Author Archives: Reuters News Agency

Wisconsin city calm but police shooting reverberates across U.S.

By Brendan McDermid and Stephen Maturen

KENOSHA, Wis. (Reuters) – Relative calm returned to Kenosha, Wisconsin, overnight after the previous night’s deadly gun violence, and investigators revealed new details about the police shooting that paralyzed a Black man and revived a wave of protests over racial injustice.

Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul on Wednesday identified Rusten Sheskey as the white police officer who fired seven shots at the back of Jacob Blake after Blake opened his car door on Sunday. Kaul also said investigators found a knife on the floor of Blake’s car.

That announcement, combined with the arrest of a 17-year-old suspect charged with homicide over the previous night’s gunfire, set the stage for what could have been another night of chaos on the streets of Kenosha, about 40 miles (60 km) south of Milwaukee.

Shockwaves from the events in the city of about 100,000 were felt throughout the United States as professional athletes went on strike and anti-racism street protests intensified in other cities. At the Republican National Convention, Vice President Mike Pence and other speakers demanded “law and order.”

But in Kenosha, after three nights of civil strife – including arson, vandalism and the shootings that killed two people on Tuesday night – calm appeared to take hold on Wednesday night and Thursday morning.

About 200 protesters defied a curfew and marched peacefully through city streets, chanting, “Black lives matter” and “no justice, no peace” in response to the shooting of Blake, 29, in the presence of three of his young sons.

Law enforcement officers kept a low profile, and counter demonstrators and armed militia figures were notably absent.

Prior nights had seen an array of rifle-toting civilians among them 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, who was arrested on Wednesday on homicide charges in connection with Tuesday night’s shootings. Rittenhouse, a police supporter, was arrested at his home in Antioch, Illinois, about 20 miles (30 km) away.

PLAYERS ON STRIKE

National Basketball Association players led by the Milwaukee Bucks went on strike to protest racial injustice during the playoffs, putting the rest of the season in jeopardy.

Players in Major League Baseball, Major League Soccer and the Women’s National Basketball followed with their own wildcat strikes, and tennis player Naomi Osaka pulled out of a tournament in Ohio.

The Kenosha turmoil struck while much of the United States remained agitated over George Floyd, who died on May 25 after a Minneapolis policeman knelt on his neck.

In Minneapolis, authorities declared a state of emergency on Wednesday to quell unrest sparked by the death of a Black homicide suspect who police say shot himself.

Police in Oakland, California, said hundreds of people took part in demonstrations that resulted in fires, broken windows and vandalized businesses. And police and protesters continued to clash in Portland, Oregon, where demonstrations have gone on for nearly three months straight.

In the police shooting that sparked the latest wave of outrage, Sheskey, a seven-year veteran of the Kenosha police force, fired seven times at Blake’s back, hitting him four times.

Blake survived despite wounds to his spine and multiple organs, and he may be permanently paralyzed, his family’s lawyers said.

Civil rights attorney Ben Crump, one of the lawyers representing Blake’s family, disputed the report that Blake had a knife.

“Jacob Blake didn’t harm anyone or pose any threat to the police, yet they shot him seven times in the back in front of his children,” Crump said.

“But when a young white supremacist shot and killed two peaceful protesters, local law enforcement and National Guardsmen allowed him to walk down the street with his assault weapon,” Crump and his co-counsels said in a statement, without offering proof that Rittenhouse was a racist.

They were referring to video from the previous night that showed the person who had just fired on protesters was able to walk past a battery of police without being arrested.

Authorities later caught up with Rittenhouse, whose since-deleted Facebook page shows him posing with another young man, both of them holding rifles. The photo is encircled by a Blue Lives Matter badge in support of police.

(Additional reporting by Nathan Layne, Daniel Trotta, Ann Maria Shibu and Kanishka Singh; Writing by Daniel Trotta; Editing by Nick Macfie and Jonathan Oatis)

FDA warns against hand sanitizers that look like drinks

(Reuters) – The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Thursday warned of alcohol-based sanitizers being packaged and sold in containers that appear like food or drinks.

