World News

By Natalie Grover

LONDON (Reuters) – Outbreaks of endemic diseases such as monkeypox and lassa fever are becoming more persistent and frequent, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) emergencies director, Mike Ryan, warned on Wednesday.

As climate change contributes to rapidly changing weather conditions like drought, animals and human are changing their behaviour, including food-seeking habits. As a result of this “ecologic fragility”, pathogens that typically circulate in animals are increasingly jumping into humans, he said.

“Unfortunately, that ability to amplify that disease and move it on within our communities is increasing – so both disease emergence and disease amplification factors have increased.”

For instance, there is an upward trend in cases of Lassa fever, an acute viral illness spread by rodents endemic to Africa, he said.

“We used to have three to five years between Ebola outbreaks at least, now it’s lucky if we have three to five months,” he added.

“So there’s definitely ecological pressure in the system.”

His commentary comes as cases of monkeypox continue to rise outside Africa, where the pathogen is endemic.

On Wednesday, the WHO said it had so far received reports of more than 550 confirmed cases of the viral disease from 30 countries outside of Africa since the first report in early May.

Meanwhile, although COVID-19 cases are declining globally, there are regions such as the Americas with concerning trends, WHO director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus highlighted in a briefing on Wednesday.

In North Korea, officials suspect there are over 3.7 million cases of fevered people, that could be COVID, as the country battles against its first ever COVID outbreak. It declared a state of emergency and imposed a nationwide lockdown last month.

Ryan said although the WHO had offered the country support in terms of vaccines, treatments and other medical supplies, it had encountered problems in securing access to raw data that would reflect the situation on the ground.

The experience of COVID has triggered the WHO to kickstart a process to draft and negotiate an international treaty to strengthen pandemic prevention, preparedness and response.

Pandemics, like climate change, affect every citizen on the planet, said Ryan.

“We’ve seen the difficulties we faced in this pandemic – we may face a more severe pandemic in the future and we need to be a hell of a lot better prepared than we are now,” said Ryan.

“We need to establish the playbook for how we’re going to prepare and how we’re going to respond together. That is not about sovereignty. That’s about responsibility.”

(Reporting by Natalie Grover in London; Twitter @NatalieGrover Editing by Catherine Evans and Mark Potter)

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HANOI (Reuters) – Vietnam said on Wednesday it had successfully developed a vaccine to administer to pigs to fight African swine fever, with the aim of becoming the first country to commercially produce and export it.

African swine fever, one of the most devastating livestock diseases, was first detected in Vietnam in February 2019 and forced the country to cull around 20% of its hog herd last year.

It originated in Africa before spreading to Europe and Asia and has killed hundreds of millions of pigs globally. African swine fever is harmless to humans.

“This is a milestone of the veterinary industry,” deputy agriculture minister Phung Duc Tien said in a statement.

“With immunity lasting six months, the vaccine will be a shield for hog-raising industry and pig production globally.”

The vaccine has been in development since November 2019 in partnership with United States experts, with five clinical trials held.

Its safety and efficacy was confirmed by the Agricultural Research Service under the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Tien said.

“This success opens great expectations and the room to export African swine fever vaccine produced in Vietnam is huge,” Tien added.

He did not provide a timeframe for when the vaccine could be exported or estimate of Vietnam’s production capacity.

Although the swine fever outbreak has subsided in Vietnam, allowing farmers to rebuild hog herds, the virus is still hurting farms in some countries.

(Reporting by Phuong Nguyen; Editing by Martin Petty)

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By Jorgelina do Rosario

LONDON (Reuters) – In 1918, Soviet revolutionary Leon Trotsky told Western creditors aghast at the Bolsheviks’ repudiation of Russia’s external debt: “Gentlemen, you were warned.”

He reminded them that dismissal of Tsarist-era debt had been a key manifesto of the failed uprising in 1905. More than a century later, Russia stands on the brink of another default but this time there was no warning.

