Author Archives: Reuters News Agency

U.S. Justice Dept launches new initiatives on cryptocurrencies, contractor hacks

By Christopher Bing and Sarah N. Lynch

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco on Wednesday unveiled two new Justice Department enforcement initiatives aimed at targeting cryptocurrencies and government contractors who fail to report cyber breaches.

Monaco announced on Wednesday, during a virtual speech at the Aspen Cyber Summit, the launch of the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team, whose goal will be to “strengthen” the Justice Department’s ability to disable financial markets that allow cybercriminals to “flourish.”

The group will include a mix of anti-money laundering and cybersecurity experts.

“Cryptocurrency exchanges want to be the banks of the future, well we need to make sure that folks can have confidence when they’re using these systems and we need to be poised to root out abuse,” Monaco said. “The point is to protect consumers.”

Cybercriminals that attack U.S. companies with ransomware, a type of malware that encrypts systems and demands payment, are typically paid in cryptocurrency. The hackers often use a mix of different cryptocurrency services to accept and transfer these payments, helping hide them from law enforcement.

Monaco also announced the creation of a civil cyber fraud initiative, which will “use civil enforcement tools to pursue companies, those who are government contractors, who receive federal funds, when they fail to follow recommended cybersecurity standards.”

“For too long, companies have chosen silence under the mistaken belief that its less risky to hide a breach than to bring it forward and report it. That changes today,” Monaco said.

The announcements come after several high profile cyberattacks earlier this year against U.S. companies and government agencies.

Cybercriminals attacked a major U.S. pipeline operator, causing localized gas shortages along the U.S. East Coast in May. The incident led to new cybersecurity rules for pipeline owners in July.

(Reporting by Chris Bing; Writing by Sarah N. Lynch; Editing by Mark Porter, Kirsten Donovan)

Canada to put federal workers who refuse COVID-19 vaccination on unpaid leave

By Steve Scherer

OTTAWA (Reuters) -Canada’s federal employees who are not fully vaccinated against COVID-19 and are not exempt from getting the shots will be put on administrative leave without pay, officials said on Wednesday, while domestic air, train and cruise ship travelers and workers will soon have to show proof of vaccination.

Federal employees will be required to show proof of vaccination through an online portal by Oct 29. Workers and travelers on trains, planes and cruise ships operating domestically must show they have been inoculated by Oct. 30.

The introduction of these vaccine mandates was a cornerstone pledge by Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau during his campaign for re-election. The Liberals returned to power in a closely contested election last month, but fell short of winning a majority.

Canada’s vaccine policy will be one of the strictest in the world.

Fiji in August forced public servants to go on leave if unvaccinated. If still not inoculated by November, they will lose their jobs. Later this month, Italy will require proof of vaccination, a negative test or recent recovery from infection for all the country’s workers.

Canada’s vaccine mandate for federal workers, first promised on Aug 13, will be reassessed every six months and stay in place until the policy is no longer required, one official said.

For travelers, a negative COVID-19 test will not be accepted as a replacement for proof of vaccination after Nov. 30, officials said. Children under 12, who are not yet eligible for vaccination in Canada will be exempted from the travel mandate.

Last week, Trudeau said he would introduce his new Cabinet this month, and lawmakers would be back in parliament this fall.

(Reporting by Steve Scherer in Ottawa, Additional reporting by Ankur Banerjee in Bengaluru; Editing by Saumyadeb Chakrabarty and Bill Berkrot)

Pfizer study to vaccinate whole Brazilian town against COVID-19

BRASILIA (Reuters) -Pfizer Inc will study the effectiveness of its vaccine against COVID-19 by inoculating the whole population over the age of 12 in a town in southern Brazil, the company said on Wednesday.

The study will be conducted in Toledo, population 143,000, in the west of Parana state, together with Brazil’s National Vaccination Program, local health authorities, a hospital and a federal university.

Pfizer said the purpose was to study transmission of the coronavirus in a “real-life scenario” after the population has been vaccinated.

