While Bangladesh captain Akbar Ali apologised for the "unfortunate incident", his Indian counterpart Priyam Garg felt it is something that should not have happened.

Poonam Yadav (4/19) snapped four wickets, two in successive deliveries of the 12th over to break the backbone of Australia's chase.

In the final over, Heyley Jensen (11) and Kerr cracked a four each but Shikha held her nerves in the end to complete the win.

Radha Yadav was initially a pace bowler who loved to bowl fast, says her coach Praful Naik who asked her to shorten her run-up and switch from pace to leg-spin.

Persistent rain since morning delayed the toss and eventually the semifinal was called off without a ball being bowled, taking Indians into the summit clash and leaving England players in tears.

India entered the final after their last-four clash against England was washed out in Sydney. They had topped the group.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has extended his best wishes to Indian and Australian teams ahead of the Women's Twenty20 World Cup final at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on Sunday.

Overwhelmed by the occasion, India crumbled to 99 all out in front of a turnout of 86174 at the iconic Melbourne Cricket Ground, a record in women's cricket history.

The MCG in its statement shared the Australian DHHS's recommendation for those who were seated in section N42 of the ground during Sunday’s ICC Women’s T20 World Cup Final.

The 2020 Olympics, which were set for July 24-August 9 this year, were postponed until 2021 by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) this week because of the coronavirus.

The ongoing Coronavirus crisis across the world and a prolonged lockdown in India has halted MS Dhoni’s planned comeback to competitive cricket. He had joined the training camp with his IPL franchise team Chennai Super Kings but the initial delays in the start of IPL until April 15 and then for an indefinite period stopped him to press on for a place in the Indian squad.

The UNWTO called on all governments to continuously review travel restrictions and ease or lift them as soon as it is safe to do so.

More than 16,000 passenger jets are grounded worldwide, according to industry researcher Cirium, as the coronavirus obliterates travel and puts unprecedented strain on airline finances.

Making things worse is that some countries that are specifically hard-hit by the coronavirus are also heavily dependent on tourism, like Italy and Spain.

The first five books of the Murty Classical Library of India (MCLI), an initiative by the Harvard University...

Fifa adding more World Cup berths could mean better representation for Asia and Africa

The ocean has deep secrets. It is a world as vibrant as the one outside. There is a unique ecology that defies common knowledge and often perplexes scientists. This barely-explored territory is also believed to hold vast quantities of precious metals and minerals that can sustain the modern world for centuries. So it is not […]

The study is the second in a series, after an earlier report found that OPEC’s spare capacity reduces oil price volatility and generates as much as $200 bn of annual economic benefits for the world economy.

Popular Indian luxury train, The Maharaja’s Express, has been awarded World’s Leading Luxury Train 2012 at the World Travel Awards 2012 held in New Delhi yesterday. The train was one of the contenders for the coveted title of the best luxury train in the world which included the...

Thunberg has become a leading voice for action on climate change, inspiring millions of students to join protests around the world.

The report on World Water Day 2020 explains that in order to tackle climate change, a lot of marginalised communities need clean water and decent toilets as a front line defense.

People can be drivers of drastic, aggressive, and effective solutions. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic crisis is a great example of how people around the world can join forces to fight a disaster together.

Straightforward but compassionate, Wolf’s film affectionately documents the heady people and ambitious ideas that fuelled Biosphere II, relating an almost too-perfect metaphor for our feeble -- and perhaps doomed -- efforts to escape our own self-destructive nature

The COVID-19 pandemic has mercilessly exposed the weaknesses of institutions upon which the overwhelming majority of the world’s people rely.

From home workouts and remote medical consultations to online classes and even virtual dating, technology today is ensuring that our lives go on, albeit from behind the screen

The campaign applauds mothers for their unwavering energy at all hours of the day

il prices slid and world equity markets see sawed Wednesday as investor hopes for a pickup in business activity were weighed against downbeat economic data and low fuel demand highlighted by a rise in U.S. crude stockpiles to three-year highs.

Banknet launches First News App focused on Financial World for Mobiles and Tablets

6 Reasons For India's 6th Win Over Pakistan At World Cup Cricket- TheBuzzDiary.com

Youtube Video on Hoisting of World's Largest and Tallest Tiranga - Indian National Tricolour Flag

HSBC Bank to Cut at Least 22,000 Jobs Worldwide in Order to Reduce Annual Costs

India moves up 4 spots on World Bank's ease of Doing Business list

India’s coronavirus disease contact-tracing app Aarogya Setu became the world’s fastest growing mobile app on Tuesday night with 50 million users in 13 days. It is to be highlighted that 11 million of these downloads were registered in a single day after Prime Minister Narendra Modi urged people to download the application in his third televised […]

The post Aarogya Setu Crosses 5 Crore Downloads In 13 Days; Becomes World’s Fastest Growing App first appeared on Trak.in . Trak.in Mobile Apps: Android | iOS.

This blog is now closed.

• Follow the latest global coronavirus blog for live news and updates

12.22am BST

We’ve launched a new blog at the link below. Head over there for live developments in the pandemic worldwide:

Related: Coronavirus live news: WHO and Five Eyes reject Chinese lab theory as global deaths pass 250,000

11.55pm BST

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is taking the lead in pressing a hard line against Beijing over the coronavirus pandemic, AFP reports.

Pompeo, in an interview Sunday on ABC, said there was “enormous evidence” that the new coronavirus came out of a Wuhan lab - not a wet market, as most scientists suggest.

11.49pm BST

The World Health Organization said Monday that Washington had provided no evidence to support “speculative” claims by the US president that the new coronavirus originated in a Chinese lab, AFP reports.

“We have not received any data or specific evidence from the United States government relating to the purported origin of the virus - so from our perspective, this remains speculative,” WHO emergencies director Michael Ryan told a virtual briefing.

11.27pm BST

11.20pm BST

In the UK, a review will analyse how factors such as ethnicity, obesity and gender can affect people’s vulnerability to coronavirus, health leaders have said.

Public Health England (PHE) said thousands of health records of people who have had Covid-19 will be examined to establish more “robust” data on what can have an impact on the number of cases and health outcomes for different groups within the population.

Related: PHE to review how ethnicity affects vulnerability to coronavirus

11.15pm BST

Hello, Helen Sullivan with you now and for the next few hours. Get in touch any time on Twitter @helenrsullivan.

11.02pm BST

According to research by both the Reuters news agency and Johns Hopkins University, at least a quarter of a million people are now known to have died as a result of the pandemic.

North America and European countries account for most of the new deaths and cases reported in recent days but numbers are rising from smaller bases in Latin America, Africa and Russia, Reuters reports.

