TOKYO, Nov 22 (Reuters) – Japan launched a probe into the Unification Church on Tuesday that could threaten its legal status, after the assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in July revealed its close ties to the ruling party and triggered a public backlash.
For the Unification Church, founded in South Korea in 1954 and relying on its Japan followers as a key source of income, the investigation could deliver a severe financial blow, affecting its tax exemptions and even its property holdings.
The stakes are also high for Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s government, teetering at an approval rate of just 30% and eager to quell the uproar over links to the Unification Church, which forced the resignation of his economic revitalisation minister last month.
“For Kishida, it’s clear that this is a huge drag on him. He’s going to be linked to the Unification Church issue no matter what,” said Levi McLaughlin, an associate professor at North Carolina State University studying religion in Japan.
The government has given the Unification Church until Dec. 9 to answer an initial series of questions about its finances and organisation, Culture Minister Keiko Nagaoka told a news conference.
After gathering evidence, the ministry will decide whether to seek a court order revoking the Unification Church’s legal standing, which could take several months and be followed by a lengthy legal battle.
The Unification Church expects to receive the first batch of government questions on Wednesday and will cooperate with the investigation, a spokesperson for the group in Japan said.
A senior church official at its South Korean headquarters added: “Japan is a democratic country that guarantees the freedom of religion, so we are closely monitoring the situation.”
Shiori Kanno, a lawyer on a Consumer Affairs Agency panel looking into the church’s practice of selling ginseng drinks, marble sculptures and other items to raise money from followers, said she expects the case to go all the way to the Supreme Court if the government ends up seeking to legally disband the church.
“The church would lose tax exemptions such as those on donations from members,” she said. “It will find it harder to borrow money.”
She added, however, that losing its status as a religious organisation would not prevent the church from continuing its activities or its members from meeting.
BLAME
When Tetsuya Yamagami was arrested for the killing of former Prime Minister Abe in July, he blamed the religious organisation for impoverishing his family and said Abe, who had appeared at events sponsored by Unification Church-affiliated groups, had promoted it.
The Unification Church, known globally for its mass weddings, says it has stopped soliciting donations that create financial hardships for its followers and has curtailed aggressive door-to-door sales of church goods, after convictions a decade ago related to such practices prompted its then-leader in Japan to resign.
With the spotlight on the church’s activities, however, Kishida has come under pressure to address public anger, stoked by revelations that more than half of all lawmakers in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party had links to the church.
The uproar has persisted despite a cabinet reshuffle on Aug. 10 that purged some senior figures with links to the church. In late October, Economic Revitalisation Minister Daishiro Yamagiwa resigned after revealing that he, too, had ties to the church.
Kishida will be particularly keen to put the issue behind him before a series of local elections next April, when his party will face voters on a national scale for the first time since winning the July upper house election that immediately followed Abe’s death.
Reporting by Tim Kelly, Kaori Kaneko and Ju-min Park; Editing by Chang-Ran Kim, Kenneth Maxwell and Edmund Klamann
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
LONDON, Nov 20 (Reuters) – Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which is under Russian control, was rocked by shelling on Sunday, drawing condemnation from the U.N. nuclear watchdog which said such attacks risked a major nuclear disaster.
More than a dozen blasts shook Europe’s biggest nuclear power plant on Saturday evening and Sunday, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said. Moscow and Kyiv both blamed the other for the shelling of the facility.
“The news from our team yesterday and this morning is extremely disturbing,” said Rafael Grossi, head of the IAEA, whose team on the ground said there had been damage to some buildings, systems and equipment at the plant.
“Explosions occurred at the site of this major nuclear power plant, which is completely unacceptable. Whoever is behind this, it must stop immediately. As I have said many times before, you’re playing with fire!”
Repeated shelling of the plant in southern Ukraine, which Russia took control of shortly after its February invasion, has raised concern about the potential for a grave accident just 500 km (300 miles) from the site of the world’s worst nuclear accident, the 1986 Chornobyl disaster.
The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant provided about a fifth of Ukraine’s electricity before Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion, and has been forced to operate on back-up generators a number of times. It has six Soviet-designed VVER-1000 V-320 water-cooled and water-moderated reactors containing Uranium 235.
The reactors are shut down but there is a risk that nuclear fuel could overheat if the power that drives the cooling systems was cut. Shelling has repeatedly cut power lines.
SIDES SWAP BLAME
Both Kyiv and Moscow have accused each other of attacking the plant on several occasions during the conflict and risking a nuclear accident, and they again exchanged blame on Sunday.
Russia’s defence ministry said Ukraine fired shells at power lines supplying the plant, while TASS reported some of the site’s storage facilities had been hit by Ukrainian shelling, quoting an official from Russian nuclear power operator Rosenergoatom.
“They shelled not only yesterday, but also today, they are shelling right now,” said Renat Karchaa, an adviser to Rosenergoatom’s CEO, adding that any artillery attack at the site posed a threat to nuclear safety.
Karchaa said the shells had been fired near a dry nuclear waste storage facility and a building that houses fresh spent nuclear fuel, but that no radioactive emissions had currently been detected, according to TASS.
Ukraine’s nuclear energy firm Energoatom accused the Russian military of shelling the site and said there were at least 12 hits on plant infrastructure.