“The initiative is the first and only of its kind to be undertaken in collaboration with the pharmaceutical company in a developing country,” Pfizer said.

A similar study was conducted by the Butantan Institute, one of Brazil’s leading biomedical research centers, in the smaller town of Serrana, in Sao Paulo state, to test the CoronaVac shot developed by China’s Sinovac Biotech Ltd.

In May, Butantan said mass vaccination had reduced COVID-19 death by 95% in the town with a population of 45,644 people. The institute is considering extending the study for a third dose.

“Here we believe in science and we lament the almost 600,000 deaths from COVID-19 in Brazil,” Toledo Mayor Beto Lunitti said at a news conference announcing the Pfizer study.

Regis Goulart, a researcher at Toledo’s Moinhos de Vento Hospital, said its aim was to validate the real-world efficacy and safety of the vaccine seen in clinical trials.

The observational study will also be an opportunity to do long-term monitoring for up to one year of participants and to answer lingering questions such as the duration of vaccine protection against COVID-19 and new variants, Goulart said.

(Reporting by Anthony Boadle; Editing by Jason Neely and Mark Porter)

Israeli rightist seeks to outlaw opening of U.S. Palestinian mission in Jerusalem

By Dan Williams

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – An Israeli right-wing opposition legislator is seeking to outlaw the planned reopening of a U.S. mission in Jerusalem that has traditionally been a base for diplomatic outreach to the Palestinians.

Israel’s new cross-partisan government led by nationalist Prime Minister Naftali Bennett also opposes the re-inauguration of the consulate, potentially buoying Likud lawmaker Nir Barkat’s effort to scupper the move, though it would strain relations with Washington.

The consulate was subsumed into the U.S. Embassy that was moved to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv in 2018 by then-U.S. President Donald Trump, steps hailed by Israel and condemned by Palestinians.

With an eye towards repairing U.S. relations with the Palestinians, and rebuilding mutual trust, President Joe Biden’s administration says it will reopen the consulate while leaving the embassy in place.

Barkat’s legislation, filed in parliament last month and with voting as yet unscheduled, would outlaw opening a foreign mission in Jerusalem without Israel’s consent.

“I think that the current Israeli government is weak. It depends on the left, it depends on radicals on our side,” he told Reuters. “We must do everything we can to maintain the unity of the city of Jerusalem.”

Israel regards all of Jerusalem as its capital. Palestinians want East Jerusalem, captured by Israel in a 1967 war along with the West Bank and Gaza Strip, as capital of the state they seek.

Ahmed Al-Deek, adviser to the Palestinian foreign ministry, said Barkat “represents the position of far-right parties in Israel which seek to block any chance of reaching a two-state solution”.

Barkat said polling showed some 70% public support for the bill – enough to garner votes from within the coalition. Asked for Bennett’s position, his spokesman cast the bill as a PR stunt, saying: “We don’t comment on trolling.”

U.S. officials have been largely reticent on the issue, saying only that the reopening process remains in effect.

Asked whether precedent existed in U.S. diplomacy for opening a mission over objections of a host country, the State Department’s Office of the Historian declined comment.

Barkat’s bill recognizes that there are a handful of countries with Jerusalem missions, like the former consulate, that predate Israel’s founding in 1948.

In what may signal a bid to persuade Israel to reconsider the former mission as a candidate to rejoin that group, Thomas Nides, Biden’s pick for ambassador, noted in his Sept. 22 confirmation hearing: “That consulate has existed, in one form or another, for almost 130 years.”

Barkat was unmoved, saying: “We respect what happened before 1948 (but) never did we give anybody consent to open up a diplomatic mission for Palestinians in the city of Jerusalem.”

(Additional by Ali Sawafta; Writing by Dan Williams; Editing by Jeffrey Heller and Mark Heinrich)

Hundreds throng passport office in Afghan capital

By Gibran Naiyyar Peshimam and Jorge Silva

KABUL (Reuters) – Hundreds of Afghans flocked to the passport office in Kabul on Wednesday, just a day after news that it would re-open this week to issue the documents, while Taliban security men had to beat back some in the crowd in efforts to maintain order.

