Tag Archives: United States

In response to Myanmar coup, Biden signs order for sanctions on generals, businesses

(Reuters) – U.S. President Joe Biden announced on Wednesday he had approved an executive order for new sanctions on those responsible for the military coup in Myanmar and he repeated demands for the generals to give up power and free civilian leaders.

Biden said the executive order would enable his administration “to immediately sanction the military leaders who directed the coup, their business interests as well as close family members.”

He said Washington would identify the first round of targets this week and was taking steps to prevent the generals in Myanmar, which is also known as Burma, having access to $1 billion in funds held in the United States.

“We’re also going to impose strong exports controls. We’re freezing U.S. assets that benefit the Burmese government, while maintaining our support for health care, civil society groups, and other areas that benefit the people of Burma directly,” Biden said at the White House.

“We’ll be ready to impose additional measures, and we’ll continue to work with our international partners to urge other nations to join us in these efforts.”

The Feb. 1 coup, which overthrew elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s civilian-led government, occurred less than two weeks after Biden took office. It presented him with his first major international crisis and an early test of his dual pledges to re-center human rights in foreign policy and work more closely with allies.

Biden said Myanmar was of “deep and bipartisan concern” in the United States.

“I again call on the Burmese military to immediately release the democratic political leaders and activists,” he said. “The military must relinquish power it’s seized.”

U.S. State Department spokesman Ned Price told a news briefing Washington was rolling out collective actions with partners on Myanmar and could impose substantial costs on the generals.

Protesters returned to the streets of Myanmar on Wednesday despite the shooting of a young woman the previous day, with some deploying humor to emphasize their peaceful opposition to the military takeover.

The protests have been the largest in Myanmar in more than a decade, reviving memories of almost half a century of direct army rule and spasms of bloody uprisings until the military began relinquishing some power in 2011.

The military justified its takeover on the grounds of fraud in a Nov. 8 election that Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) party won by a landslide. The electoral commission dismissed the army’s complaints.

The Biden administration has been working to form an international response to the crisis, including by working with allies in Asia who have closer ties to Myanmar and its military.

Western countries have condemned the coup, but despite this, analysts say Myanmar’s military’s is unlikely to be as isolated as it was in the past, with China, India, Southeast Asian neighbors and Japan unlikely to cut ties given the country’s geo-strategic importance.

While Biden did not specify who would be hit with new sanctions, Washington is likely to target coup leader Min Aung Hlaing and other top generals who are already under U.S. sanctions imposed in 2019 over abuses against Rohingya Muslims and other minorities.

It could also blacklist the military’s two major conglomerates, Myanmar Economic Holdings Limited and Myanmar Economic Corp, holding companies with investments spanning sectors including banking, gems, copper, telecoms and clothing.

Japan’s foreign ministry said U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his Japanese counterpart Toshimitsu Motegi agreed in a phone call to urge the Myanmar authorities to immediately stop violence against protesters.

There were no reports of violence in Myanmar on Wednesday, and in many places protests took on a festive air, with bare-chested body builders, women in ball gowns and wedding dresses, farmers in tractors and people with their pets.

Thousands joined demonstrations in the main city of Yangon, while in the capital, Naypyitaw, hundreds of government workers marched in support of a growing civil disobedience campaign.

The Biden administration has been working on its Myanmar policy with both fellow Democrats and Republicans in Congress.

U.S. National security adviser Jake Sullivan spoke on Wednesday with Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, who has a longstanding interest in the country and a close relationship with Suu Kyi, a McConnell aide said.

Suu Kyi, 75, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 for campaigning for democracy and remains hugely popular at home despite damage to her international reputation over the plight of the Muslim Rohingya minority.

She has spent nearly 15 years under house arrest and now faces charges of illegally importing six walkie-talkies and her lawyer said he has not been allowed to see her.

(Reporting by Reuters staff; Writing by David Brunnstrom; Editing by Mary Milliken and Grant McCool)

62.9 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines delivered, 43.2 million administered: U.S. CDC

Reuters) – The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said it had administered 43,206,190 doses of COVID-19 vaccines in the country as of Tuesday morning and delivered 62,898,775 doses.

The tally of vaccine doses are for both Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines as of 6:00 a.m. ET on Tuesday, the agency said.

The agency said 32,867,213 people had received 1 or more doses while 9,840,429 people have got the second dose as of Tuesday.

A total of 5,015,224 vaccine doses have been administered in long-term care facilities, the agency said.

