Tag Archives: United States

U.S. warns Israel against ‘unilateral’ West Bank moves

By Dan Williams

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – A U.S. envoy warned Israel on Sunday not to declare sovereignty over West Bank land without Washington’s consent, pushing back against calls for immediate action by ultra-nationalists within Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s Middle East peace plan, unveiled on Jan 28, envisages Israel keeping key swathes of the occupied territory where Palestinians seek statehood. But the question of timing has opened up a rare rift between the allies.

Netanyahu initially pledged a speedy “application of Israeli law” – de facto annexation – to Jewish settlement blocs and the Jordan Valley, delighting his religious-rightist base ahead of Israel’s March 2 election, where he hopes to win a fifth term.

But he was forced to backpedal after the White House made clear it wanted a U.S.-Israeli mapping process – likely to take weeks or more – completed first.

A demonstrator holds a Palestinian flag as the Jewish settlement of Modiin Illit is seen in the background, during a protest against the U.S. President Donald Trump’s Middle East peace plan, in the village of Bilin in the Israeli-occupied West Bank February 7, 2020. Picture taken February 7, 2020. REUTERS/Mohamad Torokman

The Palestinians, for their part, have rejected the Trump plan as a non-starter.

With Defence Minister Naftali Bennett and other Israeli ultra-nationalists urging an immediate cabinet vote on sovereignty in the West Bank, the U.S. ambassador intervened.

“Israel is subject to the completion (of) a mapping process by a joint Israeli-American committee. Any unilateral action in advance of the completion of the committee process endangers the Plan & American recognition,” envoy David Friedman tweeted.

In a separate speech, Friedman elaborated that his message was “a little bit of patience, to go through a process, to do it right, is not something which we think is too much to ask for”.

‘POTENTIALLY ADVERSE’

“With the news out that the (Israeli) cabinet was about to be pushed in a direction that was potentially adverse to our view of the process, we just let people know where we stand,” he told the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (JCPA) think-tank.

“It was not a threat.”

In parallel, Netanyahu invoked the White House position.

“The (U.S.) recognition is the main thing and we don’t want to endanger that,” the premier told his cabinet on Sunday.

At the JCPA, Friedman said the mapping process was unlikely to be completed before March 2. But he held out the possibility of implementation even if the election does not produce a clear winner, as was the case twice in the last year.

Asked if Washington first wanted a permanent Israeli government – as opposed to a caretaker government of the kind Netanyahu has headed by default for months – in place, Friedman said: “We have not made that demand.”

Most countries consider Israeli settlements on land captured in the 1967 Middle East war to be a violation of international law. Trump has changed U.S. policy to withdraw such objections and the prospect of Israeli annexations have drawn widespread condemnation.

Palestinians say the settlements make a future state unviable. Israel cites security needs as well as biblical and historical ties to the land on which they are built.

“Any unilateral step is rejected whether it is taken before or after the election,” said Nabil Abu Rdainah, a spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. “Facts can’t be created on the ground and they will never become a reality.”

“The only thing we can accept is the Palestinian map on the 1967 borders,” Abu Rdainah added.

On Saturday, Netanyahu told an election rally that the mapping process with the Americans was already under way. “We’ve been waiting since 1967 and some people are making a big deal out of a few weeks,” he said, alluding to rightist rivals.

(Additional reporting by Maayan Lubell; Editing by Mark Potter)

Gunman wounds NYC police officer inside station hours after ambushing patrol officers

By Brendan O’Brien

(Reuters) – A gunman opened fire inside a New York City police station on Sunday, striking a lieutenant in the arm, some 12 hours after he had ambushed a patrol van in the same neighborhood, wounding an officer, police said.

The gunman was arrested at the police station. The two officers were being treated in hospital and were expected to fully recover from their wounds, officials said at a news conference.

“This was an attempt to assassinate two police officers … it was a premeditated effort to kill,” New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said. “An attack on a police officer is an attack on all of us.”

The gunman, whose name has not yet been released by authorities, entered the 41st Precinct headquarters in the Bronx borough just before 8 a.m. (1300 GMT), pulled out a .9mm hand gun and started firing at the front desk where several officers stood, officials said.

