Author Archives: Reuters News Agency

Biden tells Energy Dept.: use all tools to bring fuel to storm-hit areas

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. President Joe Biden said on Thursday he has directed the Department of Energy to use all tools, including the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), to keep gasoline flowing in the aftermath of Hurricane Ida.

“It’s important to know that the region hit by it (Ida) is a key center of our nation’s oil production and refining infrastructure…that’s why we’re not waiting to assess the full impact of the storm,” Biden said.

The strategic reserve has four major storage facilities, two in Texas and two in Louisiana, to deliver crude to nearby refineries for fuel production. It was developed in the 1970s after the Arab oil embargo spiked gasoline prices, but has been tapped recently after unusual fuel disruptions like hurricanes.

Ida cut through multiple U.S. regions, devastating parts of Louisiana. On Wednesday rains caused massive flooding in the U.S. Northeast.

Presidents can authorize loans of SPR oil, known as exchange agreements, to private companies. After 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, refineries borrowed 5.2 million barrels, repaid in early 2018 with interest.

Presidents can also direct the Energy Department to hold emergency sales of crude, such as in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina.

In 2014 the department also created the 1 million barrel Northeast Gasoline Supply Reserve after Superstorm Sandy caused fuel shortages in the region.

Roughly 1.5 million barrels of daily offshore crude production is currently shut in, according to federal data from Wednesday. U.S. energy companies, prevalent along the Gulf Coast, were straining to get operations working again due to lingering loss of electrical power and other problems related to storm damage.

Biden noted that the Environmental Protection Agency approved emergency fuel waivers for Louisiana and Mississippi to increase the availability of gasoline. The EPA issued the waivers this week, allowing winter-grade fuel to be sold out of season to avoid shortages.

The SPR had 621.3 million barrels of crude in stock as of last week, according to the Energy Department, the lowest since August 2003, data showed.

(Reporting by Steve Holland and Nandita Bose and Timothy Gardner in Washington; additional reporting by Stephanie Kelly; Editing by David Gregorio)

Missing Jan. 6 defense lawyer is recovering from illness, judge is told

By Mark Hosenball

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A lawyer who recently disappeared from public view while representing 17 defendants facing charges related to the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol riot was “beginning to feel better” but also “very sick,” a federal judge was told on Thursday.

At a status hearing for Peter Schwartz, an Owensboro, Kentucky, man facing 14 riot-related charges, including felonies, Ryan Marshall, an associate of John Pierce, the lawyer who represents Schwartz and 16 other riot defendants, said he spoke to Pierce on Tuesday evening and the absent lawyer said he was “beginning to feel better.”

But Marshall said he then spoke to a friend of Pierce on Wednesday who told him Pierce remained “very sick” and had spent most of Wednesday asleep.

U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta said that because Marshall was not a lawyer, if necessary the court would appoint a lawyer to temporarily represent Schwartz if Pierce’s health status remains unclear.

Prosecutors have cited conflicting news reports about Pierce’s health problems. Some reports said Pierce had contracted COVID-19. An NPR reporter said last week that a friend of Pierce’s told him Pierce did not have COVID-19 but was hospitalized due to “dehydration and exhaustion.” That same reporter on Thursday said another source told him Pierce contracted COVID-19 but was not on a ventilator.

Among the Jan. 6 riot defendants Pierce represents are members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keeper militia groups.

Pierce also has represented Rudy Giuliani, former President Donald Trump’s former lawyer, and Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17-year-old facing homicide charges stemming from protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

Prosecutors have alleged that during the Jan 6 riot, Pierce’s client Schwartz violently “assaulted multiple law enforcement officers by spraying them with a chemical agent believed to be pepper spray.”

Schwartz has been held in pre-trial detention since his arrest in February.

(Reporting by Mark Hosenball; Editing by Howard Goller)

Biden enlists White House counsel to fight Texas abortion law

By Jeff Mason

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -President Joe Biden on Thursday said he is launching a “whole-of-government effort,” including from the White House counsel, to combat a strict new Texas abortion law after an overnight Supreme Court decision let it stand.

