Muslim pilgrims in Mecca have circled the Kaaba, Islam’s holiest site, and then converged on a vast tent camp in the nearby desert, officially opening the annual Hajj pilgrimage.

The event is returning to its full capacity for the first time since the coronavirus pandemic.

So far, more than 1.8 million pilgrims from all over the world have amassed in and around Mecca for the Hajj, and the number was growing as more pilgrims from inside Saudi Arabia joined, said a spokesman for the Saudi Hajj Ministry, Ayedh al-Ghweinim.

Authorities have said they expect this year to approach pre-Covid levels of more than two million.

Egyptian businessman Yehya Al-Ghanam said he was at a loss for words to describe his feelings on arriving at Mina, one of the biggest tent camps in the world, outside Mecca, where pilgrims will stay for much of the Hajj.

“Tears will fall from my eyes out of joy and happiness,” he said. “I do not sleep. I have not slept for 15 days, only an hour a day.”

The pilgrimage is one of the five pillars of Islam, and all Muslims are required to make the five-day Hajj at least once in their lives if they are physically and financially able to.

For pilgrims, it is a moving spiritual experience that absolves sins, brings them closer to God and unites the world’s more than 1.8 billion Muslims. Some spend years saving up money and waiting for a permit to embark on the journey.

The rituals during the Hajj largely commemorate the Koran’s accounts of Ibrahim, his son Ismail and Ismail’s mother Hajar.

Pilgrims have been doing the ritual circuit around the Kaaba since arriving in Mecca over recent days. As the last ones performed it on Monday, the pilgrims made their way by foot or bus to Mina.

In Mina, soldiers sprayed pilgrims with water to cool them down in the heat in the desert plain, where there is little respite from the blazing sun.

The faithful set up in their tents, resting in the rows of cubicles and praying together to prepare for the coming rituals.

On Tuesday, pilgrims will move to Mount Arafat, a desert hill where the Prophet Muhammad is said to have delivered his final sermon. Afterwards, they collect pebbles from a site known as Muzdalifa to be used in the symbolic stoning of pillars representing the devil back in Mina.

The final three days of the Hajj coincide with the Eid al-Adha holiday, when Muslims around the world slaughter livestock and distribute the meat to the poor.

In 2019, more than 2.4 million pilgrims participated in the Hajj. In 2020, amid worldwide coronavirus lockdowns, Saudi Arabia limited the pilgrimage to a few thousand citizens and local residents.

Last year, just under 900,000 attended as Saudi Arabia allowed limited numbers of pilgrims from abroad.

Read relevant links: Saudi Arabia bans foreign pilgrims amid Covid-19 fears.

There is “no doubt” that events in Afghanistan will have “heartened and emboldened” extremists, the boss of MI5 said as he warned of the potential return of “al Qaida-style” terrorist plots.

Director-general Ken McCallum said that, although the Government has pledged to judge the Taliban by their actions, the UK security service and its partners will plan for the chance that “more risk, progressively, may flow our way”.

He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “There is no doubt that events in Afghanistan will have heartened and emboldened some of those extremists and so being vigilant to precisely those kinds of risks (is what) my organisation is focused on along with a range of other threats.”

While “inspired” acts of terrorism are “by volume” the largest number of threats that MI5 and their partners face in the UK, Mr McCallum also warned of the “potential regrowth of al Qaida-style directed plots”.

He said that although more directed plots from terrorist organisations take time to organise and carry out, psychological boosts for their causes can happen “overnight”.

“Terrorist threats tend not to change overnight in the sense of directed plotting or training camps or infrastructure – the sorts of things that al Qaida enjoyed in Afghanistan at the time of 9/11.

“These things do inherently take time to build, and the 20-year effort to reduce the terrorist threat from Afghanistan has been largely successful.

“But what does happen overnight, even though those directed plots and centrally organised bits of terrorism take a bit longer to rebuild… overnight, you can have a psychological boost, a morale boost to extremists already here, or in other countries.

“So we need to be vigilant both for the increase in inspired terrorism which has become a real trend for us to deal with over the last five to 10 years, alongside the potential regrowth of al Qaida-style directed plots,” Mr McCallum said.