Taliban officials have said the service will resume from Saturday, after being suspended since their takeover and the fall of the previous government in August, which stranded many of those desperate to flee the country.

“I have come to get a passport but, as you can see here, there are lots of problems, the system is not working,” one applicant, Mahir Rasooli, told Reuters outside the office.

“There is no official to answer our questions here to tell us when to come. People are confused.”

A spokesman for the Taliban officials running the passport department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Poverty and hunger have worsened since the Islamist movement took over Afghanistan, which already suffered from drought and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Half a million people have been displaced in recent months, the United Nations says, and the number will only grow if health services, schools and the economy break down.

The hundreds who descended on the passport office came despite advice that distribution of passports would only begin on Saturday, and initially only for those who had already applied.

The crowd pressed against a large concrete barrier, trying to hand documents to an official who stood atop it, in a scene reminiscent of the chaos at Kabul airport in the last stages of evacuation after the withdrawal of U.S. troops.

The official urged them to return home and come back on Saturday.

“I am here to receive a passport, but unfortunately I couldn’t,” said a man in the crowd, Ahmad Shakib Sidiqi. “I don’t know what we should do in this condition.”

The bleak economic outlook drives their desire to leave, said Sidiqi and Rasooli.

“There is no job and the economic situation is not too good, so I want to have a good future for my kids,” said Rasooli.

Sidiqi said he wanted a passport to accompany a member of his family to neighboring Pakistan to seek medical treatment, but added they had no choice except to leave.

“We have to leave Afghanistan,” he said. “It is a bad situation in Afghanistan – no job, no work. It is not a good condition for us to live.”

The Taliban have said they welcome international aid, though many donors froze their assistance after they took power.

(Additional reporting by Islamabad newsroom; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)

A Chilean tree holds hope for new vaccines – if supplies last

By Aislinn Laing and Allison Martell

CASABLANCA, Chile (Reuters) – Down a dusty farm track in Chilean wine country, behind a wooden gate wrapped in chains, forestry experts are nursing a plantation of saplings whose bark holds the promise of potent vaccines.

Quillay trees, technically known as Quillaja saponaria, are rare evergreens native to Chile that have long been used by the indigenous Mapuche people to make soap and medicine. In recent years, they have also been used to make a highly successful vaccine against shingles and the world’s first malaria vaccine, as well as foaming agents for products in the food, beverage and mining industries.

Now two saponin molecules, made from the bark of branches pruned from older trees in Chile’s forests, are being used for a COVID-19 vaccine developed by drugmaker Novavax Inc. The chemicals are used to make adjuvant, a substance that boosts the immune system.

Over the next two years, Maryland-based Novavax plans to produce billions of doses of the vaccine, mostly for low- and middle-income countries, which would make it one of the largest COVID-19 vaccine suppliers in the world.

With no reliable data on how many healthy quillay trees are left in Chile, experts and industry officials are divided on how quickly the supply of older trees will be depleted by rising demand. But nearly everyone agrees that industries relying on quillay extracts will at some point need to switch to plantation-grown trees or a lab-grown alternative.

A Reuters analysis of export data from trade data provider ImportGenius shows that the supply of older trees is under increasing pressure. Exports of quillay products more than tripled to more than 3,600 tonnes per year in the decade before the pandemic.

Ricardo San Martin, who developed the pruning and extraction process that created the modern quillay industry, said producers must immediately work toward making quillay products from younger, plantation-grown trees.

“My estimate four years ago was that we were heading towards the sustainability limit,” he said.

San Martin said he has toiled through the COVID-19 pandemic in the basement of his oceanfront cabin in Sea Ranch, California, to refine a process that could help produce saponins from leaves and twigs in order to maximize the yield.

“I am working as though this needs to be done yesterday,” said San Martin, who is also sponsoring a project in which drones would count quillay trees in remote and hard-to-access forests, to determine how many are left.

