Author Archives: Reuters News Agency

Biden administration urges halt to strict Texas abortion law

By Sarah N. Lynch and Jan Wolfe

(Reuters) -President Joe Biden’s administration on Friday urged a judge to block a near-total ban on abortion imposed by Texas – the strictest such law in the nation – in a key moment in the ferocious legal fight over abortion access in the United States.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Sept. 1 allowed the Republican-backed law to take effect even as litigation over its legality continues in lower courts. The U.S. Justice Department eight days later sued in federal court to try to invalidate it.

During a hearing in the Texas capital of Austin, Justice Department lawyers asked U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman to block the law temporarily, saying the state’s Republican legislature and governor enacted it in an open defiance of the Constitution.

“There is no doubt under binding constitutional precedents that a state may not ban abortions at six weeks,” said Brian Netter, the lead Justice Department attorney on the case.

“Texas knew this but, it wanted a 6-week ban anyway. So this state resorted to an unprecedented scheme of vigilante justice.”

The Texas law bans abortions starting at six weeks of pregnancy, a point when many women may not realize they are pregnant. About 85% to 90% of abortions are performed after six weeks. Texas makes no exception for cases of rape and incest.

It also lets ordinary citizens enforce the ban, rewarding them at least $10,000 if they successfully sue anyone who helped provide an abortion after fetal cardiac activity is detected.

Will Thompson, an attorney in the Texas Attorney General’s Office, countered the Justice Department’s arguments, saying there were plenty of opportunities for people in Texas to challenge the law on their own, and claiming the Department’s arguments were filled with “hyperbole and inflammatory rhetoric.”

“This is not some kind of vigilante scheme, as opposing counsel suggests,” said Thompson. “This is a scheme that uses lawful process of justice in Texas.”

Pitman, who was appointed by Democratic former President Barack Obama in 2014, at one point seemed skeptical of Thompson’s arguments, telling him Texas seems to have “gone to great lengths” to make its abortion ban difficult to challenge in court.

The judge said: “My obvious question to you is: If the state is so confident in the constitutionality of the limitations on woman’s access to abortion, then why did it go to such great lengths to create this private cause of action rather than do it directly?”

Thompson responded that laws providing for enforcement are not as unusual as the Justice Department has claimed.

In the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that legalized abortion nationwide, the Supreme Court recognized a woman’s constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy.

The high court in December is due to hear arguments over the legality of a Mississippi abortion law in a case in which officials from that state are asking the justices to overturn Roe vs. Wade.

The Mississippi and Texas laws are among a series of Republican-backed measures passed by various states restricting abortion.

Since the Texas law went into effect, the four Whole Woman’s Health abortion clinics across the state have reported that patient visits have plummeted and some staff have quit.

In addition to infringing on women’s constitutional rights to seek an abortion, the Justice Department argued that the law also impedes the federal government’s own ability to offer abortion-related services.

In an effort to counter those claims, attorneys for the state on Friday played clips from depositions of various senior U.S. government officials.

In one clip, lawyers interrogated Alix McLearen, a senior official at the Bureau of Prisons who, in response to questions, testified that there were currently no pregnant inmates being held at certain detention facilities in Texas.

In another clip, Laurie Bodenheimer of the Office of Personnel Management was asked whether any insurance carriers had raised concerns about the impact or effect of the Texas law.

“To my knowledge no carrier has raised concerns about SB8,” she said.

The Justice Department’s Netter told the judge that Texas had cherry-picked some of the sound bites in the videos and edited out the portions in which Department attorneys had objected during the depositions.

Netter noted, for instance, that Texas conveniently omitted a portion of McLearen’s testimony in which she said the prisons bureau has pregnant inmates incarcerated currently at FMC Carswell, which he noted is “the only secure medical facility for women” in the entire country.

“It is irreparable injury for there to be a violation of the Supremacy Clause,” Netter said, referring to the Constitutional principle that establishes that federal laws have supremacy over state laws.

More than 600 marches are planned around the United States on Saturday to protest the Texas law.

