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Palestinians hope Biden would roll back Trump’s embrace of Israel

By Rami Ayyub

RAMALLAH, West Bank (Reuters) – Palestinian leaders hope Democrat Joe Biden will tone down Washington’s pro-Israel policies if he becomes U.S. president, and Palestinian-Americans have been pressing his campaign for a change, sources familiar with the efforts said.

So far, their efforts have had little impact, the sources said.

U.S. President Donald Trump has recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, moved the U.S. Embassy to the city and made peace proposals envisaging Israeli sovereignty over parts of the occupied West Bank, territory Palestinians seek for a state.

Trump’s moves — including aid cuts to the Palestinian Authority that exercises limited self-rule in the West Bank — have prompted Palestinian officials to sever ties with Washington.

“If Mr. Biden (is) elected in November, we hope that it will be a totally different dynamic,” Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh said last week during a virtual conference with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Biden is the presumptive Democratic challenger in November’s election. He is on record as challenging plans by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to extend sovereignty to Jewish settlements in the West Bank — de facto annexation of territory Israel seized in a 1967 war.

“Biden opposes any unilateral action by either side that makes the prospects of a two-state solution less likely – including annexation, which Biden opposes now, and would continue to oppose as President,” campaign spokesman Michael Gwin said in a statement for Reuters.

Gwin did not address what action Biden might take if he were president and Israel annexed West Bank land.

Netanyahu’s proposed move, under Trump’s peace blueprint, has been criticized by Arab and European nations. The Israeli leader is awaiting the green light from Washington.

PROGRESSIVE SUPPORT

Buoyed by support from progressives in the Democratic party, Palestinian diaspora activists want Biden to take a more critical look at Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.

More than 120 prominent Palestinian-Americans have signed a “Statement of Principles” that they say determine their community’s support for candidates for federal office.

They include making aid to Israel conditional on it ending “practices that violate Palestinian rights and contravene international law”, and revoking any potential U.S. recognition of Israeli sovereignty in occupied territory.

“We want to see Biden embrace the party’s progressives, who have recognized the shared struggle between Palestinians living under military occupation, and Black and brown Americans who face police brutality, systemic racism and injustice,” said Zeina Ashrawi Hutchison, a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in August.

Those positions have failed to gain traction with Biden’s team, three people familiar with the campaign’s thinking said.

“The progressives want a full-throttle platform change — a pro-Palestinian flank, an anti-annexation flank — but there just isn’t appetite in the campaign so far,” one of the sources said.

(Additional reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt in New York, Editing by Jeffrey Heller and Timothy Heritage)

WHO sets up panel to review handling of COVID-19 pandemic

By Stephanie Nebehay and John Miller

GENEVA/ZURICH (Reuters) – The World Health Organization (WHO) said on Thursday it was setting up an independent panel to review its handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and the response by governments worldwide.

The announcement follows strong criticism by U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration, which accused the WHO of being “China-centric,” and U.S. formal notification on Tuesday that it was withdrawing from the U.N. agency in a year’s time.

Former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark and former Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf have agreed to head the panel, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.

“The magnitude of this pandemic, which has touched virtually everyone in the world, clearly deserves a commensurate evaluation, an honest evaluation,” Tedros told a virtual meeting with representatives of WHO’s 194 member states.

The co-chairs will select the other panel members, he said. The panel will then provide an interim report to an annual meeting of health ministers in November and present a “substantive report” next May.

“This is not a standard report that ticks a box and is then put on a shelf to gather dust. This is something we take seriously,” Tedros said.

In May, WHO’s member states adopted unanimously a resolution proposed by the European Union calling for an evaluation of the global response to the pandemic.

Addressing Thursday’s meeting, Clark said the assignment would be “exceptionally challenging”.

Johnson-Sirleaf, whose country was ravaged by West Africa’s Ebola outbreak, the world’s worst, in 2014-2016, said she looked forward “to doing all we can to respond” to the pandemic’s challenges.

More than 12 million people are reported to have been infected by the novel coronavirus worldwide and 548,429 have died, according to a Reuters tally.

Ilona Kickbusch, a global health expert and former WHO head of communications, told Reuters on Wednesday that any review had to be credible.

“It has to be seen as a group of people that one can trust, that can start the process, and will probably involve others,” she said.