Quillay producers and their customers say the harvest can continue for now without decimating the supply of older trees.

“We continue to monitor the situation in Chile, in close collaboration with our supplier, but at this time we are confident in our supply,” Novavax said in a statement to Reuters. The company also said it was confident that uses such as “life-saving vaccines will be prioritized.”

The desert-plant extract company Desert King International Ltd, which runs the Casablanca plantation, is Novavax’s sole supplier of quillay extracts and Chile’s largest quillay exporter by far.

The company’s manager in Chile, Andres Gonzalez, told Reuters it is set to produce enough quillay extract from older trees to make up to 4.4 billion vaccine doses in 2022. With new supplies from privately owned native forests, they have enough raw material to meet demand for the rest of this year and part of next, he said.

Gonzalez said the company, where San Martin is a consultant, has built a new production plant and has the capacity to supply other interested pharmaceutical firms – all without harming the forests.

He acknowledged, however, that “at some point these native forests will come to an end.”

“We want to start having very productive plantations, and we are working on that,” he said.

A relatively small volume of quillay extract is required to make vaccines – just under one milligram per dose – but the supply is stretched by the demand from other industries. Quillay products are used, for instance, as a natural additive in animal feed, a biopesticide and an agent to reduce pollution in mining.

Individual quillay trees grow outside of Chile, but Chile is the only country where mature quillay is harvested from forests in large quantities.

AN ELUSIVE INGREDIENT

Novavax’s adjuvant, known as Matrix-M, contains two key saponin molecules. One of those, called QS-21, is more difficult to access because it is found mainly in trees that are at least 10 years old.

Among major pharmaceutical companies, only GlaxoSmithKline PLC and Novavax have bet heavily on QS-21, a relatively new pharmaceutical ingredient.

GSK’s highly successful vaccine against shingles, Shingrix, and several other promising experimental vaccines contain QS-21 supplied by Desert King. In a statement, GSK said it has “no specific challenges relating to sustainable supply” of QS-21.

The quillay-based adjuvant used in Shingrix is also part of the world’s first malaria vaccine, Mosquirix. Despite low efficacy, it was approved by European regulators in 2015 and recommended for pilot introduction by the WHO in 2016 because of dire need.

No other COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers are relying on quillay bark extracts. Some drugmakers are developing synthetic alternatives, but these could be years from regulatory approval. Switching out the ingredients in any existing vaccine would require new clinical studies to prove the product is safe and effective.

The Massachusetts-based pharmaceutical company Agenus stopped selling bark-derived QS-21 several years ago to focus full-time on trying to grow it from quillay plant cells in a laboratory.

“The shortage of QS-21 has been an issue for a while,” said Jason Paragas, Agenus vice president of strategic initiatives and growth exploration. “We saw it before COVID, and we made the hard decision that we had to change.”

Paragas said it is too soon to say when an alternative could be ready.

Entrepreneur Gaston Salinas said his Davis, California-based startup Botanical Solution Inc can already produce QS-21 from quillay tissue starting with seeds in the lab, and aims to eventually produce the chemical on a large scale to supply pharmaceutical companies.

“You cannot afford to over-exploit the native Chilean forest because of a desire to develop modern vaccines. You need to find other ways to develop your products, even if it’s something so important, ” he said.

AN EYE TOWARD THE FUTURE

Inside the gate of the carefully guarded Desert King plantation, gardeners carefully tend to the young trees using fertilizers and bountiful supplies of water. They were cloned from full-grown cousins whose dusty gray bark was especially rich in saponins.

If all goes well, the plantation could be producing for one customer in two to three years, according to Desert King’s business development manager Damian Hiley. He declined to name the company.

Desert King has its eye on future vaccines, some already in the works.

In early 2020, for instance, GSK licensed an experimental tuberculosis vaccine that contains GSK’s QS-21-based adjuvant to the Bill and Melinda Gates Medical Research Institute. It showed promising results in a mid-stage trial.