He then walked into an area next to the desk and fired several rounds at point blank range at several more officers and a civilian staffer, Police Commissioner Dermot Shea said.

“It is only by the grace of God and heroic actions of those inside the building who took him into custody that we are not talking about police officers murdered,” he said.

“This coward immediately laid down but only after he ran out of bullets,” Shea said.

A lieutenant, who returned fire, was shot in the upper left arm.

On Saturday night a uniformed police officer who was sitting in his police van with his partner was shot by the same gunman, police said. He walked up to the vehicle and began a conversation with the two officers in the vehicle before suddenly opening fire, striking one policeman in the chin and neck, police said.

The officers did not return fire. The wounded officer’s partner got in the driver’s seat and drove him to the hospital.

(Reporting by Brendan O’Brien in Chicago; editing by Grant McCool)

Palestinian and U.S. leaders blame each other for violence

By Stephen Farrell

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Palestinian and U.S. leaders blamed each other for a surge of violence, as mourners gathered in the occupied West Bank for the funeral of a Palestinian police officer shot dead during unrest, and Israel tightened security ahead of Friday Muslim prayers.

Tensions were high a day after two Palestinians were killed and 16 Israelis injured amid Palestinian anger at U.S. President Donald Trump’s Middle East peace plan, unveiled last week with Israel’s prime minister at his side.

There were sporadic clashes on Friday between Palestinian protesters and Israeli security forces near Azzun, where the funeral was held for the police officer killed in Jenin the previous day.

Palestinian authorities said he was killed by Israeli gunfire. Israeli officials did not comment, and Israeli media reported that he was shot by troops by mistake.

Palestinians also clashed with Israeli troops in Jericho and burned tyres in the West Bank village of Bil’in, and Palestinian medics said one protester had been critically wounded near Tulkarm.

“The Palestinian people will not allow the ‘Deal of the Century’ to pass,” said Mohammed Barakeh, waving a Palestinian flag in Bil’in.

“They are fighting for their national character and the independence of their country,” added Barakeh, a former Israeli lawmaker and member of Israel’s 21% Arab minority, many of whom identify with their Palestinian brethren in the West Bank and Gaza.

President Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority has rejected Trump’s peace plan, which would give Israel most of what it has sought during decades of conflict, including the disputed holy city of Jerusalem and nearly all the occupied land on which it has built settlements.

Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said Washington was to blame for the unrest since the plan was unveiled.

“Those who introduce plans for annexation and the legalizing of occupation and settlements are really responsible for deepening violence and counter-violence,” he said. Abbas would go to the U.N. Security Council with “a genuine peace plan”, Erekat said.

Trump’s senior adviser Jared Kushner, the principal architect of the U.S. plan, has repeatedly denounced the Palestinian leadership, a break from decades of diplomacy when Washington strove to appear as a neutral broker. On Thursday he blamed Abbas for the violence.

“I think he does have responsibility,” Kushner said after briefing United Nations Security Council ambassadors. “He calls for days of rage in response, and he said that before he even saw the plan.”

Israeli police said security chiefs had met late on Thursday and decided to increase security “across the country, with emphasis on Jerusalem”.

A police statement singled out the risk of trouble during Friday prayers at the Jerusalem holy site known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary.

Palestinians have long boycotted relations with the Trump administration, which they view as biased against them. Washington says its plan offers a path toward a Palestinian state, and blames the Palestinian leadership for rejecting it over unrealistic demands.

(Additional reporting by Ali Sawafta in Ramallah and Ari Rabinovitch in Jerusalem; Editing by Peter Graff and Hugh Lawson)

U.S. announces more coronavirus cases, details quarantine plans for returning travelers

By Julie Steenhuysen

CHICAGO (Reuters) – The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Monday announced a second case of transmission of the new coronavirus within the United States and provided more detailed plans on how it will handle travelers returning from China as the country works to limit the outbreak.

“We expect to see more cases of person-to-person spread,” Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said during a conference call that included confirmation of a handful of new cases, bringing the U.S. total to 11.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is making nearly $250 million in emergency funds available to cover the cost of the response, an agency spokesman said on Monday.

