Tag Archives: South Africa

Spain first European country to ask UN court for permission to join South Africa’s case accusing Israel of genocide

Spains-Foreign-Minister-Jose-Manuel-Albares-Bueno

Important Takeaways:

  • South Africa filed its case with the International Court of Justice late last year. It alleged that Israel was breaching the genocide convention in its military assault that has laid waste to large swaths of Gaza.
  • The court has ordered Israel to immediately halt its military offensive in the southern Gaza city of Rafah but stopped short of ordering a cease-fire for the enclave.
  • “There should be no doubt that Spain will remain on the right side of history,” Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez
  • Mexico, Colombia, Nicaragua, Libya and the Palestinians are waiting for the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands, to grant approval to their requests to join the case.
  • Over 140 countries have recognized a Palestinian state — more than two-thirds of the U.N. — but none of the major Western powers, including the United States, has done so.
  • Last year, the International Court of Justice allowed 32 countries, including Spain, to join Ukraine’s case alleging that Russia breached the genocide convention by falsely accusing Ukraine of committing genocide in its eastern Luhansk and Donetsk regions, and using that as a pretext for the invasion.
  • Netanyahu is also facing a separate legal challenge from the International Criminal Court, whose prosecutor is seeking an arrest warrant against the Israeli leader and others, including leaders of the Hamas militant group.

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Russia, China, India, and South Africa aim to reduce reliance on the US dollar

Money-is-Trash

Important Takeaways:

  • Russia calls on BRICS to ditch dollar
  • The statement was made at the Russia-China Financial Dialogue forum in Beijing on Monday, where Siluanov met with his Chinese counterpart, Lan Foan.
  • The BRICS group of emerging economies – which currently incorporates Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa – has been discussing ways to facilitate payments in local currencies between member countries. The bloc aims to reduce their reliance on the US dollar and the euro for accelerated growth.
  • “We need to further develop financial cooperation within the BRICS countries. Here we see opportunities … to develop a payments system that would be independent of the infrastructure, which does not always fully fulfill the goals of individual countries,” Siluanov stated.
  • “Therefore, the sustainable development of financial relations and settlements on the BRICS platform is important for us, and we believe that it is necessary to work out such issues, and today we will consider a number of them,” he added.

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Germany, U.S. take new COVID restrictions as Omicron spreads across globe

By Joseph Nasr and Jeff Mason

BERLIN/WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Germany decided on Thursday to bar the unvaccinated from all but the most essential business and the United States prepared further travel restrictions as the world scrambled to curb the Omicron variant of the coronavirus.

With countries including the United States, India and France reporting their first Omicron cases, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said she hoped the pandemic would not completely stifle economic activity.

“There’s a lot of uncertainty, but it could cause significant problems. We’re still evaluating that,” she told the Reuters Next conference.

The new measures in Germany focus on the unvaccinated, who will only be allowed in essential businesses such as grocery stores and pharmacies, while legislation to make vaccination mandatory will be drafted for early next year.

“We have understood that the situation is very serious,” Chancellor Angela Merkel told a news conference.

A nationwide vaccination mandate could take effect from February 2022 after it is debated in the Bundestag and after guidance from Germany’s Ethics Council, she said.

Eager to avoid derailing a fragile recovery of Europe’s biggest economy, Germany kept businesses open to the almost 69% of the population that is fully vaccinated as well as those with proof of having recovered from the virus.

In the United States, the Biden administration was expected to announce steps included extending requirements for travelers to wear masks through mid-March.

By early next week the United States will require inbound international travelers to be tested for COVID-19 within a day of departure, regardless of vaccination status.

And private health insurance companies will be required to reimburse customers for at-home COVID-19 tests, as part of a winter strategy that Biden is due to announce at 1840 GMT.

“The president is going to unveil a very robust plan, pull out all the stops to prepare for the winter and to prepare for the new variant,” White House COVID-19 response coordinator Jeff Zients told broadcaster MSNBC.

UNKNOWN

Much remains unknown about Omicron, which was first detected in southern Africa last month and has been spotted in at least two dozen countries, just as parts of Europe were already grappling with a wave of infections of the Delta variant.

But the European Union’s public health agency said Omicron could be responsible for more than half of all COVID infections in Europe within a few months, lending weight to preliminary information about its high transmissibility.

“It’s going to take about two more weeks to have more definitive information about the Omicron variant,” U.S. Assistant Health Secretary Rachel Levine said in an interview for the Reuters Next conference, adding that travel restrictions could slow the spread and give authorities the time to assess what further steps could be needed.

