Author Archives: Reuters News Agency

Washington caps year of drills to deter China with ten-day military exercise

By Tim Kelly

USS CARL VINSON (Reuters) – The United States on Tuesday completed ten days of joint military drills in Asian waters with Japan and other allies as it ups the ante on deterring China from pursuing its territorial ambitions amid growing tension in the region over Taiwan.

The ANNUALEX drill included 35 warships and dozens of aircraft in the Philippine Sea off Japan’s southern coast. The U.S. and Japanese forces were led by the nuclear-powered USS Carl Vinson carrier, which was also joined by ships from Canada, Australia, and for the first time, Germany. On Tuesday, the Vinson was being shadowed by a Chinese navy ship.

“We try to deter aggression from some nations that are showing burgeoning strength that maybe we haven’t experienced before,” U.S. Seventh Fleet commander Vice Admiral Karl Thomas said at a briefing aboard the carrier.

The exercise was meant to “tell those nations that maybe today is not the day,” he said.

Thomas was accompanied by the commander of the exercise, Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force Vice Admiral Hideki Yuasa. Home to the biggest concentration of American forces outside the United States, Tokyo is Washington’s key ally in the region.

Increasing pressure by China on Taiwan is causing concern in both Japan and the United States. Japan worries that key sea lanes supplying it will come under Beijing’s sway should it gain control of the island. That move would also threaten U.S. military bases in the region.

China, which views Taiwan as a breakaway province, says its intentions in the region are peaceful.

The ten-day exercise caps a year of drills between the United States, Japan and other countries, including Britain, France, Germany and the Netherlands.

London this year deployed its new $4.15 billion aircraft carrier the HMS Queen Elizabeth to the region, culminating in a visit to Japan in September along with two destroyers, two frigates and a submarine.

To get there, it sailed through the contested South China Sea, of which China claims 90%. Also in September, Britain’s HMS Richmond passed through the Taiwan Strait separating the island from mainland China, prompting a rebuke from Beijing.

Tokyo, in its latest annual defense strategy paper, identifies China as its main national security threat and said it had a “sense of crisis” regarding Taiwan as Chinese military activity around the island intensifies.

The British carrier joined a Japanese carrier, along with the Vinson – which operates F-35 stealth jets – and the USS Ronald Reagan, for a rare four-carrier training exercise in the waters around Japan.

(Reporting by Tim Kelly; Editing by Bernadette Baum)

French police evict migrants from camp on Channel coast

By Juliette Jabkhiro

GRANDE-SYNTHE, France (Reuters) – Police on Tuesday tore down a makeshift camp near the northern French port of Dunkirk where scores of migrants who say they are fleeing war, poverty and persecution in the Middle East were hunkered down with hopes of reaching Britain.

Armed officers entered the camp, which runs along a disused railway line, before workers in protective suits pulled down tents and plastic shelters.

Charity workers say the 27 migrants who drowned in the Channel last Wednesday had stayed in the same area before they attempted the perilous sea crossing from France to Britain last Wednesday. Their dinghy deflated in the open sea.

The number of migrants crossing the Channel has surged to 25,776 in 2021, up from 8,461 in 2020 and 1,835 in 2019, according to tallies compiled by the BBC using Home Office data.

The spike in numbers has angered Britain, which accuses France of doing too little to stem the flow. Paris says that once migrants reach the shores of the channel, it is too late to prevent them crossing.

French police routinely tear up the camps that spring up between Calais and Dunkirk. Evictions at the Grande-Synthe site had been taking place on a weekly basis for the past few weeks, one charity worker said.

The migrants are typically transported to holding centers scattered across the country where they are encouraged to file for asylum, though many quickly make their way back to the Channel coast.

Hussein Hamid, 25, an Iranian Kurd, said it was the second time he had been evicted. On the first occasion, he was bussed to Lyon 760km to the south.

Hamid tried to leave the camp swiftly by foot, carrying a backpack, but said the police had blocked any way out.

An Iraqi Kurd told Reuters by text message that he was hiding nearby while the police conducted their operation.

“I’ll come back if they don’t find me,” he said, requesting anonymity to avoid police reprisals.

