Author Archives: Reuters News Agency

Late monsoon floods kill more than 150 in India and Nepal

NEW DELHI (Reuters) -More than 150 people have died in flooding across India and Nepal in recent days, as heavy late monsoon rains triggered flash floods, destroyed homes, crops and infrastructure and left thousands stranded.

The north Indian state of Uttarakhand has been especially badly hit, with 48 confirmed deaths, SA Murugesan, secretary of the state’s disaster management department, told Reuters.

In Nainital, a popular tourist destination in the Himalayan state, the town’s main lake broke its banks, submerging the main thoroughfare and damaging bridges and rail tracks.

In nearby Chamoli district, rescuers from India’s paramilitary National Disaster Response Force continued to search debris following landslides caused by the heavy rains.

India’s federal interior minister Amit Shah surveyed badly hit areas on Thursday.

“Crops and homes have been wiped out, which is a severe blow to families already grappling with the devastating fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Azmat Ulla, a senior official at the International Federation of Red Crescent Societies.

“The people of Nepal and India are sandwiched between the pandemic and worsening climate disasters, heavily impacting millions of lives and livelihoods.”

Some 42 people have died in the last week in the southern Indian state of Kerala, according to a statement from the chief minister’s office.

In neighboring Nepal, at least 77 people have died.

India’s annual monsoon rains usually run from June to September.

(Reporting by Saurabh Sharma in Lucknow and Jose Devasia in Kochi, Writing by Alasdair Pal; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore and Nick Macfie)

Russia reports cases of more contagious COVID-19 Delta subvariant

MOSCOW (Reuters) -Russia has reported “isolated cases” of COVID-19 with a subvariant of the Delta variant that is believed to be even more contagious, the state consumer watchdog’s senior researcher said on Thursday.

The researcher, Kamil Khafizov, said the AY.4.2 subvariant may be around 10% more infectious than the original Delta – which has driven new cases and deaths to a series of record daily highs in Russia – and could ultimately replace it.

However, he said this was likely to be a slow process.

“The vaccines are effective enough against this version of the virus, which is not so different as to dramatically change the ability to bind to antibodies,” he said.

The AY.4.2 subvariant is also on an increasing trajectory in England and had already accounted for about 6% of all sequences generated on the week beginning Sept. 27, a UK Health Security Agency report released on Oct. 15 said.

British Health Minister Sajid Javid on Wednesday said there was no reason to believe the subvariant posed a greater threat than Delta.

Russian immunologist Nikolay Kryuchkov said Delta and its subvariants would remain dominant and might in the future adapt in some ways to vaccines, especially where vaccination rates are below or just above 50%.

“But it seems to me that a revolutionary jump will not happen, because the coronavirus, like any organism, has an evolutionary limit, and the evolutionary jump has already happened,” he said.

The Russian health ministry had no immediate comment.

Moscow’s mayor on Thursday announced the strictest lockdown measures since June of last year, a day after President Vladimir Putin approved a government proposal for a week-long workplace shutdown at the start of November.

(Reporting by Maxim Rodionov, Polina Nikolskaya and Angelina Kazakova; Writing by Olzhas Auyezov; Editing by Mark Trevelyan and Giles Elgood)

Japanese volcano spews plumes of ash, people warned away

TOKYO (Reuters) -A volcano erupted in Japan on Wednesday, blasting ash several miles into the sky and prompting officials to warn against the threat of lava flows and falling rocks, but there were no reports of injuries or casualties.

Mount Aso, a tourist destination on the main southern island of Kyushu, sent plumes of ash 3.5 km (2.2 miles) high when it erupted at about 11:43 a.m. (0243 GMT), the Japan Meteorological Agency said.

It raised the alert level for the volcano to 3 on a scale of 5, telling people not to approach, and warned of a risk of large falling rocks and pyroclastic flows within a radius of about 1 km (0.6 mile) around the mountain’s Nakadake crater.

Local police said there were no reports of people injured or missing as of Wednesday evening, and that 16 people who had gone hiking on the mountain earlier on the day came back safely.