(Reporting by Vishwadha Chander in Bengaluru; Editing by Aditya Soni)

U.S. government to ship COVID-19 vaccines directly to community health centers starting next week

(Reuters) – The U.S. government will begin shipping COVID-19 vaccines directly to community health centers around the country next week in an effort to speed vaccination and ensure doses are reaching vulnerable populations, U.S. health officials said on Tuesday.

It will begin by shipping doses to 250 centers nationwide selected based on their proximity to vulnerable groups, such as homeless people and those with limited proficiency in English, they said, but will eventually scale to 1400 community health centers in the United States.

(Reporting by Carl O’Donnell; Editing by Chris Reese)

U.S. job openings edge up in December, hiring declines

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. job openings increased marginally in December while hiring declined, pointing to a labor market that was treading water amid a raging COVID-19 pandemic.

Job openings, a measure of labor demand, rose to 6.65 million on the last day of December from 6.572 million in the previous month, the Labor Department said on Tuesday in its monthly Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, or JOLTS report. The job openings rate ticked up to 4.5% from 4.4% in November.

Hiring dropped to 5.54 million from 5.94 million in November. The hiring rate declined to 3.9% from 4.2% in November. Layoffs decreased to 1.81 million in December from 2.056 million in the prior month. That lowered the layoffs rate to 1.3% from 1.4% in November.

The JOLTS report followed on the heels of news last Friday that the economy created only 49,000 jobs in January after shedding 227,000 jobs in December. Employment is 9.9 million jobs below its peak in February 2020.

(Reporting by Lucia Mutikani; Editing by Paul Simao)

U.S. COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations log biggest weekly drops since pandemic started

(Reuters) – The United States reported a 25% drop in new cases of COVID-19 to about 825,000 last week, the biggest fall since the pandemic started, although health officials said they were worried new variants of the virus could slow or reverse this progress.

New cases of the virus have now fallen for four weeks in a row to the lowest level since early November, according to a Reuters analysis of state and county reports. The steepest drop was in California, where cases in the week ended Feb. 7 fell 48%. Only Oregon, Puerto Rico, Arkansas and Vermont saw cases rise.

At least three new variants of the novel coronavirus are circulating in the United States, including the UK variant B.1.1.7 that is 30% to 40% more contagious, according to researchers.

“I’m asking everyone to please keep your guard up,” Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said on Monday. “The continued proliferation of variants remains a great concern and is a threat that could reverse the recent positive trends we are seeing.”

The average number of COVID-19 patients in hospitals fell by 15% to 88,000 last week, also a record percentage drop, according to a Reuters analysis of data from the volunteer-run COVID Tracking Project. It was the lowest average number in hospitals since late November.

Death fell 2.5% last week to 22,193. Excluding a backlog of deaths reported by Indiana, fatalities were down 9.5% last week. Deaths are a lagging indicator and usually fall several weeks after cases and hospitalizations drop.

Cumulatively, nearly 464,000 people have died from the virus in the United States, or one in every 704 residents.

Nationally, 7.3% of tests of tests came back positive for the virus, down from 8.5% the prior week, according to data from the COVID Tracking Project.

(Graphic by Chris Canipe, writing by Lisa Shumaker, editing by Tiffany Wu)

Pentagon to deploy 1,100 troops to help COVID-19 vaccination efforts

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Joe Biden’s administration on Friday announced that the Pentagon had approved the deployment of 1,100 active-duty troops to assist with COVID-19 vaccination efforts in the United States, a number likely to rise in the coming weeks and months.

The pandemic has killed more than 447,000 Americans and thrown millions out of work.

Andy Slavitt, senior adviser to the White House’s COVID-19 response team, said in a briefing that part of the group would start to arrive in California within the next 10 days.

The Pentagon said the 1,110 troops would be broken down into five teams, each with vaccinators, nurses and clinical staff.

The deployment is likely just the first tranche of U.S. military personnel assisting in administering vaccinations around the country.

White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain last week said the Federal Emergency Management Agency was working with the Pentagon to use 10,000 troops and open 100 centers across the country to increase the availability of vaccines.

Using the military to fight the coronavirus is not new. At its peak under former President Donald Trump, more than 47,000 National Guard troops were supporting COVID-19 operations and about 20,000 continue to help.

The Army Corps of Engineers has also built thousands of rooms across the country to assist hospitals with the strain caused by the spread of the coronavirus.

(Reporting by Idrees Ali; Editing by Dan Grebler)

Canada’s Trudeau says scope for closer U.S.-Canada integration on EVs, critical mineral supply

By Steve Scherer

OTTAWA (Reuters) – Canada and the United States can collaborate more closely on manufacturing electric vehicles and on supplying critical minerals needed to make batteries for cars and other clean technologies, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Thursday.