Biden, a Democrat and a Catholic who has shifted to the left on abortion in recent years to be more in line with his party’s base, called the law that bans any abortion after six weeks an “unprecedented assault on a woman’s constitutional rights.”

The president said in a statement he was directing the office of the White House counsel and his Gender Policy Council to review how the government could “ensure that women in Texas have access to safe and legal abortions… and what legal tools we have to insulate women and providers from the impact of Texas’ bizarre scheme of outsourced enforcement to private parties.”

The White House will specifically look at what measures can be taken through the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Justice, Biden said.

The White House has called for the “codification” of abortion rights that are currently protected by the court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision through legislation in Congress, but has not outlined any specific steps that it is taking to back any such law.

A plurality of Americans believe that abortion should be legal up until the fetus is capable of living on its own, and they remain largely supportive of Roe v. Wade, a Reuters/Ipsos poll in June showed. The responses are split along party lines, with 70% of Democrats, 35% of Republicans and 47% of independents agreeing abortion should be legal in most or all cases.

Biden’s Democrats have control of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives with slim majorities and he is seeking to push through legislation on infrastructure and other Democratic priorities in the coming weeks.

The House will debate and vote on legislation stopping states from enacting restrictive anti-abortion regulations like the one just approved by Texas, Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Thursday.

(Reporting by Jeff Mason; additional reporting by Susan Heavey; Editing by Heather Timmons and Alistair Bell)

Western Union resuming services to Afghanistan – senior exec

By Tom Arnold

LONDON (Reuters) – Western Union Co is resuming money-transfer services to Afghanistan, a senior executive told Reuters on Thursday, a decision he said was in line with a U.S. push to allow humanitarian activity to continue after the Taliban’s takeover.

The world’s largest money-transfer firm and MoneyGram International Inc, another global remittance provider, suspended services in Afghanistan two weeks ago after the Islamist militia captured Kabul at lightning speed.

But an easing of security concerns following the completion of the Taliban’s conquest of the country opened the way for the reopening this week of banks, which the money-transfer firms rely on to dispense and collect funds.

Jean Claude Farah, Western Union’s president in Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, said the reopening of banks, plus a push by the United States to facilitate humanitarian assistance to the Afghan people, had given the American company confidence to resume services on Thursday.

“Much of our business involving Afghanistan is low-value family and support remittances that support basic needs of the people there, so that’s the grounding that we have and why we want to reopen our business,” Farah told Reuters.

“We’ve engaged with the U.S. government, which has conveyed that allowing humanitarian activities, including remittances, to continue are consistent with U.S. policy.”

The flow of funds from migrant workers overseas is a key lifeline for many Afghans and has helped the economy of one of the world’s poorest nations weather years of violence and instability. The United Nations says about half of the population requires aid amid the second drought in four years.

SANCTIONS ON TALIBAN

One complication is that there are a broad range of sanctions on financing to the Taliban, while the Haqqani network, which has links to the Taliban, is classed as a terrorist organization by the United States and Britain.

Yet U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration has said it is committed to allowing humanitarian work to continue in Afghanistan.

“We are continuing to engage with the U.S. government and others to understand their policies and what type of longer term regulatory framework will be put in place as it relates to the Taliban,” Farah said.

Remittances to Afghanistan reached $789 million in 2020, around 4% of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP), the World Bank estimated, down from $829 million in 2019.

MoneyGram didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on its plans in Afghanistan.

DO BANKS HAVE THE CASH?

In recent days, Afghanistan’s central bank has provided funds of hundreds of thousands of dollars to each bank that requested liquidity, a senior banker told Reuters. But the financial system and economy could be in peril unless the Taliban can access the central bank’s roughly $10 billion in assets, which are mostly outside of the country.

Farah said that Western Union had been assured by the banks it partners with in Afghanistan that they had sufficient cash to pay receivers of remittances.

“Some of them have indicated at some locations that they have good liquidity in afghani and at least some liquidity in U.S. dollars as well, we allow payouts in both, to resume remittances,” he added.