At a time when health agencies are pushing for better hand hygiene to curb the spread of the coronavirus in the United States, the top health regulator found many hand sanitizers look like beer cans, children’s food pouches, water bottles, juice bottles and vodka bottles.

Some of them were being sold with cartoons for children and had added food flavors such as chocolate or raspberry.

“These products could confuse consumers into accidentally ingesting a potentially deadly product,” FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn said in a statement.

He warned against adding scents with food flavors to hand sanitizers as it would lead to children mistaking it for food and result in alcohol poisoning.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which has backed use of sanitizers if soap and water are not available, has reported several cases of methanol poisoning, some even fatal, caused by swallowing alcohol-based hand sanitizers.

(Reporting by Vishwadha Chander in Bengaluru; Editing by Arun Koyyur)

Oil prices slip as Hurricane Laura makes Gulf Coast landfall

By Ahmad Ghaddar

LONDON (Reuters) – Oil prices fell on Thursday as a massive hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico made landfall in the heart of the U.S. oil industry, forcing oil rigs and refineries to shut down.

Brent crude futures for October, which expire on Friday, fell 50 cents, or 1.1%, to $45.14 a barrel by 1359 GMT. The more active November Brent contract was down 55 cents, or 1.2%, at $45.61 per barrel.

U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude futures fell 39 cents or 0.9% to $43 a barrel.

Hurricane Laura made landfall early on Thursday in southwestern Louisiana as a category 4 storm, one of the most powerful to hit the state, with forecasters warning it could push a wall of water 40 miles inland from the sea.

Oil producers on Tuesday had shut 1.56 million barrels per day (bpd) of crude output, or 84% of the Gulf of Mexico’s production, evacuating 310 offshore facilities.

At the same time, refiners that convert nearly 2.33 million bpd of crude oil into fuel, and account for about 12% of U.S. processing, halted operations.

“Perhaps traders are waiting to see what the damage is but the limited impact so far may also just be a reflection of the current oil market dynamics. Temporary disruptions are easily covered,” OANDA analyst Craig Erlam said.

Oil prices also shrugged off U.S. crude inventory declines and signs that gasoline demand in the world’s biggest oil consumer were improving.

Crude oil stockpiles fell last week as exports soared the most in 18 months and refineries boosted production to the highest rate since March, Energy Information Administration data showed on Wednesday. Gasoline stocks also fell.

“It appears that the gasoline inventory reduction was due first and foremost to increased demand – gasoline demand rose to a six-month high of around 9.2 million bpd,” Commerzbank said.

(Additional reporting by Sonali Paul and Koustav Samanta; editing by Jason Neely)

Beyond Meat begins direct online sales of plant-based patties

(Reuters) – Beyond Meat Inc on Thursday launched a new website to sell its plant-based meat products to U.S. customers, just nearly three months after rival Impossible Foods started its direct-to-consumer sales.

The move comes at a time when demand for vegan products has surged amid rising beef prices due to the COVID-19 pandemic and restaurant traffic has not recovered to normal levels.

Impossible Foods, which began direct online sales in June, and Beyond Meat currently sell their plant-based meat products in thousands of retail stores across the United States, including Kroger and Walmart Inc.

Beyond Meat has been seeing a jump in consumer demand in its retail channels during the lockdown and said direct online sales would include the Beyond Beef and Sausage patties, with two-day shipping included in all orders.

(Reporting by Aditi Sebastian; Editing by Ramakrishnan M.)

Hurricane Laura slams southwestern Louisiana, but less damage than forecast

By Elijah Nouvelage and Ernest Scheyder

LAKE CHARLES, La. (Reuters) – Hurricane Laura ripped through southwestern Louisiana on Thursday, destroying buildings in towns across the southwestern corner of the state and killing a 14-year-old girl after making landfall as one of the most powerful storms to hit the area.

Still, the damage Laura has inflicted so far is far less than what forecasters predicted.

The hurricane’s first reported U.S. fatality was the teenage girl in Leesville, Louisiana, who died when a tree fell on her house, a spokeswoman for Governor John Bel Edwards said.

“We do expect that there could be more fatalities,” the spokeswoman, Christina Stephens, said on Twitter.