President Emmanuel Macron on Friday told Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson to “get serious” in the effort to curb migrant flows, as post-Brexit relations between their governments deteriorate.

(Reporting by Judith Jabkhiro; Writing by Richard Lough, Editing by Alex Richardson and Ed Osmond)

Germany jails Islamic State member for life over role in Yazidi genocide

FRANKFURT (Reuters) -A German court on Tuesday jailed a former Islamic State militant for life for involvement in genocide and crimes against humanity against minority Yazidis in Iraq and Syria, including the murder of a five-year-old girl.

It was the first genocide verdict against a member of Islamic State, an offshoot of al Qaeda that seized large swathes of Iraq and Syria in 2014 before being ousted by U.S.-backed counter-offensives, losing its last territorial redoubt in 2019.

In a landmark ruling, the court in Frankfurt found Taha al-Jumailly, 29, an Iraqi national, guilty of involvement in the slaughter of more than 3,000 Yazidis and enslavement of 7,000 women and girls by IS jihadists in 2014-15.

This, the court ruled, included the murder of a five-year-old girl the defendant had enslaved and chained to a window, leaving her to die in scorching heat in 2015 in Iraq.

Al-Jumailly, who entered the court covering his face with a file folder, was arrested in Greece in 2019 and extradited to Germany where relatives of slain Yazidis acted as plaintiffs supporting the prosecution.

“Today’s ruling marks the first ever worldwide confirmation by a court that the crimes of Islamic State against the Yazidi religious group are genocide,” said Meike Olszak of Amnesty International’s branch in Germany.

The defendant’s German wife, identified only as Jennifer W., was used as a prosecution witness at his trial. She was sentenced to 10 years in prison last month for involvement in the enslavement of the Yazidi girl and her mother.

The Yazidis are an ancient religious minority in eastern Syria and northwest Iraq that Islamic State viewed as supposed devil worshippers for their faith that combines Zoroastrian, Christian, Manichean, Jewish and Muslim beliefs.

Islamic State’s depredations also displaced most of the 550,000-strong Yazidi community.

(Writing by Joseph Nasr; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

Exclusive-Ukraine PM says Russia ‘absolutely’ behind suspected coup attempt

By Robin Emmott

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Ukraine Prime Minister Denys Shmygal accused Russia on Tuesday of being “absolutely” behind what he called an attempt to organize a coup to overthrow the pro-Western government in Kyiv, citing intelligence.

Last Friday, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Ukraine had uncovered a plot to topple his government this week, involving individuals from Russia, but he stopped short of saying whether he believed the Kremlin was behind the plot.

The Kremlin has denied any role in any coup plot and rejected as baseless other accusations that it has sought to destabilize Ukraine, a fellow former Soviet republic.

“We have secret data which demonstrates the special intentions (to foment a coup),” Shmygal said. Asked if the Russian state was behind it, he said: “Absolutely.”

He also said a Russian military build-up on Ukraine’s border, the second such surge since May, was part of a wider Russian effort to break Ukrainian momentum towards joining the European Union.

“They are preparing something,” Shmygal said of Russia, without elaborating.

Shmygal, who is in Brussels for talks with top EU officials, said Ukrainian intelligence had picked up activities of “outside powers” trying to influence political opposition within the country to stoke a popular uprising and coup.

Zelenskiy, a former actor who once played a fictional president in a popular sitcom, came to power with a landslide election victory in 2019 though his popularity has fallen after 2-1/2 years in power.

But Shmygal said: “In Ukrainian society, there is no revolutionary mood. We understand there was influence from outside to enforce protests in Kyiv, to make them stronger. Our secret service is making a special investigation.”

Shmygal also said the sacking this week of Oleksandr Rusnak, the head of the counterintelligence department of Ukraine Security Service (SBU), was unrelated.

He said Ukraine’s aspiration to join the EU was among the main reasons for what he said was Russian aggression, hybrid attacks, a military build-up on its border and Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Crimea. Ukraine has also been fighting a pro-Russian insurgency in the country’s east since 2014.