Television networks broadcast images of a dark cloud of ash looming over the volcano that swiftly obscured large swathes of the mountain.

Ash falls from the 1,592-metre (5,222-foot) mountain in the prefecture of Kumamoto are expected to shower nearby towns until late afternoon, the weather agency added.

Mount Aso had a small eruption in 2019, while Japan’s worst volcanic disaster in nearly 90 years killed 63 people on Mount Ontake in September 2014.

(Reporting by Ju-min Park, additional reporting by Kiyoshi Takenaka; Editing by Clarence Fernandez and Kim Coghill)

Children with mild COVID-19 may not develop antibodies; oral vaccine booster shows promise in monkey study

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 have yet to be certified by peer review.

Children with mild COVID-19 may lack antibodies afterward

Children who contract a mild case of COVID-19 may not develop antibodies to the virus afterward, a study from Australia suggests. Researchers compared 57 children and 51 adults with mild COVID-19 or asymptomatic infections. Only 37% of children appeared to develop antibodies, compared to 76% of adults – even though viral loads were similar in the two groups, researchers found. Children’s bodies also did not appear to produce second-line cellular immune responses to the virus in the same way as adults, said study leader Paul Licciardi of Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Melbourne. The participants in the study were all infected in 2020, his team reported on Monday on medRxiv ahead of peer review. “Whether this also happens for the current circulating variant (Delta) requires further investigation, as well as studies to understand why children are less likely to produce antibody responses following SARS-CoV-2 infection,” Licciardi said. “Whether this means children are susceptible to re-infection is not known.”

Experimental oral COVID-19 vaccine shows promise in monkeys

A COVID-19 booster vaccine that can be given by mouth to people who already have antibodies from vaccination or prior infection has yielded promising results in monkeys and is likely to be tested soon in humans, according to the company developing it. The oral booster uses traditional vaccine technology in which a harmless carrier virus delivers coronavirus proteins into cells on the surface of the tongue, or lining of the cheeks and throat, stimulating production of antibodies that can block the virus before it gets a foothold in the body, said Dr. Stephen Russell, chief executive of Vyriad in Rochester, Minnesota, who led the study. “Not only would an oral COVID-19 vaccine be more convenient and acceptable… but it might also lead to better immunity because it is being administered to the site where the COVID-19 virus typically comes into the body,” he added. In monkeys at one week after vaccinations, antibody levels increased by nearly 100-fold, with no side effects, Russell said. A report of the study posted on Monday on bioRxiv ahead of peer review says Vyriad is working with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to plan human trials.

Plants may be useful in vaccine production

Plants could someday be used to produce COVID-19 vaccines, according to researchers who are developing a nasal spray vaccine. Vaccines work by delivering antigens, which are replicas of pieces of virus or bacteria that train the immune system to recognize the invader and defend against it. Vaccine antigens are typically produced in cells from mammals, but previous studies have suggested that producing them in tobacco-related Nicotiana benthamiana plants would be less expensive and safer. In the current lab study, posted on Monday on bioRxiv ahead of peer review, COVID-19 survivors’ antibodies recognized and responded to the coronavirus antigen produced in the plants “in the same way that they recognize a standard antigen produced in mammalian cells,” said study leader Allyson MacLean of the University of Ottawa. The intra-nasal vaccine is not meant to replace conventional (injected) vaccines, but rather to add another layer of protection by stimulating immune system protection in the airways, where the virus first attaches itself,” MacLean said. “We imagine the nasal-spray being used to top-up immune protection when traveling or going to events with large numbers of people.”

(Reporting by Nancy Lapid; Editing by Bill Berkrot)

Fed report shows wage pressures amid ‘modest to moderate’ economic growth

By Ann Saphir and Lindsay Dunsmuir

(Reuters) -U.S. employers reported significant increases in prices and wages even as economic growth decelerated to a “modest to moderate” pace in September and early October, the Federal Reserve said on Wednesday in its latest compendium of reports about the economy.

“Outlooks for near-term economic activity remained positive, overall, but some Districts noted increased uncertainty and more cautious optimism than in previous months,” according to the summary of information from the Fed’s 12 regional districts, prepared as part of a broad range of briefings ahead of policymakers’ Nov. 2-3 meeting.