“The integration of our economies, of our supply chains … I think gives a real opportunity for us to really take some leaps forward,” Trudeau said in a telephone interview.

After noting that Canada has many of the rare earths minerals needed for car batteries and solar panels, Trudeau said it was important to have “a secure supply from a friend and an ally”.

China has been one of the main suppliers of critical minerals to the United States, and Biden is planning to mandate a review of critical U.S. supply chains with an eye to securing U.S. industrial supplies, Reuters reported earlier this week.

Canada’s mineral wealth “is part of why so many automakers are now looking at setting up their supply chains for zero emission vehicles in Canada,” Trudeau said.

General Motors Co, Ford Motor Co and Stellantis NV have all announced plans to manufacture electric vehicles in Canada in coming years.

“We’ve already seen something like $6 billion worth of investment by auto companies in Canada over the past couple of years into zero-emissions or low-emissions vehicles,” Trudeau said.

“There’s a lot of really great opportunities to be developing partnerships and production facilities not just for the North American market, but for the world,” he added.

(Reporting by Steve Scherer; Editing by Daniel Wallis)

U.S. community health centers say they have given more vaccines than government data show

By Rebecca Spalding

(Reuters) – Some U.S. community health centers say they are doling out COVID-19 shots far faster than government data suggests, likely accounting for some of a gap between how states and the federal government describe the availability of vaccine doses.

The federal government said only about 60% of nearly 56 million doses of vaccines from Pfizer Inc or Moderna Inc that have shipped have been used. Yet states such as New York have said that their supplies are stretched thin.

Community health centers, which often serve people of color and those with low incomes, are an important piece of the Biden Administration’s plan for equitable COVID-19 vaccine distribution, which also includes pharmacies, mass vaccination sites, and hospitals.

Experts said data reporting issues at community health centers and other small providers likely represent some of the disparity, which has also been attributed to the slower-than-expected rollout pace at hospitals and nursing homes.

St. John’s Well Child and Family Center was allocated thousands of COVID-19 vaccines for their south Los Angeles community health centers. But weeks into their vaccination campaign, California state officials threatened to cut future deliveries for not administering doses fast enough.

The state’s data suggested the center had only given out 700 doses. St. John’s records showed it had administered shots into ten times that many arms.

“They think we’re sitting on thousands and thousands of doses,” St. John’s Chief Executive Jim Mangia said in an interview.

He has since begun working with officials and put 12 staffers on data entry – an expensive proposition for a center losing more than $100 on every shot due to mushrooming administrative costs, he said.

Four community health centers in New York and North Carolina said their experience has been was similar. Staff members spend hours each week entering data to meet state requirements, while juggling running vaccine clinics. Given the priority of protecting people from a deadly disease, keeping up with data entry sometimes fails.

The four centers said state reporting requirements were labor intensive and often involved manual data entry. Three said government registries have indicated they had doses on shelves at times when their supply had run out.

Six states including California, Pennsylvania, and Maryland told Reuters they had identified data reporting lags from some vaccinators. The states said they were working on measures to make their data more accurate.

New U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky said at a January White House media briefing that national data reflects a delay between when shots are given and when they are reported to states. She said the agency was working to better understand that delay.

MANY RULES TO FOLLOW

Beth Blauer, an executive director at Johns Hopkins University who has been tracking COVID-19 vaccines, said data is not being released in a way that can explain the “persistent deltas” between doses shipped and those used.

Blauer said an estimated 10% or less of doses distributed have gone to smaller providers, including community health centers. Their data reporting issues could account for only a small part of the gap, she said.

Rebecca Coyle, executive director at American Immunization Registry Association – a group for public health officials who track vaccination data – said it was no surprise community health centers and other small providers, like mom-and-pop pharmacies, would have greater data reporting challenges than large, well-resourced hospitals.

“It’s taking time to get folks up to speed in terms of what is required,” she said.

Roberta Kelly, chief nursing officer of Sun River Health, a community health center network in New York City, Long Island, and New York’s Hudson Valley, said she and other staff spend hours each week manually entering missing data to both the state’s and city’s vaccine registries.

The databases are both cumbersome to use and distinct, meaning much of the same information must be entered twice for shots given at their city locations, Kelly said, adding: “It’s like two different countries.”

A Sun River center in the New York City borough of Staten Island was highlighted at a Jan. 18 news conference by Governor Andrew Cuomo as one of the lowest-performing vaccinators in the city.