A chemical plant caught fire in Laura’s wake on Thursday morning in Westlake, Louisiana, 4 miles (6.4 km) west of Lake Charles, sending thick black smoke billowing into the sky over the wind-torn landscape near Interstate 10.

Edwards warned residents in the area to shelter in place, close doors and windows and turn off air conditioners as authorities investigated. Traffic was blocked on the interstate and Highway 90.

“Stay inside and wait for additional direction from local officials,” Edwards wrote on Twitter.

CLEANUP BEGINS

Residents of Lake Charles heard Laura’s winds howling and the sound of breaking glass as the storm passed through the city of 78,000 with winds of 85 miles per hour (137 km per hour) and gusts up to 128 mph (206 kph) in the hour after landfall.

National Guard troops cleared debris from roads in Lake Charles on Thursday afternoon. There were downed power lines in streets around the city, and the winds tipped a few semi-trucks onto their sides.

The windows of the city’s 22-floor Capital One Tower were blown out, street signs were toppled and pieces of wooden fence and debris from collapsed buildings lay scattered in the flooded streets, video footage on Twitter and Snapchat showed.

Lake Charles resident Borden Wilson, a 33-year-old pediatrician, was anxiously anticipating his return home after evacuating to Minden, Louisiana.

“I never even boarded up my windows. I didn’t think to do that. This is the first hurricane I’ve experienced. I just hope my house is fine,” he said in a telephone interview.

In the small town of Starks, about 25 miles northwest of Lake Charles, pine trees strewn across roads and homes were the biggest challenge in cleaning up.

Rev. Karl Smith carefully inspected the damage done to buildings around his First Pentecostal Church. He rode out the storm in the cellar of his house – and had to cut through trees so that he and his wife could get out.

“We just had trees thrown everywhere,” Smith said. “It’s a big mess.”

HIGH WATERS, TORNADO THREATS

Laura made landfall just before 1 a.m. (0600 GMT) as a Category 4 storm packing winds of 150 mph in the small town of Cameron, Louisiana, the National Hurricane Center (NHC) said.

It rapidly weakened to a Category 1 storm on Thursday morning with maximum sustained winds of 75 mph (120 kph), and has since become a tropical storm.

The NHC warned that high water levels would persist along the Gulf Coast for several hours as Laura moved north and then northeast.

Besides threatening life, the storm slammed the heart of the U.S. oil industry, forcing oil rigs and refineries to shut down production.

The Port of Lake Charles remained closed as workers were unable to enter or exit the facility due to downed power lines and trees.

The port avoided significant flooding but power was out as of Thursday morning, manager of security and safety Ed Manint said. The harbor police were assessing the damage, he said.

‘LESS SURGE THAN WE THOUGHT’

Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Administrator Pete Gaynor told Fox News that the agency would make storm damage assessments on Thursday and had the resources to respond to the storm now, adding he expected to see significant damage from wind and building damage.

“I think we’re generally fortunate – less surge than we thought,” Gaynor said.

The NHC on Wednesday predicted storm surge would be “unsurvivable” and could penetrate up to 40 miles inland. While the worst projections had not materialized, damaging winds and flooding rainfall would continue spreading inland later on Thursday, the NHC said.

Laura could spawn tornadoes on Thursday over Louisiana, Arkansas and western Mississippi, and was expected to drop 4 to 8 inches (10-20 cm) of rain across portions of that region, the NHC said.

(Reporting by Elijah Nouvelage in Lake Charles, La., Ernest Scheyder in Starks, La., Jennifer Hiller and Gary McWilliams in Houston, Liz Hampton in Denver, Timothy Ahmann, Susan Heavey and Daphne Psaledakis in Washington; Gabriella Borter and Peter Szekely in New York and Brad Brooks in Lubbock, Tex.; Writing by Gabriella Borter; Editing by Marguerita Choy and Matthew Lewis)

Wisconsin investigators say knife found at scene of police shooting of Jacob Blake

By Brendan McDermid and Stephen Maturen

KENOSHA, Wis. (Reuters) – Investigators of a shooting by a white police officer that left a Black man, Jacob Blake Jr., paralyzed and the town of Kenosha, Wisconsin, torn by civil strife found a knife belonging to Blake at the scene of the confrontation, the state attorney general said on Wednesday.