In Washington, D.C., protesters will march to the U.S. Supreme Court to decry the court’s 5-4 decision in September that denied a request from abortion and women’s health providers to enjoin enforcement of the ban.

(Reporting by Jan Wolfe and Sarah N. Lynch in Washington; Editing by Will Dunham, Alistair Bell and Dan Grebler)

British gas pumps still dry, pig cull fears grow

By Andrew MacAskill and James Davey

LONDON (Reuters) -Many British gas stations were still dry on Friday after a chaotic week that saw panic-buying, fights at the pumps and drivers hoarding fuel in water bottles after an acute shortage of truck drivers strained supply chains to breaking point.

Shortages of workers in the wake of Brexit and the COVID pandemic have sown disarray through some sectors of the economy, disrupting deliveries of fuel and medicines and leaving up to 150,000 pigs backed up on farms.

British ministers have for days insisted the crisis is abating or even over, though retailers said more than 2,000 gas stations were dry and Reuters reporters across London and southern England said dozens of pumps were still closed.

Queues of often irate drivers snaked back from those gas stations that were still open in London.

“I am completely, completely fed up. Why is the country not ready for anything?” said Ata Uriakhil, a 47-year-old taxi driver from Afghanistan who was first in a line of more than 40 cars outside a closed supermarket petrol station in Richmond.

“When is it going to end?,” Uriakhil said. “The politicians are not capable of doing their jobs properly. The government should have been prepared for this crisis. It is just incompetence.”

Uriakhil said he had lost about 20% of his normal earnings this week because he has been waiting for fuel rather than picking up customers.

The Petrol Retailers Association (PRA) said members reported on Friday that 26% of pumps were dry, 27% had just one fuel type in stock and 47% had enough petrol and diesel.

“Independents, which total 65% of the entire network, are not receiving enough deliveries of fuel compared with other sectors such as supermarkets,” Gordon Balmer, executive director of the Petrol Retail Association, told Reuters.

Ministers say the world is facing a global shortage of truck drivers and that they are working to ease the crisis. They deny that the situation is a consequence of an exodus of EU workers following Britain’s departure from the bloc, and have dismissed concerns the country is heading towards a “winter of discontent” of shortages and power cuts.

Though there are shortages of truck drivers in other countries, EU members have not seen fuel shortages.

After a shortage of truckers triggered panic buying at gas stations, farmers are now warning that a shortage of butchers and abattoir workers could force a mass cull of up to 150,000 pigs.

EU PIGS?

Britain’s pig industry implored retailers to continue buying local pork and not cheaper EU products, saying businesses would go bust and livestock would be culled if producers were not given immediate support.

The weekly slaughter of pigs has dropped by 25% since August after the pandemic and Britain’s post-Brexit immigration rules combined to hit an industry already struggling for workers, leading to a now acute shortage of butchers and slaughterers.

“As a result of the labor supply issues in pork processing plants, we currently have an estimated 120,000 pigs backed up on UK pig farms that should have gone to slaughter,” the National Pig Association said in a letter to retailers.

“The only option for some will be to cull pigs on farm.”

The meat processing industry has long struggled to find enough workers but it has been hit by the departure of many eastern European workers who returned home due to Brexit and COVID-19.

The pig association said that despite attempts to persuade the government to ease immigration rules, it appeared to have reached an impasse. Britain recently changed tack to allow some international workers to come in for three months to drive trucks and fill gaps in the poultry sector.

(Additional reporting by Costas Pitas, Kate Holton, James Davey and Sarah Young; Writing by Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Andy Bruce, Angus MacSwan and Alison Williams)

Guinea swears in coup leader as interim president

By Saliou Samb

CONAKRY (Reuters) – Guinea junta leader Mamadi Doumbouya was inaugurated as interim president on Friday to oversee what regional powers hope will be a short transition to constitutional rule after the Sept. 5 overthrow of president Alpha Conde.

The swearing-in ceremony was held at the Mohamed VI Palace in the capital Conakry with the marked absence of most West African heads of state, who agreed last month to impose sanctions on junta members and their relatives.