His comments follow warnings he made during his annual address in July that terrorists will “seek to take advantage” of chances to “rebuild” as troops withdraw from Afghanistan, suggesting it could be “challenging” to disrupt potential threats without “having our own forces on the ground”.

Almost 20 years on from the 9/11 terror attacks in the US, Mr McCallum said it was “difficult to give a simplistic answer” as to whether the UK was safer, or less safe now from the threat of terrorism since 2001.

He said a consequence of the success of reducing large-scale terror events had been the growth of “inspired terrorism”. The so-called Islamic State had “managed to do something that al Qaida did not” in inspiring lots of people to attempt smaller scale acts of terrorism through online grooming.

“The number of plots that we disrupt nowadays are actually higher than the number of plots that were coming at us after 9/11, but on average they are smaller plots of lower sophistication,” Mr McCallum added.

He warned the threat of terrorism in the UK remains “a real and enduring thing”, describing how security services and police had disrupted 31 late-stage attack plots in Britain in the last four years.

Over the past two years during the coronavirus pandemic, six late-stage attack plots have been disrupted, he added, as he warned it would be “reckless” of him to claim that a terror attack would not happen on UK soil “on his watch”.

But he insisted those at MI5 “spend our lives” working to mitigate such threats.

One of the hardest things about being the boss of MI5 is the “prioritisation” of threats, Mr McCallum said, adding: “While we have, I can confidently say, saved thousands of lives across the last 20 years, we cannot always succeed.”

India’s crematoria and burial grounds are being overwhelmed by the devastating new surge of coronavirus infections tearing through the country, depleting the supply of life-saving oxygen to critical levels and leaving patients to die while waiting to see doctors.

For the fourth straight day, on Sunday India set a global daily record of new infections, spurred by the emergence of a new variant that has undermined the government’s premature claims of victory over the pandemic.

The 349,691 confirmed cases over the past day took India’s total to more than 16.9 million, behind only the United States.

The Health Ministry reported another 2,767 deaths in the past 24 hours, pushing India’s Covid-19 fatalities to 192,311.

Experts say that toll could be a huge undercount, as suspected cases are not included, and many deaths from the infection are being attributed to underlying conditions.

The crisis unfolding in India is most visceral in its graveyards and crematoria, and in heartbreaking images of gasping patients dying on their way to hospital due to lack of oxygen.

Burial grounds in the Indian capital, New Delhi, are running out of space and bright, glowing funeral pyres light up the night sky in other badly hit cities.

In central Bhopal city, some crematoria have increased their capacity from dozens of pyres to more than 50, but officials said there are still long waits.

At the Bhadbhada Vishram Ghat crematorium, workers said they cremated more than 110 people on Saturday, even as government figures in the city with a population of 1.8 million put the total number of deaths at just 10.

“The virus is swallowing our city’s people like a monster,” said Mamtesh Sharma, an official at the site.

The unprecedented rush of bodies has forced the crematorium to abandon individual ceremonies and rituals that Hindus believe release the soul from the cycle of rebirth.

“We are just burning bodies as they arrive,” said Mr Sharma. “It is as if we are in the middle of a war.”

The head gravedigger at New Delhi’s largest Muslim cemetery, where 1,000 people have been buried during the pandemic, said more bodies are arriving now than last year.

“I fear we will run out of space very soon,” said Mohammad Shameem.

The situation is equally grim at unbearably full hospitals, where desperate people are dying in queues, sometimes on the roads outside, waiting to see doctors.

Health officials are scrambling to expand critical care units and stock up on dwindling supplies of oxygen. Hospitals and patients alike are struggling to procure scarce medical equipment that is being sold at inflated prices.

The crisis is in direct contrast with government claims that “nobody in the country was left without oxygen” in a statement made at Delhi High Court on Saturday by India’s Solicitor General, Tushar Mehta.

The breakdown is a stark failure for a country whose prime minister declared victory over Covid-19 in January, and which boasted of being the “world’s pharmacy”, a global producer of vaccines and a model for other developing nations.

Caught off guard by the latest deadly spike, the federal government has asked industrialists to increase the production of oxygen and other life-saving drugs in short supply. But health experts said India had an entire year to prepare for the inevitable – and failed to do so.

