Author Archives: Reuters News Agency

In Indian Himalayas, drones draw blank in search for workers missing in flooded tunnel

By Alasdair Pal and Neha Arora

TAPOVAN, India (Reuters) – Rescuers in northern India made a vain attempt on Wednesday to find signs of life using a drone to search for 35 construction workers missing inside a tunnel days after a flash flood swept down a mountain valley destroying dams and bridges.

Some 204 people remain unaccounted for since Sunday’s disaster in Uttarakhand state, most of them workers at the Tapovan Vishnugad hydroelectric project and at the smaller Rishiganga dam, which was swept away by the torrent.

At the Tapovan tunnel’s entrance, anxious relatives lingered in heavy rain, desperate for word on whether anyone had been found.

“We don’t know what else to do,” said Deepa Chauhan the sister of 30-year-old Patminder Bisht, a supervisor among the workers at the site.

A drone with five cameras was sent inside a short stretch of the tunnel for a second day on Wednesday, but found no-one, either alive or dead, an official said.

So far, police say, 32 bodies have been retrieved from the Himalayan mountainsides or pulled out of the Dhauliganga river further downstream.

As the hours passed in the winter cold, there was a mounting risk hypothermia could kill anyone in the tunnel who had survived, said Vivek Pandey, a spokesman for the Indo-Tibetan Border Police, a paramilitary force involved in the rescue effort.

Excavators had cleared more than 80 meters of mud blocking the tunnel entrance, but still have at least another 80 meters to go to reach where most of the workers were believed to be trapped, officials at the site said.

Giant boulders were blocking progress.

“Sediment and water has entered the tunnel and we are unable to clear it,” a government official monitoring the situation from New Delhi told Reuters.

Elsewhere in the valley, helicopters dropped food parcels and villagers set up a zip wire across the river to deliver supplies to some of the 13 mountain villages cut off by the disaster.

A team of scientists have reached the glacier site to determine what triggered a calamity, which fueled concern about the building of hydropower projects in the ecologically sensitive mountains.

The flash flood was initially thought to have been caused by a glacier breaking apart and crashing into the river, but some scientists now say it was more likely to have been due to an avalanche.

(Additional reporting by Saurabh Sharma in Lucknow; Writing by Sanjeev Miglani; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore)

Senators vote to proceed with Trump’s impeachment trial, but conviction may prove elusive

By David Morgan and Richard Cowan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A divided U.S. Senate voted largely along party lines on Tuesday to move ahead with Donald Trump’s impeachment trial on a charge of inciting the deadly assault on the Capitol, but conviction appears unlikely barring a major shift among Republicans.

The Senate voted 56-44 to proceed to the first-ever trial of a former president, rejecting his defense lawyers’ argument that Trump was beyond the reach of the Senate after having left the White House on Jan. 20.

Democrats hope to disqualify Trump from ever again holding public office, but Tuesday’s outcome suggested they face long odds. Only six Republican senators joined Democrats to vote in favor of allowing the trial to take place, far short of the 17 needed to secure a conviction.

Convicting Trump would require a two-thirds majority in the 50-50 Senate.

The vote capped a dramatic day in the Senate chamber. Democratic lawmakers serving as prosecutors opened the trial with a graphic video interspersing images of the Jan. 6 Capitol violence with clips of Trump’s incendiary speech to a crowd of supporters moments earlier urging them to “fight like hell” to overturn his Nov. 3 election defeat.

Senators, serving as jurors, watched as screens showed Trump’s followers throwing down barriers and hitting police officers at the Capitol. The video included the moment when police guarding the House of Representatives chamber fatally shot protester Ashli Babbitt, one of five people including a police officer who died in the rampage.

The mob attacked police, sent lawmakers scrambling for safety and interrupted the formal congressional certification of President Joe Biden’s victory after Trump had spent two months challenging the election results based on claims of widespread voting fraud.

“If that’s not an impeachment offense, then there is no such thing,” Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin, who led a team of nine House members prosecuting the case, told the assembled senators after showing the video.

He wept as he recounted how relatives he brought to the Capitol that day to witness the election certification had to shelter in an office near the House floor, saying: “They thought they were going to die.”