Before it shut down services on Aug. 16, around 45% of each transaction sent via Western Union to Afghanistan was $200 or less, he said.

(Reporting by Tom Arnold; Editing by Pravin Char)

Lost hope: Ortega’s crackdown in Nicaragua stirs fast-growing exodus

By Daina Beth Solomon and Alvaro Murillo

MEXICO CITY/SAN JOSE (Reuters) – Nicaraguan activist Jesus Adolfo Tefel has already been detained once, in 2019, when he tried to bring water to mothers on a hunger strike against President Daniel Ortega. The government accused him of planning terrorist acts and, he said, locked him up for 46 days.

That time, he stayed in Nicaragua after the government released him without pressing charges. But when the Ortega government began arresting presidential contenders, journalists and activists in June ahead of November elections, Tefel fled across the border to Costa Rica with his family.

“I don’t have the slightest doubt I would have been arrested” again if I stayed, said Tefel, 35, citing his work with opposition leaders aiming to oust the longest-standing president in the Americas, who is seeking a fourth straight term in the elections.

Tefel’s family joined tens of thousands of people who have slipped into exile this year amid the crackdown. The Nicaraguan government did not immediately respond to questions about Tefel, whose earlier arrest was documented by human rights groups and international media including Reuters.

Data from the United States, Costa Rica and Mexico reveal an exodus shaping up to be among the biggest from Nicaragua since a 1980s civil war. It threatens to overwhelm Costa Rica’s asylum system and has swollen already record Central American migration numbers to the United States.

The jump in Nicaraguans going into exile is on track to be higher than in either 2018 or 2019, when repression of opposition protests against Ortega left at least 300 people dead.

The U.S. Customs and Border Protection in July logged more than 13,000 Nicaraguans either illegally crossing or seeking asylum at the nation’s borders, almost double the month before. That pushed Nicaragua to overtake El Salvador, traditionally one of the main drivers of Latino migration to the United States.

Some 33,000 Nicaraguans have been apprehended at U.S. borders so far this year, over twice as many as in all of 2019, the year with the most apprehensions of Nicaraguans in at least a decade.

This could be “the year with the most applications since records began,” said Costa Rican official Allan Rodriguez, who oversees the country’s asylum unit.

Ortega’s office did not respond to a request for comment about the rising migration or accusations of political persecution. Ortega has said his opponents seek to topple him and conspire against national interests.

Costa Rica is struggling to process 11,000 Nicaraguan refugee applications received in July and August, more than in the peak months of the last wave of repression.

Asylum officers have a backlog of 52,000 cases to review.

CRACKDOWNS

Ortega first took power after the 1979 overthrow of U.S.-backed right-wing dictator Anastasio Somoza by Sandinista rebels, and returned to office in 2007.

Working with his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, he has tightened his grip in the second-poorest country in the Americas.

He has abolished presidential term limits, expanded his family’s business empire and piled pressure on independent media, while at the same time using budget and tax laws to take control of at least a dozen media and news outlets .

Over the past three months, Ortega has arrested 35 opposition leaders, suspended a rival party and withheld newsprint, among other tactics that U.N. officials, the United States and Europe have called an abuse of power to stifle free speech and free elections.

“What we are seeing in Nicaragua is an escalating climate of repression, fear, and hopelessness,” a U.S. State Department spokesman said.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) did not respond to a request for comment.

Under President Joe Biden, the United States has identified bad governance and weak rule of law as a root cause of migration from Central America. It is seeking to cajole the “Northern Triangle” countries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras to tackle these issues to stem flows.

Nicaragua, traditionally a lesser source of immigration to the United States, has been not included in that effort.

However, the State Department said the administration is using “diplomatic and economic tools” to pressure a government it calls undemocratic and authoritarian. Washington has sanctioned several people close to Ortega, including Vice President Murillo.

In Mexico, Nicaraguans are spending weeks or months in southern border towns as they await visas to stay legally or pass through safely to the U.S. border.

Lester Altamirano, 40, lived in the Mexican city of Tapachula for eight months before making it to California with his wife and 8-year-old daughter. He crossed into the United States in late May, a DHS document seen by Reuters showed, and he plans to apply for asylum.