Few expected the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine to elicit such a ferocious response from the West, which has all but severed Russia from global financial and payment systems.

These are Russia’s major debt events over the past century:

1918: REPUDIATION

Just before the 1917 revolution, Russia was the world’s largest net international debtor, having borrowed heavily to finance industrialisation and railways.

But seeing the Tsarist industrialisation drive as failing the working class, the Bolsheviks repudiated all foreign debt.

“They said ‘we are not paying and even if we could, we wouldn’t pay.’ And that was a political statement,” said Hassan Malik, senior sovereign analyst at Loomis Sayles and the author of the book “Bankers and Bolsheviks: International Finance and the Russian Revolution”.

Despite Trotsky’s reminder, the default shocked the world, especially France, whose banks and citizens suffered massive losses.

“Investors didn’t take it seriously because they thought it would be so self-harmful,” Malik said, estimating the debt to be worth at least $500 billion at 2020 prices and possibly more.

It took until the mid-1980s for Moscow to recognise some of that debt.

1991: USSR TO RUSSIA

Following the break-up of the USSR in 1991, Russia stopped servicing part of the overseas debt it inherited from former Soviet states.

Andrey Vavilov, Russia’s deputy finance minister between 1994 and 1997, said the Russian Federation held around $105 billion in Soviet-era debt at the end of 1992, with its own debt amounting to $2.8 billion.

For accepting the inherited debt, the Paris Club recognised Russia as a creditor nation, Vavilov wrote in his book “The Russian Public Debt and Financial Meltdowns”. And as Russia agreed with the group of nations to restructure $28 billion in debt in 1996, it was allowed to shift major Soviet-era debt payments to the next decade.

But with a financial crisis around the corner, it would take until 2017 to clear the Communist-era arrears.

1998: ROUBLE DEBT DEFAULT

By 1997, crashing oil prices slashed Russian export revenues. External debt, which stood near 50% of GDP in 1995, had swelled by 1998 to 77%, according to Vavilov, who blamed hefty IMF/World Bank loans for contributing to the pile.

Russia raised very little tax revenue and relied on short-term Treasury bills known as GKO to cover expenditure. But it found it harder and harder to roll these over and was soon spending ever-increasing amounts to defend the rouble.

“The more the government insisted that it would stand by the currency and repay its debts, the more investors concluded it was time to sell,” said Chris Miller in his book “Putinomics: Power and Money in Resurgent Russia”.

A month before the default, the IMF put together a $22.6 billion aid package, but “the market was expecting the announcement of an additional $20 billion,” Martin Gilman, the IMF representative in Moscow at the time, wrote in his book “No Precedent, No Plan: Inside Russia’s 1998 Default”.

On Aug. 17, 1998, Russia threw in the towel, devaluing the rouble, announcing it could no longer pay rouble debt and introducing a three-month moratorium on some external debt.

Russian banks that had invested heavily in T-bills and had extensive foreign currency exposure soon went under.

2022: A FORCED DEFAULT

Through dire financial straits in 1998, Moscow made sure to continue Eurobond payments. Now it has plenty of cash but may not dodge default.

To sidestep sanctions, the Kremlin is suggesting foreign creditors open Russian bank accounts to receive payments in alternative currencies to the dollar.

Non-U.S. investors can in theory agree, but U.S. bondholders cannot, after a U.S. Treasury licence allowing them to accept Russian payments expired in May.

Miller, author of “Putinomics”, said Russia would fight tooth and nail to dodge a Eurobond default.

“The officials on the central bank and the finance ministry have built their careers on restabilising Russia as a creditor that can be trusted in international markets,” he said.

“It’s built into their identity to make sure a default doesn’t happen again.”

(Reporting by Jorgelina do Rosario, editing by Sujata Rao and Nick Macfie)

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LONDON (Reuters) – The Kremlin said on Wednesday the world could be on the verge of a major food crisis, blaming “illegal restrictions” imposed on Russia by Western countries and decisions by Ukrainian authorities.