In contrast to the Democrats’ emotional presentation, Trump’s lawyers attacked the process, arguing that the proceeding was an unconstitutional, partisan effort to close off Trump’s political future even after he had already departed the White House.

“What they really want to accomplish here in the name of the Constitution is to bar Donald Trump from ever running for political office again, but this is an affront to the Constitution no matter who they target today,” David Schoen, one of Trump’s lawyers, told senators.

He denounced the “insatiable lust for impeachment” among Democrats before airing his own video, which stitched together clips of various Democratic lawmakers calling for Trump’s impeachment going back to 2017.

HOUSE MANAGERS’ CASE ‘COMPELLING, COGENT’

Trump, who was impeached by the Democratic-led House on Jan. 13, is only the third president in U.S. history to be impeached, and the only one to be impeached twice.

His defense argued he was exercising his right to free speech under the Constitution’s First Amendment when he addressed supporters before the Capitol attack.

Bruce Castor, one of Trump’s lawyers, said the storming of the Capitol by hundreds of people “should be denounced in the most vigorous terms,” but argued that “a small group of criminals,” not Trump, were responsible for the violence.

Most legal experts have said it is constitutional to have an impeachment trial after an official has left office.

“Presidents can’t inflame insurrection in their final weeks and then walk away like nothing happened. And yet that is the rule that President Trump asks you to adopt,” Democratic Representative Joe Neguse told the senators.

Most of the senators at the trial were present in the Capitol on Jan. 6, when many lawmakers said they feared for their own safety.

Several Republican senators said they found Trump’s defense, particularly Castor’s argument, disjointed and unclear.

“The House managers made a compelling, cogent case. And the president’s team did not,” said Republican Senator Bill Cassidy, who voted to advance the trial.

Cassidy had voted to block the trial on constitutional grounds last month, a Republican effort that failed 55-45. He was the only Republican to switch sides on Tuesday, a move that prompted the Republican Party in his home state, Louisiana, to issue a statement repudiating his decision.

Watching the proceedings on TV at his Florida resort, Trump was unhappy with Castor’s performance, said a person familiar with the situation.

After the Senate adjourned for the day, Castor told reporters: “I thought we had a good day,” and said he did not anticipate making any adjustments to his planned defense in response to the criticism.

The trial could provide clues on the Republican Party’s direction following Trump’s tumultuous four-year presidency. Sharp divisions have emerged between Trump loyalists and those hoping to move the party in a new direction. Democrats for their part are concerned the trial could impede Biden’s ability to swiftly advance an ambitious legislative agenda.

But few Republican senators appear willing to break with Trump.

Senator Josh Hawley, who helped lead the opposition in the Senate to the presidential election results, predicted that Tuesday’s vote would ultimately reflect the chamber’s final decision.

“That’s probably going to be the outcome, right there,” Hawley told reporters.

One year ago, the then-Republican-controlled Senate acquitted Trump on charges of obstructing Congress and abuse of power for pressuring Ukraine to launch an investigation into Biden and his son Hunter in 2019.

(Reporting by David Morgan and Richard Cowan; Additional reporting by Makini Brice, Susan Cornwall, Karen Freifeld and Steve Holland; Writing by Joseph Ax and Alistair Bell; Editing by Scott Malone, Will Dunham and Peter Cooney)

62.9 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines delivered, 43.2 million administered: U.S. CDC

Reuters) – The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said it had administered 43,206,190 doses of COVID-19 vaccines in the country as of Tuesday morning and delivered 62,898,775 doses.

The tally of vaccine doses are for both Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines as of 6:00 a.m. ET on Tuesday, the agency said.

The agency said 32,867,213 people had received 1 or more doses while 9,840,429 people have got the second dose as of Tuesday.

A total of 5,015,224 vaccine doses have been administered in long-term care facilities, the agency said.

(Reporting by Vishwadha Chander in Bengaluru; Editing by Aditya Soni)

Myanmar police fire to disperse protest, four hurt, one critical

(Reuters) – Police and protesters clashed in Myanmar on Tuesday, with injuries on both sides on the most violent day so far of demonstrations against the military coup that overthrew Aung San Suu Kyi, and a doctor said one woman was unlikely to survive a gun wound in the head.