(Additional reporting by Michael Shields and Brenna Hughes-Neghaiwi in Zurich; writing by Stephanie Nebehay; Editing by Michael Shields and Gareth Jones)

Trump says ‘may cut off funding’ if U.S. schools do not open

By Doina Chiacu

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday threatened to cut off funding to schools that do not open in the fall and criticized a federal health agency’s guidelines for reopening schools as “very tough & expensive.”

The Republican president, who is seeking re-election in November, accused Democrats of wanting to keep schools shut for political reasons, despite a surge in coronavirus cases across the country.

“The Dems think it would be bad for them politically if U.S. schools open before the November Election, but is important for the children & families. May cut off funding if not open!” Trump said on Twitter, pointing to schools reopening in some European countries with no problems.

It was not clear what specific federal aid the Republican president had in mind. States are responsible for primary and secondary education under the U.S. Constitution, but the federal government provides some supplementary funding.

Trump also took aim at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the nation’s health protection agency whose director sits on the White House coronavirus task force.

“I disagree with @CDCgov on their very tough & expensive guidelines for opening schools. While they want them open, they are asking schools to do very impractical things. I will be meeting with them!!!” Trump said in a separate Twitter post.

The White House did not elaborate on which CDC guidelines Trump took issue with.

The CDC has recommended a number of considerations for schools, including testing, dividing students into small groups, serving packaged lunches in classrooms instead of cafeterias, and minimizing sharing of school supplies. It advised sneeze guards and partitions be put in place when social distancing is not possible, and that seats be spaced at least six feet apart.

“It’s time for us to get our kids back to school,” Vice President Mike Pence said after a White House coronavirus task force meeting at the Department of Education on Wednesday.

Pence said the CDC plans to issue new guidelines on schools and stressed the agency’s guidelines were not meant to replace local school considerations and decision-making.

On Tuesday, Trump held meetings about school re-openings at the White House and said he would pressure state governors to open schools in the fall.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo retorted on Wednesday that the federal government has no authority on schools and his state will announce reopening plans in the first week of August.

Business and conservative groups have urged reopening schools safely as important to getting parents back to work and reviving the U.S. economy.

Educators say socialization and other benefits such as school food programs are critically important. Experts have also shown online learning exacerbates the divide between poorer and more wealthy Americans, who have greater access to technology.

The alarming surge in cases in the United States, however, has raised concerns about the increased risk of spread of the virus by children to vulnerable adults at home as well as to older teachers and school staff.

New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy said on Wednesday he planned to reopen state schools in the fall, but reserved the right to “tweak that if it means saving lives.”

In Los Angeles, the top public health official said the planned reopening of primary and secondary schools in the fall is at risk. “Every single school district at this point needs to have plans in place to continue distance learning for 100% of the time,” Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer told officials in a private conference call reported by the Los Angeles Times.

(Reporting by Doina Chiacu; Editing by Bernadette Baum and Jonathan Oatis)

New Jersey to make face masks mandatory outdoors as U.S. outbreak widens

By Peter Szekely and Barbara Goldberg

NEW YORK (Reuters) – New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy said on Wednesday he would sign an executive order requiring people to wear face coverings outdoors to prevent a resurgence of the novel coronavirus whenever social distancing is not possible.

More than 15,000 people have died from COVID-19 in New Jersey, ranking it second after neighboring New York state in the total number of deaths, according to a Reuters tally.

A Democrat, Murphy told MSNBC that requiring the public to wear masks outdoors was critical to controlling the spread of the virus in the state, an early hot spot where rates of the virus have started to creep up again.

“There’s no question that face coverings are a game-changer,” he said, acknowledging that it would be hard to enforce the order but saying the state needed to build on the progress made in its battle against the virus.

“We’ve gone through hell in New Jersey. We’ve lost over 13,000 people, we’ve brought our numbers way down. We can’t go through that hell again.”

The order, when formally announced later in the day, would be one of the most stringent coronavirus restrictions on public activity in the United States. Many states require use of masks in public indoor areas and recommend they be used outside.

Murphy is taking action as infections skyrocket in many other states, including California, Florida and Texas, and health officials warn of a coming spike in the death toll from the virus, which has killed more than 131,000 Americans.

The U.S. outbreak crossed a grim milestone of over 3 million confirmed cases on Tuesday, roughly equivalent to 1% of the population, as more states reported record numbers of new infections.

In New Jersey, some people voiced surprise that face coverings were not already mandatory.

“I figured that was already the rule – it’s confusing that it’s not clear and I try pretty hard to keep up,” said Calia Nochumson, a 42-year-old high school teacher from Maplewood, New Jersey. She said she was disappointed to see so few people wearing face coverings during a recent trip to the beach.