Dr Krutika Kuppalli, assistant professor of medicine in the division of infectious diseases at the Medical University of South Carolina, said the Indian government has been “very reactive to this situation rather than being proactive”.

She said the government should have used the last year, when the virus was more under control, to develop plans to address a surge and “stockpiled medications and developed public-private partnerships to help with manufacturing essential resources in the event of a situation like this”.

“Most importantly, they should have looked at what was going on in other parts of the world and understood that it was a matter of time before they would be in a similar situation,” Dr Kuppalli said.

She called the government’s premature declarations of victory over the pandemic a “false narrative”, which encouraged people to relax health measures when they should have continued strict adherence to physical distancing, wearing masks and avoiding large crowds.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is facing mounting criticism for allowing Hindu festivals and attending mammoth election rallies that experts suspect accelerated the spread of infections.

His Hindu nationalist government is trying to quell critical voices.

On Saturday, Twitter complied with the government’s request and prevented people in India from viewing more than 50 tweets that appeared to criticise the administration’s handling of the pandemic. The targeted posts include tweets from opposition ministers critical of Mr Modi, journalists and ordinary Indians.

A Twitter spokesman said it has powers to “withhold access to the content in India only” if the company determines the content to be “illegal in a particular jurisdiction”.

The company said it had responded to an order by the government and notified people whose tweets were withheld.

India’s Information Technology ministry did not respond to a request for comment.

Police officers have said they “deeply regret” the upset caused by shutting down a Good Friday church service for breaching coronavirus rules.

Two Metropolitan Police officers attended a service at Christ the King in Balham, south London, on Sunday to address worshippers about the incident.

Officers had halted the Friday service when they found some worshippers breaching social-distancing guidelines and not wearing masks, according to the force.

In a letter to parishioners on its website, the Polish Catholic church responded at the time by saying police had exceeded their powers and that all Government requirements were met.

Nine days later, Detective Superintendent Andy Wadey and Superintendent Roger Arditti addressed worshippers in a Sunday mass service which was live-streamed on YouTube.

Detective Supt Wadey said there had been “significant reflection and learning” by members of the force and New Scotland Yard since the incident.

He said: “The intention of the Met is to protect and support communities in staying safe during the pandemic.

“We know, however, that many people were very upset by what happened on Good Friday and we deeply regret that.

“Since then, there has been significant reflection and learning by me, Roger, our colleagues who work with us locally and also, senior leaders at New Scotland Yard.

“The Metropolitan Police truly wishes to serve and protect you in the very best possible way.

“I truly hope that today marks the start of a renewed, deep and lasting relationship with the parish of Christ the King Balham and also the wider Polish communities.”

In a response posted on the church’s website, priest Wladyslaw Wyszacjki said the interruption to the Good Friday service was “very painful for our parish”, but thanked the officers for attending.

He said: “The interruption of the Good Friday liturgy was very painful for our parish community, but in the spirit of the Gospel, we willingly extend our hand to the representatives of the Police authorities in order to further build a deep and lasting relationship between us, based on mutual respect and regard for the rights of worshipers to freely practice their faith.”

The church said worshippers obeyed police orders during the shutdown, and the Met said no fixed penalty notices were issued.

From March 8, places of worship in England were allowed to open for communal prayer, and limits to congregation sizes were dependent on the capacity of the establishment.

A new temporary mortuary that can hold up to 1,300 bodies has been built in London as the capital faces a growing Covid-19 death toll.

A council leader described how the newly-built facility in north-west London acted as a “sobering reminder” of how the pandemic is affecting thousands of lives as he urged people to follow Covid-19 rules.

More than 10,500 people have died from Covid-19 in London since the start of the outbreak and the city’s mayor Sadiq Khan declared a major incident last week as hospitals came under increasing pressure.

The Ruislip facility is the latest of a number of temporary mortuaries set up across the country, including at the former military hospital Headley Court in Leatherhead, Surrey, and at a former aircraft hangar at RAF Coltishall north-east of Norwich.

It took just over a week to construct the facility on the site near Breakspear Crematorium in Ruislip.