Three other people were being treated for wounds from suspected rubber bullets after police fired guns, mostly into the air, and used a water cannon to try to clear protesters in the capital Naypyitaw.

State television reported injuries to police during their attempts to disperse protesters – its first acknowledgement of the demonstrations taking place in the country.

The incidents marked the first bloodshed since the military led by army chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing overthrew Suu Kyi’s newly elected government on Feb. 1 and detained her and other politicians from her National League for Democracy (NLD).

The military claimed that the NLD won by fraud – an accusation dismissed by the election committee and Western governments.

Late on Tuesday, police in Myanmar raided the NLD’s headquarters in Yangon, two elected NLD lawmakers said.

The raid was carried out by about a dozen police personnel, who forced their way into the building in the commercial capital after dark, they said.

“DISPROPORTIONATE FORCE”

The protests are the largest in Myanmar for more than a decade, reviving memories of almost half a century of direct army rule and spasms of bloody uprisings until the military began a process of withdrawing from civilian politics in 2011.

The United Nations expressed concern about the use of force against demonstrators.

“I call on the Security Forces to respect human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the right to peaceful assembly and freedom of expression,” Ola Almgren, the UN representative in Myanmar, said.

“The use of disproportionate force against demonstrators is unacceptable.”

According to reports from Naypyitaw, Mandalay and other cities, numerous demonstrators have been injured, some of them seriously, by security forces.

A doctor in the Naypyitaw hospital said the shot woman had suffered what was most likely to be a fatal head wound.

“She hasn’t passed away yet, she’s in the emergency unit, but it’s 100% certain the injury is fatal,” said the doctor, who declined to be identified. “According to the X-ray, it’s a live bullet.”

Neither police nor the hospital responded to a request for comment.

A man had a chest wound but was not in critical condition. It was not clear if he was hit with a bullet or rubber bullet, the doctor said.

State-run MRTV news said a police truck had been destroyed at a demonstration in Mandalay, Myanmar’s second biggest city. It showed footage of the aftermath, including injured police.

MRTV described the protests as being orchestrated by people who wanted to harm the nation’s stability and had acted aggressively. It made no mention of the coup or other demonstrations across the country.

Earlier, witnesses said police fired into the air in Naypyitaw as a crowd refused to disperse. They then blasted them with water cannon while the protesters responded with stones, a witness said.

Footage posted on social media apparently of the woman who was shot showed her with other protesters by what appeared to be a bus-stop shelter some distance from a row of riot police as a water cannon sprayed and several shots could be heard.

The woman, wearing a motorbike helmet, suddenly collapsed. Pictures of her helmet showed what appeared to be a bullet hole. Reuters was not able to verify the video footage or photographs.

Video from the central town of Bago showed police confronting a crowd and firing water cannon. Police arrested at least 27 demonstrators in Mandalay, domestic media reported.

The situation nationwide was quiet by nightfall. Orders banning gatherings of more than four people and a curfew from 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. have been imposed on Yangon and Mandalay.

PROMISES

Suu Kyi’s party had won a 2015 election but Myanmar’s transition to democracy was brought to a halt by the Feb. 1 coup staged as her government was due to start a second term.

Promises on Monday from Min Aung Hlaing to eventually hold a new election drew scorn. He said the junta would form a “true and disciplined democracy,” different to previous eras of military rule, which brought years of isolation and poverty.

He gave no time frame but the junta has said a state of emergency would last one year.

A civil disobedience movement affecting hospitals, schools and government offices shows no sign of ending but the crowds in Yangon, Myanmar’s former capital and commercial hub, appeared smaller on Tuesday than the previous day.

“The main thing is we don’t want a coup,” said a 24-year-old woman protester in Yangon. “If we young people don’t come out, who will?”

Activists are also seeking the abolition of a 2008 constitution drawn up under military supervision that gave the generals a veto in parliament and control of several ministries, and for a federal system in ethnically diverse Myanmar.

Western governments have widely condemned the coup, although there has been little concrete action to press the generals.