10.49pm BST

Workers in the UK may refuse to turn up or stage walk-outs unless the government helps guarantee their safety, trade unions have warned amid anger over guidance designed to ease the lockdown.

As ministers prepare to urge the country back to return to work, Rowena Mason and Heather Stewart write that Labour has joined a string of trade unions in criticising draft guidelines for being vague, inadequate and putting staff at risk because employers can choose how closely to follow them.

Related: UK unions criticise guidance on returning to work for being inadequate

10.42pm BST

Italians were allowed out as the toughest quarantine measures were lifted throughout the country after almost two months on 4 May. About 4m people returned to work as the prime minister Giuseppe Conte appealed to the public in a Facebook post on Sunday night to “act responsibly”.

10.24pm BST

Germany’s state premiers will agree on further measures to ease restrictions during a telephone call with the chancellor Angela Merkel on Wednesday, Reuters reports citing two people familiar with the preparations.

The state premiers are expected to give the green light for large shops to reopen, probably from 11 May, Reuters says.

10.21pm BST

Tim Bray, a top engineer and vice-president at Amazon, is resigning “in dismay” over the company’s firing of employee activists who criticised working conditions amid the pandemic.

Bray’s resignation comes as Amazon faces increased scrutiny and employee activism surrounding its internal response to coronavirus. Amazon workers on Friday participated in a nationwide sick-out to protest working conditions and inadequate safety protections.

Related: Amazon executive resigns over company’s ‘chickenshit’ firings of employee activists

10.02pm BST

In the UK, the virus’ devastating spread among care homes has led to a growing number of families seeking legal advice about bringing their relatives home, Amelia Hill and Diane Taylor write.

One law firm said it had received at least 10 calls a week from families wanting to overturn guidance that prevents them from withdrawing their loved ones.

Related: Coronavirus fears leading families to remove relatives from UK care homes

9.53pm BST

Paraguay has become one of the first Latin American countries to start relaxing its lockdown, Will Costa writes from Asunción.

The landlocked nation, which has reported some of the lowest numbers of cases in the region with 396 cases and 10 deaths, has launched a four-phase plan under which some public freedoms and economic activities will gradually be reintroduced over a period extending until early July.

Paraguay must keep moving while following the hygiene protocols and using our intelligence to take responsibility for the quarantine so that we can keep the curve flattened.

9.36pm BST

A row has erupted among scientists over a new report into the use of face masks by the general public as an approach to managing the spread of Covid-19 in the community.

The report from a multidisciplinary group convened by the Royal Society called Delve – Data Evaluation and Learning for Viral Epidemics – has weighed up the evidence and come out in favour of the public wearing face masks, including homemade cloth coverings, in a bid to tackle Covid-19. The report notes:

Our analysis suggests that their use could reduce onward transmission by asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic wearers if widely used in situations where physical distancing is not possible or predictable, contrasting to the standard use of masks for the protection of wearers. If correctly used on this basis, face masks, including homemade cloth masks, can contribute to reducing viral transmission.

Related: Report on face masks' effectiveness for Covid-19 divides scientists

9.13pm BST

There have been 4,075 new cases and 263 deaths over the last 24 hours in Brazil, the country’s health ministry has said.

Brazil has now registered 105,222 confirmed cases and 7,288 deaths. New cases increased roughly 4% from the previous day, and deaths rose roughly 3.7%.

9.08pm BST

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has reported 1,152,372 cases in total, and said the number of deaths has risen to 67,456.

Over the weekend, the CDC updated its case count to 1,122,486 and said 65,735 people had died across the country, but that the numbers were preliminary and had not been confirmed by individual states. The figures do not necessarily reflect cases reported by individual states.

8.55pm BST

Kigali traders have resumed work as Rwanda partially lifted the strict lockdown measures adopted six weeks ago.

Businesses in the capital were flooded with customers hurrying to finish their shopping before an 8pm (CAT) curfew, AFP reported.

We are now two waitresses. It has been really good to return to work because we had no other source of income.

We are going back to work slowly. Usually we are eight people working as a team here. But today we work in shifts at only three at a time to respect the social distancing.

After three hours, a colleague will replace me. We don’t earn much, but it is still better than staying at home.

8.36pm BST

The government is using the pandemic to transfer key public health duties from the NH S and other state bodies to the private sector without proper scrutiny, critics are warning.

Doctors, campaign groups, academics and MPs raised the concerns about a “power grab” after it emerged on Monday that Serco was in pole position to win a deal to supply 15,000 call-handlers for the government’s tracking and tracing operation.

Related: UK government 'using crisis to transfer NHS duties to private sector'

8.09pm BST

In photographs together and with their families, the five men smile, or hold their loved ones close. All 50 or older, their friendships ranged over decades, their passions running from philanthropy to cycling, their duties from activism to business. A little over two weeks ago, they were pillars of the Pakistani community in the small pocket of Birmingham in which they all lived, with 41 grandchildren between them. Now they are all dead, victims of coronavirus.

Related: Five friends, five victims: how Covid-19 tore a hole in one Pakistani community

7.41pm BST

There must be equal access for developing countries to medicine to combat the pandemic, the Indonesian president Joko Widodo has said.

We need to fight for just and timely access to affordable Covid-19 medicine and vaccine.

Debt relief and debt repayment obligations from official creditors (for developing countries) need be rediverted into financing the handling of Covid-19.

7.26pm BST

French hospital discovers Covid-19 case from December. The hospital retested old samples from pneumonia patients and discovered that it treated a man who had Covid-19 as early as 27 December, nearly a month before the French government confirmed its first cases.

Italy’s death toll far higher than reported. Statistics bureau ISTAT said its analysis showed an extra 11,600 deaths were unaccounted for, and it was reasonable to assume these people either died of Covid-19 without being tested or that the extra stress on the health system due to the epidemic meant they died of other causes they were not treated for.

7.08pm BST

Former Chelsea attacker Salomon Kalou has been suspended by German club Hertha Berlin after posting a video showing him breaking coronavirus social distancing rules by shaking hands with teammates.

The Facebook video of Kalou, 34, greeting Hertha players and club employees with handshakes was condemned by the German league, which has put in place stringent hygiene measures as it attempts to secure the political green light to restart its interrupted season.

6.57pm BST

Coronavirus funding pledges must require any vaccine to be patent-free, campaigners have said.

Reacting to reports that today’s Coronavirus Global Response Summit has raised $8bn for the research and development of Covid-19 vaccines and treatments, Heidi Chow, of Global Justice Now said:

We welcome the funding that has been pledged today and the commitment of the hosts to make any Covid-19 vaccine available, accessible and affordable to all.

