Author Archives: Reuters News Agency

Tennessee supermarket shooting leaves 2 dead, including gunman, 12 injured

(Reuters) – One person was killed and at least 12 were injured when a lone gunman opened fire on Thursday at a supermarket in suburban Memphis, Tennessee, before the suspect was found dead from an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound, the police chief said.

Law enforcement officers swarmed to the scene just after the shooting unfolded at a Kroger grocery store in Collierville, Tennessee, and began helping victims and others found hiding inside the supermarket, chief Dale Lane told reporters.

“We found people hiding in freezers and in locked offices,” Lane said.

The gunman, who was believed to have acted alone, was found dead in a parking lot outside the store, Lane said. Local media reported the suspect’s body was discovered inside his vehicle.

“We are waiting for some special equipment to search that vehicle as well as the property that is on him,” Lane said about two hours after the shooting, which erupted at about 1:30 p.m. local time.

He called the gun violence “the most horrific event that has occurred in Collierville history.” The town is located about 30 miles (50 km) east of Memphis in southwestern Tennessee.

No immediate explanation for a possible motive was offered by authorities.

Lane said some of the surviving victims sustained “very serious” injuries. All were taken to area hospitals, he said.

(Reporting by Peter Szekely and Barbara Goldberg in New York; Writing and additional reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Aurora Ellis and Sonya Hepinstall)

Regulators issue standards to prevent another Texas grid freeze

By Timothy Gardner

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. and North American energy regulators on Thursday issued recommendations and mandatory electric reliability standards for utilities they hope will prevent a repeat of February’s deadly power outages in Texas during a deep freeze.

The freeze left 4.5 million without power over several days in the state, killing more than 100 people.

“I cannot, and will not allow this to become yet another report that serves no purpose other than to gather dust on the shelf,” Rich Glick, chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) said about the preliminary recommendations and standards the regulators expect to finalize in November.

FERC and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) released the recommendations that include revisions of mandatory reliability standards. The revisions require power utilities to identify and protect cold-weather critical components, build new or retrofit existing units to operate at specific conditions based on extreme temperature and weather data, and develop corrective plans for those that suffer freeze-related outages.

FERC does not have jurisdiction over the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the operator of the Texas grid. But Jim Robb, president and CEO of NERC, said his organization has jurisdiction in Texas over reliability matters.

In 2011, FERC probed ways to protect the Texas grid from power outages after a cold snap that was milder than the most recent one. Its recommendations included winterization of natural gas and other installations. Texas authorities never implemented those recommendations, leaving its grid vulnerable.

Texas regulators have been working on their own ways to protect the grid from extreme weather.

“The work that the team has done here reflects things that would be additive to what Texas has been working on and not in conflict with,” Robb told reporters.

ERCOT and the Texas Public Utilities Commission, which regulates the state’s grid, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

(Reporting by Timothy Gardner; additional reporting by Scott Disavino; Editing by David Gregorio)

U.S. CDC advisers recommend COVID-19 vaccine boosters for ages 65 and older, those at high risk

By Michael Erman and Manojna Maddipatla

(Reuters) – A U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) advisory panel on Thursday recommended a booster shot of the Pfizer and BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for Americans aged 65 and older and some adults with underlying medical conditions that put them at risk of severe disease.

The panel declined to recommend boosters for adults ages 18 to 64 who live or work in institutions with high risk of contracting COVID-19, based on individual risk, such as healthcare workers, teachers and residents of homeless shelters and prisons. Some panel members cited the difficulty of implementing such a proposal.

Still, the vote by the group, following U.S. Food and Drug Administration authorization, clears the way for a booster rollout to begin as soon as this week for millions of people who had their second dose of the Pfizer shot at least six months ago.

The CDC said that some 26 million people in the United States received the second Pfizer/BioNTech shot at least six months ago, including 13 million age 65 or older.