The U.N. Security Council has called for the release of SuuKyi and others. The U.N. Human Rights Council will hold a special session on Friday to discuss the crisis.

Suu Kyi won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 for campaigning for democracy and spent nearly 15 years under house arrest.

The 75-year-old faces charges of illegally importing six walkie-talkies and is being held in detention until Feb. 15. Her lawyer said he has not been allowed to see her.

Suu Kyi remains hugely popular at home despite damage to her international reputation over the plight of the Muslim Rohingya minority.

(Reporting by Reuters staff; Writing by Matthew Tostevin, Lincoln Feast, Robert Birsel; Editing by Richard Pullin, Angus MacSwan)

Greek premier orders full lockdown in Athens after surge in coronavirus cases

By Angeliki Koutantou

ATHENS (Reuters) – Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis on Tuesday announced a full lockdown in the capital Athens and the surrounding region to curb a resurgence in coronavirus cases and ease pressure on badly stretched health services.

The new restrictions in the Athens region, where half of Greece’s population of 11 million lives, include closing non-essential shops and schools from Feb. 11 until the end of the month, Mitsotakis said in a televised address.

“I will not hide: In the next two months, restrictions may be imposed and lifted depending on the level of alarm,” he said after chairing an emergency meeting with ministers and health experts. “But this is also the last mile towards freedom.”

Authorities registered 1,526 infections on Tuesday, more than double the number recorded a day earlier – half of them in the wider Athens area, with COVID-19 related deaths reaching 6,017 since the coronavirus was first detected.

Greece, which has fared relatively better than others in Europe during the pandemic, was forced to impose a partial lockdown in November after infections began climbing, threatening to overwhelm a health system badly weakened by a decade-long financial crisis.

It has since eased restrictions on the retail sector to help struggling businesses. But Mitsotakis said a fresh rise in hospital admissions in Athens and the detection of more contagious variants of the coronavirus have alarmed authorities.

Greece has administered more than 400,000 inoculations so far with the Pfizer/BionTech and Moderna vaccines and is due to start vaccinating people aged 60-64 with the AstraZeneca shots on Feb. 15.

Mitsotakis said vaccinations will soon reach 500,000 and the most vulnerable will be protected by the end of spring, when the government hopes the vital tourism sector will be able to open.

“We will be much better from April,” he said.

(Reporting by Angeliki Koutantou and Renee Maltezou; Editing by Alison Williams and Grant McCool)

Canada to demand negative COVID tests from people returning across U.S. land border

By David Ljunggren

OTTAWA (Reuters) – Canada will step up its fight against COVID-19 by obliging citizens returning home over land from the United States to show they do not have COVID-19, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Tuesday.

Everyone arriving by air already has to prove they tested negative within the previous 72 hours and this rule is being expanded to land crossings starting on Feb. 15, Trudeau said.

Although non-essential travel between the two nations is banned, hundreds of thousands of Canadians have second homes in the United States, and Ottawa is obliged to allow them to return if they wish. People who arrive without test results can be fined C$3,000 ($2,360).

The measure only affects around 5% of returning Canadians because the majority arrive by air.

“We’re using every tool in the toolbox to get us all through this crisis,” Trudeau told reporters. Essential workers such as truck drivers are exempt from the new rules.

Canada has recorded a total of 20,835 deaths and 808,120 cases of COVID-19. Many provinces reimposed restrictions to combat a second wave of the coronavirus pandemic and as a result the number of new daily cases over the last week fell to around 3,500 from 8,000 in early January.

“This is gratifying progress,” chief medical officer Theresa Tam told reporters.

Trudeau also promised the supply of vaccines from Pfizer Inc and Moderna Inc would ramp up next week.

His Liberal government has been attacked by critics over the slow pace of vaccinations, caused in part by a temporary reduction in supplies from Pfizer.

Separately, officials said Canada would allow a sixth dose to be taken from each vial of Pfizer’s vaccine rather than the originally intended five.

They told reporters that six doses could be extracted provided a special syringe was used, mirroring moves taken by the United States and some European nations.