More than three months since invading Ukraine, Russia has seized large parts of its neighbour’s coast and is blockading its ports, but is trying to pin the blame for the lack of grain shipments on Western sanctions and on Kyiv itself.

“We are potentially on the verge of a very deep food crisis linked to the introduction of illegal restrictions against us and the actions of Ukrainian authorities who have mined the path to the Black Sea and are not shipping grain from there despite Russia not impeding in any way,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on a conference call.

(Reporting by Reuters)

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By Pavel Polityuk and Max Hunder

KYIV (Reuters) – Ukraine said on Tuesday that Russia had taken control of most of the eastern industrial city of Sievierodonetsk, a bombed-out wasteland whose capture Moscow has made the principal objective of its invasion.

Russia’s all-out assault on the city in Ukraine’s Luhansk province has been met by tough resistance from Ukrainian forces. Russian-backed separatists in Luhansk acknowledged that capturing the city was taking longer than hoped, despite one of the biggest ground attacks of the three-month-long war.

After failing to capture the Ukrainian capital Kyiv and being driven out of northern Ukraine, a Russian victory in Sievierodonetsk and across the Siverskyi Donets river in Lysychansk would bring full control of Luhansk, one of two eastern provinces Moscow claims on behalf of separatists.

Western military analysts say Moscow has drained manpower and firepower from other parts of the eastern front to concentrate on Sievierodonetsk, hoping a massive offensive will secure surrounding Luhansk province for separatist proxies.

Luhansk’s regional governor, Serhiy Gaidai, said nearly all critical infrastructure in Sievierodonetsk had been destroyed and 60% of residential property damaged beyond repair.

“Most of Sievierodonetsk is under the control of the Russians. The town is not surrounded and the prerequisites for it to be are not in place,” Gaidai said. Russian shelling had made it impossible to deliver aid or evacuate people, he added.

A pro-Moscow separatist leader said that fighting was raging in the city but that Russian proxies had advanced slower than expected to “maintain the city’s infrastructure” and exercise caution around its chemical factories.

“We can say already that a third of Sievierodonetsk is already under our control,” Russia’s TASS state news agency quoted Leonid Pasechnik, the leader of the pro-Moscow Luhansk People’s Republic, as saying.

Gaidai warned Sievierodonetsk residents not to leave bomb shelters due to what he said was a Russian air strike on a nitric acid tank. The Luhansk People’s Republic’s police force said Ukraine’s forces had damaged it. Ukraine and Russian-backed separatists traded accusations over a similar incident in April.

‘HURLING MEN AND MUNITIONS’

Russian President Vladimir Putin “is now hurling men and munitions” at Sievierodonetsk, “as if taking it would win the war for the Kremlin. He is wrong,” the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War wrote this week.

Thousands of residents remain trapped in the city. Russian forces were advancing towards its centre, but slowly, regional governor Gaidai said. Russia’s advance could force Ukrainian troops to retreat across the river to Lysychansk, he added.

Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council aid agency which had long operated out of Sievierodonetsk, said he was “horrified” by its destruction.

Up to 12,000 civilians remain caught in crossfire, without sufficient access to water, food, medicine or electricity, Egeland said.

“The near-constant bombardment is forcing civilians to seek refuge in bomb shelters and basements, with only few precious opportunities for those trying to escape,” he said.

There were few reports of major shifts elsewhere on the battlefield. In the south, Ukraine claimed to have pushed back Russian forces to the border of Russian-held Kherson province.

Moscow took control of Kherson in March. Residents there have staged protests against Russian occupation. Mobile and internet access in Kherson were shut down on Tuesday, Ukrainian officials said, blaming Russia for disconnecting cables.

There was no immediate Russian comment on the events in Kherson. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said troops there were fighting on “despite the fact the Russian army has a significant advantage in terms of equipment and numbers.”