Employment increased, though labor growth was dampened by a low supply of workers, despite wage increases designed to attract new hires and keep existing employees, the report said.

Most districts reported “significantly elevated prices,” with some expecting prices to stay high or increase further, and others expecting inflation to moderate. “Many firms raised selling prices indicating a greater ability to pass along cost increases to customers amid strong demand,” the Fed districts reported.

The report will do little to change the immediate course of Fed policy, with central bankers poised to begin reducing their $120 billion in monthly bond purchases as soon as next month after what most see as substantial improvement in the labor market since the end of last year.

But it could help shade discussions of what the Fed ought to do next, particularly as inflation has been running well above the Fed’s 2% target for the last several months.

Policymakers are keenly focused on the drivers of those price rises and whether they will, as most expect, recede next year.

If current high inflation persists, the Fed may need to start raising rates sooner than widely assumed, several policymakers have said recently.

Wednesday’s report showed companies in most districts were feeling price and wage pressures from supply chain bottlenecks as well as from labor constraints.

The Philadelphia Fed reported on one firm that was offering as much as “$90,000 for a second-year CPA position that might have commanded $65,000 before the pandemic.”

The Cleveland Fed said nearly 60% of its contacts reported raising wages recently, but with supply chains slowing production of goods, even that appeared not to be enough. One auto dealer, the district reported, noted that “supply chain disruptions were causing his labor challenges, adding, ‘nothing to sell makes it hard to keep employees.'”

A furniture retailer told the Boston Fed it had raised prices more than 30% since February 2021 to reflect increased shipping and materials costs.

The San Francisco Fed reported competition for talent and workers’ willingness to switch jobs as driving up wages, with one contact from the banking sector calling it “a wage war.”

Meanwhile, the increase in available workers that many employers expected to see as pandemic unemployment benefits expired and schools came back into session failed to materialize in many districts, the report showed.

(Reporting by Ann Saphir and Lindsay Dunsmuir; Editing by Andrea Ricci)

Biden under pressure as U.S.-Mexico border arrests reach record highs

By Kristina Cooke

(Reuters) – U.S. authorities arrested 1.7 million migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border this fiscal year, the most ever recorded, according to a U.S. government source familiar with the numbers, underscoring the stark political and humanitarian challenges the Biden administration faces on immigration.

The current numbers for the 2021 fiscal year, which began last October, topped a previous high in 2000. The numbers were first reported by the Washington Post.

President Joe Biden, a Democrat who took office in January, reversed many of the hardline immigration policies of his Republican predecessor, President Donald Trump, promising a more “humane” approach to immigration policy.

Biden’s nominee to head U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Tucson, Arizona, Police Chief Chris Magnus, faced questions on Tuesday from Republican lawmakers who referred to the situation at the border as chaos and a crisis.

Adding to concerns was an influx of thousands of mostly Haitian migrants last month who crossed the Rio Grande river from Mexico and set up a makeshift camp under an international bridge in Del Rio, Texas.

On the other side of the aisle, Democrats and immigration advocates have slammed Biden for his swift expulsions of many of those migrants back to Haiti, a country that has been devastated by violence, political crises and natural disasters. The administration also launched an investigation into the tactics of border patrol agents on horseback photographed and filmed in Del Rio trying to push back Haitian migrants along the river bank.

Many of the Haitians were returned under one sweeping Trump policy that Biden has kept in place. Known as Title 42, it was implemented in March 2020 at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in an effort to curb infections and allows most migrants to be quickly expelled without a chance to seek asylum.

Many of the arrests this fiscal year were repeat crossings, with some people expelled to Mexico turning around and trying again.

A federal court has also ordered the Biden administration to reinstate another Trump-era policy known as the Migrant Protection Protocols, which forced thousands of asylum seekers to wait in Mexico for U.S. immigration court hearings. The administration said it is taking steps to restart the program in November, pending agreement from Mexico.