Some of that may be used to support screening and monitoring returning U.S. citizens from China who are exempt from the presidential proclamation issued on Friday suspending entry of foreign nationals who had visited China within the past 14 days.

The CDC outlined enhanced screening plans for family members of U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents returning from China, who may face a 14-day quarantine if they had been in Wuhan or the Hubei province of China, the epicenter of the epidemic.

Passengers arriving in the United States on commercial airlines will be directed to one of 11 U.S. airports for additional health assessments. If they show virus symptoms such as fever, U.S. citizens and those who are exempt will be transferred for medical evaluation, and will not be allowed to complete their travel plans.

“CDC is working with the states to determine where travelers will be quarantined,” Messonnier said.

Flights with U.S. government employees being evacuated by the State department will go to military bases. They will be under federal quarantine for 14 days from when they left Wuhan.

The CDC has sent additional teams to specific locations where the planes will arrive.

Those who do not have symptoms will be allowed to continue to their final destination, and will be asked to stay at home as much as possible and monitor their health for 14 days.

Where people will be quarantined may differ depending on the operational plans laid out by states. Some of the designated airports have military bases nearby, while some states have planned to use hotels.

“It is very localized depending on the state and local considerations,” Messonnier said. “We do not believe these people pose a risk to the communities where they are being temporarily housed. We are taking measures to minimize any exposure.”

HHS on Sunday notified Congress it may need to transfer $136 million to support efforts by the CDC, the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response and the Office of Global Affairs to respond to the outbreak, the agency confirmed on Monday.

That followed a Jan. 25 notice to Congress that the CDC would tap as much as $105 million from a rapid response reserve fund to cover the costs for enhanced screening, transportation, and monitoring of U.S. citizens arriving from China.

Of the five new U.S. cases announced on Monday, one is in Massachusetts and the other four in California. Four of the five had recently traveled to Wuhan, where the outbreak originated.

One of the patients in California was infected through close contact with someone in the same household who had been infected in China. It marked the second instance of person-to-person spread of the virus in the United States after such a case was announced last week in Illinois.

The agency said it is currently monitoring 82 people for potential infection with the virus.

(Reporting by Julie Steenhuysen in Chicago; additional reporting by Manas Mishra in Bangaluru; Editing by Bill Berkrot)

Top Senate Republican lashes out at Democrats over Trump impeachment

By Susan Cornwell and Makini Brice

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A day before the Senate is expected to acquit President Donald Trump in his impeachment trial, the chamber’s top Republican on Tuesday exhorted senators to clear Trump and stop Democrats’ “factional fever” from scorching America’s system of government.

But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s Democratic counterpart, Senator Chuck Schumer, said the president, not impeachment, was the threat to democracy in the United States.

The impeachment trial of the 45th U.S. president began on Jan. 16 and is winding to a close on Wednesday, when the deeply divided Senate is scheduled to vote on whether Trump should be removed from office. He appears assured of acquittal, with a two-thirds vote needed to remove him from office and his fellow Republicans occupying 53 of the Senate’s 100 seats.

Senators on Tuesday were delivering a series of speeches explaining how they will vote.

McConnell, who helped engineer a stripped-down trial with no witnesses or new evidence, lashed out during a speech on the Senate floor at the Democratic House of Representatives for pursuing impeachment.

The House impeached Trump on Dec. 18 on charges of abuse of power for asking Ukraine to investigate political rival Joe Biden and his son Hunter and obstruction of Congress for blocking testimony and documents sought in the investigation. The Constitution allows for the removal of a president for committing “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

“We must vote to reject the House abuse of power, vote to protect our institutions, vote to reject new precedents that would reduce the framers’ design to rubble, vote to keep factional fever from boiling over and scorching our republic,” McConnell said.

McConnell echoed the arguments made by Trump’s legal team that Democrats were seeking to annul the 2016 election in which Trump defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton.

“Washington Democrats think President Donald Trump committed a high crime or misdemeanor the moment – the moment – he defeated Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. That is the original sin of this presidency – that he won and they lost,” McConnell said. “Ever since, the nation has suffered through a grinding campaign against our norms and institutions from the same people who keep shouting that our norms and institutions need defending.”