Ohio is ordering people in seven counties to wear face coverings in public starting on Wednesday evening.

TRUMP PUSHES RETURN TO SCHOOL

President Donald Trump, who owns a golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, has eschewed the idea of wearing a face mask and has exhorted Americans to return to their daily routines since the end of mandatory lockdowns imposed in March and April.

The Republican president, seeking a second White House term in a Nov. 3 election, threatened on Wednesday to cut off federal funding to schools that fail to open in the autumn due to the coronavirus outbreak.

It was unclear what specific aid Trump had in mind. States are responsible for primary and secondary education under the U.S. Constitution but the federal government provides some supplementary aid.

SURGE IN NEW CASES

Nineteen states have reported record increases in cases this month and about 24 states have reported disturbingly high infection rates as a percentage of diagnostic tests conducted over the past week.

In Texas alone, the number of hospitalized patients more than doubled in just two weeks, and the number of available hospital intensive care unit beds for adults in Florida has fallen sharply in recent days.

Additional hospitalizations could strain healthcare systems in many areas, leading to an uptick in lives lost. The U.S. death toll rose by 962 on Tuesday, the biggest one-day rise since June 10, according to a Reuters tally.

The surge has forced authorities to backpedal on moves to reopen businesses, such as restaurants and bars, after mandatory lockdowns in March and April reduced economic activity to a virtual standstill and put millions of Americans out of work.

(Reporting by Peter Szekely and Barbara Goldberg in New York and Doina Chiacu and Susan Heavey in Washington; Writing by Paul Simao; Editing by Howard Goller)

U.S. Supreme Court shields religious schools from employment lawsuits

By Jan Wolfe

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court, siding with Catholic schools in a legal dispute with teachers who said they were unlawfully dismissed, ruled on Wednesday that religious institutions like churches and schools are shielded from employment discrimination lawsuits.

The 7-2 decision embraced a broad interpretation of the “ministerial exception,” a legal doctrine recognized by the Supreme Court in a 2012 case that bars ministers or people in similar roles from suing religious institutions for workplace bias. The court blocked two teachers from pursuing lawsuits accusing the two Catholic elementary schools in California of discrimination based upon age and disability.

Conservative Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the court, said there was “abundant” evidence that the two teachers performed “vital religious duties” and therefore fell under the exception.

“Educating and forming students in the Catholic faith lay at the core of the mission of the schools where they taught,” Alito wrote.

President Donald Trump’s administration sided with the schools, saying the ministerial exception should apply to any employee of a religious organization who performs an important religious function.

The ruling could strip more than 300,000 lay teachers working in religious schools of employment law protections and could impact industries including nurses in Catholic hospitals, the plaintiffs said in a court filing.

At issue was the breadth of a “ministerial exception” that protects religious organizations from employee suits alleging violations of laws such as Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars employers from discriminating against employees on grounds including sex, race, national origin and religion.

The ministerial exemption was grounded in the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment guarantee of religious freedom, language meant to prevent government interference with religion.

The ruling arose from separate lawsuits brought by teachers Agnes Morrissey-Berru and Kristen Biel against two private schools that operate under the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles.

Biel accused St. James School in Torrance of unlawfully dismissing her when she requested time off to undergo surgery and chemotherapy for breast cancer. Biel died last year but her husband has continued the litigation on her behalf.

Morrissey-Berru brought an age discrimination case against Our Lady of Guadalupe School in Hermosa Beach after being told in 2015, just before her 65th birthday, that her contract would not be renewed.

Morrissey-Berru and Biel taught their students religion several days a week in addition to secular subjects.

Federal judges concluded that the ministerial exception barred both claims. The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals subsequently ruled that both lawsuits could proceed.

In a separate dispute affecting religious schools, the court on June 30 endorsed Montana tax credits that helped pay for students to attend religious schools, a decision paving the way for more public funding of faith-based institutions.

(Reporting by Andrew Chung in New York and Jan Wolfe in Washington; Editing by Will Dunham)

Kanye West breaks ranks with Trump, vows to win presidential race

(Reuters) – Rapper Kanye West signaled he no longer supported U.S. President Donald Trump and said he would enter the presidential race to win it, according to an interview published on Wednesday.

West, previously a vocal supporter of Trump, announced on Saturday that he would run for president in 2020.West and his reality TV star wife Kim Kardashian West have visited Trump in the White House.

