Author Archives: Reuters News Agency

Brutal heat wave persists in U.S. West as Oregon wildfire rages

(Reuters) – A punishing heat wave was again forecast to bring near-record temperatures to much of the U.S. West on Monday, as a wildfire in drought-stricken Oregon continued raging out of control.

The agency that manages California’s power grid, the California Independent System Operator, issued a “flex alert” urging residents to conserve power between 4 p.m. and 9 p.m. local time on Monday, after the Bootleg Fire in Oregon disrupted electric transmission lines.

The fire had burned through more than 153,000 acres (nearly 240 square miles) as of Monday morning, mostly in Oregon’s Fremont-Winema National Forest.

Hundreds of residents in the Klamath Falls area are under mandatory evacuation orders, and the Klamath County Sheriff’s Department has begun issuing citations and will consider the unusual step of making arrests if necessary people to enforce them, county officials said.

Other states have also confronted fires amid the heat. In California along the Nevada border, the Beckwourth Complex Fire had grown to around 89,600 acres (140 square miles) as of Monday morning, with approximately 23% containment, according to the state’s fire incident reporting system.

The National Weather Service predicted additional record highs on Monday in some areas, a day after Death Valley, California, hit a scorching 130 degrees Fahrenheit (54 Celsius), one of the highest temperatures ever recorded on Earth.

But forecasters said the intense heat had likely peaked across much of the region, ahead of more seasonable temperatures later this week.

(Reporting by Joseph Ax; Editing by Aurora Ellis)

‘Be cautious’: Johnson goes ahead with lifting England’s COVID curbs

By Costas Pitas and Alistair Smout

LONDON (Reuters) -British Prime Minister Boris Johnson urged people on Monday to show caution when nearly all remaining COVID-19 restrictions are lifted in England next week, saying an increase in cases underlined that the pandemic was by no means over.

England will from July 19 be the first nation in Britain to lift the legal requirement to wear masks and for people to socially distance. The government says Britain’s vaccination drive – one of the world’s fastest – has largely broken the link between infections and serious illness or death.

But what was once billed as “freedom day” is now being treated with wariness by ministers after a new surge in cases and fears that there could be as many as 100,000 new infections a day over the summer.

Johnson set a somber tone, defending his decision to lift most of the remaining restrictions by saying the four conditions the government set itself had been met, but also warning the country that more people would die from the coronavirus.

“We think now is the right moment to proceed…But it is absolutely vital that we proceed now with caution and I cannot say this powerfully or emphatically enough – this pandemic is not over,” he told a press conference.

“To take these steps we must be cautious and must be vaccinated,” he said, adding that England would see “more hospitalizations and more deaths from COVID”.

Johnson added: “I generally urge everyone to keep thinking of others and to consider the risks.”

Earlier, health minister Sajid Javid told parliament that people should still wear masks in crowded areas like on public transport and should only gradually move back to the workplace, and that the government would encourage businesses holding mass events to use health certification as a way to open up.

Business welcomed the move, but also called on the government to offer clearer guidance. Claire Walker, co-executive director of the British Chambers of Commerce, said companies still did not have the full picture they needed.

“Business leaders aren’t public health experts and cannot be expected to know how best to operate when confusing and sometimes contradictory advice is coming from official sources,” she said.

GLOBAL STRUGGLE

After 18 months of pandemic, governments around the world have been wrestling with how and when to reopen their economies.

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte conceded on Monday that coronavirus restrictions had been lifted in the Netherlands too soon and he apologized as infections surged to their highest levels of the year.

Britain has implemented one of the world’s swiftest vaccination programs, with more than 87% of adults having received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine and 66% having received two.

The Conservative government argues that the fact that deaths and hospital admissions remain far lower than before, even though cases have risen sharply, is proof that the vaccines are saving lives and it is now safer to open up.

But the surge in infections to rates unseen since the winter has raised concern, with some epidemiologists saying the Euro soccer championships might have helped fuel the rise.

Britain, which ranks 20th in the world for per-capita reported deaths from COVID-19, on Monday reported a further 34,471 COVID-19 cases, up 26% in a week, and six additional deaths within 28 days of a positive test.

London’s Wembley Stadium hosted the Euro 2020 final on Sunday between England and Italy. Large crowds gathered in London, including around the stadium, and there were reports that some had gained entry to the match without tickets to join the more than 60,000 who had them – much to the dismay of the World Health Organization.