(Reporting by Manojna Maddipatla in Bengaluru and Michael Erman in New Jersey; Editing by Bill Berkrot)

Abortion providers ask U.S. Supreme Court to intervene in challenge to Texas law

By Andrew Chung

(Reuters) -Abortion providers in Texas on Thursday asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene on an urgent basis in their challenge to a state law imposing a near-total ban on abortion.

The providers asked the justices to hear their case before lower courts have finished ruling on the dispute because of the “great harm the ban is causing.” The Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, this month refused to block the law, which bans abortion after six weeks of pregnancy.

The Texas law is unusual in that it gives private citizens the power to enforce it by enabling them to sue anyone who assists a woman in getting an abortion past the six-week cutoff. That feature has helped shield the law from being immediately blocked as it made it more difficult to directly sue the government.

In their petition to the Supreme Court, the abortion providers including Whole Woman’s Health and other advocacy groups said that the justices should decide if the state can “insulate” its law from federal court review by delegating its enforcement to the general public.

The Supreme Court rarely agrees to hear a case before lower courts have had a chance to weigh in with their own rulings. But in the court’s 5-4 decision on Sept. 1 to let the law stand for now, the dissenting justices, including conservative Chief Justice John Roberts, expressed skepticism about how the law is enforced.

Roberts said he would have blocked the law’s enforcement at that point “so that the courts may consider whether a state can avoid responsibility for its laws in such a manner.”

The providers said that the ban has eliminated the vast majority of abortions in the state given the threat of “ruinous liability,” causing Texans to have to travel hundreds of miles (km) to other states, causing backlogs there.

“Texans are in crisis,” they said in a legal filing.

Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration on Sept 9 sued Texas, seeking to block enforcement of the Republican-backed law, as his fellow Democrats fear the right to abortion established in 1973 may be at risk.

The Texas law is the latest Republican-backed measure passed at the state level restricting abortion.

The measure prohibits abortion at a point when many women do not even realize they are pregnant. Under the law, individual citizens can be awarded a minimum of $10,000 for bringing successful lawsuits against those who perform or help others obtain an abortion that violates the ban.

The providers said that they have been forced to comply with the law because defending against these lawsuits, even if they prevail, would amount to “costly, and potentially bankrupting, harassment.”

The Supreme Court already is set to consider a major abortion case on Dec. 1 in a dispute centering on Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban in which that state has asked the justices to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that legalized abortion nationwide and ended an era when some states had banned the procedure. A ruling is due by the end of June 2022.

(Reporting by Andrew Chung in New York; Editig by Will Dunham)

U.S. House backs bill to provide $1 billion for Israel Iron Dome system

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly on Thursday for legislation to provide $1 billion to Israel to replenish its “Iron Dome” missile-defense system, just two days after the funding was removed from a broader spending bill.

As voting continued, the House backed the measure by 360 to 8.

(Reporting by Patricia Zengerle; Editing by Chris Reese)

U.S. fallout over Kabul drone strike grows with plans for multiple probes

By Patricia Zengerle

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A senior U.S. Democrat said on Thursday that multiple congressional committees will investigate a drone strike that killed 10 Afghan civilians last month, to determine what went wrong and answer questions about future counterterrorism strategy.

“This is an issue that several committees are going to look at, and we’ve already started to do that,” Representative Adam Schiff, chairman of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, told reporters.

The U.S. military apologized on Friday for the Aug. 29 drone strike in Kabul that killed as many as 10 civilians, including seven children, calling it a “tragic mistake.”

The Pentagon had said the strike targeted an Islamic State suicide bomber who posed an imminent threat to U.S.-led troops as they completed their withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The intelligence failure raised hard questions about future risks, particularly whether the United States can keep track of threats from Afghanistan without a presence in the country.

“Particularly as we are going to be moving to an over-the-horizon strategy, we need to understand exactly what went wrong and what that means in terms of the limits of what we are able to do,” Schiff told a meeting with journalists sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor.

“Over-the-horizon” refers to counterterrorism efforts from outside Afghanistan, such as drone strikes from bases located 1,000 miles from their targets.