The family first requested asylum in the United States in 2020 but was deported. Back in Nicaragua, Altamirano and his wife were jailed for 11 days for opposing the government, Altamirano said.

Altamirano’s anti-government Facebook posts then drew the attention of officials in his small town in northern Nicaragua.

“It was going to be worse if we stayed. We had to risk it,” he said, echoing others Reuters spoke to for this story, including journalist Carlos Padilla, 26, who said he had been scared to protest on the street at home for fear of arrest.

Tefel, who once ran a tourism company in Nicaragua, said he does not know when he could return home without risking jail.

“I lived it in my own skin,” he said. “I know what it means to be locked up, and unjustly.”

(Reporting by Daina Beth Solomon in Mexico City and Alvaro Murillo in San Jose; Additional reporting by Ismael Lopez and Matt Spetalnick; Editing by Frank Jack Daniel and Alistair Bell)

Poland declares state of emergency on Belarus border

WARSAW (Reuters) -Poland’s president has declared a state of emergency in parts of two regions bordering Belarus, his spokesman said on Thursday, an unprecedented move in the country’s post-communist history that follows a surge in illegal migration.

The European Union has accused Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko of using migrants from countries like Iraq and Afghanistan as part of a “hybrid war” designed to put pressure on the bloc over sanctions it has imposed on Minsk.

Poland has been trying to improve security along its frontier by building a fence and deploying troops.

“The situation on the border with Belarus is difficult and dangerous,” presidential spokesman Blazej Spychalski told a news conference. “Today, we as Poland, being responsible for our own borders, but also for the borders of the European Union, must take measures to ensure the security of Poland and the (EU).”

The Polish Border Guard said on Wednesday there had been around 3,500 attempts to illegally cross the border in August alone, 2,500 of which it had managed to thwart.

The government has also said it needs to be prepared for “provocations” that could transpire during military exercises organized by the Russian army that will be held on Russian and Belarusian territory near Poland from Sept. 10.

The “West-2021” drills will involve thousands of servicemen, including those from Kazakhstan, a member of the Moscow-led defense bloc, as well as tanks, artillery and aircraft.

“The second reason for bringing in the state of emergency in this area is the military exercises…that will take place on our border,” Polish Interior Minister Mariusz Kaminski said. “We must be prepared for every scenario.”

The state of emergency, which will restrict the movement of people and ban mass gatherings, is to apply to a 3-km-(1.9-mile)-deep swathe along the border for 30 days.

NGOs have sharply criticized the government’s approach to the issue and have said Warsaw must provide more humanitarian aid to migrants stranded on the border.

“This state of emergency is a nuclear solution that is to move us away from this border, not only us but also the media, and make sure that no one…will document what is happening there,” said Marianna Wartecka of the Ocalenie Foundation refugee charity.

Poland says the migrants are the responsibility of Belarus and it has also accused Minsk of refusing a convoy of humanitarian aid meant for them.

(Reporting by Alan Charlish, Pawel Florkiewicz, Alicja Ptak and Anna Koper; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

U.S. Supreme Court declines to block Texas abortion ban

By Lawrence Hurley and Andrew Chung

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Texas’ new abortion ban, the strictest in the nation, stood on Thursday after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to block it, dealing a major blow to abortion rights by leaving in place the state law, which prohibits the vast majority of abortions.

The decision is a major milestone in the fight over abortion, as opponents have sought for decades to roll back access to the procedures.

By a 5-4 vote, the justices denied an emergency request by abortion and women’s health providers for an injunction on enforcement of the ban, which took effect early on Wednesday and prohibits abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, while litigation continues.

The law would amount to a near-total ban on the procedure in Texas – the United States’ second most populous state – as 85% to 90% of abortions are obtained after six weeks of pregnancy, and would probably force many clinics to close, abortion rights groups said.

One of the court’s six conservatives, Chief Justice John Roberts, joined its three liberals in dissent.

“The court’s order is stunning,” liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a dissenting opinion.