And in April, researchers at Oxford University announced that a new malaria vaccine containing Novavax’s Matrix-M adjuvant appeared to be highly effective in a trial involving 450 children in Burkina Faso.

Gustavo Cruz, a researcher at the University of Chile who worked with San Martin to industrialize production of quillay, said he generally trusts quillay producers to manage supply and demand. He is more worried about other threats – specifically drought and fire.

“The trees do eventually regrow,” he said, “but there comes a time when they don’t anymore.”

(Aislinn Laing reported from Casablanca; Allison Martell from Toronto. Additional reporting by Nivedita Balu in Bangalore. Editing by Caroline Humer, Peter Henderson and Julie Marquis)

California port where spill occurred had numerous ships waiting to unload

By Jessica Resnick-Ault and Nichola Groom

LOS ANGELES, Calif. (Reuters) – Ships in record numbers have jammed the port complex near this weekend’s oil spill in California, according to port data, as investigators look into whether a ship’s anchor could have hit a pipeline to cause the leak.

More than 3,000 barrels of oil leaked into the Pacific Ocean off the coast of southern California over the weekend, killing wildlife, damaging sensitive environmental areas and closing beaches. Officials are investigating whether an anchor could have hit the pipeline, owned by Amplify Energy Corp of Houston.

An anchor strike is a plausible explanation, said two former Amplify employees who asked not to be named. They noted that anchor strikes have dented or scratched offshore pipelines before.

There were certainly more anchors in the area due to supply chain bottlenecks as consumer demand has rebounded from the depths of the pandemic. As of Tuesday morning, there were 63 container ships in San Pedro Bay waiting to unload at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, according to the Marine Exchange of Southern California. On Sept. 19, a COVID-era record 97 ships were backed up.

Prior to the pandemic, there was typically no more than one container ship at anchor in the bay, according to Captain Kip Louttit of the Marine Exchange, who added that anchorages around the port have been full for the last year.

“All ships were anchored where they were supposed to be,” Louttit said of the vessel backup.

The spill closed numerous beaches and has killed wildlife in Orange County, south of Los Angeles. On Monday, Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer said a separate investigation is being conducted to determine the cause, and that Amplify could face civil and criminal liability.

Environmental watchdog group SkyTruth said satellite imagery from Oct. 1, the day before the spill was reported, shows cargo ships anchored near the area where the pipeline runs, according to government maps. The closest, however, was about 450 meters away from the pipeline, SkyTruth President John Amos said.

“That seems like a comfortably long distance to separate that pipeline from that ship, but one thing I don’t know is how accurate is this government data on exactly where this pipeline sits on the seafloor,” Amos said in an interview.

The pipeline runs along the ocean floor from the Elly platform, located in 255 feet of water, then heads toward port. Some sections are buried and some are above the sand.

The company and contractors patrol the pipeline by boat about once a week, with workers looking for clues of a possible spill, leak or anomaly. Chemical analysts test the product coming out of the pipeline for iron, which could indicate corrosion or metal loss in the line.

Metal devices called “smart pigs” are run through the pipeline about every three years to check for anomalies. The last such test was conducted in 2019, Amplify Energy CEO Martyn Willsher said at a news conference Monday.

Huntington Beach, about 40 miles (65 km) south of Los Angeles, had 13 square miles (34 square km) of ocean and portions of its coastline “covered in oil,” said Mayor Kim Carr. The town, which advertises itself as Surf City USA, is one of the rare places in Southern California where oil platforms are visible from the beach.

Angry residents blasted what they called a slow initial response to the spill. Already, one lawsuit has been filed against Amplify by a local DJ, Peter Moses Gutierrez Jr.

Some 23 oil and gas production facilities operate in federal waters off the California coast, according to the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. Amplify’s Beta Offshore unit has three, including the Elly offshore platform, where the pipeline was connected.