“I am taking the red hat off, with this interview,” West told Forbes magazine, referring to Trump’s trademark red “Make America Great Again” baseball cap. “Like anything I’ve ever done in my life, I’m doing (this) to win.”

He said he would run under a new banner – the Birthday Party.

There was no record of West filing any official paperwork with the Federal Election Commission. The deadline to add independent candidates to the ballot has not yet passed in many states.

West denied that his aim was to split the Black vote and hurt the chances of Trump’s Democratic opponent, Joe Biden. It was “a form of racism and white supremacy” to suggest all Black people should support the Democrats, he said.

Trump, who hosted Kanye West in a widely publicized visit to the Oval Office in 2018, said the rapper’s candidacy “would be a great trial run” and that he had a “real voice,” according to an interview Tuesday with Real Clear Politics news website.

White House spokesman Hogan Gidley on Wednesday called Kanye’s announcement “a scathing indictment of the Democrat Party, not just their policies on abortion, the Planned Parenthood, but also the policies that disproportionately affected African Americans in a negative way.”

West told Forbes he believed “Planned Parenthoods have been placed inside cities by white supremacists to do the Devil’s work.” The group provides reproductive health care and education, with most of that being preventive care.

The rapper also said he had been ill in February with COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, and would be suspicious of any vaccines developed to prevent the infection. Reiterating false theories that link vaccines with child developmental disorders, he said: “So when they say the way we’re going to fix COVID is with a vaccine, I’m extremely cautious.”

(Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Peter Graff)

U.S. tops 3 million known infections as coronavirus surges

By Callaghan O’Hare and Lisa Shumaker

HOUSTON (Reuters) – The U.S. coronavirus outbreak crossed a grim milestone of over 3 million confirmed cases on Tuesday as more states reported record numbers of new infections, and Florida faced an impending shortage of intensive care unit hospital beds.

Authorities have reported alarming upswings of daily caseloads in roughly two dozen states over the past two weeks, a sign that efforts to control transmission of the novel coronavirus have failed in large swaths of the country.

California, Hawaii, Idaho, Missouri, Montana, Oklahoma and Texas on Tuesday shattered their previous daily record highs for new cases. The biggest jumps occurred in Texas and California, the two largest U.S. states, with more than 10,000 each. About 24 states have reported disturbingly high infection rates as a percentage of diagnostic tests conducted over the past week.

In Texas alone, the number of hospitalized patients more than doubled in just two weeks.

The trend has driven many more Americans to seek out COVID-19 screenings. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said on Tuesday it was adding short-term “surge” testing sites in three metropolitan areas in Florida, Louisiana and Texas.

In Houston, a line of more than 200 cars snaked around the United Memorial Medical Center as people waited hours in sweltering heat to get tested. Some had arrived the night before to secure a place in line at the drive-through site.

“I got tested because my younger brother got positive,” said Fred Robles, 32, who spent the night in his car. “There’s so many people that need to get tested, there’s nothing you can do about it.”

Dean Davis, 32, who lost his job due to the pandemic, said he arrived at the testing site at 3 a.m. Tuesday after he waited for hours on Monday but failed to make the cutoff.

“I was like, let me get here at 3, maybe nobody will be here,” Davis said. “I got here, there was a line already.”

In Florida, more than four dozen hospitals across 25 of 67 counties reported their intensive care units had reached full capacity, according to the state’s Agency for Health Care Administration. Only 17% of the total 6,010 adult ICU beds statewide were available on Tuesday, down from 20% three days earlier.

Additional hospitalizations could strain healthcare systems in many areas, leading to an uptick in lives lost from the respiratory illness that has killed more than 131,000 Americans to date. At least 923 of those deaths were reported Tuesday, the biggest single-day toll since June 10 but still far fewer than the record 2,806 tallied back in April.

A widely cited mortality model from the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) projected on Tuesday that U.S. deaths would reach 208,000 by Nov. 1, with the outbreak expected to gain new momentum heading into the fall.

A hoped-for summertime decline in transmission of the virus never materialized, the IHME said.

“The U.S. didn’t experience a true end of the first wave of the pandemic,” the IHME’s director, Dr. Christopher Murray, said in a statement. “This will not spare us from a second surge in the fall, which will hit particularly hard in states currently seeing high levels of infections.”

‘PRESSURE ON GOVERNORS’

President Donald Trump, who has pushed for restarting the U.S. economy and urged Americans to return to their normal routines, said on Tuesday he would lean on state governors to open schools in the fall.