WEAPONS PACKAGE, OIL BAN

Kyiv says weapons sent by the United States and Europe since the start of the invasion have helped them fend off Russian gains. Zelenskiy has urged more weapons while lambasting the European Union, which agreed overnight to cut imports of Russian oil, for not sanctioning energy from Moscow sooner.

U.S. President Joe Biden and his top aides are in the final stages of preparing a new weapons package for Ukraine with an announcement expected soon, possibly as early as Wednesday.

The White House says that while Biden is still considering sending longer-range rocket systems to Ukraine, he does not want them used to launch attacks inside Russia, which U.S. officials fear could broaden the war.

Moscow, responding to the EU oil embargo, widened its gas cuts to Europe in a move that pushed up prices and ratcheted up its economic battle with Brussels.

The EU said it will ban imports of Russian oil by sea. Officials said that would halt two-thirds of Russia’s oil exports to Europe at first, and 90% by the end of this year as

Putin launched his “special operation” in February to disarm and “denazify” Ukraine. Ukraine and its Western allies call this a baseless pretext for a war to seize territory.

Ukraine accuses Moscow of war crimes on a huge scale, flattening cities and killing and raping civilians. Russia denies the accusations.

In the second war crimes trial to be held in Ukraine, two Russian soldiers were jailed on Tuesday for 11-1/2 years after pleading guilty to shelling civilian targets.

(Reporting by Reuters bureaux; Writing by Peter Graff, Nick Macfie and Rami Ayyub; Editing by Alison Williams, Tomasz Janowski and Grant McCool)

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By Jeff Mason and Steve Holland

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President Joe Biden and his team are still considering the sending of longer-range rocket systems to Ukraine but do not want them used to launch attacks inside Russian territory, the White House said on Tuesday.

U.S. officials said Biden and his national security aides are in the final stages of preparing a new weapons package for Ukraine with an announcement expected soon, possibly as early as Wednesday.

Ukrainian officials have been asking allies for longer-range systems including the Multiple Launch Rocket System, or MLRS, that can fire a barrage of rockets hundreds of miles away, in the hopes of turning the tide in the three-month-long war.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said this system is under consideration.

“But as the president said, we won’t be sending long-range rockets for use beyond the battlefield in Ukraine,” she said. Other U.S. officials have said Biden does not want them launched into Russian territory to avoid broadening the Ukraine war.

Biden on Tuesday told reporters that “we’re not going to send to Ukraine rocket systems that strike into Russia.”

He did not rule out providing any specific weapons system, but instead appeared to be placing conditions on how they could be used. Biden and his team are working on a new package of military equipment using some of the money from a $40 million budget appropriation approved by the U.S. Congress.

The MLRS was under consideration, but nothing with long-range strike capabilities outside of battlefield use, a senior administration official said.

Biden wants to help Ukraine defend itself but has been opposed to providing weapons that Ukraine could use to attack Russia.

Thousands of people have been killed in Ukraine and millions more displaced since the Russian invasion on Feb. 24, which Moscow calls a “special military operation” to “denazify” its neighbor. Ukraine and its Western allies call this a baseless pretext for a war to seize territory.

The West has been increasingly willing to give Ukraine longer-range weaponry, including M777 howitzers, as its force battle Russians with more success than intelligence officials had predicted.

But U.S. intelligence has also warned about growing risks, particularly given a mismatch between Russian President Vladimir Putin’s apparent ambitions and the performance of his military.

Ukraine has started receiving Harpoon anti-ship missiles from Denmark and self-propelled howitzers from the United States, Ukrainian Defence Minister Oleksiy Reznikov said on Saturday.

(Reporting by Jeff Mason and Steve Holland; editing by Grant McCool)

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PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — Haiti’s government has nominated a fifth judge to oversee the investigation into the killing of President Jovenel Moïse, magistrate Bernard Saint-Vil told The Associated Press on Tuesday.

It’s not clear yet whether Judge Walther Wesser Voltaire would accept the nomination. He could not be immediately reached for comment.