But what is not clear is how the hosts of today’s summit intend to achieve the aim of universal access. Recent history tells us that it will not happen by default.

Ruling out pharmaceutical monopolies will not only prevent corporate profiteering but will also enable mass production at a scale that will be required by global demand.

The challenge of our time is not just to develop a vaccine but to also take the bold steps needed to ensure new Covid-19 vaccines and treatments are affordable for all countries and free to the public.

6.50pm BST

Auction house Christie’s will hold a sale to help raise money for The Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR) Covid-19 fund after the pandemic forced the cancellation of the charity’s famous Cannes Film Festival gala.

Leading collectors and artists have donated several contemporary artworks, some of which have never been seen before, Christie’s and amfAR said in a statement.

6.43pm BST

The World Health Organization has stressed that contact-tracing apps and other technology cannot replace old-fashioned “boots-on-the-ground” surveillance measures as many countries begin easing lockdowns imposed to curb the coronavirus.

“We are very, very keen to stress that IT tools do not replace the basic public health workforce that is going to be needed to trace, test, isolate and quarantine,” the WHO’s top emergencies expert, Mike Ryan, told journalists at an online briefing in Geneva.

6.37pm BST

The number of people who have died after contracting coronavirus in France increased by 306 to 25,201 on Monday, the sharpest rate of increase in four days, government data showed.

On Sunday, only 135 new deaths were reported, but on Sundays the data reporting from nursing homes is often delayed, leading to a catch-up during the week.

6.35pm BST

European Union lawmakers said the coronavirus pandemic should not soften the bloc’s long-term climate goals, although some called for a “beefed up” fund to help coal-dependent regions move towards a greener economy.

Europe is facing a recession and governments are pumping out cash to keep economies afloat, but the EU’s executive Commission has pledged not to roll back its climate ambitions.

I understand that some would like to delay this goal due to the economic challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic.

But, in my view, the pandemic provides a unique opportunity to transform and rebuild our economies based on the European Green Deal.

6.30pm BST

Mexican medical staff treating Covid-19 patients will be housed in the country’s former presidential palace – a luxurious abode, in which the austere president Andrés Manuel López Obrador refuses to live.

Staff from three Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS) hospitals will be offered temporary residence in the mansion known as Los Pinos, which was turned into a cultural centre after López Obrador (commonly called Amlo) took office in late 2018.

6.20pm BST

Turkey will start easing coronavirus containment measures as of Monday, president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said, lifting intercity travel restriction in seven provinces and easing a curfew imposed for senior and youth citizens after weeks.

The country has around 130,000 confirmed cases, the highest total outside Western Europe, the United States and Russia.

6.14pm BST

As Canada’s Yukon territory braces for coronavirus, residents have been asked keep one caribou’s length apart from each another. (For those not familiar with the dimensions of the reindeer, that’s roughly equivalent to two husky lengths or eight loaves of sourdough bread.)

The light-hearted advice is part of a viral public health awareness campaign that seeks to inform residents and pay homage to the region’s cultural history.

6.10pm BST

Carnival Cruise Line has announced plans to resume operations at the beginning of August despite dozens of deaths on cruise ships during the Covid-19 pandemic and investigations into the industry’s possible role in spreading the disease around the planet.

In a statement on Monday, the operator said eight cruise ships would resume operations from 1 August, sailing from Galveston, Texas, and Miami and Port Canaveral in Florida, once a no-sail order from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had expired.

6.06pm BST

Studies in Britain show that most people who have had Covid-19 develop antibodies, England’s deputy chief medical officer Jonathan Van-Tam said, but it was too early to say whether this gave them immunity.

The overwhelming majority of people so far called back who’ve had definite Covid-19 infection have got antibodies in their blood stream.

By and large the signal is that people get antibodies. The next question is, do those antibodies protect you from further infections?

6.02pm BST

Finland will lift some coronavirus restrictions, allowing restaurants to reopen and public services including libraries and sports facilities to start operating again from 1 June, the government has said.

A ban on public meetings will be relaxed from a maximum of 10 people to 50 people from 1 June but emergency powers will be kept in place, it said.

6.01pm BST

The head of the World Health Organization has urged the world to unite to defeat the new coronavirus.

WHO’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, told a virtual briefing in Geneva:

This virus will be with us for a long time and we must come together to develop and share the tools to defeat it.

We will prevail through national unity and global solidarity.

5.57pm BST

Apple and Google have said they would ban the use of location tracking in apps that use a new contact tracing system the two are building to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

Apple and Google, whose operating systems power 99% of smartphones, said last month they would work together to create a system for notifying people who have been near others who have tested positive for Covid-19.

5.53pm BST

Tanzania has suspended the head of its national health laboratory in charge of testing for the coronavirus and ordered an investigation, a day after president John Magufuli questioned the tests’ accuracy, Reuters reports.

Magufuli said on Sunday the imported test kits were faulty as they had returned positive results on a goat and a pawpaw - among several non-human samples submitted for testing, with technicians left deliberately unaware of their origins.

5.46pm BST

Bulgaria will not extend a state of emergency past its 13 May expiry date but some coronavirus restrictions will remain in force for two more months, finance minister Vladislav Goranov has said.

Bulgaria, which declared a state of emergency on 13 March, has so far confirmed 1,652 cases of the illness and 78 deaths.

5.44pm BST

France might allow religious services to resume before the end of the month if a gradual easing of lockdown rules from 11 May did not result in the rate of coronavirus infections increasing, prime minister Edouard Philippe has said.

The government had indicated religious ceremonies would be banned until 2 June at the earliest, but Philippe told the Senate this might be advanced by four days. He said:

Many faiths have made proposals to reconcile how their meetings are held with social distancing rules

I know the May 29 - June 1 period is for several faiths an important date on the religious calendar.

5.39pm BST

Britain needs new cases of Covid-19 to fall further, England’s deputy chief medical officer, Jonathan Van-Tam, has said, even as data indicates that the peak of the coronavirus outbreak has passed.

“It’s now very clear in the data that we are past the peak,” Van-Tam said at a daily news conference. “New cases need to come down further ... we have to get cases lower.”

Related: UK coronavirus live: Matt Hancock launches track and tracing app test on Isle of Wight; death toll reaches 28,734

5.36pm BST

A plane carrying aid supplies has crashed in Somalia’s southern Bay region, killing seven people on board, a security official said.

State-run Somalia News Agency said the plane belonged to African Express Airways and was ferrying supplies for use in the fight against coronavirus. It said there were six crew members on board.

5.34pm BST

The world economy may have dramatically dipped and the price of oil crashed, but one commodity is seeing an unprecedented boom: the face mask.

Samanth Subramanian explores the newly distorted marketplace for masks and the lengths some will go to get them in the latest episode of our Today in Focus podcast.