($1=1.2704 Canadian dollars)

(Reporting by David Ljunggren; Editing by Marguerita Choy and Mark Heinrich)

U.S. government to ship COVID-19 vaccines directly to community health centers starting next week

(Reuters) – The U.S. government will begin shipping COVID-19 vaccines directly to community health centers around the country next week in an effort to speed vaccination and ensure doses are reaching vulnerable populations, U.S. health officials said on Tuesday.

It will begin by shipping doses to 250 centers nationwide selected based on their proximity to vulnerable groups, such as homeless people and those with limited proficiency in English, they said, but will eventually scale to 1400 community health centers in the United States.

(Reporting by Carl O’Donnell; Editing by Chris Reese)

Austria to isolate province in EU’s worst outbreak of South African coronavirus variant

By Francois Murphy

VIENNA (Reuters) – Austria is stepping up its response to the European Union’s biggest outbreak of the so-called South African coronavirus variant in its Alpine province of Tyrol, by requiring those leaving Tyrol to show a negative test result as of Friday.

A year ago Tyrol, a winter sports hotspot bordering Germany, Italy and Switzerland, was the scene of one of Europe’s worst instances of virus spreading at the ski resort of Ischgl. Thousands of tourists from across Europe were infected.

Despite that damaging episode, the provincial government has resisted pressure from Vienna to do more to curb the new variant that threatens Austria’s vaccination plans. After days of fraught negotiation, the national government said on Tuesday it would screen those leaving Tyrol, starting in three days.

“We have a responsibility throughout Austria to fight mutations against which vaccinations are less or maybe barely effective,” conservative Chancellor Sebastian Kurz told a news conference, a day after his government asked the public not to travel to Tyrol unless they have to.

Police will require anyone leaving the province to show a negative coronavirus test result no more than 48 hours old, and the measure will last 10 days. It will not apply to East Tyrol, which is separated from the rest of the province, or to children.

So far 293 cases of the variant have been confirmed in Tyrol, and 129 of them are currently active, the government said. The authorities have been unable to explain how it arrived in the province where lockdown measures have kept hotels closed to tourists, though ski lifts are open.

As in much of the EU, Austria’s national vaccination plan relies heavily on the AstraZeneca vaccine and a recent study has shaken confidence in its effectiveness against the South African variant, showing it had little effect against mild disease caused by that variant.

“Almost 50% of Europeans will be vaccinated with AstraZeneca in the coming months. If this drug is less effective then we must be aware that these mutations, that these variants, are extremely dangerous for us,” Kurz said.

On Monday, his government had loosened Austria’s third coronavirus lockdown, letting non-essential shops reopen, including in Tyrol, despite stubbornly high infections nationally.

The opposition Social Democrats criticized the bickering between the provincial and national governments, both of which are led by Kurz’s conservatives, saying in a statement they had “learned nothing from Ischgl”.

(Reporting by Francois Murphy; Editing by Alex Richardson and Grant McCool)

Dozens collapsed glacier after Himalayan glacier’s collapse, scores still missing

LUCKNOW, India (Reuters) – Rescuers raced to free around 35 Indian construction workers trapped in a tunnel, two days after the hydroelectric dam they were helping to build was swept away by a wall of water from a collapsed glacier that barreled down a Himalayan river.

The workers were among 197 people who officials said were still unaccounted for as the death toll from the disaster – which also broke apart bridges, cut off villages and scarred tracts of mountain landscape – rose to 28.

Packing rocks, dirt and construction debris and thought to have been triggered when a glacier lake fed by India’s second highest peak, Nanda Devi, collapsed, the flood swept down the Dhauliganga river on Sunday.

Officials said most of those still missing were shift workers at either the Tapovan Vishnugad hydroelectric project, where the tunnel was situated, or at Rishiganga, a smaller dam which was swept away in the flood.

Soldiers using bulldozers had cleared away rocks at the mouth of the 2.5-km (1.5-mile) tunnel, and video posted by the Indo-Tibetan border police service showed rescuers checking the water level deeper inside.

Rescuers hoped to open the tunnel up by Tuesday afternoon, said Ashok Kumar, director general of police in Uttarakhand state, where the flash flood occurred.