“Am I supposed to be enjoying watching transmission happening in front of my eyes?” WHO epidemiologist Maria Van Kerkhove tweeted in the late stages of the match.

“The #COVID19 pandemic is not taking a break tonight … #SARSCoV2 #DeltaVariant will take advantage of unvaccinated people, in crowded settings, unmasked, screaming/shouting/singing. Devastating.”

(Additional reporting by Elizabeth Piper, William James and Michael Holden in London, Emma Farge in Geneva; Editing by Nick Macfie and Mark Heinrich)

EU holds up Hungary’s recovery money in rule-of-law standoff

By Gabriela Baczynska

BRUSSELS (Reuters) -The European Union’s executive missed its own deadline to sign off on billions of euros in economic recovery aid to Hungary, delaying its decision in an attempt to win rule-of-law concessions from Budapest.

Hungary is set to receive 7.2 billion euros in EU stimulus funds meant to kickstart economic growth mauled by the coronavirus pandemic.

The funds will start flowing once the Brussels-based European Commission accepts national plans on how to spend them to ensure digital and green transitions, among others goals.

However, the Commission is using the money as leverage to push Hungary on its observance of the rule of law, an area where the increasingly authoritarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has clashed with the EU.

A spokeswoman for the Commission said on Monday it was still analyzing the plan Budapest submitted and might propose a longer delay should it consider “months rather than days” were still needed to decide on it.

While the spokeswoman declined to give detail, the bloc’s Economics Commissioner Paolo Gentiloni said last week: “We are working on aspects to do with the respect for the rule of law.”

The Hungarian Prime Minister’s office said in a statement to state news agency MTI that talks with the Commission had been close to completion but that after Hungary’s law banning from schools materials seen as promoting homosexuality was passed, the European Commission came forward with what they said were “absurd demands”.

“The ideologically motivated political attacks obviously slow down the acceptance of the plan which was formulated earlier, in professional consultations,” the PM’s office said.

It added that talks were continuing with the Commission.

The Commission has long wanted Hungary to improve its public procurement process to combat “systemic irregularities” – or fraud.

Orban has also infuriated many of his EU peers in recent weeks with a new legislation that bans from schools materials seen as promoting homosexuality, the latest in a series of laws seen as discriminatory and restricting people’s rights.

Budapest has clashed with the EU on multiple occasions over Orban’s treatment of migrants and gay people, as well as the tightening of curbs around the freedom of media, academics and judges.

Orban portrays himself as a crusader for what he says are traditional Catholic values under pressure from the liberal West.

Russians head for lakes as Moscow swelters in near-record heat

PSKOV/MOSCOW (Reuters) – People are heading to lakes to cool off as a heatwave sweeps western Russia, driving temperatures in Moscow towards record highs.

The capital’s daytime temperatures are forecast at 30-35 degrees Celsius in the coming days and could break record highs on three days this week that have stood since 1936, 1951 and 2010, the RIA news agency reported.

In the western city of Pskov, near the border with Estonia, a lakeside beach was packed at the weekend with families trying to cool off in the oppressive heat.

“People are suffering, just suffering! They wait until evening for the end of the working day and then head straight for the lake,” said Iskak, a resident who did not give his last name.

Last month the air temperature in Moscow reached 34.8C (94.64 degrees Fahrenheit), the hottest recorded in the month of June in 142 years of monitoring, the city’s weather authorities were cited by Interfax news agency as saying.

In the capital on Monday, the temperature hit 31C. A polar bear napped in the shade at the zoo, while gardeners lamented their parched plants at one of the city’s botanical gardens.

Pavel Konstantinov, a meteorologist at Moscow State University, said the heatwave had been caused by a “blocking anticyclone” that had moved in from Scandinavia.

“The increase in the frequency of dangerous weather events and in particular heatwaves unavoidably accompany global warming,” he told Reuters.

“It’s already clear they will happen more and more often and we need to prepare for them not as extremely rare events as in the past, but as dangerous weather phenomena that occur in populated parts of Russia,” he said.

(Reporting by Dmitry Turlyun; Writing by Tom Balmforth; Editing by Janet Lawrence)

Identifying remains arduous as Florida condo collapse death toll rises to 94

(Reuters) -Confirmed deaths in the partial collapse of a condominium near Miami rose by four to 94 on Monday as identifying remains became progressively difficult with the recovery effort in its 19th day, Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said.

Due to the passage of time, recovery workers are leaning more heavily on the medical examiner’s office to identify recovered bodies, an undertaking that is “very methodical” and takes time, Levine Cava said at a briefing.