Wesser’s appointment comes as the investigation into the July 7 shooting at the former president’s private home stalls amid a high turnover of judges.

The previous nominee, judge Chavannes Étienne, told the AP in February that his family was pressuring him not to take the case because they feared for his life.

Étienne was expected to replace Garry Orélien, who had requested more time to probe the case, but Saint-Vil refused to grant an extension.

Orélien had replaced judge Mathieu Chanlatte, whose resignation was announced last August. He cited unspecified personal reasons but left the position a day after one of his assistants died in unclear circumstances.

More than 40 suspects have been arrested in the slaying, including at least 18 Colombian soldiers and 20 Haitian police officers as the investigation continues.

Three other suspects, including a former Haitian senator, have been extradited to the U.S. where they face federal charges including conspiring to commit murder or kidnapping outside the United States and providing material support resulting in death, knowing or intending that such material support would be used to prepare for or carry out the conspiracy to kill or kidnap.

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BEIRUT (Reuters) – Lebanese Shi’ite Muslim politician Nabih Berri was reelected parliament speaker on Tuesday, extending his tenure in a post he has held since 1992.

Here is some background on his career:

CIVIL WAR

Berri, 84, has been head of the Shi’ite Amal Movement since 1980. Throughout Lebanon’s 1975-90 civil war, he led Amal through battles with many of the conflict’s other main parties. He rose to international prominence in 1985 when he helped negotiate the release of 39 Americans held hostage in Beirut by Shi’ite militants who hijacked a TWA airliner.

HEZBOLLAH ALLY

He emerged from the war as one of Lebanon’s most powerful leaders, his influence underpinned by close ties to Damascus – which dominated Beirut from 1990 to 2005 – and to the heavily armed, Iran-backed Shi’ite group Hezbollah.

Berri has moved in political lockstep with Hezbollah for years and supports its possession of arms. Amal and Hezbollah dominate Shi’ite representation in Lebanon’s sectarian system, in which state posts are divided among confessional groups.

CLOUT IN FINANCIAL SYSTEM

He has exercised significant influence over the financial policies of a state in economic crisis since 2019 – the result of decades of state corruption and mismanagement. His right-hand-man Ali Hassan Khalil was finance minister from 2014 until 2020, and Berri had a decisive say over the choice of Khalil’s two successors since then.

Berri supported Lebanon’s decision to default on its sovereign debt in 2020, and has backed veteran central bank governor Riad Salameh, who has come under fire over the crisis.

Amal was one of several factions that torpedoed a financial recovery plan drawn up by government in 2020. Its ministers also voted against the cabinet’s recovery roadmap in May 2022, although it passed.

SUPPORT AND OPPOSITION

His supporters in the Shi’ite community credit him with helping to improve their standing in a system that had been skewed in favour of other groups after independence in 1943.

But along with other Lebanese leaders, Berri was a focal point of protester anger during unprecedented, nationwide demonstrations in 2019, reflecting widespread outrage at corruption, sectarianism and bad governance.

NO SUCCESSOR

Born in 1938 in Sierra Leone to an emigrant merchant family from south Lebanon, he was raised in Lebanon and was active in politics by the time he was in university. He divorced his first wife, Laila, during the war and his second wife, Randa, became a public figure. He has had 10 children in total, but has broken with Lebanon’s tradition of dynastic politics by not appointing any of them as his political successor.

(Writing by Tom Perry; Editing by Maya Gebeily and Raissa Kasolowsky)

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By Robin Emmott and Kate Abnett

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – European Union leaders handed Hungary concessions to agree an oil embargo on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, sealing a deal in the wee hours on Tuesday that aims to cut 90% of Russia’s crude imports into the bloc by the end of the year.

By making a promise that the EU’s embargo excludes the pipeline that landlocked Hungary relies on for Russian oil, the bloc aims to reduce Moscow’s income to finance the war it launched more than three months ago in Ukraine.