It can currently hold 217 bodies, but will reach a capacity of 1,300 once building works are completed around January 20.

It will provide an additional 20% in capacity for public mortuaries in London, helping to relieve pressure on hospitals and council-run morgues.

Since the pandemic began, 10,820 deaths have been registered in London where Covid-19 was mentioned on the death certificate.

The figures, from the Office for National Statistics, show that 492 deaths involving Covid-19 were registered in the capital in the seven days to January 1 – the highest weekly number since the seven days to May 1.

Westminster City Council chief executive Stuart Love, who is leading the pan-London response, said local authorities worked with faith communities in the capital to ensure all religious requirements, wishes and needs were met.

When asked whether he thought the temporary mortuary could reach full capacity in the current wave of the pandemic, he said: “We really hope it doesn’t come to that.

“From my point of view, we have built this really hoping it doesn’t get used to its capacity.

“This really is a visual, sobering reminder that we are still in the midst of a severe pandemic. We want to give people hope but we are not there yet.

“This just re-emphasises the message of staying at home and looking after your loved ones.”

During the first wave of the pandemic, four temporary mortuaries were built in London to provide extra capacity.

Mr Love said those sites were decommissioned and a decision was made to open one hub in north-west London instead, making the process of storing bodies more streamlined.

“We learnt from the first wave how additional capacity was or was not being used and that informed our decision-making this time round,” he said.

The entire Ruislip site, made up of tented facilities with refrigeration units, has cost £3.2 million, with the total expected to reach £4 million by March, Mr Love added.

“As the number of deaths have increased, particularly since Christmas Eve, we made the decision to build temporary capacity with the overriding principle of ensuring the dignity and respect for the bereaved and the diseased are maintained.

“It’s really important that people have confidence that bodies are being treated with respect.

“As mortuary capacity needs increase so do the risks around various elements of the system in storing the diseased.”

The risk of being exposed to Covid-19 is now 100 times greater than it was four months ago, the Department of Health has warned.

Deputy chief medical officer Dr Heather Burns appealed for people to stay at home and adhere to public health guidance as the country’s incident rate exceeded 300 per 100,000 population for the first time since the onset of the pandemic.

Dr Burns said: “The 14-day incidence was at three per 100,000 at the end of June, today it is 302 per 100,000 population.

“The risk of you being exposed to Covid-19 is now 100 times greater than it was four months ago.

“Please limit your risk by staying at home and following public health advice.”

She added that the positivity rate in schools is 2.8%, compared with 13% in the general public, which supports the position that schools are not prime environments for the spread of the disease.

It comes as a further 1,066 cases of Covid-19 were confirmed by the Department of Health on Thursday.

Three more deaths linked to the virus were also reported.

Over the past 14 days, 14,404 cases have been notified to the Department of Health.

The five-day moving average is now 1,160 cases per day.

Among cases notified in the last 14 days, the median age was 31.

Some 69% of the cases were in people aged under 45 and 8% were in people aged 65 and older.

The latest public health data found a total of 116,640 tests have been conducted over the past seven days. The positivity rate is 6.9%.

There were 313 patients with Covid-19 in hospital as of 2pm on Thursday, including 37 patients with the virus in critical care units.

Dr Burns said there were 649 new outbreaks notified in the week up to October 17, 71% of which were in private houses, 29% in other locations.

Six additional outbreaks in nursing home and community hospitals were confirmed. There are now 33 current outbreaks in these settings with 451 linked cases.

She said the latest figures also showed the number of deaths had continued to increase.

In the first three weeks of October there have been 60 deaths, 24 of which are linked to nursing home outbreaks.

Chief medical officer Dr Tony Holohan said the country was now at Level 5 restrictions because the disease is at “very serious levels in our country and posing a significant risk to public health”.

He reiterated his plea for anyone who had tested positive, or anyone who was awaiting a test or a test result, to self-isolate.

Dr Holohan asked everyone else to behave as if they are a close contact of someone with the virus, even if they are not, so that they limited interactions with others.

“We’re in effect asking everyone else to behave as though they are a close contact,” he said.

“In all circumstances other than for essential reasons to stay at home for the six-week period.