The number of people still unaccounted for dropped to 22 on Monday from 31 a day earlier, and may include some of the victims who have yet to be identified in the rubble of the 12-story oceanfront building in the town of Surfside that partially collapsed in the early morning hours of June 24.

“The process of making identifications has become more difficult as time goes on, and the recovery at this point is yielding human remains,” Levine Cava said.

With no survivors rescued from the ruins since the first few hours after the collapse, officials last week declared that their search effort had switched from rescue to recovery.

Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett said security is being tightened at the site due to the importance of the location to families who lost loved ones.

A debate has already begun in the community over what to do with the site, with some people eager for it to be turned into a memorial for the victims.

“It’s much more than a collapsed building. It is a holy site,” Burkett said.

(Reporting by Nathan Layne in Wilton, Connecticut and Barbara Goldberg in Maplewood, New Jersey; editing by Jonathan Oatis and Steve Orlofsky)

U.S. restricts visas of 100 Nicaraguans affiliated with government

By Daphne Psaledakis

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The United States on Monday imposed visa restrictions on 100 Nicaraguans affiliated with the Nicaraguan National Assembly and judicial system, increasing pressure on the government of President Daniel Ortega as Washington warned of further action.

Scores of prominent Nicaraguans, including six who planned to challenge Ortega’s bid for a fourth consecutive term in office, have been arrested in recent weeks. Many have fled abroad.

Monday’s move targeted those who “helped to enable the Ortega-Murillo regime’s attacks on democracy and human rights,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, including through the arrest of 26 political opponents and pro-democracy advocates and the passing of what he said were repressive laws.

“The United States will continue to use the diplomatic and economic tools at our disposal to push for the release of political prisoners and to support Nicaraguans’ calls for greater freedom, accountability, and free and fair elections,” Blinken said in a statement.

The statement did not name the Nicaraguans hit with visa restrictions in the action.

International pressure has mounted on Nicaragua, with Ortega’s crackdown on the opposition described by Washington as a “campaign of terror” that the United Nations said meant November elections are unlikely to be free or fair.

(Reporting by Daphne Psaledakis and Doina Chiacu; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

Colombian police say no ‘hypothesis’ in Haiti assassination probe

By Luis Jaime Acosta

BOGOTA (Reuters) – Colombian police said on Monday they could not share any hypothesis about the murder of Haitian President Jovenel Moise and that they respect the Haitian state’s autonomy, after 18 Colombians tied to the case were arrested and three others killed.

Moise was shot dead early on Wednesday at his Port-au-Prince home by what Haitian authorities describe as a unit of assassins formed of 26 Colombians and two Haitian Americans, plunging the troubled Caribbean nation deeper into turmoil.

On Sunday, Haitian police said they had detained one of the suspected masterminds, 63-year-old Christian Emmanuel Sanon, a Haitian man whom authorities accuse of hiring mercenaries to oust and replace Moise. They did not explain Sanon’s motives beyond saying they were political.

“We cannot construct any hypothesis,” General Jorge Luis Vargas, head of the Colombian national police, told journalists in Bogota. “We respect the judicial autonomy of the Haitian state and its authorities.”

Families of some of the Colombians, many ex-soldiers, have said their loved ones were hired as bodyguards, not as mercenaries, and that they are innocent of killing Moise.

The men were initially contracted to protect Sanon, Haiti’s National Police Chief Leon Charles said Sunday, but then they were given a warrant for Moise’s arrest.

Most of the men were detained after an overnight shoot-out on Wednesday in Petionville, a hillside suburb of Port-au-Prince, and three killed.

Nineteen tickets to Haiti were bought for the men via a Miami-based company called CTU, Vargas added.

CTU, run by Venezuelan émigré Antonio Enmanuel Intriago Valera, has not responded to requests for comment from Reuters made on Sunday.

A man named Dimitri Herard, who served as Moise’s head of security, transited through Colombia multiple times earlier this year, Vargas added, during trips to Ecuador and the Dominican Republic between January and May.

Colombian police are investigating Herard’s activities during his visits, Vargas said.

High-ranking Colombian intelligence officials have been in Haiti since late on Friday to assist with the investigation.

Haitians in parts of Port-au-Prince were planning protests this week against interim prime minister and acting head of state Claude Joseph, according to social media posts.

Joseph’s right to lead the country has been challenged by other senior politicians, threatening to exacerbate the turmoil engulfing the poorest country in the Americas.

