More than 200,000 people, mostly women and children, have fled surging violence in Ituri since March in the Democratic Republic of Congo's volatile east, the UN said Friday.

In an interview with FRANCE 24, Taiwan's Vice President Chen Chien-jen, an epidemiologist by training, discussed his country's handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, while criticising the response of China and the World Health Organization. Chen refused to rule out the "possibility" that the coronavirus originated in a Chinese laboratory in Wuhan. He also expressed concern about a second wave of the virus appearing in autumn or winter.

With parents and policymakers agonising over when to reopen schools as lockdowns ease, scientists are still struggling to find out how the new coronavirus affects children.

The UN's World Food Programme (WFP) is warning of potential famines of "biblical proportions" as the Covid-19 pandemic affects countries in an already dire situation. In an interview with FRANCE 24, the United Nation's WFP Executive Director David Beasley said he was especially worried about a breakdown in the supply chain that allows his agency to provide food to dozens of millions of people around the globe.

Dozens of Afghan migrants are feared dead after Iranian border guards allegedly forced them into a river on the Iran-Afghan border on May 1. Of the 57 men and boys in the group only 12 are known to have survived. One of the survivors told the France 24 Observers team that he and the others were arrested and tortured by guards from an Iranian border post overlooking the Harirud river. His account, along with amateur videos circulating on social media in Afghanistan, allowed the Observers team to pinpoint the location of the Iranian border post. 

Despite being one of Greece's best-known folk singers, Natassa Bofiliou is among thousands of artists worried about the economic impact of coronavirus lockdowns that have only just begun to be eased.

Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, about 30 different quotes attributed to public figures including French infectious disease expert Didier Raoult, French president Emmanuel Macron and Madagascar president Andry Rajoelina have been making the rounds on Congolese Facebook pages. But it turns out all of them were made up. The FRANCE 24 Observers team tracked down the source of these widely circulated fake quotes and discovered a 20-year-old keen to generate “a buzz”.

Russia marks 75 years since the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in World War Two on Saturday, but the coronavirus outbreak has forced it to scale back celebrations seen as boosting support for the Kremlin.

Brazil, the country in Latin America that has been hardest hit by the coronavirus crisis, said Friday it had reached a new daily record for COVID-19 fatalities with 751 deaths.

In a mid-April report, the NGO Human Rights Watch cited UN statistics that the main prisons in the Democratic Republic of Congo are at 432 percent capacity, with Makala Prison in the country’s capital of Kinshasa at 461 percent. While media access to prisons in Kinshasa is denied, FRANCE 24 obtained amateur footage from Makala inmates and spoke with an NGO and a Congolese official about the potential for a major Covid-19 health crisis.

While residents of Benin haven’t been ordered to stay home like their neighbours in Nigeria, the Covid-19 pandemic has forced them to slow down nevertheless, putting many at risk of food insecurity.

Madonna said Thursday she has recovered from the Covid-19 disease, which forced her to pull out of a string of concerts in Paris in February and March.

Economic activity in France picked up slightly over the last two weeks as the country prepares to emerge from a coronavirus lockdown, but it remains a third below normal levels, the INSEE official statistics agency said on Thursday.

For many farmers, the Covid-19 pandemic has been brutal with large orders cancelled and revenue plunging. But some small-scale farmers have noticed a rise in direct sales. FRANCE 24's Catherine Norris-Trent reports.

French Prime Minister Édouard Philippe on Thursday detailed his government’s plan for easing Covid-19 confinement measures on May 11, warning that the exit from lockdown would be gradual and targeted to stem a resurgence of the viral outbreak. 

France on Thursday recorded 178 Covid-19 deaths in 24 hours, a 0.7 percent rise from the previous day in the lowest rate of increase in four days, taking the total number of deaths to 25,987. 

Since the start of the Covid-19 epidemic, there has been no shortage of solidarity with those on the frontline on the pandemic. One such example comes from the French NGO Aviation Sans Frontières ("Aviation Without Borders"), which has brought together key players in the aviation sector to allow medical professionals to travel by plane free of charge from one French region to another. These flights help take some of the pressure off overwhelmed hospital staff. Our reporters Benoît Perrochais and Natalia Ruiz Giraldo went on board.

France on Friday marked the 75th anniversary of Victory in Europe (VE) day with President Emmanuel Macron attending a scaled-down ceremony on Paris’s Champs-Élysées. Click on the player to see how the commemorations unfolded.

France’s lockdown measures are among the strictest in Europe as the country bids to stamp out the Covid-19 pandemic. Paris is usually known for its night wanderers but the last few weeks has seen its lively and vibrant atmosphere replaced by calm and silence. However, not all Parisians are respecting lockdown measures and FRANCE 24 went out to meet them. Some are simply wandering the streets. Others are out and about because the streets are what they call home.

As France prepares to gradually end its Covid-19 lockdown on May 11, workers are busy installing dozens of kilometres of temporary bike lanes across Paris and surrounding suburbs, part of plans to prepare for – and encourage – an expected boom in cycling in the capital.

