly regulated sector. Reuters reports that the country’s health department began investigating the industry after outbreaks in three registered private facilities in the state of Nuevo Leon. Officials closed 40 unregistered homes in and around the city of Monterrey. As of 25 May, there had been 88 confirmed cases of the coronavirus in the three homes in Nuevo Leon, the department said on Monday. One person tested positive in a fourth home. Officials have not said if they have found evidence of outbreaks in the unregistered facilities, but said families should take home their elderly relatives. Here’s a summary of the latest events: Confirmed cases worldwide exceed 5.5m. According to the Johns Hopkins University coronavirus tracker, known infections worldwide number at least 5,550,399. The known death toll stands at 348,302. True death tolls and cases are likely to be significantly higher due to differing definitions and testing rates, delays and suspected underreporting. The WHO says the Americas are the new epicentre of the disease. The World Health Organization’s regional director Dr Carissa Etienne said outbreaks were accelerating in countries such as Brazil, where the number of deaths reported in the last week was the highest in the world for a seven-day period since the coronavirus pandemic began. The number of coronavirus infections to accelerate in Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua, she said. The UN refugee agency said Covid-19 had pushed its humanitarian work to near “breaking point” in Yemen, a country devastated by five years of war. It said a growing number of families were resorting to begging, child labour and marrying of children to survive. A separate UN agency said it had only received around 15% of the funding required for the $3.38bn (€3bn) aid package for Yemen this year. Spain has declared 10 days of mourning starting on Wednesday for the nearly 27,000 people who have died from coronavirus in the country. Flags will be hoisted to half-staff in more than 14,000 public buildings across the country and on Spanish naval vessels until 5 June. It marks the longest official mourning period in Spain’s four-decade-old democracy. The UK death toll passed 47,000, according to new figures from the country’s Office for National Statistics. This figure is higher than the latest figure given by the UK government – nearly 37,000 – because it includes deaths in which Covid-19 is given as a “suspected” cause. The UK government figure only includes deaths of patients who have tested positive for the coronavirus. Russia reports record one-day rise in deaths. Russia has announced that 174 people with coronavirus have died in the past 24 hours, a record one-day amount that has pushed the nationwide death toll to 3,807. Officials reported 8,915 new cases, pushing its overall case tally to 362,342 – but Vladimir Putin said the country has “passed the peak” of the virus. Mexico City records thousands more deaths than usual, amid doubt over the official Covid-19 toll. This year, Mexico City has issued 8,072 more death certificates than the average for the same period in the past four years, according to a study that suggests the country’s coronavirus death toll could be significantly higher than the official figure of nearly 7,400. The report’s authors found 37% more death certificates were issued in April 2020 than that month’s average during the previous four years. By the end of May they estimated the number may grow to 120%. Bosses at a UK hospital that has temporarily stopped accepting new patients due to the high number already being treated there with Covid-19 have said there is an “emerging picture of asymptomatic staff testing positive for the virus”. Weston General Hospital in Weston-super-Mare, in Somerset, stopped taking new admissions, including into its A&E department, from 8am on Monday “to maintain patient and staff safety”. In an update on Tuesday evening, Dr William Oldfield, the medical director at the University Hospitals Bristol and Weston NHS Foundation Trust, said: There are currently a high number of patients with coronavirus in the hospital. We have tested all inpatients and will undertake retesting in line with national guidance, and we have appropriate segregation in place for patient care. Testing for symptomatic staff and household contacts has been offered across the trust since the beginning of April. In addition, there is an emerging picture of asymptomatic staff testing positive for the virus. Any members of staff who have tested positive have self-isolated in line with national guidance. We are also in the process of testing all staff in clinical areas at the hospital who may have had some patient contact. Appropriate levels of personal protective equipment (PPE) are available and this is being used in line with Public Health England guidance, and there have been significant efforts to minimise unnecessary staff movements across the hospital.