Related: The global race for face masks – podcast

5.31pm BST

France’s prime minister has stood by a plan for lifting the country’s coronavirus lockdown next week, despite concerns the government is moving too fast to reopen schools, as well as doubts over the availability of face masks.

The French are due to emerge on 11 May from a lockdown that began in mid-March to combat the virus, and in a strategy different to other European countries, some schools are set to reopen.

This confinement was necessary to meet the emergency, but its social and economic cost is colossal.

We’re at a decisive moment, we cannot remain in confinement.

5.26pm BST

New York governor, Andrew Cuomo, has outlined a phased reopening of business activity in the state hardest hit by the coronavirus pandemic, starting with select retailers, wholesale suppliers and the construction and manufacturing industries.

Cuomo, speaking at a daily briefing, did not put specific dates to the outline, which envisions allowing finance, insurance, retail, administrative support and real estate businesses to restart in a second phase of reopening.

5.24pm BST

Syrian president Bashar al-Assad has warned that the country could face a “real catastrophe” if coronavirus cases spike and overwhelm health services.

The current low level of infections did not mean Syria had gone out of the “circle of danger”, Assad said in an address to the government committee that oversees measures to curb the pandemic.

5.23pm BST

World leaders promised $8bn on Monday for the fight against the coronavirus pandemic, European Commission head Ursula von der Leyen said at the end of a pledging event that she chaired.

In the space of just few hours we have collectively pledged €7.4bn euros ($8.07bn) for vaccine, diagnostics and treatment.

This will help kick-start unprecedented global cooperation.

5.19pm BST

Britain’s Covid-19 death toll has risen by 288 to 28,734, according to figures announced by health secretary Matt Hancock.

The increase was the smallest since late March, Hancock said, adding that he expected it to rise in coming days as the numbers tended to be lower over the weekend.

5.18pm BST

Coronavirus deaths in Italy climbed by 195 on Monday, up from 174 the day before, the Civil Protection Agency said, but the daily tally of new infections declined to 1,221 from 1,389 on Sunday.

Italy’s daily death toll in recent weeks has always fallen on Sundays and risen the following day, while the underlying trend has been steadily declining since a peak above 900 daily fatalities around the end of March.

5.13pm BST

US senators returned to Washington for the first time in nearly six weeks on Monday, amid concerns that their legislative sessions could put lawmakers and staff at risk of contracting Covid-19.

The Senate was due to reconvene to address partisan differences over the next step in legislation to combat the pandemic and to scrutinize a series of nominations for senior government posts put forward by president Donald Trump.

5.00pm BST

There were feelings of relief and trepidation as people in Italy returned to the streets after almost two months indoors under a strict lockdown.

Rina Sondhi, who lives in the Umbrian town of Orvieto, said:

I literally haven’t been out of the house. The biggest shock for me was the fresh air.

Today I feel liberated, but with caution – that’s the important thing, we can have the freedom but we must be really careful.

In some ways, I’m more afraid than when we closed, as a lot will now depend on people managing the moment in a responsible way.

Related: ‘The biggest shock was fresh air’: Italy begins cautious exit from virus lockdown

4.52pm BST

The Czech government has agreed to lift a ban on international bus and train travel from 11 May, a member of the government said.

The measure was put in place on 14 March in an effort to control the spread of Covid-19.

4.49pm BST

4.46pm BST

Yemen has reported two new coronavirus infections in Hadhramout, the national emergency coronavirus committee said on Monday, raising the number of diagnosed infections in the war-town country to 12, with two deaths.

The province of Hadhramout was where Yemen recorded its first case of Covid-19 on 10 April.

4.41pm BST

A French hospital has retested old samples from pneumonia patients and discovered that it treated a man who had Covid-19 as early as 27 December, nearly a month before the French government confirmed its first cases.

Yves Cohen, head of resuscitation at the Avicenne and Jean Verdier hospitals in the northern suburbs of Paris, told BFM TV that scientists had retested samples from 24 patients treated in December and January who tested negative for the flu.

He was sick for 15 days and infected his two children, but not his wife, who works in a supermarket.

He was amazed, he didn’t understand how he had been infected. We put the puzzle together and he had not made any trips. The only contact that he had was with his wife.

4.32pm BST

So far 6.3 million workers in Britain have been furloughed, with £8bn ($9.9bn) claimed from the government to sustain their wages during the coronavirus lockdown, tax authorities said on Monday.

HM Revenue and Customs said on Twitter that 800,000 employers had furloughed their staff, citing figures up to midnight on Sunday.

The Job Retention Scheme launched on 20 April.

By midnight 3 May a total of:

➡️ 6.3m jobs furloughed *
➡️ 800K employers furloughing **
➡️ Total value of claims £8bn

Apply for a grant to cover the wages of your furloughed staff now: https://t.co/bx1Nszshsr pic.twitter.com/29n9h0RB2k

4.30pm BST

The major Canadian province of Quebec, among the worst hit by the coronavirus, started gradually restarting its economy on Monday, while prime minister Justin Trudeau maintained his cautious stance.

Quebec is allowing stores with an outside entrance for customers to reopen but this does not apply to Montreal, Canada’s second largest city, where retail establishments must wait until 11 May.

4.23pm BST

The coronavirus pandemic has pushed the number of unemployed Austrians to historically high levels, according to official figures released on Monday, with a year-on-year rise of almost 60%.

The blow to the economy dealt by the virus – and the lockdown brought in to combat it – means 571,477 people are out of work, Austria’s AMS employment service said.

4.15pm BST

Italy’s coronavirus death toll is much higher than reported, statistics bureau ISTAT said on Monday, in an analysis pointing to thousands of fatalities that have never been officially attributed to Covid-19.

In its first report of the epidemic’s impact on Italy’s mortality rate, covering 86% of the population, ISTAT said that from 21 February, when the first Covid-19 deaths occurred, until 31 March, nationwide deaths were up 39% compared with the average of the previous five years.

4.09pm BST

Chemicals manufacturer INEOS said it has built two hand sanitiser plants in the United States in response to greater demand amid the novel coronavirus outbreak.

The plants are in Arkansas and Pennsylvania and they will each produce one million bottles of hand sanitiser a month.

INEOS gets #HandsOn.

Within 10 days, INEOS sets-up two new factories in Arkansas and Pennsylvania to provide FREE hand sanitizer to hospitals in hotspot states: https://t.co/yyXxK6utc3

MILLIONS of bottles will be produced every month to fight #COVID19 in the United States. pic.twitter.com/c66igxy9Qq

4.07pm BST

The number of coronavirus cases in Chile has exceeded 20,000, the health ministry said on Monday.