Officials said thermal imaging equipment had also been deployed to help locate would-be survivors, and Uttarakhand’s chief minister, Trivendra Singh Rawat, said 28 bodies had been recovered so far.

Thirteen villages had been cut off by the floodwaters were being resupplied from the air, Home Minister Amit Shah told parliament.

A government official said many locals had apparently managed to escape the waters by fleeing to higher ground as soon as they heard the rumble of the water racing down the valley.

“The workers in the tunnel may not have heard anything and got stuck,” the official said.

The 520 MW Tapovan project, being built by state firm NTPC, is one of many run-of-river projects being developed to upgrade Uttarakhand’s power network.

Officials have yet to conclusively determine what caused the disaster, though scientists investigating it believe heavy snowfall followed by bright sunshine combined with a rise in temperatures may have triggered the glacier’s collapse.

A clearer picture of the circumstances is expected to emerge later this week, officials said.

(Writing by Sanjeev Miglani; editing by John Stonestreet)

Trump impeachment trial to open with fight on constitutionality

By David Morgan and Richard Cowan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Donald Trump’s historic second impeachment trial, on a charge of inciting last month’s deadly storming of the U.S. Capitol, opens on Tuesday with a debate over the constitutionality of the Senate trying a president after he has left office.

Trump’s lawyers plan to open the trial on Tuesday by questioning whether the U.S. Constitution allows the Senate to hold an impeachment trial for a president after he has left office, as Trump did on Jan. 20.

Most Senate Republicans have embraced that argument, which strongly suggests that Democrats will be unable to garner the two-thirds majority needed to convict in the 100-member Senate. Democrats and many legal scholars reject the Republicans’ constitutional interpretation.

Senate Democrats are expected to prevail in Tuesday’s vote on the constitutionality of the trial. A Republican effort to block the trial on those grounds was defeated 55-45 last month.

Trump, a Republican, was impeached by the Democratic-led House of Representatives on Jan. 13 on a charge of inciting an insurrection, becoming the only president to have been impeached twice and the only former president to face a Senate trial.

Eager to get beyond debates over the constitutionality of the trial, a group of nine House Democratic impeachment managers prosecuting the case will present arguments that “will be more like a violent-crime criminal prosecution, because that is what it is,” a senior aide told reporters. The managers aim to prove Trump “incited a violent insurrection to interfere with the peaceful transfer of power. That is the most serious of constitutional crimes,” an aide said.

“When you have such a serious charge, sweeping it under the rug will not bring unity – it will keep the sore open, the wounds open. You need truth and accountability. I believe the managers will present a very strong case,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat, told reporters.

The trial could provide clues on the direction of the Republican Party following Trump’s tumultuous four-year presidency. Sharp divisions have emerged between Trump loyalists and those hoping to move the party in a new direction.

The House Democrats face a high bar, needing the votes of at least 17 Republicans as well as all 48 Democrats and the two independents who caucus with them to secure a conviction. Democrats also hope to disqualify Trump from ever again holding public office.

FOUR DAYS OF ARGUMENTS

On Wednesday, the prosecution and defense will turn to the merits of the charge. They have a total of 32 hours evenly divided over no more than four days to present their cases.

The arguments would begin midday on Wednesday. The proceedings could be extended further as senators would have time to question both sides.

If House managers want to call witnesses or subpoena documents, the Senate would have to vote to allow those. Trump lawyers and House managers could question witnesses – a far more exhaustive procedure than Trump’s first impeachment trial, which had no witness testimony.

Trump’s defense is also anchored in the argument that he was exercising his constitutional right to free speech in urging backers to “fight” to overturn the election result.

His lawyers said in a pretrial document that Trump was using the word “fight” in a “figurative sense,” adding: “Notably absent from his speech was any reference to or encouragement of an insurrection, a riot, criminal action, or any acts of physical violence whatsoever.”

One year ago, the then Republican-controlled Senate acquitted Trump on charges of obstructing Congress and abuse of power related to his pressure on Ukraine to launch an investigation into Biden and his son Hunter in 2019.

(Reporting by Richard Cowan; Writing by Alistair Bell; Editing by Scott Malone and Peter Cooney)