South Africa said it was seeing an increase in COVID-19 reinfections in patients contracting Omicron – with people who have already had the illness getting infected again – in a way that it did not see with other variants.

The first known U.S. case, announced late on Wednesday, was a fully vaccinated person in California who had travelled to South Africa. Another case was reported in Minnesota on Thursday. The two French cases, in the greater Paris region and in eastern France, were passengers arriving respectively from Nigeria and South Africa.

Global shares fell on Thursday, reversing gains from the previous session as a lack of information about Omicron left markets volatile, while crude oil futures extended losses.

TRAVEL RESTRICTIONS

Russia has imposed a two-week quarantine for travelers from some African countries including South Africa, the Interfax news agency said, quoting a senior official. Hong Kong extended a travel ban to more countries and Norway, among others, re-introduced travel restrictions.

Amid all the new restrictions, Europe’s largest budget airline, Ryanair, said it expected a challenging time at Christmas, although it was still optimistic about summer demand.

In the Netherlands, health authorities called for pre-flight COVID-19 tests for all travel from outside the European Union, after it turned out that most of the passengers who tested positive after arriving on two flights from South Africa on Nov. 26 had been vaccinated.

In France, the country’s top scientific adviser, Jean-Francois Delfraissy, said the “true enemy” for now was still the more familiar Delta variant of the virus, spreading in a fifth wave.

Laboratory analysis of the antibody-based COVID-19 therapy GlaxoSmithKline is developing with U.S. partner Vir has indicated the drug is effective against Omicron, the British drugmaker said.

And Novavax Inc said it could begin commercial manufacturing of a COVID-19 vaccine tailored for the Omicron coronavirus variant in January next year, while it tests whether or not its current vaccine works against the variant.

(Reporting by Reuters bureau; Writing by Ingrid Melander; Editing by Nick Macfie and Frances Kerry)

 

First known U.S. Omicron case found in fully vaccinated overseas traveler

By Trevor Hunnicutt

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States on Wednesday identified its first known case of Omicron, discovered in a fully vaccinated patient who traveled to South Africa, as scientists continue to study the risks the new COVID variant could pose.

Public health officials said the infected person, who had mild symptoms, returned to the United States from South Africa on Nov. 22 and tested positive seven days later.

That patient was fully vaccinated but did not have a booster shot, according to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. infectious disease official, who briefed reporters at the White House.

The person is in self-quarantine and all of the patient’s close contacts have tested negative so far, he said.

Key questions remain about the new variant, which has rattled markets amid signs it may spread quickly and evade some of the defenses provided by vaccines. It has been found in two dozen countries, including Spain, Canada, Britain, Austria and Portugal.

Fauci said it could take two weeks or more to gain insight into how easily the variant spreads from person to person, how severe is the disease it causes and whether it can bypass the protections provided by vaccines currently available.

“We don’t have enough information right now,” said Fauci, who serves as an adviser to President Joe Biden, adding that the variant’s molecular profile “suggests that it might be more transmissible, and that it might elude some of the protection of vaccines, but we don’t know that now… We have to be prepared that there’s going to be a diminution in protection.”

For days, U.S. health officials have said the new variant -first detected in southern Africa and announced on Nov. 25 – was likely already in the United States as dozens of other countries also detected its presence.

“This new variant is a cause for concern but not a cause for panic,” Biden said on Wednesday before the Omicron case was announced. A spokesperson, Jen Psaki, said he the president had been briefed by his team on the first known case.

The United States has barred nearly all foreigners who have been in one of eight southern African countries. On Tuesday, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) directed airlines to disclose names and other information of passengers who have been to those countries.

(Reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt, Ahmed Aboulenein and Nandita Bose in Washington, and Mrinalika Roy in Bengaluru; Editing by Anil D’Silva and Lisa Shumaker)

South Africa detects new coronavirus variant, still studying its mutations

By Alexander Winning

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) – South African scientists have detected a new coronavirus variant with multiple mutations but are yet to establish whether it is more contagious or able to overcome the immunity provided by vaccines or prior infection.

The new variant, known as C.1.2, was first detected in May and has now spread to most South African provinces and to seven other countries in Africa, Europe, Asia and Oceania, according to research which is yet to be peer-reviewed.

It contains many mutations associated in other variants with increased transmissibility and reduced sensitivity to neutralizing antibodies, but they occur in a different mix and scientists are not yet sure how they affect the behavior of the virus. Laboratory tests are underway to establish how well the variant is neutralized by antibodies.

South Africa was the first country to detect the Beta variant, one of only four labelled “of concern” by the World Health Organization (WHO).

