Coronavirus live news: Iran death toll exceeds 20,000; Mykonos bans parties and festivities | World news

At the popular Peking roast duck restaurant chain Quanjude in Beijing, staff have been passing on a new message to diners: do not order more than you can eat.

The eatery is the latest business to join a campaign against food waste, which began nationwide last week in earnest after the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, said such practices were “shameful” while the country battles a pandemic, Reuters reports.

Local governments and catering associations have been urging restaurants to offer smaller portions while some eateries have rolled out penalties for wasting food. One restaurant even started weighing diners to decide how much they can order, but later backtracked after coming under heavy online criticism.

Servers at Quanjude now tell customers to order according to their guest numbers and even urge them to order one less dish than their total head count, he said. They also ask them to pack up any leftovers to take home.

China’s catering industry wastes 17-18m tonnes of food a year, enough to feed a population of 30-50 million, state media has reported.

The anti-food waste campaign, named Clear Your Plate, follows concerns raised by Beijing about ensuring food security due to disruptions caused to the agriculture supply chains from the pandemic.

Livestreaming stars known for their ability to eat large amounts of food were warned last week against encouraging food wastage on platforms such as Kuaishou and Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, which said they could be banned or face penalties if found to do so.

Special investigators in South Africa are investigating government departments for graft over irregularities in coronavirus-related tenders worth 5bn rand (£220m).

In a presentation to a parliamentary committee, Andy Mothibi, the head of the Special Investigating Unit, which investigates allegations against public sector figures or institutions, said it was working on 658 cases nationwide.

The provincial health department of the central Gauteng province, an economic hub and home to Johannesburg, alone accounted for just under half of the total, at 2.2bn rand, Reuters quoted Mothibi as saying.

“The allegations reported to the SIU involved the procurement of PPEs (personal protective equipment), hospital and quarantine sites, catering services (food parcels), ventilators, disinfecting equipment and motorised wheelchairs,” he said.

The figure is likely to add to pressure on South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, and the ruling African National Congress, who have struggled to deflect criticism from alliance partners and opposition parties as allegations of corruption implicated senior ANC politicians.

Ramaphosa, who replaced his scandal-prone predecessor, Jacob Zuma, in 2018 with promises to eradicate corruption, has battled to root out criminality linked to the fight against Covid-19 in South Africa, which has the world’s fifth-highest number of coronavirus infections at 592,144.

Toulouse has become the first city in France to impose the mandatory wearing of face masks outdoors, in an attempt to curb the spread of coronavirus.

Officials in France’s fourth-largest city fear that a mass movement of people towards the end of the summer break will lead to a spike in infections, according to the French state-funded news agency AFP.

New infections across France have been increasing in recent weeks and the numbers of people admitted to hospital and to intensive care have also been rising.

Face masks are already compulsory on public transport in France and indoors in public places. Many French towns and cities, including Paris and Toulouse, have also used discretionary powers to make masks mandatory in certain areas – often busy streets, near tourist hotspots and at outdoor food markets.

Toulouse officials said masks would be compulsory outdoors across the city starting on Friday, from 7am to 3am the next day, for all people aged 12 and over, including those on bikes and kick-scooters.

The coronavirus outbreak has claimed more than 30,400 lives in France so far.

The party’s over at Mykonos, with officials from Greece’s civil protection agency announcing strict restrictions on the island, a tourist hotspot, to contain the spread of coronavirus infections.

The measures, which also cover the coastal area of Chalkidiki in northern Greece, include a complete ban on live parties and festivities, a limit of nine people in all public and private gatherings and compulsory mask wearing in closed and open spaces, according to Reuters.

They will come into effect from 21 August, for 10 days.

On Tuesday, Greece recorded 269 coronavirus infections, its highest daily tally since its first case was detected on 26 February. In spite of that, the deputy civil protection minister, Nikos Hardalias, told reporters that Greece continued to be in a “better situation” compared with other European countries.

Greece, he said, ranked 180th in terms of deaths per million inhabitants, noting that 83% of recent infections were due to domestic dispersion of the virus as people did not observe proper social distancing.

A report has found that websites spreading misinformation about health attracted nearly half a billion views on Facebook in April alone, as the coronavirus pandemic escalated worldwide, write Emma Graham-Harrison and Alex Hern.

Facebook had promised to crack down on conspiracy theories and inaccurate news early in the pandemic. But as its executives promised accountability, its algorithm appears to have fuelled traffic to a network of sites sharing dangerous false news, campaign group Avaaz has found.