The confirmation of civilian deaths provided further fuel to critics of the chaotic U.S. withdrawal, which generated the biggest foreign policy crisis yet for President Joe Biden’s administration.

Many of Biden’s fellow Democrats, as well as Republicans, have criticized the conduct of the withdrawal. Congressional committees have scheduled hearings with top administration officials.

Schiff said he backed the withdrawal. “We can’t occupy everywhere,” he said. “Today there is a greater risk in other parts of the world than there is in Afghanistan.”

(Reporting by Patricia Zengerle; Editing by Daniel Wallis)

Don’t panic buy, Britain tells consumers as BP shuts gas stations

By Guy Faulconbridge, James Davey and Kate Holton

LONDON (Reuters) -Oil giant BP said on Thursday it was having to temporarily close some petrol filling stations in Britain because of a lack of truck drivers, hours after a junior minister cautioned the public not to panic buy amid fears of food shortages.

Small Business Minister Paul Scully said Britain was not heading back into a 1970’s-style “winter of discontent” of strikes and power shortages amid widespread problems caused by supply chain issues.

Soaring wholesale European natural gas prices have sent shockwaves through energy, chemicals and steel producers, and strained supply chains which were already creaking due to insufficient labor and the tumult of Brexit.

After gas prices triggered a carbon dioxide shortage, Britain was forced to extend emergency state support to avert a shortage of poultry and meat.

Tesco, Britain’s biggest supermarket group, told government officials last week the dearth of truck drivers would lead to panic-buying in the run-up to Christmas if no action was taken.

Supermarket shelves of carbonated drinks and water were left empty in some places and turkey producers have warned that families could be left without their traditional turkey lunch at Christmas if the carbon dioxide shortage continues.

In a further sign of worsening supply chain dislocation, BP temporarily closed some of its 1,200 UK petrol stations due to a lack of both unleaded and diesel grades, which it blamed on driver shortages.

ExxonMobil’s Esso said a small number of its 200 Tesco Alliance retail sites had also been impacted.

“There is no need for people to go out and panic buy,” Scully told Times Radio.

“Look, this isn’t a 1970s thing at all,” he said when asked if Britain was heading back into a winter of discontent – a reference to the 1978-79 winter when inflation and industrial action left the economy in chaos.

The Bank of England said inflation would temporarily rise above 4% for the first time in a decade later this year, largely due to energy and goods prices.

A Tesco spokesperson said the group currently had good availability though it said the shortage of HGV drivers had led to “some distribution challenges.” A spokesperson for No. 2 player Sainsbury’s said “availability in some product categories may vary but alternatives are available.” Supermarkets and farmers have called on Britain to ease shortages of labor in key areas – particularly of truckers, processing and picking – which have strained the food supply chain.

LABOR CRUNCH

The trucking industry needs another 90,000 drivers to meet demand after Brexit made it harder for European workers to drive in Britain and the pandemic prevented new workers from qualifying.

“My business has about 100 HGV drivers short, and that is making it increasingly very, very difficult to service our shops,” said Richard Walker, managing director at supermarket Iceland, adding that deliveries were being cancelled.

“It is a concern and as we look to build stock as an industry, to work towards our bumper time of year, Christmas, we’re now facing this shortage at the worst possible time. I am worried.”

The National Farmers’ Union has written to Prime Minister Boris Johnson asking him to urgently introduce a new visa system to help tackle labor shortages across the supply chain.

COAL POWER?

The rise in natural gas prices is adding to the sense of chaos. Six energy suppliers have gone out of business this month, leaving nearly 1.5 million customers facing a rise in bills.

Just over a month before Johnson hosts world leaders at a United Nations climate conference, known as COP26, power generator Drax Group Plc said it could keep its coal-fired power plants operating beyond their planned closure next year.

Britain is having talks with the energy regulator Ofgem about whether or not a cap on gas and electricity prices for consumers may have to go up, Scully said.

The cap was brought in to stop energy companies gouging consumers but has now turned their businesses unprofitable as it is below the wholesale price.

Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng told parliament the government would not bail out failed energy companies and would not offer grants or subsidies to larger energy companies.

(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge, Kate Holton, James Davey and Michael Holden; editing by Angus MacSwan, Elaine Hardcastle and Nick Macfie)

Ukrainian lawmakers pass law on oligarchs after assassination attempt

By Pavel Polityuk and Natalia Zinets

KYIV (Reuters) -Ukraine’s parliament passed a law on Thursday to order “oligarchs” to register and stay out of politics, a day after an attempt to kill a top aide to President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, which officials said could have been a response to the reform.

The law provides a definition for an oligarch and gives a body headed by the president, the National Security and Defense Council, the power to determine who meets the criteria.

Oligarchs would be forbidden from financing political parties or taking part in privatizations. Top officials, including the president, prime minister and head of the central bank, would be required to declare dealings they had with them.

Zelenskiy says it is necessary to protect the country from powerful businessmen who have corrupted its political system for decades. His opponents say they fear it will be applied selectively to concentrate more power in the president’s hands.

“Thanks to the anti-oligarch law, Ukraine gets a historic chance to build a civilized and clean relationship between big business and the state,” Zelenskiy said in a statement.

“Yes, many politicians do not like it. Yes, they want to live as before, working for the oligarchs. Yes, there was a lot of pressure on our deputies, a lot of intrigue and even blackmail. But the law was passed.”

The law passed a first reading in July. Thursday’s second reading, which passed with 279 votes in the 450-seat parliament, means it now goes to Zelenskiy for approval.

Zelenskiy’s team has suggested anger at the law could be behind an attempt to assassinate Serhiy Shefir, a top aide and close friend of the president. Shefir’s car was sprayed with gunfire on Wednesday by unidentified attackers as he travelled between two villages outside the capital.

Shefir was unharmed though his driver was wounded. Police are searching for the weapon and interviewing possible witnesses who were picking mushrooms nearby, Interior Ministry spokesperson Artem Shevchenko said on Thursday.

Zelenskiy, a former TV comic, won a landslide election in 2019 promising to tackle corruption and curb the influence of tycoons who have dominated business, the media and politics since the end of the Soviet era. Opponents say he owes his own rise to the tycoon whose TV channel backed his earlier career.

Opposition lawmaker Oleksiy Goncharenko, from former President Petro Poroshenko’s party, said by giving a presidential body the authority to determine who is an oligarch, the law “creates huge scope for corruption”.

Kira Rudyk, the leader of the Voice party, said the bill was designed “only to strengthen the power, strengthen the position of the president and make it so that he can, together with the National Security and Defense Council, actually decide who can have control over the media and who cannot.”

(Writing by Matthias WilliamsEditing by Peter Graff)

Islamic State uses Taliban’s own tactics to attack Afghanistan’s new rulers

By Alasdair Pal and Jibran Ahmed

(Reuters) – A little more than a month after toppling the Western-backed government in Kabul, Afghanistan’s new Taliban rulers are facing internal enemies who have adopted many of the tactics of urban warfare that marked their own successful guerrilla campaign.

A deadly attack on Kabul airport last month and a series of bomb blasts in the eastern city of Jalalabad, all claimed by the local affiliate of Islamic State, have underlined the threat to stability from violent militant groups who remain unreconciled to the Taliban.

While the movement’s spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid has downplayed the threat, saying this week that Islamic State had no effective presence in Afghanistan, commanders on the ground do not dismiss the threat so lightly.

Two members of the movement’s intelligence services who investigated some of the recent attacks in Jalalabad said the tactics showed the group remained a danger, even if it did not have enough fighters and resources to seize territory.

Using sticky bombs – magnetic bombs usually stuck to the underside of cars – the attacks targeted Taliban members in exactly the same way the Taliban itself used to hit officials and civil society figures to destabilize the former government.