McConnell called the two charges constitutionally incoherent, though he did disagree with the view offered by Trump’s legal team that a president cannot be impeached without a violation of statutory law.

Shortly after McConnell spoke, top Senate Democrat Schumer said Trump’s actions in the Ukraine matter were the true threat to America. Schumer said that for a president to “blackmail a foreign country to interfere in our elections gets at the very core of what our democracy is about.”

“If Americans believe that they don’t determine who is president, who is governor, who is senator, but some foreign country out of reach can join us on elections, that is the beginning of the end of democracy,” Schumer said on the Senate floor.

Trump has drawn almost uniform support among Republican senators though several have called his actions wrong and inappropriate.

THE NOVEMBER ELECTION

Trump is running for re-election in the Nov. 3 election. Former Vice President Biden is a leading contender for the Democratic nomination to challenge Trump. Besides aiming to unseat Trump, Democrats hope to keep their majority in the House and seek to seize the Senate from Republican control.

Trump is scheduled to deliver the annual State of the Union address to Congress in the House chamber on Tuesday night.

Any hints of fallout in the impeachment trial will be most closely watched in electoral districts and states closely divided between Republicans and Democrats and will play a pivotal role in November’s House and Senate races.

Any backlash against the impeachment drive could hurt some Democratic incumbents seeking re-election, while Republicans who have staunchly defended Trump could find themselves in a tough spot with their moderate constituents.

On Monday night, Republican U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski, a moderate, said she would vote to acquit Trump but also sharply criticized the president and lawmakers in both parties.

“The president’s behavior was shameful and wrong. His personal interests do not take precedent over those of this great nation,” Murkowski said on the Senate floor.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the top Democrat in Congress, said that even if the Senate votes to acquit the president as expected, Democrats have succeeded in uncovering Trump’s actions that they argue make him unfit for office or re-election.

“Whatever happens, he has been impeached forever. And now these senators, though they don’t have the courage to assign the appropriate penalty, at least are recognizing that he did something wrong,” Pelosi told the New York Times.

(Reporting by Susan Cornwell, David Morgan, Makini Brice, Richard Cowan, Lisa Lambert, Patricia Zengerle and Susan Heavey; Writing by Will Dunham; Editing by Howard Goller)

Iran to launch satellite in program that U.S. links to missiles

DUBAI (Reuters) – Iran will launch a satellite into orbit by the end of this week, a government minister said on Monday, as part of a fledging program that the United States says is a cover for ballistic missile development.

“We are not afraid of failure and we will not lose hope. With your prayers and trust in God, the Zafar satellite by the end of this week … will be heading toward an orbit of 530 km from Earth,” Iranian Minister of Information and Communications Technology Mohammad Javad Azari-Jahromi tweeted.

Iran had at least two failed satellite launches last year.

The United States fears long-range ballistic technology used to put satellites into orbit could also be used to launch nuclear warheads. Tehran denies that satellite activity is a cover for missile development and says it has never pursued the development of nuclear weapons.

The administration of U.S. President Donald Trump reimposed sanctions on Iran following Washington’s 2018 withdrawal from an international accord designed to curb Iran’s nuclear program.

Trump said the nuclear deal did not go far enough and did not include restrictions on Tehran’s missile program.

Tensions have reached the highest level in decades between Iran and the United States after Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani was killed in a U.S. drone strike on Jan. 3, prompting Iran to retaliate with a missile attack against a U.S. base in Iraq.

Iran launched its first satellite Omid (Hope) in 2009 and the Rasad (Observation) satellite was sent into orbit in June 2011. Tehran said in 2012 that it had successfully put its third domestically-made satellite Navid (Promise) into orbit.

(Reporting by Babak Dehghanpisheh; Editing by Alison Williams and Pravin Char)

Unaffordable rental housing may be ‘new normal’ in the United States

By Carey L. Biron

WASHINGTON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – A growing number of Americans cannot afford to pay their rent as rental property prices hit a record high, researchers said on Friday, amid an outcry over rising evictions and homelessness.