Beta is believed to spread more easily than the original version of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, and there is evidence vaccines work less well against it, leading some countries to restrict travel to and from South Africa.

PANDEMIC ‘FAR FROM OVER’

Richard Lessells, an infectious disease specialist and one of the authors of the research on C.1.2, said its emergence tells us “this pandemic is far from over and that this virus is still exploring ways to potentially get better at infecting us.”

He said people should not be overly alarmed at this stage and that variants with more mutations were bound to emerge further into the pandemic.

Genomic sequencing data from South Africa show the C.1.2 variant was still nowhere near displacing the dominant Delta variant in July, the latest month for which a large number of samples was available.

In July C.1.2 accounted for 3% of samples versus 1% in June, whereas Delta accounted for 67% in June and 89% in July.

Delta is the fastest and fittest variant the world has encountered, and it is upending assumptions about COVID-19 even as nations loosen restrictions and reopen their economies.

Lessells said C.1.2 may have more immune evasion properties than Delta, based on its pattern of mutations, and that the findings had been flagged to the WHO.

A spokesman for South Africa’s health department declined to comment on the research.

South Africa’s COVID-19 vaccination campaign got off to a slow start, with only around 14% of its adult population fully vaccinated so far.

(Reporting by Alexander Winning; Editing by Tim Cocks and Gareth Jones)

South Africa’s big retail chains race to restock looted stores

By Nqobile Dludla

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) – South Africa’s big retailers are working round the clock to replenish shelves with food in hundreds of stores looted this week in some of the country’s worst unrest for years, they said on Friday.

Retailers also said they are racing to keep stores unaffected by the violence stocked as some shoppers were stripping shelves with panic buying, though blocked roads and disruptions to supply chains were hampering their efforts.

Retailers were just starting to recover from months of coronavirus restrictions when the violence triggered by the jailing of former president Jacob Zuma erupted and the looting could now set them back several months.

Massmart, which is majority owned by U.S. retail giant Walmart Inc, said protesters had looted 41 of its stores and two of its distribution centers, with four sites suffering significant damage from arson.

TFG, the owner of Foschini clothing and @home chains, said 190 stores had been looted and damaged to varying degrees. All its stores in KwaZulu-Natal province are shut.

“The timeline to reopen will be quick in some locations whilst in others it will be dependent on the nature and extent of the damage and on the availability of the relevant resources and supply chains,” TFG said.

Pepkor, which is majority owned by Steinhoff International, said 489 stores, representing about 9% of its retail outlets, had been damaged and looted as well as one of the JD Group’s distribution centers in KwaZulu-Natal.

Pepkor’s supply chain and distribution operations in the affected areas have been severely disrupted, it said.

All three retailers, as well as grocery chains Pick n Pay, Shoprite and SPAR Group, whose 184 stores were looted and vandalized, said the priority was to replenish shelves as concerns about food shortages mount.

SPAR trucks were dispatched on Friday with security escorts and the chain said it would try to restock all its KwaZulu-Natal stores open for business over the weekend.

Woolworths said it was working closely with suppliers to make sure its stores were stocked.

“This is largely dependent on the reopening of key transport routes, the ability of local suppliers to continue production, the ability of our staff to access our stores and the safety of our logistics and distribution operations,” it said.

(Additional reporting by Emma Rumney; Editing by Jason Neely and David Clarke)

In South African COVID-19 ward, medics battle worst infection wave yet

By Sisipho Skweyiya

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) – At an emergency COVID-19 ward run by a charity in southern Johannesburg, medics wheel gasping patients to their beds, rush from room to room with oxygen cylinders and pat the back of someone in the grip of a coughing fit.

The scenes in the converted community hall are a reminder of how badly South Africa has been hit by its third and most debilitating COVID-19 wave yet, as the infectious Delta variant surges through a mostly unvaccinated population.

“The Delta variant has caused enormous strain on the resources … Every hospital is getting strained, every healthcare worker is getting strained,” said Fatimah Lambat, the doctor in charge of the ward set up by Gift of the Givers, a Muslim charity, to ease overloaded public hospitals.

“It’s very draining … patients are still phoning me from the community for help. And when we’re full here, we still need to help them,” she said. “We don’t want them to be lost.”

With South Africa recording an average of about 20,000 cases a day and nursing active cases, cumulatively, of more than 10 times that, Africa’s most economically advanced nation has also been its worst hit by the virus, with 64,000 deaths.

A vaccination campaign has been slow, with just 4.2 million doses administered to a population of 60 million. Officials aim to reach a vaccination rate of 300,000 a day by the end of August.