(Reporting by Nichola Groom, Jessica Resnick Ault, Lisa Baertlein and Daniel Trotta; Editing by David Gregorio)

Their prospects dim, Haitian migrants strain Mexico’s asylum system

By Daina Beth Solomon

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Mexico could see asylum applications jump 70% this year compared with 2019 as requests from Haitians soar, though most of those Caribbean migrants do not meet the criteria under current rules, according to Mexico’s top asylum official.

Haiti is currently the second-most common country of origin for asylum requests in Mexico, and is on track to overtake Honduras to claim the top spot for the first time in nearly a decade.

The surge has been fed by political and economic malaise in Haiti and South America, and last month thousands of mostly Haitian migrants crossed into Del Rio, Texas.

Thousands then retreated back to Mexico to avoid being deported from the United States to Haiti.

Most Haitians do not qualify for asylum in Mexico because they left home years ago for economic reasons, said Andres Ramirez, head of the Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance (COMAR).

Most resettled in Brazil and Chile after Haiti’s devastating 2010 earthquake and are heading north due to poor economic prospects in their adopted countries, Ramirez told Reuters.

“They’re not really refugees, they don’t even want to be refugees,” Ramirez said in an interview on Monday. “The majority want to get to the United States.”

Haitians were seeking asylum because they had no alternative, but the demand had brought COMAR to a standstill, which was “detrimental to genuine refugees, who we can’t serve because there are too many Haitians,” he added.

Asylum applications are now taking six to seven months, at least twice the time they should take, he said.

In the southern border city of Tapachula, where most migrants request asylum, COMAR is scrambling to lighten the load by canceling appointments of applicants no longer there.

COMAR is in talks with Mexico’s migration authorities and international aid organizations to see if Haitians have options for staying in Mexico aside from asylum, Ramirez said, such as humanitarian visas that let migrants work and travel freely.

Lasting one year and renewable, that visa is currently only available to migrants after they apply for asylum with COMAR.

“What concerns me is when I know someone isn’t a refugee, and they come to us because they have no other option,” Ramirez said. “But there could be another way… there is a precedent.”

Mexico distributed humanitarian visas in early 2019 when thousands of Central Americans arrived in migrant caravans, but stopped after U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to impose trade tariffs if Mexico did not curb the flow of people.

The Biden administration is also putting pressure on Mexico to stem migrant traffic, even as it gradually rolls back Trump-era measures and promises more humane migration policies.

Mexico’s National Migration Institute did not immediately respond when asked if it was considering issuing humanitarian visas to Haitian migrants.

Asylum applications in Mexico from all nationalities reached 90,300 by September. Ramirez estimated the number could surpass 120,000 by year’s end.

Suppressed by the coronavirus pandemic, applications tumbled to just over 41,000 last year, but rose for Haitians, who filed 5,957 requests. From January to September 2021, the number of Haitian applications leapt to 26,007.

An increase in requests from Brazilians and Chileans has been fueled by children born to Haitians in those countries, Ramirez said.

(Reporting by Daina Beth Solomon; Editing by Dave Graham and Alistair Bell)

Treasury warns Arizona it can’t use federal funds to undermine school mask requirements

By Andrea Shalal

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo told Arizona’s governor on Tuesday that his state could not use federal funds to pay for programs aimed at undermining face mask requirements in schools, and said Arizona could lose funding if it did not change course.

In a letter to Governor Douglas Ducey, Adeyemo raised concerns about two new Arizona state programs funded under the coronavirus relief “American Rescue Plan” which he said would “undermine evidence-based efforts to stop the spread of COVID-19.”

Adeyemo’s letter comes a month after the U.S. Department of Education opened civil rights investigations to determine whether five states – Iowa, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee and Utah – that have banned schools from requiring masks are discriminating against students with disabilities.

One of the Arizona programs offers grants to school districts on condition they not require the use of face coverings during instructional hours. The second gives families a voucher of up to $7,000 per student to cover tuition or other educational costs at a new school that does not require face coverings if the student’s current school requires them.

Both programs tapped a $350 billion fund established under the American Rescue Plan to mitigate the fiscal effects of the COVID-19 emergency, which has killed over 700,000 people in the United States, Adeyemo said in his letter.