The number of U.S. households living in rentals also surged to 43.7 million in 2018 – up 21% from 2004 – a study by Harvard University found, as a growing share of older, larger families can no longer afford to buy their own homes.

“This is like nothing that we’ve seen,” said Whitney Airgood-Obrycki, the study’s lead author, pointing to the rising number of households who are cost-burdened – or spend more than 30% of their income on housing.

Some 21 million U.S. renters are cost-burdened, according to the report – accounting for almost half of all renters – in both urban and rural areas across the country, with minorities disproportionately affected.

“When we talk about cost burden, this could be the new normal,” Airgood-Obrycki, a researcher with Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The problem of unaffordable rental housing is a global one, according to World Bank, which found that the only affordable rentals in most fast-growing developing countries were insecure, in the informal sector and with poor living conditions.

About 65% of the U.S. population are homeowners, according to federal statistics, with most of the rest in rentals.

Since the 2008 recession, caused in part by a wave of homeowners unable to repay their mortgages, the number of cost-burdened renters has risen by 2.8 million, according to Apartment List, an online rental platform.

These people are forced to make difficult trade-offs.

“You might cut back on health care to pay for rent, or you might miss a rent payment, which could trigger eviction or homelessness,” Airgood-Obrycki said.

High-income renters have flooded the U.S. market, having either lost their homes or unable to afford to buy, leading to higher rents, the lowest vacancy rates since the mid-1980s and a spurt of rental construction tailored to them.

Households earning at least $75,000 per year accounted for three-quarters of the growth in renters since 2010 – up by 3.2 million – the Harvard study found.

In turn, the property prices for rental apartments have reached record highs, rising 150% between 2010 and late 2019.

“In the past decade, the lowest-income renters have seen a loss of more than 2 million apartments affordable to them and experienced increased evictions,” said Diane Yentel, chief executive of the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

“The report makes clear that the housing crisis is most acute for the lowest-income renters, particularly low-income black and Latino renters,” she said in emailed comments.

Millions of poor people who are eligible for housing subsidies have not received help as federal rental assistance programmes have grown by only about 1.5% annually in recent years, the Harvard report said.

(Reporting by Carey L. Biron, Editing by Katy Migiro. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s and LGBT+ rights, human trafficking, property rights, and climate change. Visit http://news.trust.org)

‘Do not travel to China’, says U.S. as virus deaths reach 213

By Brenda Goh and Muyu Xu

SHANGHAI/BEIJING (Reuters) – The United States, Japan and others tightened travel curbs to virus-hit China on Friday while businesses struggled with supply problems from an epidemic that has infected nearly 10,000 people and been declared a global emergency.

Russia, Britain and Italy all reported their first two cases, Rome declaring its own national emergency as it sought to reconstruct the itinerary of two infected Chinese tourists.

Deaths from the outbreak rose to 213, all within China where the coronavirus came from animals in central Wuhan city.

“Do not travel to China due to novel coronavirus first identified in Wuhan,” the U.S. State Department said, raising the warning for China to the same level as Afghanistan and Iraq.

Japan also advised citizens to put off non-urgent travel to China, while Bahrain recommended no travel to any country hit by the virus, and Iran urged a ban on all travelers from China.

Singapore, a major travel hub in Asia, stopped entry of passengers with a recent history of travel to China and also suspended visas for Chinese passport holders.

The ban extends to those just transiting Singapore.

With major fallout inevitable for the world’s No. 2 economy, global shares were heading for their biggest weekly losses since August on Friday, and oil and metals markets were showing even more brutal damage. [MKTS/GLOB]

The outbreak could “reverberate globally”, Moody’s said.

In the latest impact to big name corporations, South Korea’s Hyundai Motor said it planned to halt production of a sport utility vehicle this weekend to cope with a supply disruption caused by the outbreak. Sangyong Motor said it would idle its plant in the South Korean city of Pyeongtaek from Feb. 4-12 for the same reason.

Home appliance maker Electrolux issued a similar warning. And French carmaker PSA Peugeot Citroen said its three plants in Wuhan will remain closed until mid-February.

BEIJING: “WE WILL WIN”

After holding off as the crisis grew, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Thursday the epidemic in China now constituted a public health emergency of international concern.