Speaking at the White House, Trump said some people wanted to keep schools closed for political reasons. “No way, so we’re very much going to put pressure on governors and everybody else to open the schools.”

New COVID-19 infections are rising in 42 states, based on a Reuters analysis of the past two weeks. By Tuesday afternoon, the number of confirmed U.S. cases had surpassed 3 million, affecting nearly one of every 100 Americans and a population roughly equal to Nevada’s.

In Arizona, another hot spot, the rate of coronavirus tests coming back positive rose to 26% for the week ended July 5, leading two dozen states with positivity rates exceeding 5%. The World Heath Organization considers a rate over 5% to be troubling.

The Texas state fair, which had been scheduled to open on Sept. 25, has been canceled for the first time since World War Two, organizers announced on Tuesday.

In Ohio, Governor Mike DeWine said the state was ordering people in seven counties to wear face coverings in public starting Wednesday evening.

(Reporting by Callaghan O’Hare in Houston and Lisa Shumaker in Chicago; Additional reporting by Maria Caspani, Gabriella Borter, Caroline Humer and Peter Szekely in New York and Susan Heavey and Jeff Mason in Washington Writing by Paul Simao and Steve Gorman; Editing by Bill Berkrot, Cynthia Osterman, Tom Brown and Leslie Adler)

Trump administration to encourage schools to safely reopen amid coronavirus surge

By Alexandra Alper and Susan Heavey

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Donald Trump is pushing for schools to reopen in the fall and is hosting White House events on the topic on Tuesday, despite a steady increase in coronavirus infections across the country led by younger Americans and rising hospitalizations in many states.

Trump on Monday tweeted “SCHOOLS MUST OPEN IN THE FALL!!!”, as local officials across the country began pausing or scaling back their re-openings due to the surge in infections.

On Tuesday, he will hold a discussion at the White House on re-opening schools, while Vice President Mike Pence speaks with governors on the topic, according to a senior administration official who briefed reporters.

“It is really … critically important to get our schools open,” the official said, highlighting the role schools play in communities. “There are a variety of different strategies that schools can adopt that really minimize the risk and can open these schools quite safely.”

The call comes as state and local governments, which largely control schools for kindergarten through 12th grade, grapple with how to handle the upcoming school year, seeking to balance the need for education with the risk of spreading the highly contagious disease.

Most working parents of school-age children also depend on in-person instruction to allow them to work.

But an alarming surge in cases in the United States, especially among younger people, has raised concerns about the increased risk of spread by children to vulnerable adults at home as well as to older teachers and school staff.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “encourages school districts to make reopening plans that anticipate COVID-19 cases, minimize risk of spread and then limit the need for the potential of school closures,” the official said.

Florida, a Republican-led state, on Monday issued a sweeping executive order for children to return to school this fall, despite sharply rising new COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations there.

Asked about Florida, the senior administration official stressed that “these are state and local decisions at the end of the day and we are confident that state and local leaders across the country are taking these decisions very seriously.”

Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, said it was too soon to decide on schools given the nature of the resurgent outbreak.

If Trump wants schools to re-open, he should call for masks to be worn nationwide, she told CNN, calling mask wearing “a simple, cost effective” solution to mitigate virus spread.

Colleges and universities are also weighing plans to resume this autumn, including calendar changes on online classes.

The Trump administration on Monday said foreign students must leave the country if their schools move to fully online classes, which could choke off revenue for those schools.

(Reporting by Alexandra Alper and Susan Heavey; Editing by Bill Berkrot)

Televangelists, Dallas megachurch that hosted Pence approved for millions in pandemic aid

By Chris Prentice

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A Dallas megachurch whose pastor has been a vocal supporter of President Donald Trump was approved for a forgivable loan worth $2 million to $5 million, according to long-awaited government data released on Monday.

Vice President Mike Pence spoke at a rally last month at the First Baptist Church of Dallas, whose pastor, Robert Jeffress, has been on Trump’s evangelical advisory board.

It was among the tens of thousands of religious organizations that received a total of $7.3 billion in pandemic aid from the Small Business Administration.

The list of religious organizations approved for about 88,400 small business loans also included Joyce Meyer Ministries Inc, a Missouri church which in 2007-2011 was investigated by the Senate over its finances. That church was approved for $5 million to $10 million – the largest sum an individual entity could apply for.

Neither organization immediately responded to requests for comment on the loans. Joyce Meyer fully cooperated with the Senate investigation and agreed to join the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability.