(Reporting by Kristina Cooke in San Francisco; Editing by Mica Rosenberg and Aurora Ellis)

California ports, key to U.S. supply chain, among world’s least efficient

By Lisa Baertlein

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Southern California’s Los Angeles and Long Beach ports handle the most ocean cargo of any ports in the United States, but are some of the least efficient in the world, according to a ranking by the World Bank and IHS Markit.

In a review of 351 container ports around the globe, Los Angeles was ranked 328, behind Tanzania’s Dar es Salaam and Alaska’s Dutch Harbor. The adjacent port of Long Beach came in even lower, at 333, behind Turkey’s Nemrut Bay and Kenya’s Mombasa, the groups said in their inaugural Container Port Performance Index published in May.

The total number of ships waiting to unload outside the two adjacent ports hit a new all-time record of 100 on Monday. Americans’ purchases of imported goods have jumped to levels the U.S. supply chain infrastructure can’t handle, causing delivery delays and snarls.

Top port honors went to Japan’s Yokohama and Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah on the ranking. Finishing out the top five were Chiwan, part of Shenzhen’s port in Guangdong Province; South China’s Guangzhou port; and Taiwan’s Kaoshiung port.

Ports in Asia, the Middle East and North Africa dominated the top 50 spots, while just four U.S. ports cracked the top 100 – Philadelphia (83), the Port of Virginia (85), New York & New Jersey (89) and Charleston, South Carolina (95).

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted trade around the globe, snarling trade and exposing the frailty of a supply chain built for predictable, just-in-time movement of goods.

The United States is the world’s biggest consumer, importing goods valued at roughly $2.5 trillion a year. President Joe Biden is fighting for massive federal funding to modernize crumbling infrastructure – including seaports. Government control, 24/7 operations and automation help make many non-U.S. ports more efficient.

Biden is pushing port executives, labor union leaders and major retailers like Walmart to attack shipping hurdles that are driving up the price of goods and raising the risk of product shortages during the all-important holiday season.

Southern California port executives are coaxing terminal operators, importers, truckers, railroads, dock workers and warehouse owners to adopt 24/7 operations in a bid to clear clogs that have backed up dozens of ships offshore and delayed deliveries to stores and e-commerce fulfillment centers.

(Reporting by Lisa Baertlein in Los Angeles; Editing by Heather Timmons and Diane Craft)

Damascus bomb kills 14, then army shells fall on rebel area killing 12

DAMASCUS/AMMAN (Reuters) – A blast on an army bus in Damascus on Wednesday killed 14 people, state media reported, the deadliest bombing in the Syrian capital in years, quickly followed by army shelling in rebel-held Idlib which rescue workers said killed 12 people.

The bus carrying troops was blown up near a bridge in the center of Damascus. A military source quoted by state media said two bombs had been attached to the vehicle in advance. Army engineers defused a third.

Syrian state TV posted images of the charred bus, and rescue workers could be seen removing body parts. A number of people were wounded, state media said.

About an hour after the bus blast, shells rained down on Ariha in Idlib in the northwest of the country, one of the last areas still held by rebels fighting against President Bashar al-Assad.

Four children and a teacher on their way to school were among those confirmed killed, the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF said. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group, called it the deadliest attack on Idlib since March 2020. Rescue workers said at least 30 people were wounded.

“The numbers of children injured and killed continue to increase,” UNICEF said in a statement.

In an apparent third incident, Iran’s state-run Al-Alam TV reported a blast during maintenance at a Syrian army ammunition depot that killed five people and injured four on the road between the cities of Homs and Hama. It did not identify those killed. Iranian forces have backed the Syrian government.

A decade of conflict in Syria has killed hundreds of thousands of people, although major fighting has mostly died down in recent years with the government of Assad now in control of nearly all major cities and towns.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the Damascus bombing, and the Syrian army and state media were silent about the subsequent shelling of Idlib.

Attacks in Damascus have been rare since the army crushed rebel enclaves around the city with backing from Russia and Iran-backed forces in 2018.

Dozens of people were killed in Damascus in 2017 in several suicide attacks claimed by jihadists, including two against police stations which Islamic State said it carried out.

Islamic State militants still operate in the deserts of central and eastern Syria, where they have mounted several attacks this year on army vehicles.