Kelly was puzzled by that conclusion. Doses are gone within days even when data suggests otherwise, she said.

Recently for instance, the city’s registry showed they had 250 doses available when in fact those doses had been given out days before.

“The system’s just not caught up with what’s actually happening on the ground,” Kelly said. “We’re following the rules and there are many of them.”

(Reporting by Rebecca Spalding; Editing by Caroline Humer and Bill Berkrot)

COVID-19 cases falling in U.S., Canada, but still rising in Mexico, Colombia, Brazil: PAHO

BRASILIA (Reuters) – COVID-19 infections are finally decreasing in the United States and Canada after weeks of unrelenting rise, but in Mexico cases and deaths continue to increase, particularly in states that drew tourism in the holiday season, the Pan American Health Organization said on Wednesday.

In South America, Colombia reported the highest incidence of cases, followed by Brazil, where the city of Manaus is still seeing exponential increases in both cases and deaths, PAHO director Carissa Etienne said. Three new variants have been detected in 20 countries of the Americas, though their frequency is still limited, she said in a briefing.

(Reporting by Anthony Boadle, Editing by Franklin Paul)

U.S. private hiring rebounds solidly in January

By Lucia Mutikani

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. private payrolls rebounded more than expected in January, suggesting the labor market recovery was back on track after the economy shed jobs in December as soaring COVID-19 infections hurt operations in the leisure and hospitality industry.

The ADP National Employment Report on Wednesday showed broad gains in hiring last month, though the pace was half of the monthly average job growth in the last six months of 2020. The stronger-than-expected rise in hiring was likely driven by the nearly $900 billion in additional pandemic relief provided by the government in late December.

“Recovery in payrolls is ongoing, albeit at a slow pace,” said Rubeela Farooqi, chief U.S. economist at High Frequency Economics in White Plains, New York. “However, contact-facing businesses continue to face downside risks from virus-related restrictions.”

Private payrolls increased by 174,000 jobs last month after dropping by 78,000 in December. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast private payrolls would rebound by 49,000 in January.

The ADP report is jointly developed with Moody’s Analytics.

Goods producers added 19,000 jobs in January, with employment in the construction industry rising 18,000. Manufacturing payrolls gained only 1,000. Hiring in the services sector rebounded by 156,000 jobs after falling 73,000 in December. The leisure and hospitality industry added 35,000 jobs after shedding 79,000 positions in December.

January was the worst month of the coronavirus pandemic since it started in the United States, according to data from Johns Hopkins University, forcing consumers to hunker down.

The bounce back in hiring last month as authorities started to ease restrictions on businesses has offered hope of faster job growth in the months ahead as the boost from recent stimulus package fully kicks in and the vaccines rollout speeds up.

“The rebounds suggest that demand rebounded quickly once the latest coronavirus wave passed its peak,” said Paul Ashworth, chief U.S. economist at Capital Economics in Toronto.

U.S. stocks opened higher after strong quarterly results from Alphabet and Amazon, and hopes of more stimulus. The dollar was steady against a basket of currencies. U.S. Treasury prices were lower.

SPOTTY RECORD

President Joe Biden has unveiled a recovery plan worth $1.9 trillion, though resistance from some lawmakers worried about the ballooning national debt could see the package trimmed. The Biden administration has pledged to speed up and simplify the distribution of vaccines.

Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi said vaccines and fiscal stimulus could help to spur faster job growth.

The ADP report was published ahead of the government’s closely watched, and comprehensive, monthly employment report on Friday. Despite the solid ADP number, economists did not change their estimates for January nonfarm payrolls, noting its spotty record predicting the private payrolls count in the government’s employment report.

“We don’t think that the ADP report gives a very reliable signal about the Labor Department data,” said Daniel Silver, an economist at JPMorgan in New York.

According to a Reuters poll of economists payrolls likely increased by 50,000 jobs in January after declining by 140,000 in December, the first drop in employment in eight months.

Expectations for a rebound in hiring were bolstered by a report on Monday from the Institute for Supply Management showing that manufacturers hired more workers in January, though a flare-up in COVID-19 infections caused labor shortages at factories and their suppliers.

But the Conference Board’s survey last week showed consumers’ perceptions of labor market conditions deteriorated further in January.

The economy has recouped 12.5 million of the 22.2 million jobs lost in March and April. The Congressional Budget Office estimated on Monday that employment would not return to its pre-pandemic level before 2024.

(Reporting By Lucia Mutikani; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)