West and Central Africa has seen four coups since last year – political upheaval that has intensified concerns about a slide towards military rule in a resource-rich but poverty-stricken region.

Wearing military dress uniform, a red beret and wraparound sunglasses, Doumbouya held up a white-gloved hand as he took the oath of office.

“I fully appreciate the magnitude and immensity of the responsibilities entrusted to me,” he said in a speech afterwards.

He promised to oversee a transition that would include the drafting of a new constitution, fighting corruption, electoral reform and the organization of free and transparent elections.

The junta has said its members will be barred from standing in the next elections, but has not made clear when these might take place, saying this will be decided by an 81-member Transitional National Council.

The Economic Community of West African States, a regional bloc, has frozen assets and imposed travel bans on the junta, hoping to encourage a swift return to democracy.

Coup leaders have said they ousted Conde because of concerns about poverty and corruption, and because he was serving a third term only after altering the constitution to permit it.

Fears that the political crisis would hinder Guinea’s production of bauxite, a mineral used to make aluminum, have eased. The country’s largest foreign operators say they have continued work without interruption.

(Writing by Alessandra Prentice; Editing by Giles Elgood)

More destruction feared in La Palma as lava pours from new volcano vent

By Juan Medina and Marco Trujillo

MADRID (Reuters) -Lava flowed from a newly opened crack in the Cumbre Vieja volcano on Spain’s La Palma on Friday, carving a different path from previous flows and raising fears of more destruction, while fine ash forced islanders to don masks and goggles.

A river of red-hot lava snaked downhill from the new fissure, which burst open late on Thursday around 400 meters (1,300 ft.) to the north of the primary eruption site.

Multiple vents have opened since the volcano began erupting on Sept. 19 but the Canaries Volcanology Institute described the latest opening as a new “focus of eruption.”

“There is concern about the path of this new flow towards the sea, although it is expected to join up with the previous one within the next few hours,” said the head of La Palma’s council, Mariano Hernandez Zapata.

He said more houses had been engulfed by lava overnight.

“We have more drama ahead, more people to take care of,” he told a news conference.

About 6,000 people have been evacuated since the eruption began and are yet to return home. More than 800 buildings including houses, churches and schools have been destroyed.

The volcano has thrown out 80 million cubic meters of molten rock, regional leader Angel Victor Torres said, doubling the amount expelled during La Palma’s last major eruption 50 years ago in half the time.

Residents of Los Llanos de Aridane, one of the worst affected towns, have taken to carrying umbrellas and wearing eye protection as a precaution against the volcanic dust blanketing the streets and floating in the air.

“Last night the ash was irritating my eyes a lot, I had to use eye drops and my skin was stinging,” said Matilde Gonzalez Tavarez, a 45-year-old nursing assistant visiting her mother at a care home in Los Llanos.

“It’s helplessness, fear, insecurity. You don’t know what’s going to happen,” she said, while street cleaners brushed away the carpet of black ash behind her.

Juan Antonio Perez Gonzalez, 56, who runs a floristry business in the town, fears the worst is yet to come.

“I can’t put a good face on it or give you good news because this is a calamity,” he told Reuters. He said many of the townspeople were preparing to pack up and leave.

(Additional reporting by Emma Pinedo in Madrid; Writing by Nathan Allen; Editing by Andrei Khalip and Janet Lawrence)

Turkey’s Russian air defense systems and U.S. response

(Reuters) – Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan this week flagged potential further cooperation with Russia on defense industry projects including fighter jets and submarines even as the United States warned it could respond with more sanctions.

Turkey received the first deliveries of the S-400 surface-to-air systems in July 2019, prompting Washington to begin removing the NATO ally from its F-35 stealth fighter program over security concerns.

The following timeline presents the main developments in the program and Ankara’s relations with the United States.

Dec. 29, 2017 – Turkey and Russia sign an accord on deliveries of Russian S-400 surface-to-air missile batteries, reportedly worth around $2.5 billion.

June 19, 2018 – A U.S. Senate committee passes a spending bill that includes a provision to block Turkey’s purchase of Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter jets unless it drops the plan to buy the S-400s.