U.N.-backed efforts to reach a political settlement to the war, which have so far made little progress, took a step forward on Sunday when the U.N. envoy said the government and opposition had agreed to draft a new constitution.

(Reporting by Suleiman al-Khalidi in Amman and Jonathan Spicer in Turkey; Writing by Maher Chmaytelli/Tom Perry; Editing by Angus MacSwan)

Nepal floods and landslides kill at least 77

By Gopal Sharma

KATHMANDU (Reuters) -The death toll after three days of heavy rain in Nepal triggered landslides and flash floods rose to 77 on Wednesday after rescuers recovered 34 more bodies, authorities said.

Twenty-four deaths have been reported in the Panchthar district of east Nepal bordering India, 13 in neighboring Ilam and 12 in Doti in west Nepal, interior ministry official Dil Kumar Tamang said. Others died elsewhere in west Nepal.

The ministry said 22 people were injured and 26 were missing.

Authorities said the government would provide $1,700 as relief to the families of each dead victim and free treatment for the injured.

About 350 km (220 miles) west of the capital Kathmandu, persistent heavy rains were hampering efforts to reach Seti, a village in west Nepal where 60 people have been marooned by floods for two days.

“Rescuers were unable to reach the village due to bad weather and continuous rains yesterday. Rescue efforts are continuing today,” Police spokesman Basanta Kunwar told Reuters.

Television channels showed rice paddy crops submerged or washed away, and rivers sweeping away bridges, roads, houses and the runway of an airport in the city of Biratnagar.

Flash floods and landslides are common in Nepal during the monsoon season from mid-June through September.

Authorities have warned of more rain in the next few days.

There are “chances of heavy rainfall in some places and light to moderate snowfall” in the eastern mountainous areas, the Department of Hydrology and Meteorology said in a forecast for the next two days.

(Reporting by Gopal Sharma; Editing by Lincoln Feast and Giles Elgood)

Putin approves week-long Russian workplace shutdown as COVID-19 surges

By Alexander Marrow and Darya Korsunskaya

MOSCOW (Reuters) -Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday approved a government proposal for a week-long workplace shutdown at the start of November to combat a sharp rise in COVID-19 cases and deaths.

Coronavirus-related deaths across Russia in the past 24 hours hit yet another daily record at 1,028, with 34,073 new infections.

Speaking at a televised meeting with government officials, Putin said the “non-working days” from Oct. 30 to Nov. 7, during which people would continue to receive salaries, could begin earlier or be extended for certain regions.

“The epidemiological situation is developing differently in each region,” Putin said. “In light of this, the heads of regions are given the right to impose additional measures.”

Authorities have stepped up the urgency of their efforts to slow the pandemic as they confront widespread public reluctance to get injected with the Russian-made Sputnik V vaccine. Moscow’s mayor announced four months of stay-home restrictions for unvaccinated over-60s on Tuesday.

The mayor’s office was seeking to force shopping centers to connect their security cameras to a centralized facial recognition system that would allow authorities to enforce protective mask-wearing in public, the Kommersant daily reported.

Half of Moscow’s 600 shopping centers have not connected to the system, Kommersant cited Bulat Shakirov, president of the Union of Shopping Centers, as saying.

“But now, due to growing infections, authorities have decided to tighten control,” he said, adding that shopping centers that failed to comply could be ordered to close.

Health Minister Mikhail Murashko said the healthcare system was operating under great strain. Around 650,000 medical professionals across Russia were involved in treating patients suffering from COVID-19, Interfax news agency cited Murashko as saying on Wednesday.

Russia began a revaccination campaign in July, one of the first countries to do so, but Putin has yet to receive a booster shot, the Kremlin said on Wednesday.

“The president has not been revaccinated yet,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said. “He will do this when doctors and specialists tell him to.”

(Reporting by Vladimir Soldatkin, Gabrielle Tétrault-Farber, Alexander Marrow, Darya Korsunskaya, Gleb Stolyarov, Dmitry Antonov and Maria Kiselyova; writing by Mark Trevelyan; editing by Timothy Heritage)