Doctors say they have never had to deal with so many COVID-19 infections all at once. Hospitals in the largest city Johannesburg, where the latest wave started, are full.

For 79-year-old Catherine Naidoo, the most terrifying thing about falling gravely ill was knowing that so many had died.

“You don’t know what lies ahead. You look at the news and see how people are passing away,” the recovered COVID-19 patient said, lying on her back and adjusting her mask. “It was the most frightening experience.”

Behind another curtain, medics covered head to toe in protective gear adjusted the drip of a sleeping patient, while in another, a medic was getting a patient to do some exercises before getting her to blow into a tube to test her lungs.

President Cyril Ramaphosa extended COVID-19 restrictions on Sunday for another 14 days, including a ban on gatherings, a curfew from 9 p.m. to 4 a.m. and a nationwide ban on the sale of alcohol.

(Writing by Tim Cocks; Editing by Janet Lawrence)

Worst violence in years spreads in South Africa as grievances boil over

By Alexander Winning and Wendell Roelf

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) -Crowds clashed with police and ransacked or burned shopping malls in South Africa on Tuesday, with dozens reported killed as grievances unleashed by the jailing of former president Jacob Zuma boiled over into the worst violence in years.

Protests that followed Zuma’s arrest last week have widened into looting and an outpouring of generalized anger over inequality that persists 27 years after the fall of apartheid. Poverty has been exacerbated by severe social and economic restrictions aimed at blocking the spread of COVID-19.

Security officials said the government was working to halt the spread of the violence and looting, which has so far spread from Zuma’s home in KwaZulu-Natal province to Gauteng province surrounding the country’s biggest city Johanesburg. They deployed soldiers onto the streets to try to contain it, but stopped short of declaring a state of emergency.

“No amount of unhappiness or personal circumstances from our people gives the right to anyone to loot, vandalize and do as they please and break the law,” Police Minister Bheki Cele told a news conference, echoing sentiments expressed by President Cyril Ramaphosa overnight.

The bodies of 10 people were found on Monday evening after a stampede at a Soweto shopping mall, premier David Makhura said.

Hundreds of looters raided warehouses and supermarkets in Durban, one of the busiest shipping terminals on the African continent and a major import-export hub.

Outside a Durban warehouse of retailer Game, Reuters filmed looters stuffing cars with electronic goods and clothes. Inside, the floor was a wreckage of discarded packaging as the crowd systematically emptied the shelves.

Aerial footage from local channel eNCA showed black smoke rising from several warehouses, while debris lay strewn.

Troops were moving into flashpoints on Tuesday as outnumbered police seemed helpless to stop the unrest. Columns of armored personnel carriers rolled down highways.

The rand, which had been one of the best performing emerging market currencies during the pandemic, dropped to a three-month low on Tuesday, and local and hard currency bonds suffered.

UNFULFILLED PROMISE

At least 45 people have so far been killed during the unrest, 19 in Gauteng and 26 in KwaZulu-Natal, according to state and provincial authorities. Police Minister Cele put the official death toll at 10.

On the streets, protesters hurled stones and police responded with rubber bullets, Reuters journalists said.

In Soweto, police and military were patrolling as shop owners assessed the damage.

Cele said 757 people had been arrested so far. He said the government would act to prevent it from spreading further and warned that people would not be allowed “to make a mockery of our democratic state”.

Defense Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula, speaking at the same news conference, said she did not think a state of emergency should be imposed yet.

Zuma, 79, was sentenced last month for defying a constitutional court order to give evidence at an inquiry investigating high-level corruption during his nine years in office until 2018.

The legal proceedings have been seen as a test of post-apartheid South Africa’s ability to enforce the rule of law.

But any confrontation with soldiers risks fueling charges by Zuma and his supporters that they are victims of a politically motivated crackdown by his successor, Ramaphosa.

The violence worsened as Zuma challenged his 15-month jail term in South Africa’s top court on Monday. Judgement was reserved until an unspecified date.

The deteriorating situation pointed to wider problems and unfulfilled expectations that followed the end of white minority rule in 1994. The economy is struggling to emerge from the damage wrought by Africa’s worst COVID-19 epidemic, with authorities repeatedly imposing restrictions on businesses.

Growing joblessness has left people ever more desperate. Unemployment stood at a new record high of 32.6% in the first three months of 2021.