Paula Daza, the health ministry subsecretary, said there were now 20,643 confirmed cases, 980 more than the previous day, and 10 new deaths, taking the total number of fatalities to 270.

4.01pm BST

Belarus will hold a military parade this week to mark the defeat of Nazi Germany, its president has said, despite having one of the worst coronavirus outbreaks in Europe.

Alexander Lukashenko said in televised remarks that he did not want to cancel the parade in part because people “would say we were scared”.

3.50pm BST

It is a mystery that has left doctors questioning the basic tenets of biology: Covid-19 patients who are talking and apparently not in distress, but who have oxygen levels low enough to typically cause unconsciousness or even death.

The phenomenon, known by some as “happy hypoxia” (some prefer the term “silent”) is raising questions about exactly how the virus attacks the lungs and whether there could be more effective ways of treating such patients.

It’s intriguing to see so many people coming in, quite how hypoxic they are.

We’re seeing oxygen saturations that are very low and they’re unaware of that.

Related: 'Happy hypoxia': unusual coronavirus effect baffles doctors

3.43pm BST

In a break from tradition caused by the coronavirus pandemic, the US Supreme Court for the first time heard arguments in a case by teleconference.

The case was a trademark dispute involving popular hotel reservation website Booking.com – and even typically silent Justice Clarence Thomas asked questions.

3.34pm BST

The US president, Donald Trump, is planning executive orders to increase the production of medical products and energy components in the country, the White House said on Monday.

Trump’s trade adviser, Peter Navarro, told Fox News in an interview that an order would soon require federal agencies to purchase US-made medical products, saying the Covid-19 outbreak had exposed the nation’s reliance on China.

3.30pm BST

Bangladesh authorities said on Monday they will gradually open up more factories, as well as farms and logistics operations, as they try to diminish the economic impact of a coronavirus lockdown which they extended to 16 May.

Shopping malls were given permission to reopen with shorter than usual hours.

3.22pm BST

Kuwaiti authorities dispersed a “riot” by Egyptian workers who demonstrated on Monday to demand repatriation amid the coronavirus crisis, state media said.

Such protests are rare in the tightly controlled Gulf countries, where there is a large population of foreign workers.

3.16pm BST

One of Brazil’s most celebrated composers and lyricists has died at the age of 73 after contracting Covid-19.

Aldir Blanc, whose mastery of the Portuguese language made him a legend of 20th-century Brazilian music, had been in hospital in Rio de Janeiro since 10 April and died in the early hours of Monday.

3.13pm BST

Scores of sheep crossed empty streets in Samsun, northern Turkey, as people stayed indoors over the weekend during the coronavirus lockdown.

3.11pm BST

Participants have started enrolling in a study to find out the infection rate of Covid-19 in children and their families in the United States.

The government-funded study, which will be conducted completely remotely, looks to determine how many children infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, develop symptoms of the disease.

3.07pm BST

Spain will pledge €125m ($136.58m) to developing a global response to the coronavirus pandemic, prime minister Pedro Sanchez has said.

Speaking at a virtual pledging conference today, Sanchez said Spain would contribute €50m to the Global Vaccine Alliance and €75m to the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations.

3.00pm BST

A street artist called Msale has taken it upon himself to create giant murals bringing public health messages directly to the overcrowded Mathare slum in Nairobi. With half a million people living in such ‘a squeezed area’ social distancing is quite impossible to achieve, says Msale, so he is providing information for people on how to keep safe from Covid-19 in the ‘simplest, clearest’ way he knows

2.54pm BST

Related: ‘My soul is dancing’: Spain comes out to play after Europe's strictest lockdown

2.50pm BST

Hearings in the US extradition case against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will resume in September after being postponed from later this month because of the coronavirus outbreak, a London court said on Monday.

Reuters reports from a hearing at Westminster Magistrates’ Court on Monday where it was agreed that September would be the most convenient date for the hearings to resume, although an exact date and an appropriate venue was yet to be decided, a spokesman said.

2.35pm BST

A phased easing of a five-week lockdown on Abuja, Lagos and Ogun State in Nigeria has begun today, even as a rise in new cases of Covid-19 across Nigeria continues to accelerate.

Infections have almost doubled in the last week to 2,500. Over 2000 cases are active infections, with 87 people dying from the virus and 400 having now recovered.

Movement is permitted providing face masks are worn. Several businesses including restaurants, viewing centres and places of worship will remain closed. Gatherings of more than 20 remain banned.

Yet the easing of restrictions has drawn sharp criticism. This weekend, the head of the Nigerian Medical Association said: “The easing of the lockdown even in phases is very premature,” and could portend a “frightening scenario”.

Many African countries including Nigeria, swiftly adopted restrictive lockdowns, travel bans and other measures to curb Covid-19, far earlier than in many other parts of the world.

Yet a worsening economy, and stretched security services, have diminished the limit of Nigeria’s ability to withstand the effects that the lockdown has wrought.

The government has provided support to only a small fraction of millions most affected.

During the lockdown, the number of testing laboratories have significantly improved to 18 from four two months ago. But low levels of testing in Nigeria have only slowly risen, with 17,500 tests administered in total.

Heightening fears further are hundreds of additional deaths in Kano, Nigeria’s second largest city, which have now been confirmed as linked to Covid-19.

Local media reports of residents fleeing Kano despite a ban on inter-state travel have heightened concerns that a potential epicentre is not secure.

A two-week lockdown was imposed on Kano by President Buhari but the state governor has since declared that the measures would be suspended on Monday and Thursday this week to help residents during Ramadan.

2.33pm BST

The European Union pledged €1bn ($1.09bn) on Monday for the global search for vaccines and treatment for the novel coronavirus, the European commission president Ursula von der Leyen told a pledging conference, Reuters reports.

Norway pledged to give $1bn to support the distribution worldwide of any vaccine developed against Covid-19 as well as for vaccines against other diseases, prime minister Erna Solberg said on Monday.

2.29pm BST

England reported 204 new coronavirus hospital deaths, the lowest daily increase since 30 March.

The new hospital deaths bring the total figure of confirmed deaths in hospitals to 21,384.

2.26pm BST

Related: Share your tributes and memories of UK coronavirus care home victims

2.23pm BST

Downing Street has published the names of the more than 50 scientists who sit on its Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies to discuss coronavirus, after criticism of the secrecy surrounding the group and the Guardian’s revelation that the No 10 adviser Dominic Cummings had attended meetings of the group.

The list of names was made available on the government’s website, showing that around half of the experts come from universities and another half are made up of government chief scientific advisers, public health officials or NHS senior staff.