The incident sparked three nights of civil unrest that has included a wave of arson, widespread vandalism and a separate shooting that claimed two lives in Kenosha, a city of about 100,000 residents on Lake Michigan, 40 miles (60 km) south of Milwaukee.

In the first official details of Sunday’s shooting released by the Wisconsin Justice Department, which is probing the incident, Attorney General Josh Kaul said the knife was recovered from the driver-side front floorboard of the car Blake was leaning into when he was shot in the back.

Kaul also told a news conference that Blake, during the course of the investigation, had “admitted that he had a knife in his possession.”

Blake’s lawyer responded in a statement that his client posed no threat to police and disputed that he was in possession of a knife.

Kaul did not describe the knife or say whether it had anything to do with why the officer, a seven-year veteran of the Kenosha police department identified as Rusten Sheskey, had opened fire on Blake.

Kaul’s briefing came shortly before the U.S. Justice Department announced it had opened a federal civil rights inquiry into the shooting, to be conducted by the FBI in cooperation with Wisconsin authorities.

In a separate development hours earlier, a teenager was arrested and charged with shooting three people, two of whom died, during Tuesday night’s protests in Kenosha.

Video footage from that incident showed a white gunman, armed with an assault-style rifle, firing at protesters who tried to subdue him, and then calmly walking away from the scene, hands in the air – his rifle hanging in front of him – as several police vehicles drive by without stopping him.

Wisconsin Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes said on MSNBC the suspect, later identified as Kyle Rittenhouse, 17, of Antioch, Illinois, was apparently a militia group member who “decided to be a vigilante and take the law into his own hands and mow down innocent protesters.”

Bracing for a fourth night of possible upheavals on Wednesday, Governor Tony Evers said he was doubling the National Guard force he had ordered deployed to 500 troops, and a dusk-to-dawn curfew was imposed an hour earlier.

About 200 protesters defied the curfew for hours after dark as they marched peacefully through city streets, chanting, “Black lives matter” and “No justice, no peace,” while law enforcement kept a low profile. No counter-demonstrators or armed militia figures were present.

National Guard soldiers were seen taking a dinner break behind the county courthouse, surrounded by barricades and heavy fencing erected around several downtown public buildings the previous day.

PREAMBLE TO SHOOTING

By Kaul’s account of events leading to the Blake shooting, city police confronted Blake when they were called to the home of a woman who reported that her boyfriend was present “and was not supposed to be on the premises.”

The location he gave for the residence corresponds with the address of the woman identified in media reports as Blake’s fiance, Laquisha Booker.

During the incident, Kaul said, police tried to arrest Blake, using a Taser stun gun in a failed attempt to subdue him.

Blake, according to the attorney general, then walked around his vehicle, opened the driver-side door and leaned forward, as officer Sheskey, clutching Blake’s shirt, fired his weapon seven times at Blake’s back.

Kaul said no other police officers fired their weapons. The officers involved have been placed on administrative leave.

Bystanders captured the encounter in video footage that has since gone viral, unleashing public outrage at the latest in a long series of instances in which police have been accused of using indiscriminate lethal force against African Americans.

Kaul said police in Kenosha are not equipped with body cameras.

A lawyer for Blake’s family, civil rights attorney Ben Crump, issued a statement late Wednesday saying Blake “did nothing to provoke police” and was “only intending to get his children out of a volatile situation” at the time.

“Witnesses confirm that he was not in possession of a knife and didn’t threaten officers in any way,” he added.

Three of Blake’s young sons – aged 3, 5 and 8 – were in the vehicle at the time and witnessed their father being gunned down, Crump said. Blake has a total of six children.

Neither Crump nor law enforcement officials have mentioned court records showing that an arrest warrant was filed against Blake in July by Kenosha’s district attorney for three domestic abuse-related charges – criminal trespass, disorderly conduct and third-degree sexual assault, a felony.

Crump has declined to respond to Reuters queries about those records, which list Blake’s address as the same street number where Booker is reported to reside.