“Presented with an application to enjoin a flagrantly unconstitutional law engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights and evade judicial scrutiny, a majority of justices have opted to bury their heads in the sand.”

In an unsigned explanation, the court’s majority said the decision was “not based on any conclusion about the constitutionality of Texas’s law” and allowed legal challenges to proceed.

A majority of Americans believe abortion should be legal in the United States, according to Reuters/Ipsos polling. Some 52% said it should be legal in most or all cases, with just 36% saying it should be illegal in most or all cases.

But it remains a deeply polarizing issue, with a majority of Democrats supporting abortion rights and a majority of Republicans opposing them.

The decision illustrates the impact of former Republican President Donald Trump’s three conservative appointees to the nation’s highest court, who have tilted it further right. All were in the majority.

Such a ban has never been permitted in any state since the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade, the landmark ruling that legalized abortion nationwide, in 1973.

Texas is among a dozen mostly Republican-led states to ban the procedure once a fetal heartbeat can be detected, often at six weeks and sometimes before a woman realizes she is pregnant.

Courts had previously blocked such bans, citing Roe v. Wade.

The court’s action over the Texas ban could foreshadow its approach in another case over a 15-week ban by Mississippi in which the state has asked the justices to overturn Roe v. Wade.

The court will hear arguments in the term beginning in October, with a ruling due by the end of June 2022.

The Texas law is unusual in that it prevents government officials from enforcing the ban and instead gives private citizens that power by enabling them to sue anyone who provides or “aids or abets” an abortion after six weeks, including a person who drives someone to an abortion provider.

Citizens who win such lawsuits would be entitled to at least $10,000.

That structure has alarmed both abortion providers, who said they feel like they now have prices on their heads, and legal experts who said citizen enforcement could have broad repercussions if it was used across the United States to address other contentious social issues.

(Reporting by Lawrence Hurley; Editing by Scott Malone and Jonathan Oatis)

‘Historic’ New York-area flooding in Ida’s wake leaves at least 14 dead

By Barbara Goldberg and Maria Caspani

NEW YORK (Reuters) -Flooding killed at least 14 people, swept away cars, submerged subway lines and temporarily grounded flights in New York and New Jersey as the remnants of Hurricane Ida brought torrential rains to the area.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio told a Thursday news conference there were nine confirmed fatalities in New York caused by what he had described as a “historic weather event.”

Countless rescues were made overnight of motorists and subway riders who became stranded in the flood waters, de Blasio said. “So many lives were saved because of the fast, courageous, response of our first responders,” he said.

Images posted on social media overnight showed water gushing over subway platforms and people wading through knee-deep water in their buildings.

Streets turned to rivers as flooding swept away cars in videos captured by stunned residents.

Four residents of Elizabeth, a city in New Jersey, perished in flooding at Oakwood Plaza, a public housing complex that was “flooded out with eight feet of water,” city spokesperson Kelly Martins told Reuters.

“Sadly, more than a few folks have passed as a result of this,” New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy said without elaborating on the death toll at a briefing in Mullica Hill in the southern part of the state where a tornado had ripped apart several homes.

The hit to the Middle Atlantic region came three days after Ida, one of the most powerful hurricanes to strike the U.S. Gulf Coast, devastated southern Louisiana. Reconnaissance flights revealed entire communities destroyed by wind and floods.

Ida’s remnants brought six to eight inches (15 to 20 cm) of rain to a swath of the Northeast from Philadelphia to Connecticut and set an hourly record of 3.15 inches for Manhattan, breaking the previous one that was set less than two weeks ago, the National Weather Service said.

The 7.13 inches of rain that fell in New York City on Wednesday was the city’s fifth highest daily amount, it said.

The number of disasters, such as floods and heat waves, driven by climate change has increased fivefold over the past 50 years, according to a report released earlier this week by The World Meteorological Organization, a U.N. agency.

One person died in Passaic, New Jersey, due to the flooding and the search continued for others, the city’s mayor, Hector Lora, said in a video posted to Facebook on Thursday.

“We are presently still making efforts to identify and try to locate other individuals that have not been accounted for,” Lora said.