Ukrainians ousted a Russian-backed president in February 2014 in a pro-European uprising. Along with Moldova and Georgia, it hopes for the promise of closer ties with the EU at a special “Eastern Partnership” summit next month.

EU and other Western leaders are involved in a geopolitical tug-of-war with Russia for influence in Ukraine and two other ex-Soviet republics, Moldova and Georgia, through trade, cooperation and protection arrangements. Ukraine is also seeking more military support from the United States, Shmygal said.

“This is one of the main reasons for the hybrid attacks from the Russian side, because we strongly would like to be integrated into Europe, to have the standard of living of European, of civilized countries,” he said.

“That is why we have all these hybrid attacks, cyber attacks, physical military attacks, occupied territories, disinformation to hamper Ukraine’s European aspirations.”

(Reporting by Robin Emmott; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

Germany’s Scholz supports mandatory vaccines by end Feb – sources

BERLIN (Reuters) – Olaf Scholz, who is set to take over as German chancellor next week, supports making vaccination against COVID-19 compulsory and backs barring the unvaccinated from non-essential stores, sources said on Tuesday.

Scholz and outgoing Chancellor Angela Merkel were meeting regional leaders on Tuesday to discuss how to respond to soaring infections in a fourth wave of the pandemic.

According to sources with information about the discussion, Scholz told the meeting he was in favor of a cross-party initiative to make vaccines mandatory, with the hope that it could be put into practice by the end of February.

Neighboring Austria, which like Germany has a relatively low rate of vaccination compared with the rest of western Europe, earlier this month announced plans to make vaccines compulsory as of February.

Scholz is also in favor of making non-essential stores require customers to show proof of vaccination or recovery from COVID-19, the sources said.

Germany’s Robert Koch Institute for infectious diseases reported that 452.2 people per 100,000 were infected in the last week, down slightly from 452.4 on Monday. It was the first decline since early November.

Despite this, the number of new daily cases rose slightly on Tuesday compared to last week to 45,753, and another 388 deaths were recorded – the highest daily figure since early March. That bought the overall death toll to 101,344.

(Reporting by Emma Thomasson; Editing by Miranda Murray and Alison Williams)

‘Tonight’s the night’: Barbados prepares to become a republic

By Guy Faulconbridge and Brian Ellsworth

BRIDGETOWN (Reuters) -Barbados on Monday prepared to remove Britain’s Queen Elizabeth as its head of state and become a republic, as it severs imperial ties some 400 years after English ships first reached the Caribbean island.

Britain’s Prince Charles arrived on Sunday night to join the inauguration of President-elect Sandra Mason in replacement of Queen Elizabeth, a move by Barbados to shed the final vestiges of a colonial system that once spanned the globe.

“Tonight’s the night!” read the front-page headline of Barbados’ Daily Nation newspaper.

Prime Minister Mia Mottley, the leader of Barbados’ republican movement, will help lead the ceremony. Mottley has won global attention by denouncing the effects of climate change on small Caribbean nations.

“I am happy. We are on our own now with no king or queen from England,” said Nigel Mayers, 60, who sells oranges at a stall in central Bridgetown. “This is the full drop after independence.”

A celebration including Barbadian music and dance will begin at 8 p.m. local time (0000 GMT), with Mason to be inaugurated just after midnight – coinciding with Barbados Independence Day.

Prince Charles will give a speech highlighting the continuing friendship of the two nations despite the change in constitutional status.

Barbados will remain a republic within the Commonwealth, a grouping of 54 countries across Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe.

British colonialists shipped over captured African slaves to work the island’s sugar cane fields and Barbados became a focus of the brutal transatlantic slave trade. Today’s population of under 300,000 is overwhelmingly of African descent.

Monday’s elegant celebration comes at a time when Barbados is struggling with inflation due to supply-chain disruptions driving up prices in a country that must import most goods. Its tourism industry, a crucial part of the economy, is still recovering from earlier coronavirus travel restrictions.

Some residents acknowledge they are uncertain what the transition to a republic even means or why it matters. Others would have preferred not to change.

“They should leave Queen Elizabeth be – leave her as the boss. I don’t understand why we need to be a republic,” said Sean Williams, 45, standing in the shadow of an independence monument.