March 28, 2019 – U.S. Senators introduce a bipartisan bill to prohibit the transfer of F-35s to Turkey unless the U.S. administration certifies that Ankara will not take delivery of the S-400s.

June 7, 2019 – The United States decides to stop accepting any additional Turkish pilots to train on F-35 fighter jets.

July 17, 2019 – The United States says it was removing Turkey from the F-35 program; Ellen Lord, Undersecretary of Defense for acquisition and sustainment, says Turkey would no longer receive more than $9 billion in projected work.

July 25, 2019 – Russia completes the first shipment of its S-400 systems to Turkey, according to Turkish military officials.

Sept. 15, 2019 – Turkey’s defense ministry confirms delivery of a second battery of S-400s.

Nov. 12, 2020 – Turkey’s Defense Minister Hulusi Akar says Turkey is ready to discuss U.S. concerns about the technical compatibility of Russian S-400 defense systems and U.S.-made F-35 jets, renewing Ankara’s call for a joint working group with Washington on the issue.

March 24, 2021 – U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in a meeting with Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, urges Ankara to drop the S-400 system. In the same meeting, Cavusoglu told his U.S. counterpart that its purchase was “a done deal.”

July 21, 2021 – U.S. President Joe Biden is committed to maintaining sanctions on Turkey under the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) for buying Russian missile defenses and would impose further sanctions if Ankara bought further major arms systems from Moscow, according to a senior U.S. diplomat.

Aug. 23, 2021 – The Interfax new agency reports the head of Russia’s arms exporter as saying Russia and Turkey were close to signing a new contract to supply Ankara with more S-400s in the near future.

Sept. 26, 2021 – Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan says Turkey still intends to buy a second batch of missile defense systems from Russia.

Sept. 30, 2021 – Turkey is considering more joint defense industry programs with Russia including fighter jets and submarines, President Erdogan says after talks with President Vladimir Putin. Erdogan did not mention further S-400 purchases or U.S. sanctions, but said “Turkey would not back down.”

(Compiled by Oben Mumcuoglu and Berna Syuleymanoglu in Gdansk; Editing by Tomasz Janowski and Daren Butler)

In political crosshairs, U.S. Supreme Court weighs abortion and guns

By Lawrence Hurley and Andrew Chung

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Just before midnight on Sept. 1, the debate over whether the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority will dramatically change life in America took on a new ferocity when the justices let a near-total ban on abortion in Texas take effect.

The intense scrutiny of the court will only increase when the justices – six conservatives and three liberals – open their new nine-month term on Monday. They have taken up cases that could enable them to overturn abortion rights established in a landmark ruling 48 years ago and also expand gun rights – two cherished goals of American conservatives.

In addition, there are cases scheduled that could expand religious rights, building on several rulings in recent years.

These contentious cases come at a time when opinion surveys show that public approval of the court is waning even as a commission named by President Joe Biden explores recommending changes such as expanding the number of justices or imposing term limits in place of their lifetime appointments.

Some justices have given speeches rebutting criticism of the court and questions about its legitimacy as a nonpolitical institution. Its junior-most member Amy Coney Barrett, a conservative confirmed by Senate Republicans only days before the 2020 presidential election, said this month the court “is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks.”

“There’s no doubt that the court’s legitimacy is under threat right now,” lawyer Kannon Shanmugam, who frequently argues cases at the court, said at an event organized by the conservative Federalist Society. “The level of rhetoric and criticism of the court is higher than I can certainly remember at any point in my career.”

The court’s late-night 5-4 decision not to block the Republican-backed Texas law banning abortions after six weeks of pregnancy put abortion-rights advocates including Biden on high alert.

The justices now have a chance to go even further. They will hear a case on Dec. 1 in which Mississippi is defending its law banning abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. Mississippi’s Republican attorney general is asking the court to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that legalized abortion nationwide and ended an era when some states banned it.

In another blockbuster case, the justices could make it easier for people to obtain permits to carry handguns outside the home, a major expansion of firearms rights. They will consider on Nov. 3 whether to invalidate a New York state regulation that lets people obtain a concealed-carry permit only if they can show they need a gun for self-defense.