NBC New York reported at least 23 fatalities, including a toddler and said that most “if not all” deaths were flood-related.

The governors of New York and New Jersey, who had declared emergencies in their states on Wednesday, urged residents to stay home as crews worked to clear roadways and restore service to New York City subways and commuter rail lines serving millions of residents.

“Right now my street looks more like a lake,” said Lucinda Mercer, 64, as she peered out her apartment window in Hoboken, New Jersey, just across the Hudson River from New York.

Mercer, who works as a crisis line fundraiser, said flood waters were lapping halfway up the hub caps of parked cars.

Subway service in New York City remained “extremely limited” while there was no service at all on commuter rail lines to the city’s northern suburbs on Thursday morning, the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) said. Janno Lieber, the MTA’s acting chair and CEO, told local media it was going to take until later in the day to restore full service.

The Long Island Railroad, which is also run by the MTA, said early on Thursday that services on most of its branches had been restored but commuters should expect systemwide delays of up to 30 minutes.

‘HUMBLED BY MOTHER NATURE’

Michael Wildes, mayor of Englewood, a city in New Jersey located just across the Hudson River from Manhattan, said the city’s central business district was under water and some residents had to be evacuated to the library overnight.

“We are being humbled by mother nature in this last year and a half,” Wildes told Reuters by phone.

He said there were no known deaths in Englewood, although police, fire and other emergency responders had extracted several people trapped in their cars.

Mark Haley of Summit, New Jersey, said getting back home after a 15-minute drive to a bowling alley to celebrate his daughter’s sixth birthday on Wednesday night became a six-hour slog through flood waters that often left him trapped.

“When we got out, it was a war zone,” said Haley, 50, a fitness trainer, who got home to find almost two feet (0.6 m) of water in his basement.

All New Jersey Transit rail services apart from the Atlantic City Rail Line were suspended, the service said on its website.

Amtrak said on Thursday morning that it canceled all passenger rail service between Philadelphia and Boston.

New Jersey’s Newark Liberty Airport warned about flight disruptions and said about 370 flights were canceled as of Thursday morning.

More than 200,000 electricity customers were without power early on Thursday in five northeastern states that got most of the rains overnight, mostly in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, according to PowerOutage.US, which gathers data from utility companies. There were also outages in New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts, it said.

(Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Bengaluru, Maria Caspani and Peter Szekely in New York, Barbara Goldberg in Maplewood, New Jersey, and Nathan Layne in Wilton, Connecticut; Additional reporting by Doina Chiacu and Susan Heavey in Washington, Ann Maria Shibu and Akriti Sharma in Bengaluru and Sarah Morland in Gdansk; Editing by Christopher Cushing, Shri Navaratnam, Hugh Lawson, Frances Kerry and Steve Orlofsky)

Antibody levels higher after Moderna shot; Lilly arthritis drug used with steroid cuts death risk

By Nancy Lapid

(Reuters) – The following is a summary of some recent studies on COVID-19. They include research that warrants further study to corroborate the findings and that have yet to be certified by peer review.

Antibody levels are higher after Moderna vaccine

The mRNA vaccine from Moderna Inc induces higher levels of antibodies against the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 than the similar vaccine from Pfizer Inc and partner BioNTech SE, Belgian researchers have found, although what this means for their efficacy is not clear. Soon after receiving their second shot, the 688 healthcare workers who got Moderna’s vaccine had antibody levels roughly twice as high as the 959 who received the Pfizer/BioNTech product, regardless of their ages, doctors at a Belgian medical center reported. This held true even after accounting for individual risk factors, and regardless of whether participants had previously been infected with the virus, the researchers reported on Monday in JAMA. Antibodies are just one component of the immune system’s defenses, however. The study cannot determine whether one vaccine is more effective at preventing infection or illness, or whether the antibodies induced stay longer in the blood before disappearing. Those questions, and others, require further investigation, the researchers said.