According to Crump, Blake was struck by four of the seven gunshot rounds fired at him on Sunday. Bullets shattered some of his vertebrae, leaving Blake paralyzed from the waist down, possibly permanently, his lawyers said. He also suffered wounds to his stomach, intestines, kidney and liver and will require multiple operations to recover, they said.

Kaul said his department’s division of criminal investigations plans to issue a full report on the incident to prosecutors in 30 days, and that no other details were immediately available.

Blake’s family and protesters have demanded the officers involved in the shooting be immediately fired and prosecuted.

(Reporting by Nathan Layne, Maria Caspani and Jonathan Allen; Writing and additional reporting by Steve Gorman; editing by Jonathan Oatis, Bill Berkrot, Aurora Ellis, Lincoln Feast and William Mallard)

U.S. CDC reports 177,759 deaths from coronavirus

(Reuters) – The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Wednesday said the number of deaths due to the coronavirus had risen by 1,142 to 177,759 and also reported 5,752,653 cases, an increase of 37,086 cases from its previous count.

The CDC reported its tally of cases of the respiratory illness known as COVID-19, caused by a new coronavirus, as of 4 pm ET on Aug. 25 versus its previous report a day earlier.

The CDC figures do not necessarily reflect cases reported by individual states.

(Reporting by Dania Nadeem in Bengaluru, Editing by Sherry Jacob-Phillips)

Antarctica ice shelves vulnerable to meltwater that could cut ice ‘like a knife,’ study finds

By Cassandra Garrison

BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) – Meltwater could undermine the walls of ice holding back Antarctica’s glaciers, scientists reported on Wednesday, a finding that underscores concern about the potential for a significant sea level rise.

The ice shelves, formed over thousands of years, serve as dams to prevent much of the continent’s snow and ice from flowing toward the ocean. Scientists found that about 60% of the ice shelf area is vulnerable to a process call hydro-fracturing, in which meltwater seeps into the shelves’ crevasses, some of which are hundreds of meters deep, and triggers collapse.

“This meltwater is heavier than ice, so it can penetrate through the entire ice thickness, just like a knife,” said climate scientist Ching-Yao Lai at Colombia University.

It’s unclear how long such a process might take. Antarctic weather is highly variable, making it difficult for scientists to determine how much of a role is being played by human-caused climate change.

Lai said, however, that previous research suggested meltwater could cover the ice shelves in about a century.

The new study, published in the journal Nature, used AI to identify ice-fracture features in nearly 260 satellite images of 50 ice shelves across the continent. Those ice shelves surround about 75% of the Antarctic coastline.

Finding vulnerabilities in the ice shelves buttressing the glaciers above was a surprise, Lai said.

“Previously, we thought there are going to be places vulnerable to hydro-fracture, but that those places might not matter at all for the ice sheet,” Lai said.

Scientists fear that losing ice shelves to hydro-fracturing will leave Antarctica’s ice sheets a more direct pathway to the ocean, which could accelerate ice loss and contribute to sea level rise.

The latest reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have projected future sea levels to rise by more than a meter by 2100. However, scientists worry that a sudden collapse of these steep ice shelves could increase future sea levels dramatically. More than half of the world’s fresh water is locked into Antarctica’s ice.

Meanwhile, warming temperatures driven by climate change are also eating into glaciers and the ice sheet in the Arctic. Last month, Canada’s last intact ice shelf collapsed.

And Greenland’s ice sheet lost a record amount of mass last year, raising concerns the icy bulk is melting more quickly than anticipated. Greenland’s ancient ice sheet holds enough water to raise sea levels by at least 20 feet (6 meters) if it were to melt entirely.

In Antarctica, if “we start seeing the collapse of some of this ice that is there like a wall holding back everything behind it, it’s just going to accelerate the pace of sea level rise beyond what we’re probably predicting right now,” said Alexandra Isern, head of Antarctic studies for the U.S. National Science Foundation who was not involved in the study.

Once gone, the ice shelves wouldn’t be able to form again “in any time we’ll ever see,” Isern said. “It took a long time to make them, and it maybe isn’t going to take as long to get rid of them.”