“It’s a fair compromise … this was the best we could get,” Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas told reporters as she arrived for the second day of an EU summit, where leaders will now discuss ways to mitigate soaring energy prices.

Oil prices extended a bull run after the EU’s agreement, stoking concern about inflation, which was ran at a record high of 8.1 percent year-on-year in euro zone countries this month, Eurostat said on Tuesday.

Leaders will ask the EU’s executive Commission to examine temporary price caps and work on potential reforms to Europe’s electricity market – a move backed by countries including Spain and Greece, but which countries including Germany have opposed.

They are also set to endorse a Commission’s plan to wean itself off all Russian fossil fuels through a faster rollout of renewable energy, improvements in saving energy, and more investments in energy infrastructure.

And they will call for better contingency planning in case of further gas supply shocks. Moscow on Wednesday cut gas supplies to the Netherlands for refusing to comply with a demand to pay for gas in roubles, having already cut off Poland, Bulgaria and Finland.

HUNGARIAN DEMANDS

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, fresh from re-election and now one of the bloc’s longest-serving leaders, repeated that a full embargo would have been an “atomic bomb” for his country’s economy.

“It would have been unbearable for us to operate the Hungarian economy with the more expensive (non-Russian) oil … this would have amounted to an atomic bomb but we have managed to avoid that,” Orban said in a video posted on Facebook.

The embargo – once legally imposed – will hit seaborne shipments of Russian oil and encompass most imports from Russia once Poland and Germany stop buying via pipeline by the end of 2022.

The remaining 10% will be temporarily exempt from the embargo so that Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic have access via the Druzhba pipeline from Russia.

Latvian Prime Minister Krisjanis Karins said keeping the EU united was the prime goal, despite effectively giving into the demands of Hungary, a member state that rights groups say is increasingly authoritarian and combative vis-à-vis the bloc.

“The important news is that the EU is still united in its purpose; the purpose is to stop Russia’s aggressive war in Ukraine,” Karins said.

RUSSIAN GAS NEXT TARGET?

While there are still details to be thrashed out, the oil embargo deal follows an earlier ban on Russian coal and allows the bloc to impose a sixth round of sanctions that includes cutting Russia’s biggest bank, Sberbank, from the SWIFT international system.

Targeting Russian natural gas supplies looked set to be the EU’s next diplomatic battleground. But while several countries want work to begin on a seventh round of sanctions, Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer said: “Gas can’t be part of next sanctions.”

Europe is heavily dependent on Russian gas, which explains why it has been left out of EU sanctions so far. The EU this month agreed a law requiring countries to fill gas storage to reach at least 80% ahead of next winter, in a bid to create a buffer against supply disruptions.

EU gas storage is currently 46% full.

“Russian oil is much easier to compensate … gas is completely different, which is why a gas embargo will not be an issue in the next sanctions package,” Nehammer said.

(Additional reporting by Gabriela Baczynska, Sabine Siebold, John Chalmers, Bart Meijer; Writing by Robin Emmott and Kate Abnett; Editing by Ingrid Melander and John Chalmers)

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(Reuters) -Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy visited troops on the frontline in Ukraine’s northeastern Kharkiv region on Sunday, his first official appearance outside the Kyiv region since the start of Russia’s invasion on Feb. 24.

“You risk your lives for us all and for our country,” the President’s office website cited him as telling the soldiers, adding that he handed out commendations and gifts.

Zelenskiy’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, wrote on the Telegram app that the president had also visited Ukraine’s second-largest city of Kharkiv.

Yermak said Zelenskiy toured destroyed residential buildings, noting that their replacements had to be built with bomb shelters in place.

The president’s chief of staff added that 31% of Kharkiv region’s territory was currently occupied by Russia, and a further 5% had been taken back by Ukraine having been occupied earlier.

(Reporting by Max Hunder; Editing by Emelia Sithole-Matarise and Nick Macfie)

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