Arthritis drug adds to benefit of steroids in severe illness

Hospitalized COVID-19 patients died less often if they received Eli Lilly and Co’s rheumatoid arthritis drug baricitinib along with the other treatments their doctors had prescribed, according to a study published on Wednesday in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine. The randomized trial involved 1,525 seriously ill patients, all of whom needed extra oxygen to help with breathing. More than 90% were already receiving dexamethasone, a cheap generic steroid known to improve survival of critically ill COVID-19 patients. While baricitinib, sold under the brand name Olumiant, did not appear to keep patients from getting sicker, it did reduce their risk of dying. The 28-day and 60-day death rates were 5% lower among patients randomly assigned to receive baricitinib instead of a placebo. Baricitinib is already approved in the United States for use in hospitalized COVID-19 patients in combination with Gilead Science’s antiviral drug remdesivir. The two drugs together appear to have more benefit than remdesivir alone. In the new study, more than 80% of participants were not receiving remdesivir, suggesting that baricitinib also “has synergistic effects with other standard-of-care treatments,” including dexamethasone, researchers said.

Vaccine poses low risk for adults with high-risk allergies

Highly allergic adults can safely receive the COVID-19 vaccine from Pfizer/BioNTech, a new study suggests. Among the 8,102 patients with allergies in the Israeli study, 95% received the shots in routine settings because their risk of a severe allergic reaction to the vaccine was low, and no such reactions were reported. The remaining 429 patients, who were considered to be highly allergic, received the vaccines under careful supervision and were observed for two hours afterward. Nine had allergic reactions, including three who showed signs of potentially life-threatening anaphylaxis. All responded to treatment with epinephrine and no one had to be hospitalized, according to a report published on Tuesday in JAMA Network Open published with the study said lessons from this study of allergic reactions to the Pfizer vaccine are likely “generalizable to the Moderna” shot as well.

(Reporting by Nancy Lapid; Editing by Bill Berkrot)

More grain terminals found damaged by Ida, exports may stall for weeks

By Karl Plume and PJ Huffstutter

CHICAGO (Reuters) – Grain shippers on the U.S. Gulf Coast reported more damage from Hurricane Ida to their terminals on Wednesday as Cargill Inc confirmed damage to a second facility, while power outages across southern Louisiana kept all others shuttered.

Global grains trader Cargill Inc said its Westwego, Louisiana, terminal was damaged by Hurricane Ida, days after confirming more extensive damage at its only other Louisiana grain export facility located in Reserve.

Hurricane Ida, which roared ashore on Sunday, has disrupted grain and soybean shipments from the Gulf Coast, which accounts for about 60% of U.S. exports, at a time when global supplies are tight and demand is strong from China.

Emergency authorities were still surveying the destruction, as numerous barges and boats were sunk in the lower Mississippi River while other debris has obstructed the navigation channel, the U.S. Coast Guard said.

The major shipping waterway remains closed to vessel traffic from the Louisiana-Mississippi border to the Gulf of Mexico, shipping sources said.

Mike Strain, commissioner of the Louisiana Department of Agriculture and Forestry, saw scores of barges and at least five ships grounded during a flyover of the river.

He said the Army Corps of Engineers and the Coast Guard anticipate getting the upper Mississippi, from Baton Rouge on northward, “opened up by later today so we can start moving ships.”

The Army Corps of Engineers did not immediately respond to request for comment.

On the lower Mississippi, authorities aim to reopen the section from Nine Mile Point and down in seven days, Strain said.

“There are still transmission lines in the river, and those need to be removed before there can be safe passage,” Strain said. He said low water levels were making it harder to get stuck ships and barges moving again.

Cargill is still assessing the extent of the damage and does not yet know how soon its grain loading and shipping operations at the busiest U.S. grains port may resume, Cargill spokeswoman April Nelson said.

Rival exporter CHS Inc is diverting its export shipments scheduled through the next month through its Pacific Northwest terminal as the hurricane knocked out a transmission line that powers its lone Gulf Coast facility, the company said.

Other shippers, including Bunge Ltd and Archer-Daniels-Midland Co are still assessing damage to their locations, although all are still without power, the companies said.

Power may not be restored for weeks.

(Reporting by Karl Plume and P.J. Huffstutter in Chicago; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and David Gregorio)