Related: Government names dozens of scientists who sit on Sage group

2.18pm BST

Migrant labourers in Indian cities whose incomes have plummeted as a result of anti-coronavirus lockdown measures have been told that they will have to pay to board special trains taking them back to their homes in the countryside.

The decision has prompted derision in India, where most labourers live off what they earn in a day and have been surviving on state handouts.

Related: Destitute migrant workers in India forced to pay train fares home

2.01pm BST

Mass deaths in a northern Nigerian state were caused by coronavirus, authorities said after a preliminary investigation into the phenomenon.

Gravediggers in the state of Kano have reported burying dozens of corpses per day, in what the authorities had called “mysterious deaths”.

1.55pm BST

Hundreds of South African health workers were given a century-old tuberculosis vaccine on Monday in a trial to see whether the venerable formula can protect against coronavirus.

Devised at France’s legendary Pasteur Institute 100 years ago, the Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG) vaccine is one of the world’s oldest and most trusted immunisations.

1.48pm BST

Millions of people were allowed to return to work in Italy on Monday as Europe’s longest lockdown started to ease.

Italy, the first European country hit by the pandemic and a nation with one of the world’s highest death tolls, started stirring after its two-month shutdown.

1.38pm BST

The Pulitzer prizes in journalism and the arts will be announced on Monday after being postponed by the coronavirus outbreak.

The initial Pulitzer ceremony, which was scheduled for 20 April, was pushed back to give Pulitzer board members who were busy covering the pandemic more time to evaluate the finalists.

1.35pm BST

Germany, which is part of Europe’s open-border Schengen area, will extend its border checks until 15 May, a spokesman for the interior ministry has said.

The measure is in line with the European commission, he added. “Of course, we are guided by the European spirit not to act unilaterally or in an uncoordinated way.”

1.26pm BST

A street artist called Msale has created giant murals bringing public health messages directly to the overcrowded Mathare slum in Nairobi, Kenya.

With half a million people living in such “a squeezed area” social distancing is quite impossible to achieve, says Msale, so he is providing information for people on how to keep safe in the “simplest,

Russia on the offensive, Brexit Britain stands alone, and US disdain for European allies recalls its naivety with Stalin

Victory in Europe was made possible by a remarkable military collaboration between the main anti-Axis powers – the US, Russia and Britain. But the three-way relationship, between Franklin D Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill, was never easy, and it set a pattern of national rivalry, suspicion, fear and distrust that persists to this day.

A row over a top-secret message, known as SCAF-252, sent to Stalin in late March 1945 by Gen Dwight Eisenhower, the supreme allied commander, shows how fraught the relationship could be. In it, Eisenhower detailed his plans for the final defeat of Nazi Germany – but omitted to first consult or inform his British allies.

Related: VE Day: Churchill feared De Gaulle would declare victory early

EU-hosted talks tout cooperation but is not addressed by India, Russia or US

• Coronavirus – latest updates
• See all our coronavirus coverage

World leaders, with the notable exception of Donald Trump, stumped up nearly €7.4bn (£6.5bn) to research Covid-19 vaccines and therapies at a virtual event convened by the EU, pledging the money will also be used to distribute any vaccine to poor countries on time and equitably.

But in a sign of the fractured state of global health diplomacy, the event was not addressed by India, Russia or the US. After a weekend of persuasion, China was represented by its ambassador to the EU.

UK data from the Office for National Statistics has revealed that men are almost twice as likely to die from the disease as women. The trend was first seen in China, where one analysis found a fatality rate of 2.8% in men compared with 1.7% in women. Since then, the pattern has been mirrored in France, Germany, Iran, South Korea and Italy, where men have accounted for 71% of deaths.

UK data from the Office for National Statistics has revealed that men are almost twice as likely to die from the disease as women. The trend was first seen in China, where one analysis found a fatality rate of 2.8% in men compared with 1.7% in women. Since then, the pattern has been mirrored in France, Germany, Iran, South Korea and Italy, where men have accounted for 71% of deaths.

A radical new form of universal basic income could revitalise damaged economies

While countries in east Asia and Europe are gradually taking steps towards reopening their economies, many in the global south are wondering whether the worst of the pandemic is yet to come. As economists who work on poverty alleviation in developing countries, we are often asked what the effects of coronavirus will be in south Asia and Africa. The truth is, we don’t know. Without extensive testing to map the number of cases, it’s impossible to tell how far the virus has already spread. We don’t yet have enough information about how Covid-19 behaves under different conditions such as sunlight, heat and humidity. Developing countries’ more youthful populations may spare them the worst of the pandemic, but health systems in the global south are poorly equipped to deal with an outbreak, and poverty is linked to co-morbidities that put people at a higher risk of serious illness.

Without the information widespread testing provides, many poorer countries have taken an extremely cautious approach. India imposed a total lockdown on 24 March, by which time the country had about 500 confirmed cases. Countries such as Rwanda, South Africa and Nigeria enforced lockdowns in late March, long before the virus was expected to peak. But these lockdown measures can’t last forever. Poorer countries could have used the quarantine to buy time, gather information about how the disease behaves and develop a testing and tracing strategy. Unfortunately, not much of this has happened. And, far from coming to their aid, rich countries have outrun poorer nations in the race for PPE, oxygen and ventilators.

I loved Nina Paley’s brilliant animated film Sita Sings the Blues. If you’re reading this, stop right now—and watch the film here.

Paley has set the story of the Ramayana to the 1920s jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw. The epic tale is interwoven with Paley’s account of her husband’s move to India from where he dumps her by e-mail. The Ramayana is presented with the tagline: “The Greatest Break-Up Story Ever Told.”

All of this should make us curious. But there are other reasons for admiring this film:

The film returns us to the message that is made clear by every village-performance of the Ramlila: the epics are for everyone. Also, there is no authoritative narration of an epic. This film is aided by three shadow puppets who, drawing upon memory and unabashedly incomplete knowledge, boldly go where only pundits and philosophers have gone before. The result is a rendition of the epic that is gloriously a part of the everyday.

This idea is taken even further. Paley says that the work came from a shared culture, and it is to a shared culture that it must return: she has put the film on Creative Commons—viewers are invited to distribute, copy, remix the film.

Of course, such art drives the purists and fundamentalists crazy. On the Channel 13 website, “Durgadevi” and “Shridhar” rant about the evil done to Hinduism. It is as if Paley had lit her tail (tale!) and set our houses on fire!

Rave Out © 2007 IndiaUncut.com. All rights reserved.
India Uncut * The IU Blog * Rave Out * Extrowords * Workoutable * Linkastic

This is the 24th installment of The Rationalist, my column for the Times of India.