The last time the queen was removed as head of state was in 1992 when Mauritius, an island in the Indian Ocean, proclaimed itself a republic.

The shift may spur discussion of similar proposals in other former British colonies that have Queen Elizabeth as their sovereign, which include Jamaica, Australia and Canada.

(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge in Bridgetown and Brian Ellsworth in Washington; Writing by Brian Ellsworth; Editing by Daniel Flynn and Lisa Shumaker)

Judge blocks U.S. COVID-19 vaccine rule for health workers in 10 states

By Tom Hals

(Reuters) – A federal judge on Monday blocked in 10 states a Biden administration vaccine requirement, finding the agency that issued the rule mandating healthcare workers get vaccinated against the coronavirus likely exceeded its authority.

The ruling by U.S. District Judge Matthew Schelp in St. Louis prevents the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) from enforcing its vaccine mandate for healthcare workers until the court can hear legal challenges brought by the 10 states.

The ruling is the second legal setback for the Biden Administration’s requirements aimed at increasing the use of vaccines to halt the COVID-19 pandemic. A federal appeals court in New Orleans earlier this month blocked a sweeping workplace mandate that requires businesses with at least 100 employees to get their staff vaccinated or tested weekly.

Republican state attorneys general sued the administration in early November over the CMS rule, seeking to block the requirement because they alleged it would worsen healthcare staffing shortages.

Schelp said CMS had significantly understated the burden of its mandate on the ability of healthcare facilities to provide proper care.

Schelp’s ruling applied in the 10 states that brought the case: Missouri, Nebraska, Arkansas, Kansas, Iowa, Wyoming, Alaska, South Dakota, North Dakota and New Hampshire.

On Nov. 4, CMS issued the interim final rule it said covers over 10 million people and applies to around 76,000 healthcare providers including hospitals, nursing homes and dialysis centers.

Providers that fail to comply with the mandate could lose access to Medicare and Medicaid funds. Medicare serves people 65 and older and the disabled. Medicaid serves the poor.

(Reporting by Tom Hals in Wilmington, Delaware; additional reporting by Ahmed Aboulenein in Washington; Editing by Bill Berkrot)

U.S. Commerce chief makes pitch for chips funding in Michigan

By David Shepardson

TAYLOR, Michigan (Reuters) -U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo on Monday made a pitch for Congress to approve $52 billion to expand U.S. semiconductor manufacturing in a visit to Michigan where she heard about auto sector struggles with the ongoing chip supply crisis.

“The reality is Michigan will lose jobs … if we don’t increase our supply of chips,” Raimondo said.

She visited a United Auto Workers local hall near Detroit and met with Michigan politicians, and officials from General Motors Co, Ford Motor and Chrysler-parent Stellantis on the push for funding before the end of December.

Detroit’s Big Three automakers and other global automakers have been forced to cut production and even make some vehicles without features like heated seats or digital speedometers because of the semiconductor shortage.

On Nov. 17, House of Representatives and Senate leaders said they would negotiate seeking final agreement on a bill to boost U.S. technology competitiveness with China and semiconductor manufacturing. The Senate-approved legislation would award $52 billion for semiconductor manufacturing and authorize $190 billion to strengthen U.S. technology and research.

Stellantis executive Marlo Vitous said the company is working hard to get chips to make vehicles. “It is pure grit right now — the fight for the parts that we need.”

UAW President Ray Curry said the chips shortage “at its core … is not to off-shore American jobs. Bring those” semiconductor jobs back to the United States.

Automotive chips demand will continue to rise as automakers shift to electric vehicles, which use twice as many chips as gasoline-powered models. The companies say the crisis will continue at least another year.

Michigan lawmakers cast the issue in geopolitical terms.

“We are not going to let China kick our ass. We are going to kick China’s ass,” Representative Debbie Dingell said at the forum, saying it was crucial for U.S. workers that Congress boost funding for chips.

The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“We need the House to pass its version of the CHIPS Act,” Raimondo said at a separate Detroit Economic Club appearance.