Monday’s data released by the U.S. Treasury Department and Small Business Administration (SBA) named borrowers that were approved for loans of $150,000 or more under the $660 billion Paycheck Protection Program.

The data showed religious organizations accounting for more than 1 million of the 51.1 million jobs protected by the high profile program. The list of named religious organizations was heavily skewed toward Christian denominations, according to a Reuters analysis.

Launched on April 3, the Paycheck Protection Program allows small businesses, non-profits and individuals hurt by the pandemic to apply for a forgivable government-backed loan.

Critics of the program’s rules, though, say it is unconstitutional for religious groups to receive taxpayer funds because America’s founders, in a bid to preserve religious freedom for all, envisaged a strict separation between church and state.

“Going back to the founding of our country, one of the major principles is that no one should be forced to be taxed to propagate the religious ideas of another person,” said Alison Gill, vice president of legal and policy at religious equality watchdog American Atheists.

Among the other 19 religious organizations to be approved for between $5 million and $10 million was Oklahoma-based Life.Church Operations LLC. Its pastor Bobby Gruenewald said in response to Reuters questions that he was grateful that churches were able to qualify for the loans, but did not say how much his church got or whether it will seek loan forgiveness.

Also in the $5 million-$10 million bracket were the Roman Catholic Diocese of San Bernardino, California, which has publicly acknowledged its role in a decades-old sexual abuse scandal, and Willow Creek Community Church Inc. in Illinois. In 2018, the Chicago Tribune, citing court records, reported that Willow Creek paid $3.25 million to settle lawsuits alleging a church volunteer sexually abused children. Willow Creek did not respond immediately to request for comment.

A spokesman for San Bernardino diocese said its entities received about $8.5 million which were used to pay staff wages and utility costs, and that the diocese expects to seek loan forgiveness.

(Reporting by Chris Prentice; Additional reporting by Koh Gui Qing and Brad Heath; Editing by Michelle Price, Tom Lasseter and Gerry Doyle)

U.S. envoy arrives in South Korea as North Korea rejects talks

By Hyonhee Shin

SEOUL (Reuters) – A U.S. envoy arrived in South Korea on Tuesday in an effort to renew stalled nuclear talks with North Korea, hours after it issued a statement saying it has no intention of sitting down with the United States and told South Korea to “stop meddling”.

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun, who has led working-level talks with the North Koreans, landed at a U.S. military base south of Seoul, media reported, and was due to meet South Korean officials on Wednesday and Thursday.

Earlier on Tuesday, Kwon Jong Gun, director general for U.S. affairs at North Korea’s foreign ministry, accused South Korea of misinterpreting a North Korean statement dismissing an “untimely rumor” about another summit between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and U.S. President Donald Trump.

North Korea said on Saturday it did not feel the need for a new summit, days after South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who had offered to mediate between Kim and Trump, suggested the two leaders meet again before the U.S. elections in November.

“It is just the time for (South Korea) to stop meddling in others’ affairs but it seems there is no cure or prescription for its bad habit,” Kwon said in a statement carried by the North’s official KCNA news agency.

“Explicitly speaking once again, we have no intention to sit face to face with the United States.”

Trump and Kim met for the first time in 2018 in Singapore, raising hopes for a negotiated end to North Korea’s nuclear program. But their second summit, in 2019 in Vietnam, and subsequent working-level negotiations fell apart.

Yang Moo-jin, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul, said Kwon’s statement reflected lingering inter-Korean tension and North Korea’s view that nuclear issues should be discussed only with the United States.

“It also suggested that North Koreans would ditch the past concept of negotiations where the South played a broker role, and won’t return to the table without major U.S. concessions,” Yang said.

Biegun said last week there was time for both sides to re-engage and “make substantial progress” but the novel coronavirus pandemic would make an in-person summit difficult before the U.S. presidential elections on Nov. 3.

The coronavirus complicated Biegun’s visit in a more personal way as well.

A newspaper reported that because of the outbreak, the envoy would not be visiting a Korean chicken soup restaurant that has been a regular stop on previous visits, and instead had arranged for the dish to be prepared at the U.S. ambassador’s residence.

Last month, North Korea abruptly raised tensions with South Korea and blew up a joint liaison office, just on its side of the border, before just as suddenly suspending plans for unspecified military actions.

(Reporting by Hyonhee Shin; Additional reporting by Josh Smith; Editing by Chris Reese, Howard Goller and Lincoln Feast)

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