False medical information can be deadly; researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical medicine have directly linked a single piece of coronavirus misinformation to 800 deaths.

Pages from the top 10 sites peddling inaccurate information and conspiracy theories about health received almost four times as many views on Facebook as the top 10 reputable sites for health information, Avaaz warned in a report.

Global trade in goods suffered an unprecedented fall in the second quarter of 2020, as fear of the coronavirus pandemic shut down large parts of the world economy, according to the World Trade Organization.

The WTO said on Wednesday that its goods trade barometer had hit a record low, according to Reuters. The global trade monitor said:

Additional indicators point to partial upticks in world trade and output in the third quarter, but the strength of any such recovery remains highly uncertain: an L-shaped, rather than V-shaped, trajectory cannot be ruled out.

The barometer reading of 84.5 was down 18.6 points from the same period last year. In normal times, it anticipates changes in the trajectory of trade by a few months, but volatility triggered by the pandemic has reduced its predictive value.

This reading – the lowest on record in data going back to 2007, and on par with the nadir of the 2008-09 financial crisis – is broadly consistent with WTO statistics issued in June, which estimated an 18.5% decline in merchandise trade in the second quarter of 2020 as compared to the same period last year.

The exact extent of the fall will become clear only when official trade data for April to June becomes available.

South Korea’s health ministry has warned that the country is facing a “desperately dangerous crisis” of spreading coronavirus, after the country reported its highest daily rise in cases since early March.

On Wednesday, officials asked people in Seoul, the capital, to stay at home if they could, warning that testing, tracing and isolation measures were insufficient to stop the spread of the virus.

The 297 new infections mark the sixth straight day of triple-digit increases in a country that has managed to blunt several previous outbreaks, according to Reuters. The national tally has risen to 16,058 infections with 306 deaths, according to data from the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC).

The vice health minister, Kim Gang-lip, told a briefing:

We’re in a desperately dangerous crisis where infections are spreading in the Seoul metropolitan area and threatening to lead to a massive nationwide transmission.

The government cannot contain the current spread only with tracing and isolation … please stay home unless you must go out.

Authorities said if the number of infections rose or continued at the current rate of spread, they would likely impose the highest level of social-distancing rules, under which schools would be closed, businesses advised to work from home and gatherings limited to 10 people.

The first nine days of coronavirus movement restrictions in New Zealand were unlawful, a court has found.

The ruling comes after a Wellington lawyer, Andrew Borrowdale, challenged the legality of steps taken in the early stages of the five-week lockdown, including calls by the prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, and other officials between 26 March and 3 April telling New Zealanders to stay at home.

An order imposing stay at home restrictions was not passed until 3 April, so New Zealanders rights and freedoms were unlawfully limited for those first nine days, the court said. According to the judgment:

While there is no question that the requirement was a necessary, reasonable and proportionate response to the Covid-19 crisis at that time, the requirement was not prescribed by law.

All other challenges to the lockdown were dismissed.

The court said few, if any, prosecutions for lockdown breaches would be affected.

Following the ruling, New Zealand’s attorney general, David Parker, said:

The government was trying to educate people about the health risks and transition them quickly to take actions that curtailed normal freedoms like staying at home to stop the spread of the virus. In the end the measures taken by the government worked to eliminate Covid-19, save lives and minimise damage to our economy.

Hello everybody, this is Damien Gayle taking the reins of the live blog now. I will be bringing you the latest updates on the ongoing coronavirus outbreak from around the world for the next eight hours or so.

If you have any comments, tips or suggestions for coverage, please drop me a line, either via email to damien.gayle@theguardian.com, or via Twitter direct message to @damiengayle.

Iran surpassed 20,000 confirmed deaths from the coronavirus on Wednesday, the health ministry said: the highest death toll for any Middle East country so far in the pandemic.

The announcement came as the Islamic Republic, which has been struggling with both the region’s largest outbreak and the highest number of fatalities, went ahead with university entrance exams for over 1 million students. Iran is also preparing for mass Shiite commemorations later this month.

Iran suffered the region’s first major outbreak, with top politicians, health officials and religious leaders in its Shiite theocracy infected with the virus. It has since struggled to contain the spread across the nation of 80 million people, initially beating it back only to see it rise again at the beginning in June.

Still, international experts remain suspicious of Iran’s case counts. Researchers in the Iranian parliament suggested in April that the death toll was likely to be nearly double the officially reported figures, due to undercounting and because not everyone with breathing problems had been tested for the virus.