“Commerce is pursuing strategies like ‘nearshoring’ and ‘friendshoring,’ so like-minded partners are integrated into our supply chains,” Raimondo added. “As we rebuild our supply chains, we can’t be dependent on foreign countries that don’t share our values for our critical chip components.”

Last week, Samsung Electronics said it had picked Taylor, Texas, as the location for a new $17 billion plant to make advanced chips.

(Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Lincoln Feast and Leslie Adler)

COVID-19 reinfection less likely to be severe; cardiac stress test useful for unexplained lingering breathlessness

By Nancy Lapid

(Reuters) – The following is a summary of some recent studies on COVID-19. They include research that warrants further study to corroborate the findings and that has yet to be certified by peer review.

Coronavirus reinfections rarely severe

Reinfections with the virus that causes COVID-19 are rarely severe, new findings suggest. Researchers in Qatar compared 1,304 individuals with a second SARS-CoV-2 infection with 6,520 people infected with the virus for the first time. The odds of developing severe disease were 88% lower for people with second infections, the researchers reported online on Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine. Re-infected patients were 90% less likely to be hospitalized compared to patients infected for the first time, and no one in the study with a second infection required intensive care or died from COVID-19, said Dr. Laith Jamal Abu-Raddad of Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar in Doha. “Nearly all reinfections were mild, perhaps because of immune memory that prevented deterioration of the infection to more severe outcomes,” he said. The risk for severe illness in people who had been infected before was only about 1% of the risk associated with initial COVID-19 infections, the researchers estimated. For half of those with a second infection, the first infection had occurred more than nine months earlier. It is not clear how long immune protection against severe reinfection would last, the researchers noted. If it does last for a long time, they speculate, it might mean that as the coronavirus becomes endemic, infections could become “more benign.”

Cardiac stress test useful for lingering breathlessness

In COVID-19 survivors struggling with lingering shortness of breath for which doctors do not have an explanation, cardiac stress testing may help identify the cause of the problem, researchers say. “The current clinical guidelines do not recommend cardiopulmonary exercise testing out of concern that this test could worsen the patients’ symptoms. However, we found that cardiopulmonary exercise testing was able to identify reduced exercise capacity in about 45% of patients,” said Dr. Donna Mancini of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. The 18 men and 23 women in the study all had persistent shortness of breath for more than three months after recovering from COVID-19, according to a report published on Monday in Journal of the American College of Cardiology: Heart Failure. They had normal-looking results on lung function tests, chest X-rays, chest CT scans and echocardiograms. The exercise tests revealed problems that would otherwise have been missed, Mancini said. “Low level functional testing recommended by the guidelines, such as a 6-minute walk test, would not be able to detect these abnormalities,” she said.

Experimental smartwatch COVID-19 detection improving

Smartwatch alerting systems for early detection of COVID-19 infection are coming closer to reality, researchers reported on Monday in Nature Medicine. They tested their new system, developed with open-source software, in 2,155 wearers of Fitbit, Apple Watch, Garmin watches or other devices. Ultimately, 84 of the volunteers were diagnosed with coronavirus infections – including 14 of 18 people without symptoms. Overall, the researchers’ algorithms generated alerts in 67 (80%) of the infected individuals, on average three days before symptoms began. “This is the first time, to our knowledge, that asymptomatic detection has been shown for COVID-19,” they said. Presently, the system mainly depends on measurements of wearers’ resting heart rate, said study leader Michael Snyder of Stanford University School of Medicine in California. Going forward, he said he hopes watch manufacturers will be able to provide other types of highly accurate physiologic data. “Many stressors can trigger the alerting,” Snyder said. “Most of these are easy to spot – travel, excessive alcohol, even work or other types of stress, so the user knows to ignore the alerts.” When watches can report other health data such as heart rate variability, respiration rate, skin temperature, and oxygen levels, it will become easier to distinguish the COVID-19 cases from other non-COVID-19 events, researchers said. “Right now we are running this as a research study,” Snyder said. “But soon we hope that FDA approved devices will dominate this area.”