CONGRESSIONAL HEARINGS

Former President Donald Trump was able to appoint three conservative justices including Barrett who tilted the court further rightward, with the help of maneuvering by a key fellow Republican, Senator Mitch McConnell.

The Democratic-led Congress has held two hearings in recent months on how the court has increasingly decided major issues, including the Texas abortion one, with late-night emergency decisions using its “shadow docket” process that lacks customary public oral arguments.

“The Supreme Court has now shown that it’s willing to allow even facially unconstitutional laws to take effect when the law is aligned with certain ideological preferences,” Democrat Dick Durbin, the Senate Judiciary Committee’s chairman, said on Wednesday.

Conservative Justice Samuel Alito in a speech on Thursday objected to criticism that portrays the court’s members as a “dangerous cabal that resorts to sneaky and improper methods.”

“This portrayal feeds unprecedented efforts to intimidate the court or damage it as an independent institution,” Alito said.

Conservative Justice Clarence Thomas last month said judges are “asking for trouble” if they wade into political issues. Thomas has previously said Roe v. Wade should be overturned, as many conservatives have sought.

Liberal Justice Stephen Breyer noted in a May speech that the court’s legitimacy relies in part on avoiding major upheavals in the law when people have come to rely on existing precedents.

“The law might not be perfect but if you’re changing it all the time people won’t know what to do, and the more you change it the more people will ask to have it changed,” Breyer said.

Abortion rights advocates have cited the fact that Roe v. Wade has been in place for almost a half century as one reason not to overturn it.

Breyer, at 83 the court’s oldest member, himself is the focus of attention. Some liberal activists have urged him to retire so Biden can appoint a younger liberal who could serve for decades. Breyer has said he has not decided when he will retire.

George Mason University law professor Jenn Mascott, a former Thomas law clerk, said the justices should not be swayed by public opinion.

“What the justices have said they want to do is decide each case on the rule the law,” Mascott said. “I don’t think they should be thinking that the perception would be that they are too partisan one way or another.”

(Reporting by Lawrence Hurley and Andrew Chung; Editing by Will Dunham and Scott Malone)

U.S. immigration agents to more narrowly target migrants for deportation

By Mica Rosenberg and Kristina Cooke

(Reuters) – The U.S. government will narrow who immigration agents target for arrest and deportation, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said on Thursday, in a marked departure from the hardline approach taken by then-U.S. President Donald Trump.

New guidance issued on Thursday gives agents more discretion to make case-by-case decisions, Mayorkas said, focusing primarily on those who pose a national security or public safety threats and recent border crossers.

Immigrants who have been in the United States for a lengthy period of time, who are elderly or minors or whose family members might be adversely affected by deportation could be spared enforcement, according to a memo issued Thursday. Other mitigating factors given consideration could be service in the military by the immigrant or an immediate family member or those who have been victims of a crime among other examples, the memo sent to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) said. The new guidelines take effect in 60 days.

U.S. President Joe Biden, a Democrat, pledged a more humanitarian approach to immigration than his Republican predecessor Trump. Under Trump, ICE agents were told no immigrant would be exempt from immigration enforcement including low-level offenders and non-criminals, as well as people who have been in the United States for many years.

“It is estimated there are more than 11 million undocumented or otherwise removable non-citizens in the United States,” including teachers, farmworkers and people working on the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic, the memo said. “We do not have the resources to apprehend and seek the removal of every one.”

The new guidelines do not include categories, but rather instruct the agents to look at the totality of circumstances as a way to prioritize resources.

“In the area of public safety, very often guidelines in the past have defined who is a public safety threat by looking at the issue categorically, if you have done X than you are public safety threat,” Mayorkas said. That approach “could lead to ineffective and unjust results,” he said.

Earlier interim guidelines by the Biden administration instructed ICE agents to focus on categories of immigrants deemed security threats and those who entered the United States after Nov. 1, 2020. A federal judge blocked those guidelines in August, siding with two Republican-led states – Texas and Louisiana – that had challenged them.