In response, Beijing said it had taken “the most comprehensive and rigorous prevention and control measures”.

“We have full confidence and capability to win this fight,” added foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying.

The roughly 60 million residents of Hubei province, where Wuhan is the capital, have had movements curbed to try and slow the spread. But some people were leaving and entering the area by foot on a bridge over the Yangtze river, a Reuters witness said, and infections have jumped in two cities flanking Wuhan.

Wuhan’s Communist Party chief said the city should have acted earlier to contain the virus.

The number of confirmed cases in China has risen beyond 9,800, Beijing’s envoy to the United Nations in Vienna said.

More than 130 cases have been reported in at least 24 other countries and regions. German cases rose to six with the infection of a child.

The WHO has reported at least eight cases of human-to-human transmission – as opposed to people coming infected from China – in four countries: the United States, Germany, Japan and Vietnam. Thailand said it too had such a case.

EVACUATION FLIGHTS

Amid the rising public alarm, which has also brought a wave of anti-China sentiment around the world, various major airlines have stopped flying to mainland China, including Air France KLM SA, British Airways, Lufthansa and Virgin Atlantic [VA.UL]. Others have cut flights.

Russia said all direct flights to China would be halted on Friday, with the exception of national airline Aeroflot.

Governments around the world are evacuating citizens from Hubei and putting them in quarantine. A plane with 83 British and 27 foreign nationals landed in Britain on Friday.

Japan, with 14 confirmed cases, has sent three flights to bring citizens home. The first of four planned flights taking South Koreans home landed on Friday.

Seeking to prevent panic, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has commended China for its efforts and said the global health body was not recommending curbs on travel or trade with Beijing.

A WHO spokesman said keeping borders open actually helped by preventing illegal or unofficial crossings.

China’s statistics show just over 2% of infected people have died, suggesting the virus is less deadly than the 2002-2003 outbreak of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).

But economists fear its impact could be bigger than SARS, which killed about 800 people at an estimated cost of $33 billion to the global economy, since China’s share of the world economy is now far greater.

There was rare good news, however, for movie fans as cinema attendance plummets across China: martial arts film “Enter the Fat Dragon” was to premiere via video streaming on Saturday, its makers said, after dropping plans for a theater debut.

(GRAPHIC: Tracking the novel coronavirus – https://graphics.reuters.com/CHINA-HEALTH-MAP/0100B59S39E/index.html)

(Reporting by Brenda Goh in Shanghai, Muyu Xu and Cate Cadell in Beijing; Martin Pollard in Jiujiang, Felix Tam and Clare Jim in Hong Kong; John Geddie and Aradhana Aravindan in Singapore; Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva; Michelle Nichols at the U.N.; Gilles Guillaume in Paris; Dylan Martinez in Brize Norton; Maria Tsvetkova in Moscow; David Shepardson in Washington; Writing by Michael Perry and Nick Macfie; Editing by Timothy Heritage and Andrew Cawthorne)

 

WHO declares global emergency as China virus death toll reaches 170

By Lusha Zhang and Stephanie Nebehay

BEIJING/GENEVA (Reuters) – The World Health Organization (WHO) said on Thursday it was declaring the China coronavirus outbreak that has killed 170 people in China a global emergency, as cases spread to 18 countries.

The United States reported its first case of person-to-person transmission. Experts say cases of person-to-person transmission – which have also been detected outside China in Germany, Vietnam, and Japan – are especially concerning because they suggest greater potential for the virus to spread further.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO director-general, told a news conference in Geneva that recent weeks have witnessed an unprecedented outbreak which has been met by an unprecedented response.

“Let me be clear, this declaration is not a vote of no confidence in China,” he said. “Our greatest concern is the potential for the virus to spread to countries with weaker health systems.”

The declaration of a global emergency triggers recommendations to all countries. It is aimed at preventing or reducing cross-border spread of disease.

Tedros said the WHO was not recommending limiting trade or travel to China due to the outbreak, however.

The vast majority of the more than 7,800 cases detected globally, according to the latest WHO data, have been in China, where the virus originated in an illegal wildlife market in the city of Wuhan.