(Additional reporting by Siyabonga Sishi in Durban and Tim Cocks, Siphiwe Sibeko and Tanisha Heiberg in Johannesburg; Writing by Angus MacSwan and Tim CocksEditing by Peter Graff)

S. African researchers hope to deter rhino poachers with radioactive markers

By Akhona Matshoba and Tanisha Heiberg

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) – Researchers in South Africa are working on a potentially new method to deter rhino poachers and smugglers by using radioactive markers to make smuggled horns detectable at global ports of entry and less desirable to buyers.

South Africa is home to the world’s largest rhino population but has battled poaching for decades. The rhino horn is one of the most expensive commodities in the world by weight, fetching tens of thousands of dollars per kilogram.

Demand is mainly from Asia where rhino horns are believed to have potent medicinal properties and are also a symbol of wealth.

The study, a collaboration between the University of Witwatersrand and a global team of scientists and funded by Russia’s nuclear agency Rosatom, is not using radioactive material on the animals yet, but hopes to if proven safe.

“We are doing our homework at the moment and our whole aim is to find an appropriate quantity of radioactive material which will not harm the animal,” said James Larkin, director at the radiation and health physics unit at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.

Rhinos Igor and Denver at the Buffalo Kloof Private Game Reserve in the Eastern Cape are the first to have trace amounts of non-radioactive, stable isotopes inserted in a hole made in their horns.

The study will gather samples from the animals over the next three months to understand how the isotope interacts within the horn while assessing the animals’ behavior and health, Larkin said.

Rhino poaching often involves both local poachers and international criminal syndicates who smuggle rhino horns across borders. Poachers often shoot the rhino with high-powered hunting rifles before removing the horn from the skull with a knife.

South Africa has about 16,000 rhinos located within its borders, the environmental ministry told Reuters in May.

But relentless poaching and a drought in the North-East region has hit the rhino population hard. In the Kruger National Park, the number of rhinos has plummeted almost more than two thirds in the last decade to around 3,800 in 2019 from 11,800 rhinos in 2008, according to a South African National Parks report.

The project could provide an alternative to de-horning where the animals are tranquilized before the horn is cut off to prevent poaching, which needs to be done around every 18 months. By contrast, radioactive markers would only need to be inserted every five years, Larkin said.

Despite a 30% decline in rhino poaching in 2020 due to lockdown and travel restrictions in South Africa, poachers still killed nearly 400 rhinos for their horns.

(Writing by Tanisha Heiberg, Editing by MacDonald Dzirutwe and Raissa Kasolowsky)

‘It’s going to change our country’: South Africa starts vaccinating over-60s

By Akhona Matshoba and Shafiek Tassiem

KRUGERSDORP, South Africa (Reuters) – Hope and excitement gripped the Munsieville care home in the South African mining city of Krugersdorp on Monday, when people over the age of 60 were called to receive the COVID-19 vaccine for the first time.

“It’s going to change our country for the better,” Caroline Nicholls, 64, a judge, told Reuters while waiting to get her first dose of the Pfizer vaccine.

“I am very excited to finally be here today,” said Ellen Segope, 65, a pensioner who lives nearby. In Cape Town, celebrated anti-apartheid activist and cleric Desmond Tutu was among those vaccinated.

South Africa’s vaccination campaign has suffered a series of setbacks, delaying the point at which it can start protecting its elderly against the coronavirus.

In February, it ditched plans to use AstraZeneca’s vaccine because of data showing it had greatly reduced efficacy against the dominant local variant, and it temporarily paused use of Johnson & Johnson’s (J&J) vaccine in a research study vaccinating health workers because of concerns over very rare cases of blood clots.

But it recently signed large bilateral supply deals with Pfizer and J&J for a combined 61 million doses and had received the first 1 million Pfizer shots by Monday.

“We do know that our people have been waiting for long for these vaccines, … but we are pleading for patience,” Health Minister Zweli Mkhize told a news conference.

“We would have loved to have had the vaccines as early as January or December last year. It was not possible, but now it is here. Let’s make use of it,” he added.

Wealthier countries like the United States and Britain started their vaccination campaigns in December.

South Africa kicked off immunizations in mid-February, but the rollout of the J&J vaccine has been slow because it is being administered in a research study using limited stock to further evaluate its efficacy in the field.

As of Sunday, roughly 480,000 health workers had been given J&J’s vaccine in the so-called Sisonke study.

Mkhize said the country worst affected by COVID-19 on the African continent in terms of recorded deaths was aiming to vaccinate more than 16 million people in the second phase of its vaccination campaign, which started on Monday.

Along with the over-60s, the government plans to vaccinate those with co-morbidities and workers deemed essential for economic activity in that second phase, which is expected to last until mid-October.

(Writing by Alexander Winning; Editing by Nick Macfie)