(Reporting by Mica Rosenberg and Kristina Cooke; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)

Texas abortion clinics struggle to survive under restrictive law

By Julia Harte

(Reuters) – Since Texas enacted the strictest anti-abortion law in the country a month ago, the four Whole Woman’s Health abortion clinics across the state have seen patient visits plummet, some staff quit and recruitment efforts falter.

The new law, which bans abortions after about six weeks and empowers private citizens to enforce it, has the clinics “teeter-tottering between financial risk, legal risk and staffing risk,” said Marva Sadler, the facilities’ director of clinical services.

As the law is debated in courts – with a key hearing slated for Friday – abortion rights advocates say its impact has been swift and wide-ranging since it took effect on Sept. 1.

Abortion clinics are struggling to survive: The number of patients getting abortions at Whole Woman’s Health clinics dropped 70%, Sadler said. Women are seeking other options, including traveling to out-of-state clinics or obtaining abortion-inducing pills via mail.

Abortion rights advocates warn Texas will be a blueprint for other Republican-led states if its law is upheld. They consider it a major blow to Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 1973 decision that established the right to abortion access, which will itself be tested by a Mississippi case the court will hear in December.

“Lawmakers from across the country were watching the Texas bill very closely… and when the Supreme Court allowed this unconstitutional ban to go into effect, they said, ‘now’s our chance,'” said Elizabeth Nash, a state policy analyst at the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive rights research and policy organization.

Texas’ so-called “heartbeat” law bans abortion after cardiac activity is detected in the embryo, usually around six weeks. That’s before most women know they are pregnant and before 85% to 90% of all abortions are carried out, experts say.

The law makes no exception for cases of rape and incest. It lets citizens enforce the ban, rewarding them at least $10,000 if they successfully sue anyone who helped provide an abortion after cardiac activity is detected.

Some of Texas’ so-called “crisis pregnancy centers,” Christian-based facilities that encourage women to not have abortions, have seen a rise in visits since the law took effect, with more women seeking ultrasounds earlier in their pregnancies.

The Raffa pregnancy clinic in Greenville had a 166% increase in ultrasounds in the first three weeks of September compared to the same period last year, said the facility’s executive director Threesa Sadler, who supports the law.

Two clients whose scans revealed a fetal heartbeat were women she thinks might have terminated their pregnancies had that still been an option, she said.

“Beyond helping decrease abortion in Texas, I don’t know if it was an intended consequence that the law would also push more women to (crisis) pregnancy centers, but I love that that’s what’s happening,” she said.

On Friday, the U.S. Justice Department will ask a federal judge in Austin to temporarily block the law while its constitutionality is challenged. Under Roe v. Wade, states cannot ban abortion before the fetus is viable outside the womb, which doctors generally view as between 24 and 28 weeks.

Abortion rights advocates worry the law will have lasting damage even if eventually overturned.

“We know that when these laws are passed, part of the strategy is to close clinics while these bills sit in the courts awaiting decisions,” said Nikki Madsen, executive director of Abortion Care Network, a national association that includes seven independent abortion clinics in Texas.

Madsen said 23 of Texas’ 42 surgical abortion clinics closed after the state passed a law in 2013 requiring clinic physicians to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned that law in 2016, but today there are still only 19 clinics offering surgical abortions in Texas.

ALTERNATE ABORTION ROUTES

Hundreds of women now are seeking abortions outside Texas, lengthening wait times in nearby states such as Oklahoma and Louisiana, according to evidence the Justice Department cited in its lawsuit.

In court documents, an Oklahoma-based Planned Parenthood doctor said Texas patients had traveled long distances to get treatment at his clinic since Sept. 1. One woman drove six hours alone, one way, because she feared any companion could get in trouble under the law.

Others are procuring abortion-inducing medication by mail.

KT Volkova, a graduate student in central Texas who uses the pronoun “they,” discovered they were pregnant a few days before the law’s effective date.