Back in the last decade, I was a cricket journalist for a few years. Then, around 12 years ago, I quit. I was jaded as hell. Every game seemed like déjà vu, nothing new, just another round on the treadmill. Although I would remember her fondly, I thought me and cricket were done.

And then I fell in love again. Cricket has changed in the last few years in glorious ways. There have been new ways of thinking about the game. There have been new ways of playing the game. Every season, new kinds of drama form, new nuances spring up into sight. This is true even of what had once seemed the dullest form of the game, one-day cricket. We are entering into a brave new world, and the team leading us there is England. No matter what happens in the World Cup final today – a single game involves a huge amount of luck – this England side are extraordinary. They are the bridge between eras, leading us into a Golden Age of Cricket.

I know that sounds hyperbolic, so let me stun you further by saying that I give the IPL credit for this. And now, having woken up you up with such a jolt on this lovely Sunday morning, let me explain.

Twenty20 cricket changed the game in two fundamental ways. Both ended up changing one-day cricket. The first was strategy.

When the first T20 games took place, teams applied an ODI template to innings-building: pinch-hit, build, slog. But this was not an optimal approach. In ODIs, teams have 11 players over 50 overs. In T20s, they have 11 players over 20 overs. The equation between resources and constraints is different. This means that the cost of a wicket goes down, and the cost of a dot ball goes up. Critically, it means that the value of aggression rises. A team need not follow the ODI template. In some instances, attacking for all 20 overs – or as I call it, ‘frontloading’ – may be optimal.

West Indies won the T20 World Cup in 2016 by doing just this, and England played similarly. And some sides began to realise was that they had been underestimating the value of aggression in one-day cricket as well.

The second fundamental way in which T20 cricket changed cricket was in terms of skills. The IPL and other leagues brought big money into the game. This changed incentives for budding cricketers. Relatively few people break into Test or ODI cricket, and play for their countries. A much wider pool can aspire to play T20 cricket – which also provides much more money. So it makes sense to spend the hundreds of hours you are in the nets honing T20 skills rather than Test match skills. Go to any nets practice, and you will find many more kids practising innovative aggressive strokes than playing the forward defensive.

As a result, batsmen today have a wider array of attacking strokes than earlier generations. Because every run counts more in T20 cricket, the standard of fielding has also shot up. And bowlers have also reacted to this by expanding their arsenal of tricks. Everyone has had to lift their game.

In one-day cricket, thus, two things have happened. One, there is better strategic understanding about the value of aggression. Two, batsmen are better equipped to act on the aggressive imperative. The game has continued to evolve.

Bowlers have reacted to this with greater aggression on their part, and this ongoing dialogue has been fascinating. The cricket writer Gideon Haigh once told me on my podcast that the 2015 World Cup featured a battle between T20 batting and Test match bowling.

This England team is the high watermark so far. Their aggression does not come from slogging. They bat with a combination of intent and skills that allows them to coast at 6-an-over, without needing to take too many risks. In normal conditions, thus, they can coast to 300 – any hitting they do beyond that is the bonus that takes them to 350 or 400. It’s a whole new level, illustrated by the fact that at one point a few days ago, they had seven consecutive scores of 300 to their name. Look at their scores over the last few years, in fact, and it is clear that this is the greatest batting side in the history of one-day cricket – by a margin.

There have been stumbles in this World Cup, but in the bigger picture, those are outliers. If England have a bad day in the final and New Zealand play their A-game, England might even lose today. But if Captain Morgan’s men play their A-game, they will coast to victory. New Zealand does not have those gears. No other team in the world does – for now.

But one day, they will all have to learn to play like this.

© 2007 IndiaUncut.com. All rights reserved.
India Uncut * The IU Blog * Rave Out * Extrowords * Workoutable * Linkastic

Autonomous vehicles are coming. In a statistic from the U.S. Department of Transportation, about 37,000 people died in car accidents in the United States in 2018. Having safe, fully automatic vehicles could drastically reduce that number—but the trick is figuring out how to make an autonomous vehicle safe. Internet-enabled systems in cars are more common than ever, and it’s unlikely that the use of them will slow or stop—and while they provide many conveniences to a driver, they also represent another attack surface that a potential criminal could use to disable a vehicle while driving.

So—what’s being done to combat this? Green Hills Software is on the case, and they explained the landscape of security in automotive systems in a presentation given by Max Hinson in the Cadence Theater at DAC 2019. They have software embedded [FS1] in most parts of a car, and all the major OEMs use their tech. The challenge they’ve taken on is far from a simple one—between the sheer complexity of modern automotive computer systems, safety requirements like the ISO 26262 standard, and the cost to develop and deploy software, they’ve got their work cut out for them. It’s the complexity of the systems that represents the biggest challenge, though. The autonomous cars of the future have dynamic behaviors, cognitive networks, require security certification to at least ASIL-D, require cyber security like you’d have on an important regular computer system to cover for the internet-enabled systems—and all of this comes with a caveat: under current verification abilities, it’s not possible to test every test case for the autonomous system. You’d be looking at trillions of test cases to reach full coverage—not even the strongest emulation units can cover that today.

With regular cars, you could do testing with crash-test dummies, and ramming the car into walls at high speeds in a lab and studying the results. Today, though, that won’t cut it. Testing like that doesn’t see if a car has side-channel vulnerabilities in its infotainment system, or if it can tell the difference between a stop sign and a yield sign. While driving might seem simple enough to those of us that have been doing it for a long time, to a computer, the sheer number of variables is astounding. A regular person can easily filter what’s important and what’s not, but a machine learning system would have to learn all of that from scratch. Green Hills Software posits that it would take nine billion miles of driving for a machine learning system of today’s caliber to reach an average driver’s level—and for an autonomous car, “average” isn’t good enough. It has to be perfect.

A certifier for autonomous vehicles has a herculean task, then. And if that doesn’t sound hard enough, consider this: in modern machine-vision systems, something called the “single pixel hack” can be exploited to mess them up. Let’s say you have a stop sign, and a system designed to recognize that object as a stop sign. Randomly, you change one pixel of the image to a different color, and then check to see if the system still recognizes the stop sign. To a human, who knows that a stop sign is octagonal, red, and has “STOP” written in white block letters, a stop sign that’s half blue and maybe bent a bit out of shape is still, obviously, a stop sign—plus, we can use context clues to ascertain that sign at an intersection where there’s a white line on the pavement in front of our vehicle probably means we should stop. We can do this because we can process the factors that identify a stop sign “softly”—it’s okay if it’s not quite right; we know what it’s supposed to be. Having a computer do the same is much more difficult. What if the stop sign has graffiti on it? Will the system still recognize it as a stop sign? How big of an aberration needs to be present before the system no longer acknowledges the mostly-red, mostly-octagonal object that might at one point have had “stop” written on it as a stop sign? To us, a stop sign is a stop sign, even with one pixel changed—but change it in the right spot, and the computer might disagree.