The number of people who have died from coronavirus infection in France rose 243 to 26,230 on Friday, a higher daily death toll than the previous day when it stood at 178.

An investigation by French daily Le Monde has uncovered the extraordinary chain of events that led successive French governments to build an ambitious pandemic response strategy and then dismantle it almost entirely, leaving the country dangerously exposed to the Covid-19 disease.

In this edition of Middle East Matters, we continue our rolling coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic across the region. Jordan is flattening its coronavirus curve after a series of strict measures, including travel bans. We speak to Health Minister Saad Jaber, himself a doctor, about how he's managed the crisis. Also, deadly clashes erupt after hundreds take to the streets in northern Lebanon amid a crash in the local currency and a surge in food prices. 

Protests against growing economic hardship erupted in Tripoli and spread to other Lebanese cities on Tuesday, with banks set ablaze and violence boiling over into a second night.

We continue our coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic in the Middle East. Iran is one of the worst-hit countries in the region – authorities there have reported more than 6,000 deaths. But observers and health experts say the numbers are in reality much higher. After weighing up economic risks against health ones, the country's leadership decided to reopen businesses in late April, followed by schools and mosques. We speak to a doctor from Tehran, who has been on the frontlines of the battle against Covid-19. He has asked for his identity to be concealed.

A third of people in the Afghan capital Kabul have tested positive for Covid-19, according to a recent study. FRANCE 24 spoke to Afghan doctors on the Covid-19 frontline as civil war continues to ravage the country.

A choice between lives and livelihoods? Iranian authorities have gradually been easing confinement since April 11, this in a nation hit early and hard by Covid-19. Did they have to reopen mosques? Could they afford to keep the sanctions-squeezed country in lockdown and risk a complete collapse of the economy or does opening it up make it worse? Already there are signs of a resurgence of coronavirus. The show features Sanam Shantyaei's exclusive interview with a frontline medic in Tehran while Esfandyar Batmanghelidj and Behnam Ben Taleblu disagree on whether the US should ease sanctions.

After 76 days under lockdown, China's Wuhan city is gradually returning to a new normal. But while Covid-19 infection rates have fallen, social distancing measures are still in place and the economic repercussions for the industrial hub are also becoming clear.

New Zealand on Monday recorded no new cases of the coronavirus for the first time since March 16 and less than a week after the Pacific nation ended a strict lockdown that appears to have contained the outbreak.

South Korea returned largely to normal Wednesday as workers went back to offices, and museums and libraries reopened under eased social distancing rules after new coronavirus cases dropped to a trickle.

India will within days roll out a version of its coronavirus contact-tracing application that can run on mobile carrier Reliance Jio's cheap phones, as it looks to increase the reach of the system, a senior government official said on Thursday.

"You have to track every single thing you eat if you want to keep posting big numbers on the scale each week."

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A few weeks ago, I received an email from MamaSezz, a plant-based meal delivery service, offering me an opportunity to help promote their business in exchange for a commission.  As a blogger, I get a lot of offers like this, from companies selling everything from supplements to olive oil to keto meals (yikes!) I delete 99.9%...

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The contrast sensitivity function shows how our sensitivity to contrasts is affected by spatial frequency. You can test it using gratings of alternating light and darker shade. Ian Goodfellow has this neat observation: By looking at this image, you can see how sensitive your own eyes are to contrast at different frequencies (taller apparent peaks=more … Continue reading "A graph that is made by perceiving it"

Psychologists have been measuring reaction times since before psychology existed, and they are still a staple of cognitive psychology experiments today. Typically psychologists look for a difference in the time it takes participants to respond to stimuli under different conditions as evidence of differences in how cognitive processing occurs in those conditions. Galton, the famous … Continue reading "Did the Victorians have faster reactions?"

I have a review of John Bargh’s new book “Before You Know It: The Unconscious Reasons We Do What We Do” in this month’s Psychologist magazine. You can read the review in print (or online here) but the magazine could only fit in 250 words, and I originally wrote closer to 700. I’ll put the … Continue reading "Review: John Bargh’s “Before You Know It”"

I have a guest post for the Research Digest, snappily titled ‘People who think their opinions are superior to others are most prone to overestimating their relevant knowledge and ignoring chances to learn more‘. The paper I review is about the so-called “belief superiority” effect, which is defined by thinking that your views are better … Continue reading "Believing everyone else is wrong is a danger sign"

The Guardian recently published an article saying “People won’t get ‘tired’ of social distancing – and it’s unscientific to suggest otherwise”. “Behavioural fatigue” the piece said, “has no basis in science”. ‘Behavioural fatigue’ became a hot topic because it was part of the UK Government’s justification for delaying the introduction of stricter public health measures. … Continue reading "Do we suffer ‘behavioural fatigue’ for pandemic prevention measures?"

Marissa's not-for-profit organization sought a college graduate with the ability to code and create basic software solutions. Given their organization's financial limitations, they...

Content Management Systems always end up suffering, at least a little, from the Inner Platform Effect. There’s the additional problem that, unlike say, a big ol’ enterprise HR system or similar,...