No appointments for surgical abortions near Volkova were available before Sept. 1, and Volkova was already nearly six weeks pregnant. Volkova, who volunteers with a group that provides financial assistance to abortion seekers, opted against seeking funds to travel out of state for the procedure and instead took an abortion-inducing medication that came by mail.

“I would have preferred to have it in-clinic, with staff holding my hand, but I had to go through the entire process in my apartment alone,” Volkova said.

Access to abortion-inducing medication will soon be further restricted in Texas.

A state law taking effect on Dec. 2 will narrow the window for medical abortions from 10 weeks to seven weeks after conception. Providing women with abortion-inducing drugs by mail will be a criminal offense under the law.

(Reporting by Julia Harte; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Aurora Ellis)

Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano erupts for first time in nearly a year

(Reuters) -Hawaii’s Kīlauea volcano, in its first eruption in nearly a year, was filling the crater at its summit with hot red lava and clouding the skies with volcanic smog on Thursday morning, the U.S. Geological Survey said.

The latest eruption of Hawaii’s youngest and most active volcano began on Wednesday afternoon.

While the lava presented no immediate threat to populated areas, residents who live downwind of Kīlauea were warned of possible exposure to sulfur dioxide and other volcanic gases that can irritate the respiratory system.

The eruption was taking place within the confines of Hawaiian Volcanoes National Park, which remained open to visitors who wished to observe the lava’s glow and the pluming smoke from a safe distance.

Kīlauea’s last eruption took place in December 2020, when a water-filled lake that had formed at the crater evaporated, replaced by a lava lake.

Two years before that, a string of earthquakes and a major eruption led to the destruction of hundreds of homes and businesses as lava flowed down to the ocean over a period of several months, hardening into new land.

(Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Bengaluru; Additional reporting by Jonathan Allen in New York; Editing by Giles Elgood and Mark Porter)

Ethiopia expels seven U.N. officials, accusing them of “meddling”

By quotes updates with context

ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) – Ethiopia is expelling seven senior U.N. officials, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Thursday, two days after the U.N. aid chief warned hundreds of thousands of people in the northern region of Tigray were likely experiencing famine due to a government blockade of aid.

The move comes amid increasing international criticism over conditions in Tigray, and as all parties to fighting in northern Ethiopia face the possibility of sanctions from the United States government.

Many nations fear the spreading conflict in Ethiopia – Africa’s second most populous nation and a regional diplomatic heavyweight – might further destabilize an already fragile region.

The seven people being expelled include the country heads of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the head of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). The seven have 72 hours to leave, the ministry said in a statement, accusing them of “meddling” in internal affairs.

A statement from U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres said he was “shocked” by the expulsions and added, “We are now engaging with the Government of Ethiopia in the expectation that the concerned UN staff will be allowed to continue their important work.”

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Conflict erupted between federal forces and those aligned with the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), the political party that controls the region, in November.

Tigrayan forces retook most of the region at the end of June, and then pushed into the neighboring regions of Afar and Amhara, forcing hundreds of thousands of people there to flee their homes.

On Tuesday, United Nations aid chief Martin Griffiths – the head of OCHA – said a nearly three-month long “de-facto blockade” of Tigray’s borders has restricted aid deliveries of what is required.

“This is man-made, this can be remedied by the act of government,” Griffiths said, noting nearly a quarter of children in Tigray are malnourished.

Five of the seven people being expelled work for OCHA; a sixth works for UNICEF and the seventh works for the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, which is conducting a joint investigation with Ethiopia’s state-appointed human rights commission into reports of mass killings of civilians, gang rapes and other abuses in Tigray.

Ethiopian authorities have previously accused aid workers of favoring and even arming Tigrayan forces, although they have provided no evidence to support their accusations.

In August, Ethiopia suspended the operations for the Dutch branch of medical charity of Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) and the Norwegian Refugee Council, accusing them of arming “rebel groups”.

So far, 23 aid workers have been killed in Tigray.

(Reporting by Dawit Endeshaw and Ayenat Mersie; Additional reporting by Giulia Paravicini; Editing by Katharine Houreld, Alison Williams, Emelia Sithole-Matarise, William Maclean)