(Reporting by Nancy Lapid; Additional reporting by Megan Brooks; Editing by Bill Berkrot)

Exclusive-World Bank works to redirect frozen funds to Afghanistan for humanitarian aid only: sources

By Jonathan Landay and Andrea Shalal

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The World Bank is finalizing a proposal to deliver up to $500 million from a frozen Afghanistan aid fund to humanitarian agencies, people familiar with the plans told Reuters, but it leaves out tens of thousands of public sector workers and remains complicated by U.S. sanctions.

Board members will meet informally on Tuesday to discuss the proposal, hammered out in recent weeks with U.S. and U.N. officials, to redirect the funds from the Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund (ARTF), which has a total of $1.5 billion.

Afghanistan’s 39 million people face a cratering economy, a winter of food shortages and growing poverty three months after the Taliban seized power as the last U.S. troops withdrew from 20 years of war.

Afghan experts said the aid will help, but big gaps remain, including how to get the funds into Afghanistan without exposing the financial institutions involved to U.S. sanctions, and the lack of focus on state workers, the sources said.

The money will go mainly to addressing urgent health care needs in Afghanistan, where less than 7% of the population has been vaccinated against the coronavirus, they said.

For now, it will not cover salaries for teachers and other government workers, a policy that the experts say could hasten the collapse of Afghanistan’s public education, healthcare and social services systems. They warn that hundreds of thousands of workers, who have been unpaid for months, could stop showing up for their jobs and join a massive exodus from the country.

The World Bank will have no oversight of the funds once transferred into Afghanistan, said one of the sources familiar with the plans.

“The proposal calls for the World Bank to transfer the money to the U.N. and other humanitarian agencies, without any oversight or reporting, but it says nothing about the financial sector, or how the money will get into the country,” the source said, calling U.S. sanctions a major constraint.

‘NOT A SILVER BULLET’

While the U.S. Treasury has provided “comfort letters” assuring banks that they can process humanitarian transactions, concern about sanctions continues to prevent passage of even basic supplies, including food and medicine, the source added.

“It’s a scorched earth approach. We’re driving the country into the dust,” said the source. Crippling sanctions and failure to take care of public sector workers will “create more refugees, more desperation and more extremism.”

Any decision to redirect ARTF money requires the approval of all its donors, of which the United States has been the largest.

A State Department spokesperson confirmed that Washington is working with the World Bank and other donors on how to use the funds, including potentially paying those who work in “critical positions such as healthcare workers and teachers.”

The spokesperson said the U.S. government remains committed to meeting the  critical needs of the  Afghan people, “especially across health, nutrition, education, and food security sectors … but international aid is not a silver bullet.”

BYPASSING TALIBAN

Established in 2002 and administered by the World Bank, the ARTF was the largest financing source for Afghanistan’s civilian budget, which was more than 70% funded by foreign aid.

The World Bank suspended disbursements after the Taliban takeover. At the same time, Washington stopping supplying U.S. dollars to the country and joined in freezing some $9 billion in Afghan central bank assets and halting financial assistance.

A World Bank spokesperson confirmed that staff and executive board members are exploring redirecting ARTF funds to U.N. agencies “to support humanitarian efforts,” but gave no further details. The United Nations declined to comment.

Initial work has also been done on a potential swap of U.S. dollars for Afghanis to deliver the funds into the country, but those plans are “basically just a few PowerPoint slides at this point,” one of the sources said. That approach would deposit ARTF funds in the international accounts of Afghan private institutions, who would disburse Afghanis from their Afghan bank accounts to humanitarian groups in Afghanistan, two sources said.

This would bypass the Taliban, thereby avoiding entanglement with the U.S. and U.N. sanctions, but the plan is complex and untested, and could take time to implement.

One major problem is the lack of a mechanism to monitor disbursements of funds in Afghanistan to ensure Taliban leaders and fighters do not access them, a third source said.

Two former U.S. officials familiar with internal administration deliberations said that some U.S. officials contend that U.S. and U.N. sanctions on Taliban leaders bar financial aid to anyone affiliated with their government.

(Reporting by Jonathan Landay and Andrea Shalal; Additional reporting by Arshad Mohammed and Michelle Nichols; editing by Grant McCool)