The National Institute of Security and Technology tracks vulnerabilities along those lines in all sorts of systems; by their database, a major vulnerability is found in Linux every three days. And despite all our efforts to promote security, this isn’t a battle we’re winning right now—the number of vulnerabilities is increasing all the time.

Check back next time to see the other side: what does Green Hills Software propose we do about these problems? Read part 2 now.

If you missed the first part of this series, you can find it here.

So: what does Green Hills Software propose we do?

The issue of “solving security” is, at its core, impossible—security can never be 100% assured. What we can do is make it as difficult as possible for security holes to develop. This can be done in a couple ways; one is to make small code in small packs executed by a “safing plan”—having each individual component be easier to verify goes a long way toward ensuring the security of the system. Don’t have sensors connect directly to objects—instead have them output to the safing plan first, which can establish control and ensure that nothing can be used incorrectly or in unintended ways. Make sure individual software components are sufficiently isolated to minimize the chances of a side-channel attack being viable.

What all of these practices mean, however, is that a system needs to be architected with security in mind from the very beginning. Managers need to emphasize and reward secure development right from the planning stages, or the comprehensive approach required to ensure that a system is as secure as it can be won’t come together. When something in someone else’s software breaks, pay attention—mistakes are costly, but only one person has to make it before others can learn from it and ensure it doesn’t happen again. Experts are experts for a reason—when an independent expert tells you something in your design is not secure, don’t brush them off because the fix is expensive. This is what Green Hills Software does, and it’s how they ensure that their software is secure.

Now, where does Cadence fit into all of this? Cadence has a number of certified secure offerings a user can take advantage of when planning their new designs. The Tensilica portfolio of IP is a great way to ensure basic components of your design are foolproof. As always, the Cadence Verification Suite is great for security verification in both simulation and emulation, and JasperGold platform’s formal apps are a part of that suite as well.

We are entering a new age of autonomous technology, and with that new age we have to update our security measures to match. It’s not good enough to “patch up” security at the end—security needs to beat the forefront of a verification engineer or hardware designer’s mind at all stages of development. For a lot of applications, quite literally, lives are at stake. It’s uncharted territory out there, but with Green Hills Software and Cadence’s tools and secure IP, we can ensure the safety of tomorrow.

This is the 24th installment of The Rationalist, my column for the Times of India.

Back in the last decade, I was a cricket journalist for a few years. Then, around 12 years ago, I quit. I was jaded as hell. Every game seemed like déjà vu, nothing new, just another round on the treadmill. Although I would remember her fondly, I thought me and cricket were done.

And then I fell in love again. Cricket has changed in the last few years in glorious ways. There have been new ways of thinking about the game. There have been new ways of playing the game. Every season, new kinds of drama form, new nuances spring up into sight. This is true even of what had once seemed the dullest form of the game, one-day cricket. We are entering into a brave new world, and the team leading us there is England. No matter what happens in the World Cup final today – a single game involves a huge amount of luck – this England side are extraordinary. They are the bridge between eras, leading us into a Golden Age of Cricket.

I know that sounds hyperbolic, so let me stun you further by saying that I give the IPL credit for this. And now, having woken up you up with such a jolt on this lovely Sunday morning, let me explain.

Twenty20 cricket changed the game in two fundamental ways. Both ended up changing one-day cricket. The first was strategy.

When the first T20 games took place, teams applied an ODI template to innings-building: pinch-hit, build, slog. But this was not an optimal approach. In ODIs, teams have 11 players over 50 overs. In T20s, they have 11 players over 20 overs. The equation between resources and constraints is different. This means that the cost of a wicket goes down, and the cost of a dot ball goes up. Critically, it means that the value of aggression rises. A team need not follow the ODI template. In some instances, attacking for all 20 overs – or as I call it, ‘frontloading’ – may be optimal.

West Indies won the T20 World Cup in 2016 by doing just this, and England played similarly. And some sides began to realise was that they had been underestimating the value of aggression in one-day cricket as well.

The second fundamental way in which T20 cricket changed cricket was in terms of skills. The IPL and other leagues brought big money into the game. This changed incentives for budding cricketers. Relatively few people break into Test or ODI cricket, and play for their countries. A much wider pool can aspire to play T20 cricket – which also provides much more money. So it makes sense to spend the hundreds of hours you are in the nets honing T20 skills rather than Test match skills. Go to any nets practice, and you will find many more kids practising innovative aggressive strokes than playing the forward defensive.

As a result, batsmen today have a wider array of attacking strokes than earlier generations. Because every run counts more in T20 cricket, the standard of fielding has also shot up. And bowlers have also reacted to this by expanding their arsenal of tricks. Everyone has had to lift their game.

In one-day cricket, thus, two things have happened. One, there is better strategic understanding about the value of aggression. Two, batsmen are better equipped to act on the aggressive imperative. The game has continued to evolve.

Bowlers have reacted to this with greater aggression on their part, and this ongoing dialogue has been fascinating. The cricket writer Gideon Haigh once told me on my podcast that the 2015 World Cup featured a battle between T20 batting and Test match bowling.

This England team is the high watermark so far. Their aggression does not come from slogging. They bat with a combination of intent and skills that allows them to coast at 6-an-over, without needing to take too many risks. In normal conditions, thus, they can coast to 300 – any hitting they do beyond that is the bonus that takes them to 350 or 400. It’s a whole new level, illustrated by the fact that at one point a few days ago, they had seven consecutive scores of 300 to their name. Look at their scores over the last few years, in fact, and it is clear that this is the greatest batting side in the history of one-day cricket – by a margin.

There have been stumbles in this World Cup, but in the bigger picture, those are outliers. If England have a bad day in the final and New Zealand play their A-game, England might even lose today. But if Captain Morgan’s men play their A-game, they will coast to victory. New Zealand does not have those gears. No other team in the world does – for now.

But one day, they will all have to learn to play like this.

The India Uncut Blog © 2010 Amit Varma. All rights reserved.
Follow me on Twitter.

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VELIZY-VILLACOUBLAY, France — November 13th, 2019 — Dassault Systèmes (Euronext Paris: #13065, DSY.PA) is holding a Life Sciences Day for analysts and investors, today, Wednesday, November 13th, 2019 starting at 09.00 am ET in New York. The event includes presentations by the senior executive management team. The sessions are being webcast live and will be available for replay by accessing https://investor.3ds.com/events/event-details/life-sciences-day. Bernard Charlès, Dassault Systèmes’ Vice...