“A program or service that imposes conditions on participation or acceptance of the service that would undermine efforts to stop the spread of COVID-19 or discourage compliance with evidence-based solutions for stopping the spread of COVID-19 is not a permissible use of (such) funds,” he said.

Adeyemo asked Ducey to respond within 30 days on how Arizona planned to come into compliance with the federal requirements, warning that “failure to respond or remediate may result in administrative or other action.” Such action included federal efforts to recoup the funds, a Treasury official said.

Florida, Texas and Arkansas have also banned mandatory masking orders in schools. The Education Department left those states and Arizona out of its inquiry because court orders or other actions have paused their enforcement, it said in a news release.

(Reporting by Andrea Shalal; Editing by Mark Porter and Sonya Hepinstall)

Ukrainians unearth hiding places of Jews in city sewers during Nazi Holocaust

By Sergiy Karazy and Lewis Macdonald

LVIV, Ukraine (Reuters) – Under cobblestone streets in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, diggers have uncovered new hiding spots in underground sewers where some Jews managed to flee from Nazi occupying forces during World War Two.

More than 100,000 Jews, or around one third of the city’s population at the time, were killed by the Nazis, according to the local historian Hanna Tychka.

A few managed to survive, including father and daughter Ignacy and Krystyna Chiger, who escaped from the Jewish ghetto by digging a tunnel to the city’s sewage system, and later wrote books recounting their experiences.

Tychka and local diggers said they recently uncovered the exact area where Chiger’s family lived in 1943-1944, using the books as a guide.

Chiger dug a seven-meter-long (7 yard) tunnel to the sewer from his ghetto barrack, breaking the sewer’s concrete wall, which was 90-cm thick, Tychka said.

“They had to work quietly so that Nazis would not find out that digging activity was happening in the barrack basement. The Jews used a hammer wrapped in a duster,” Tychka told Reuters near the site of the discovery.

Ukraine this September and October is marking the 80th anniversary of the mass shooting of nearly 34,000 civilians at the wooded ravine of Babyn Yar in the capital Kyiv, one of the biggest single massacres of Jews during the Holocaust.

In Lyiv, Tychka and her team in July discovered a tiny cave where they believe Jews fleeing the ghetto would spend their first night before moving on to a larger shelter in the sewage system.

In the larger shelter, the team found artefacts which they believe were used by the hiding families, including a corroded plate, the figurine of a sheep, and traces of carbide used for lanterns. They also discovered pieces of glass placed in between bricks in the wall, which were used to prevent rats from stealing food.

On a visit to the site, Tychka also pointed out a pipe from where she believed the families could take drinking water.

Chiger’s family was part of a larger group that also included Halina Wind Preston, then in her early twenties.

Of the original group of 21, only 10 including the Chigers and Halina survived the ordeal, her son David Lee Preston says.

Several could not stand the conditions in the sewer for long and left, and the group faced the constant danger of being discovered.

A baby born to one of the women in the group, whose husband had been swept away by water while going out to get drinking water, had to be suffocated for fear that its crying would give away their location, Preston said.

Preston, who worked as a journalist for many years, wrote several articles for the Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper after his mother’s death, recounting her story as well as that of his father, a former prisoner in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald death camps.

Preston, who maintains a website about his family’s experiences and reporting on the Holocaust, says his mother and her group were helped throughout the time they lived in the sewer by two sewer workers.

They left their hiding place when Lviv was taken back by Soviet Army in July 1944.

The film ‘In Darkness,’ a dramatized account of the group’s survival by Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland, was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2012 Academy Awards.

Preston paid tribute to Tychka and the team who made the discovery, saying as the numbers of those who survived the Holocaust dwindle, new generations of all backgrounds had to keep telling their stories.

The work to trace the group’s hiding place indicated “a great desire by many young Ukrainians to set straight the history and prevent it from being corrupted,” Preston said.

(Writing by Margaryta Chornokondratenko; editing by Matthias Williams and Aurora Ellis)