Asked at a briefing about the breakdown in the HSE’s contact tracing system, Dr Holohan said: “We’re not going to contact trace our way out of the scale of exponential growth we’ve experienced. We’ve had significant amount of infection occurring and very, very rapid increases in that over the period.”

He added that the HSE had done a “very significant job” in putting the system in place and that the “best defence against transmission of the disease” was people’s individual behaviour.

Dr Holohan said the system was challenged by the “scale of the infection that we have” and with cases heading to between 1,200 and 1,500 cases a day “it was a large burden of infection”.

He also said that as long as there is high transmission in the community, it will be impossible to protect nursing homes despite all the measures taken.

“It is simply not realistic to expect that we will protect nursing homes while we have the scale of infection spreading as it is in our population,” he said.

Professor Philip Nolan said the reproduction number was between 1.3 and 1.4 nationally.

“Our collective goal now is to suppress transmission of the virus and bring our case numbers to manageable levels,” he said.

“If we work hard together to get the reproduction number to 0.5, we should succeed in reducing cases to below 100 a day in six weeks’ time.”

He added that it was an “absolutely realistic target” and an “essential target” to get the reproduction number below one.

Prof Nolan also said the difference between this surge and the onset of the pandemic was that the “vast majority” of cases of coronavirus in the community were being detected, compared with earlier this year.

He said in March and April, only one in three cases were being detected.

Prof Nolan said they were catching milder and asymptomatic cases now and in a younger cohort who were less likely to be admitted to hospital and less likely to die, but he said they did not know the long-term effects they would suffer.

He added it was very important that these cases were detected because otherwise people unknowingly infect others.

Pope Francis apologised to the faithful for not being able to greet them and shake their hands as Italy posted a record spike in coronavirus infections that is threatening to once again spiral out of control.

Instead of wading into the crowd to embrace the sick and kiss babies during his weekly general audience on Wednesday, Francis walked in through a back door directly onto the stage to begin his catechism lesson.

At 83 and with part of a lung removed when he was in his 20s due to illness, the pope would be at high-risk for Covid-19 complications.

And yet he has been reluctant to wear a face mask and appeared without one again on Wednesday, even though many of his entourage and all of the Swiss Guards were using them.

He told the crowd on Wednesday: “I would like to come down as usual and get close to you to greet you, but with new prescriptions, we would better keep our distances.”

Francis often seems out of breath and speaks in a whisper because of his lung condition, suggesting that wearing a mask might be particularly uncomfortable for him.

This week, four Swiss Guards tested positive for Covid-19 and were in isolation.

All told there have been 19 cases in the Vatican, and the tiny city state amended its mask mandate last week to conform to that of Italy to require them indoors and out.

Italy is seeing a sharp resurgence in Covid-19 cases, with the Lazio region around the Vatican among the worst-hit in this new wave of the pandemic, with more people in the hospital than any other region.

On Wednesday, the country as a whole recorded its single biggest single-day jump in infections since the start of the outbreak, adding another 7,332 cases.

Public health officials are warning that hospitals are starting to fill up and Italy’s contact-tracing system is starting to crumble under the weight of the new infections.

“No health system is able to do contact tracing for more than a few thousand infections,” said virologist Andrea Crisanti, who as a regional adviser was credited with helping to keep Veneto’s infections down during the peak of Italy’s outbreak with aggressive testing and tracing.

Speaking to RAI TG24 on Wednesday, Dr Crisanti said the spike threatened to create a “vicious circle” of too many infections to trace, allowing the virus to spread uncontrolled.

He suggested that a Christmastime lockdown would help stop the chain of transmission and give enough breathing room to “reset” the contact tracing system.

Read more: Terrorists look for different targets as Coronavirus cuts crowds, says MI5 chief

The Charity Commission has launched a new inquiry into a south London church which was found to be selling a coronavirus “plague protection kit”.

Bishop Climate Wiseman, head of the Kingdom Church in Camberwell, claimed earlier this year that the £91 small bottle of oil and piece of red yarn would protect people against Covid-19.

Media reports about his claims led to an investigation by the charity watchdog in April, resulting in the link to buy the kits being removed.