Scientists say that, while governments should prepare for higher seas, there is still time to curb climate-warming emissions in order to slow the rate of sea level rise and avoid coastal catastrophes.

“There’s no ice on the planet that gets along well with warming air and warming ocean temperatures,” said glaciologist Twila Moon at the National Snow and Ice Data Center who was not involved in the study.

“These kinds of details and tools are helping us to narrow our range of being able to say what will happen in the future, given that humans follow any particular path.”

(Reporting by Cassandra Garrison; Editing by Katy Daigle and Bernadette Baum)

Gaza man dies of coronavirus as lockdown imposed to curb first outbreak

By Nidal al-Mughrabi

GAZA (Reuters) – Gaza reported one coronavirus death and at least 10 new cases of infection on Wednesday as the blockaded Palestinian enclave sought to control its first public outbreak of the disease.

Hamas-controlled security forces enforced a lockdown in all cities in the coastal territory, warning people to stay at home or to wear face masks if they had to go out for emergencies.

Health officials said the 61-year-old man who died had pre-existing conditions and had been on a respirator.

Ten more cases were reported on Wednesday, six of them in Maghazi refugee camp where the first four infections were discovered on Monday, and another four in Gaza City and the northern area of the enclave of 2 million people.

The new infections added to concerns among local and international health organizations about Gaza’s potentially disastrous combination of poverty, densely populated refugee camps and limited hospital capacity.

Until Monday the 360 square-kilometre (139 square-mile) coastal strip had reported no infections outside border quarantine facilities for new arrivals.

Facing for the first time a situation that the rest of the world has been dealing with for months, Gazans have been going online to share experiences and voice their concerns.

“We are now alone with Corona, with the blazing sun and the power supply being cut off. Corona came to empty pockets and homes on the brink of sadness and anger,” wrote one Gaza resident on Twitter.

The 40 kilometre-long territory is sealed off from the outside world by Israeli walls, watchtowers and gunboats along 90% of its border and coastline, and by Egypt along a narrow strip to the south.

Both countries impose tight restrictions on movement in and out of Gaza, citing security concerns over Hamas, which is regarded as a terrorist organization by Israel and the United States.

The blockade is thought to be one reason why Gaza remained relatively virus-free, with many of its residents comparing their situation to a permanent lockdown.

The United Nations agency dealing with Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said it was considering alternative plans to continue under lockdown the health, education and food services it provides to more than half Gaza’s population.

UNRWA spokesman Adnan Abu Hasna said clinics remained open but staffers were providing medical consultations over the phone, and some medication was being delivered to homes.

(Additional reporting by Zainah El-Haroun in Ramallah; Writing by Stephen Farrell and Dan Williams; Editing by William Maclean and Hugh Lawson)

Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine shows similar immune response in old and young

(Reuters) – Moderna Inc said on Wednesday that an analysis of the early-stage data of its experimental COVID-19 vaccine showed it induced immune responses in older adults that were similar to younger participants.

The drug developer is one of the leading U.S. contenders in the race to develop a safe and effective vaccine against the novel coronavirus and its candidate, mRNA-1273, is already in the Phase 3 stage of human testing.

Moderna is now reporting interim data from the Phase 1 study, which includes new analysis from 20 additional people and details on how the vaccine performs in older people.

The analysis looked at 100 micro gram dosage that has been selected for the larger Phase 3 trial. Moderna said the immune responses in those aged between 56 and 70 years, above 70 and those in the age-group of 18 and 55 were similar.

The data is being presented at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices meeting on Wednesday.

The company has so far enrolled over 13,000 participants in the late-stage study and about 18% of the total participants are Black, Latino, American Indian or Alaska Native, groups that are the hardest hit by the pandemic.

Moderna, which has no drugs in the market, has received nearly $1 billion from the U.S. government under a plan to speed up vaccine development for COVID-19. It has also struck a $1.5 billion supply agreement with the United States.

Shares of the drug developer rose more than 7% to $71.35 after the data. They have more than tripled in value so far this year and results from its studies have boosted the broader market.

(Reporting by Manojna Maddipatla in Bengaluru; Additional reporting by Ankur Banerjee; Editing by Arun Koyyur)