(Reporting by Luis Jaime Acosta; Writing by Julia Symmes Cobb; Editing by Alistair Bell)

In symbolic end to war, U.S. general steps down from Afghanistan command

By Phil Stewart

KABUL (Reuters) -The U.S. general leading the war in Afghanistan, Austin Miller, relinquished command on Monday at a ceremony in Kabul, in what was a symbolic end to America’s longest conflict even as Taliban insurgents gain momentum across the country.

Miller, America’s last four-star commander to serve on the ground in Afghanistan, stepped down ahead of a formal end to the U.S. military mission there on Aug. 31, a date set by President Joe Biden as he looks to extricate the country from the two-decade-old war.

Addressing a small gathering outside his military headquarters in Kabul, Miller vowed to remember the lives lost in the fighting and called on the Taliban to halt a wave of violent attacks that have given them control of more territory than at any time since the conflict began.

“What I tell the Taliban is they’re responsible too. The violence that’s going on is against the will of the Afghan people, and it needs to stop,” Miller said. While the ceremony may offer some sense of closure for U.S. veterans who served in Afghanistan, it’s unclear whether it will succeed in reassuring the Western-backed Afghan government as the Taliban press ground offensives.

U.S. Marine General Kenneth McKenzie, whose Florida-based Central Command oversees U.S. forces in hot-spots including Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, flew into Kabul to underscore America’s future assistance to Afghan security forces.

“You can count on our support in the dangerous and difficult days ahead. We will be with you,” McKenzie said in his address.

Speaking separately to a small group of reporters, McKenzie cautioned that the Taliban, in his view, were seeking “a military solution” to a war that the United States has unsuccessfully tried to end with a peace agreement between the Taliban and Afghan President Ashraf Ghani’s government.

He said provincial capitals were at risk but noted that the U.S.-backed Afghan security forces “are determined to fight very hard for those provincial capitals.”

McKenzie will be able to authorize U.S. air strikes against the Taliban through Aug. 31 in support of Ghani’s Western-backed government.

But after that, the Marine general said when it came to U.S. strikes in Afghanistan, his focus will shift squarely to counter-terrorism operations against al Qaeda and Islamic State.

INTELLIGENCE NETWORK

Gathering enough intelligence on the ground to prevent another Sept. 11-style attack could become increasingly challenging, as America’s intelligence network weakens with the U.S. withdrawal and as Afghan troops lose territory.

U.S. Representative Elissa Slotkin, a Democrat and former senior Pentagon official, said many lawmakers were still looking for answers from the Biden administration about how the U.S. will be able to detect a future al Qaeda plot against the United States.

“I don’t need them to tell the entire world what our day-after plan is. But I think it’s important that they let us know some of the details on a private basis,” Slotkin said.

U.S. officials do not believe the Taliban could be relied upon to prevent al Qaeda from again plotting attacks against the United States from Afghan soil.

The United Nations said in a report in January there were as many as 500 al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan and that the Taliban maintained a close relationship with the Islamist extremist group.

LONGEST-SERVING GENERAL

As he steps down, Miller, 60, has spent longer on the ground than any of the previous generals to command the war.

He had a close call in 2018 when a rogue Afghan bodyguard in Kandahar province opened fire and killed a powerful Afghan police chief standing near Miller. A U.S. brigadier general was wounded, as were other Americans, but Miller emerged unscathed.

After Miller leaves the post, the Pentagon has engineered a transition that will allow a series of generals to carry on with supporting Afghan security forces, mostly from overseas.

Beyond McKenzie’s over watch from Florida, a Qatar-based brigadier general, Curtis Buzzard, will focus on administering funding support for the Afghan security forces – including aircraft maintenance support.

In Kabul, Navy Rear Admiral Peter Vasely will lead a newly created U.S. Forces Afghanistan-Forward, focusing on protecting the U.S. embassy and the airport.

Vasely, as a two-star admiral, is higher ranked than usual for a U.S. embassy-based post. But a U.S. defense official added that Afghanistan was a “very unique situation.”

“There’s no comparable diplomatic security situation in the world with what we’re going to establish,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Still, what happens next in Afghanistan appears to be increasingly out of America’s control.

Biden acknowledged on Thursday that Afghanistan’s future was far from certain but said the Afghan people must decide their own fate.

“I will not send another generation of Americans to war in Afghanistan with no reasonable expectation of achieving a different outcome,” he said.

About 2,400 U.S. service members have been killed in America’s longest war – and many thousands wounded.