But nearly 100 cases have emerged in other countries, spurring cuts to travel, outbreaks of anti-China sentiment in some places and a surge in demand for protective face masks.

Officials from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the flu-like virus was confirmed in a man in Illinois, bringing the total number of U.S. cases to six. The man’s wife, who was also infected, had previously travelled to China, but he had not.

TIGHTER CONTAINMENT

 

A man wearing a face mask pushes his luggage at a footbridge near Beijing Railway Station as the country is hit by an outbreak of the new coronavirus, in Beijing, China January 30, 2020. REUTERS/Carlos Garcia

The WHO held off twice last week from declaring a global emergency. Thursday’s move will trigger tighter containment and information-sharing guidelines, but may disappoint Beijing, which had expressed confidence it can beat the “devil” virus.

Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, said the WHO decision was “absolutely right”.

“Declaration of an international emergency will undoubtedly sharpen governments’ focus on protecting citizens,” Farrar said. The needed public health measures would be a “challenge” for all countries, but would be especially difficult for lower-income countries, he added.

The virus has spread quickly since the WHO’s Emergency Committee last met a week ago. But there has been no death reported outside China and neither has the virus emerged in Africa.

“The vast majority of cases outside China have a history of travel to Wuhan or history of contact with someone with a travel history to Wuhan,” said Ter

ECONOMIC IMPACT

The total number of infections has already surpassed the total in the 2002-2003 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) epidemic.

SARS also came from China, killing about 800 people and costing the global economy an estimated $33 billion.

Economists fear the impact could be bigger this time as China now accounts for a larger share of the world economy. Markets have been spooked since news of the virus emerged earlier this month. [MKTS/GLOB]

Companies have also been rattled and Alphabet Inc’s Google and Sweden’s IKEA were the latest big names to close China operations. South Korea’s Samsung Electronics Co Ltd extended its Lunar New Year holiday closure for some Chinese production facilities.

Airlines to suspend flights to mainland China include Air France, Lufthansa, Air Canada, American Airlines and British Airways.

Thousands of factory workers currently on Lunar New Year holidays may struggle to get back to work next week due to travel restrictions.

China dominated U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell’s news conference on Wednesday. “When China’s economy slows down we do feel that,” he said.

(Reporting by Pei Li, Gabriel Crossley, Cate Cadell, Kevin Yao and Muyu Xu in Beijing; Samuel Shen and David Stanway in Shanghai; Josh Smith, Sangmi Cha and Joyce Lee in Seoul, Chang-Ran Kim in Tokyo and Se Young Lee; Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva; Kate Kelland in London; Crispian Balmer in Rome; Thu Thu Aung in Yangon; Ben Blanchard in Taipei; Writing by Alex Richardson and Rosalba O’Brien; Editing by Frances Kerry and Lisa Shumaker)

U.S. reports its first case of person-to-person coronavirus spread

U.S. reports its first case of person-to-person coronavirus spread
(Reuters) – The first U.S. incident of person-to-person spread of the new coronavirus that emerged in Wuhan, China has been identified in Illinois, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said on Thursday.

The confirmed case brings the total number of U.S. patients infected with the fast-spreading virus to six.

The infected man is the husband the Illinois woman who had previously traveled to China and was confirmed as having the virus. Both patients are in their 60s, officials said on a conference call.

He recently began showing symptoms and was immediately hospitalized, an Illinois health official said.

The Illinois Department of Public Health said it is currently tracking 21 people who had contact with the couple.

“If additional cases are confirmed, we will make sure to share that information as quickly as possible,” said Dr. Ngozi Ezike, director of the Illinois health department.

“The general public is believed to be at low risk,” she added.

The new virus, like Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) which also originated in China, is a member of the coronavirus family that also includes the common cold.

There have been nearly 8,000 reported cases of the virus and at least 170 deaths, the vast majority in and around Wuhan, where it is believed to have originated in a market that traded in illegal wildlife.

Symptoms include fever, cough and breathing difficulty. In sever cases, it can lead to pneumonia and death.

(Reporting By Deena Beasley in Los Angeles and Manas Mishra in Bangaluru; Editing by Bill Berkrot)