But the commission has now launched a new inquiry into the church, which is registered as a charity, over concerns about its management and finances.

The commission said it had examined the charity’s records, and was “concerned” about the accuracy of the information provided with regard to its income and expenditure.

The new probe, which was launched on August 7, will examine the charity trustees’ compliance with their legal duties around its administration, governance and management.

This will include an examination of its relationship with a connected organisation called Bishop Climate Ministries, which the charity claimed was responsible for the sale of the “plague protection kits”, the commission said.

Helen Earner, director of regulatory services at the Charity Commission, said: “Charities should be organisations that people can trust. Many will have been concerned by allegations about this charity’s activities in relation to Covid-19, and so it is right that we, and others, have intervened.

“Our own examination into The Kingdom Church GB has identified further concerns that require investigation, which is why we have now opened an official inquiry.”

In a blog post earlier this year, Bishop Wiseman claimed his concoction of cedar wood, hyssop and scarlet yarn acts as “an invisible barrier to the powers of darkness”.

He wrote: “It is by faith that you can be saved from the coronavirus pandemic by covering yourself with the divine plague protection oil and wearing the scarlet yarn on your body.

“That is why I want to encourage you, if you haven’t done so already, to get your divine plague protection kit today!”

He told the PA news agency in April that the church had sold more than 1,000 of the kits.

“This is based on the Bible – I’m a Christian and there is a way that the Bible says to protect us from plagues,” he said.

He previously insisted that the church was not selling the kits, and that the price tag was just to cover the cost of the ingredients, yarn and postage and packaging.

Bishop Wiseman said at the time that his church was not telling people to ignore the Government’s advice.

The Charity Commission said it would continue to work with Southwark Council Trading Standards’ investigation into the sale of the kits.

We are currently seeing a change and shift in relations between the United Kingdom and the Chinese Communist Party. This on the back of a number of issues that have included Huawei, the Coronavirus crisis, aggressive postures against human rights activists in Hong Kong and the mass internment of Uighur Muslims.

For far too long, the Chinese Communist Government has been allowed to do what it likes under a policy of approachment by the then Prime Minister, the Rt. Hon. David Cameron. However, we are now in a different place and China cannot be allowed to carry on its abuse of human rights, whilst it still maintains an aggressive policy against those who peacefully demonstrate against the Government’s autocratic policies. Let us also never forget the massacre of peaceful demonstrators in Tianenmen Square in 1989.

This Government is right in challenging and in stopping the influence of China’s Communist Government. Who would have thought that over a million people would be forcibly interned because of their religion in 2020? Who would have thought that a Government would restrict public access to information during the outbreak of a global pandemic? Furthermore, who would have thought that a policy of breaking the will of peaceful demonstrators in Hong Kong, would be enacted in 2020, with the eyes of the world watching?

China has, for far too long, thought it could do what it wanted. That time has come to an end. Unless, they realise the futility of their policies in the areas outlined, we should continue to hold the Chinese Communist Government to account at every step.

The Archbishop of Canterbury has said he hopes for a Royal Commission into social care after the coronavirus pandemic.

Speaking to BBC News, Justin Welby said he hoped there would be lessons learned after this crisis, mentioning a Royal Commission, a rarely used form of public inquiry.

The archbishop said: “What I hope and pray that we learn is first of all that we cannot base our society on the idolatry of wealth, even of health.

“Secondly, that we build a vision of the society we want. We have a commission of inquiry into what we learned from this, not to blame but to learn.

“We have Royal Commission on how we look after social care.”

When asked whether austerity measures should be put in place after the pandemic, he said it would be “catastrophic”, particularly for already disadvantaged people.

The archbishop also spoke about mental health in the pandemic, stressing that there is reasonable anxiety which may be difficult to talk about.

He said: “When I talk to the doctor who I talk to from time to time he says the point about anxiety and depression is they’re there to tell you something.

“Loss, grief, anxiety are traumas and trauma has to be gone through and you can’t do it just with the stiff upper lip.”

Last month the archbishop delivered the first assembly for the newly-formed virtual Oak National Academy, telling pupils “patience, positivity, and keeping going under pressure” will sustain hope.