“We are worried about these sticky bombs that once we used to apply to target our enemies in Kabul. We are concerned about our leadership as they could target them if not controlled them successfully,” said one of the Taliban intelligence officials.

Islamic State in Khorasan, the name taken from the ancient name for the region that includes modern Afghanistan, first emerged in late 2014 but has declined from its peak around 2018 following a series of heavy losses inflicted by both the Taliban and U.S. forces.

Taliban security forces in Nangarhar said they had killed three members of the movement on Wednesday night and the intelligence officials said the movement still retains the ability to cause trouble through small-scale attacks.

“Their main structure is broken and they are now divided in small groups to carry out attacks,” one of them said.

FUNDING DRIED UP

The Taliban have said repeatedly that they will not allow Afghanistan to be used as a base for attacks on other countries. But some Western analysts believe the return of the Islamist group to power has invigorated groups like ISIS-K and al Qaeda, which had made Afghanistan their base when the Taliban last ruled the country.

“In Afghanistan, the return of Taliban is a huge victory for the Islamists,” said Rohan Gunaratna, professor of security studies at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University. “They have celebrated the return of the Taliban, so I think that Afghanistan is the new theatre.”

ISIS-K is believed to draw many of its fighters from the ranks of the Taliban or the Pakistani version of the Taliban, known as the TTP, but much of the way it operates remains little understood.

It has fought the Taliban over smuggling routes and other economic interests but it also supports a global Caliphate under Islamic law, in contrast with the Taliban which insists it has no interest in anywhere outside Afghanistan.

Most analysts, as well as the United Nations, peg ISIS-K’s strength at under 2,000 fighters, compared to as many as 100,000 at the Taliban’s disposal. The ranks of ISIS-K were swollen with prisoners released when Afghanistan’s jails were opened by the Taliban as they swept through the country.

According to a June report by the UN security council, ISIS-K’s financial and logistic ties to its parent organization in Syria have weakened, though it does retain some channels of communication.

“Funding support to the Khorasan branch from the core is believed to have effectively dried up,” the report said.

However, the report said signs of divisions within the Taliban, which have already started to emerge, could encourage more fighters to defect as the wartime insurgency tries to reshape itself into a peacetime administration.

“It remains active and dangerous, particularly if it is able, by positioning itself as the sole pure rejectionist group in Afghanistan, to recruit disaffected Taliban and other militants to swell its ranks,” the UN said.

(Reporting by Jibran Ahmed, Alasdair Pal and James Mackenzie; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)

Russia’s COVID-19 deaths return to record daily highs

MOSCOW (Reuters) -Russia on Thursday reported 820 coronavirus-related deaths in the last 24 hours, matching an all-time high set on Aug. 26, and authorities warned that cases were again rising rapidly.

Moscow recorded 3,445 new infections in the last 24 hours, the most reported in a single day since July 31 following a case surge over the summer, authorities said. There were 21,438 cases recorded nationwide, they said.

The Kremlin told reporters that officials were not discussing the idea of re-imposing lockdown measures or other restrictions, but that the government and regional officials were monitoring the situation closely.

“As far as I know, despite the increase in numbers, no decisions have yet been made anywhere (in Russia),” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said.

Thirty-six regions have recorded case increases this week, Anna Popova, the head of consumer watchdog Rospotrebnadzor, said on Wednesday.

She said the virus was spreading fastest in regions where there were fewer vaccinated people. Russia, which has a population of more than 144 million, says almost 40 million people have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19.

Russia has recorded a total of 7,354,995 cases, authorities say.

The government coronavirus task force says 201,445 people have died of coronavirus-related causes so far, while the federal statistics agency gives a higher number of 365,000 deaths from April 2020 to July 2021.

Reuters calculations based on official statistics show there were 528,000 excess deaths between April 2020 and July 2021. Some epidemiologists say excess deaths are the best way to measure the real death toll from COVID-19.

(Reporting by Gleb Stolyarov, Dmitry Antonov and Alexander Marrow; editing by Tom Balmforth and Emelia Sithole-Matarise)