(Reporting by Phil StewartEditing by Robert Birsel and Paul Simao)

WHO committee calls for gene editing tools to be shared with poorer nations

By Ludwig Burger

FRANKFURT (Reuters) -A World Health Organization (WHO) committee said on Monday that human genome editing technologies to treat serious disease should be shared more generously, to allow poorer nations to benefit from the highly dynamic scientific field.

“WHO should work with others to encourage relevant patent holders to help ensure equitable access to human genome editing interventions,” the 18-member committee said in a report, which covered a wide range of governance structures and processes.

The panel of gene editing experts was established in late 2018 after a Chinese scientist said he had edited the genes of twin babies to make then resistant to HIV infection.

Underlining the WHO’s existing stance, the report strongly opposed making modifications to the genetic code in humans that would be passed on to future generations, known as heritable germline genome editing.

“No-one in their right mind should contemplate doing it because the techniques are simply not safe enough or efficient enough and we’re not ready in terms of looking at all the ethical considerations,” said Robin Lovell Badge of Britain’s Francis Crick Institute, a committee member.

But the technology, with the CRISPR/Cas9 ‘genetic scissors’ as its most prominent tool, also holds the promise of curing diseases such as HIV or sickle-cell disease and boosting fundamental medical knowledge, and unequal access could cement global disparities, the panel warned.

“The danger in fully implementing intellectual property as we know it,” would be that rich countries benefit while poor countries bear the main burden of diseases such as sickle cell anemia, Anne Wangari Thairu-Muigai of Kenja’s Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, told a press briefing.

Intellectual property in medicine became a contested issue when U.S. President Joe Biden in May proposed a temporary waiver of vaccine patents to make anti-COVID-19 shots more quickly available in low-income countries.

Pharmaceutical companies and other countries have argued such a step would be ineffective and risks discouraging work on future health technologies.

Seeking to head off irresponsible human gene modification, the panel also warned it should only be conducted where sufficient policies and oversight are in place, raising the specter of rogue clinics attracting medical tourism to loosely regulated countries with purported therapies or clinical trials.

Specific rules, however, could be a while in the making as WHO said its Science Division would be given up to 3 years to initiate an extensive review of the recommendations, while the review itself could take as long as 18 months.

(Reporting by Ludwig Burger; Editing by Toby Chopra)

U.S. oil mergers surge as energy, share prices recover from pandemic

HOUSTON (Reuters) – U.S. oil and gas mergers surged last quarter with the most $1 billion plus combinations since 2014, according to data released on Monday, as rising energy and share prices led to larger oil patch deals.

Producers are consolidating in U.S. shale as oil and natural gas prices recover from last year’s pandemic swoon and this month traded at multi-year highs. Smaller producers also are snapping up unwanted properties in a bet on continued demand for oil and gas while some big oil companies shift their acquisition emphasis to renewables.

Total value of the 40 reported deals last quarter was $33 billion, estimated energy data provider Enverus Inc, up from $44.5 billion for all of last year.

The quarter’s seven $1 billion plus deals were mostly in Texas and Colorado oilfields but a fifth of the total value was spend on natural gas properties in the U.S. east, said Andrew Dittmar, Enverus’ senior M&A analyst.

BIG GAS MERGERS

Natural gas shot into the spotlight with U.S. prices rising 40% this year, helping spark Southwestern Energy’s $2.7 billion acquisition of Indigo Natural Resources and EQT Corp’s $2.9 billion deal for northeast gas producer Alta Resources.

“There is still a lot of activity out there,” said Dittmar, citing recovering share prices and the number of private-equity backed firms looking to sell. “Public companies are not done consolidating” smaller, closely-held producers, he said.

“If commodity prices stay strong, we’ll see a fairly active rest of the year,” Dittmar said.

A number of top oil companies including Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron, Exxon Mobil, and Occidental Petroleum are considering or have put U.S. oil properties on the market due to rising buyer interest.

CABOT-CIMAREX TOPS LIST

Top deals by price last quarter were Cabot Oil and Gas’s $7.4 billion combination with Cimarex Energy and Pioneer Natural Resources’ $6.4 billion acquisition of closely held DoublePoint Energy, both for assets in the Permian Basin of West Texas and New Mexico.

KKR & Co’s Independence Energy merged with Contango Oil & Gas, a deal that valued the pair at $5.7 billion, including debt, and will become a platform to acquire other producers.

(Reporting by Gary McWilliams; Editing by David Gregorio)