It said that Russia had targeted the infrastructure necessary to restart parts of the plant in an attempt to further limit Ukraine’s power supply.
Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge in London, Pavel Polityuk in Kyiv and Caleb Davis in Gdansk; Writing by Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Pravin Char and Frances Kerry
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Oct 28 (Reuters) – Meta Platforms Inc (META.O) Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg will testify in a case by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) that argues the company’s proposed deal to buy virtual reality (VR) content maker Within Unlimited should be blocked.
In a court document filed with U.S. District Court Northern District Of California on Friday, the FTC listed 18 witnesses it plans to question, including Zuckerberg, Within CEO Chris Milk and Meta Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth.
They were also on a list of witnesses submitted on Friday by defendants Meta and Within.
In addition to defending the Within acquisition, Zuckerberg is expected to be questioned about the Facebook-parent’s strategy for its VR business, as well as the company’s plans to support third-party developers, according to the court document.
The FTC had filed a lawsuit in July saying that Meta’s acquisition of Within would “tend to create a monopoly” in the market for VR-dedicated fitness apps.
The regulator argues that the proposed deal would “substantially lessen competition or tend to create a monopoly” in that market. read more
Meta, in court documents, has argued that “the FTC’s conclusory, speculative, and contradictory allegations do not plausibly plead any facts to establish that any supposed market for VR Deliberate Fitness apps is ‘oligopolistic’ as to either behavior or structure.” read more
Facebook agreed to buy Within in October 2021 for an undisclosed sum.
Reporting by Ismail Shakil in Ottawa; Editing by Aurora Ellis
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
CHICAGO/LONDON, Sept 8 (Reuters) – Scott Taylor never got to move on from COVID-19.
The 56-year-old, who caught the disease in spring 2020, still had not recovered about 18 months later when he killed himself at his home near Dallas, having lost his health, memory and money.
“No one cares. No one wants to take the time to listen,” Taylor wrote in a final text to a friend, speaking of the plight of millions of sufferers of long COVID, a disabling condition that can last for months and years after the initial infection.
Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com
“I can hardly do laundry without complete exhaustion, pain, fatigue, pain all up and down my spine. World spinning dizzily, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea. It seems I say stuff and have no idea of what I’m saying,” Taylor added.
Long COVID is a complex medical condition that can be hard to diagnose as it has a range of more than 200 symptoms – some of which can resemble other illnesses – from exhaustion and cognitive impairment to pain, fever and heart palpitations, according to the World Health Organization.
There is no authoritative data on the frequency of suicides among sufferers. Several scientists from organizations including the U.S. National Institutes of Health and Britain’s data-collection agency are beginning to study a potential link following evidence of increased cases of depression and suicidal thoughts among people with long COVID, as well as a growing number of known deaths.
“I’m sure long COVID is associated with suicidal thoughts, with suicide attempts, with suicide plans and the risk of suicide death. We just don’t have epidemiological data,” said Leo Sher, a psychiatrist at Mount Sinai Health System in New York who studies mood disorders and suicidal behavior.
Among key questions now being examined by researchers: does the risk of suicide potentially increase among patients because the virus is changing brain biology? Or does the loss of their ability to function as they once did push people to the brink, as can happen with other long-term health conditions?
Sher said pain disorders in general were a very strong of predictor of suicide, as was inflammation in the brain, which several studies have linked with long COVID.
“We should take this seriously,” he added.
An analysis for Reuters conducted by Seattle-based health data firm Truveta showed that patients with long COVID were nearly twice as likely to receive a first-time antidepressant prescription within 90 days of their initial COVID diagnosis compared with people diagnosed with COVID alone.
The analysis was based on data from 20 major U.S. hospital systems, including more than 1.3 million adults with a COVID diagnosis and 19,000 with a long COVID diagnosis between May 2020 and July 2022.
‘WE DON’T KNOW THE EXTENT’
The potential long-term effects of COVID-19 are poorly understood, with governments and scientists only now starting to systematically study the area as they emerge from a pandemic that itself blindsided much of the world.
While many long COVID patients recover over time, around 15% still experience symptoms after 12 months, according to the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME). There’s no proven treatment and debilitating symptoms can leave sufferers unable to work.
The implications of long COVID potentially being linked with increased risk of mental illness and suicide are grave; in America alone, the condition has affected up to 23 million people, the U.S. Government Accountability Office estimated in March.
Long COVID has also pushed roughly 4.5 million out of work, equal to about 2.4% of the U.S. workforce, employment expert Katie Bach of the Brookings Institution told Congress in July.
Worldwide, nearly 150 million people are estimated to have developed long COVID during the first two years of the pandemic, according to the IHME.
In many developing countries, a lack of surveillance of long COVID makes the picture even murkier, said Murad Khan, a psychiatry professor at Aga Khan University in Karachi, Pakistan, who is part of an international group of experts researching the suicide risk linked to COVID-19.
“We have a huge problem, but we don’t know the extent of the problem,” he said.
HITTING BREAKING POINT
Time is a scarce commodity for a growing number of long COVID sufferers who say they are running out of hope and money, according to Reuters interviews with several dozen patients, family members and disease experts.
Lauren Nichols, who has long COVID, takes a break from work to read her blood oxygen levels and heart rate from a machine on her finger in her home in Andover, Massachusetts, U.S., August 3, 2022. REUTERS/Lauren Owens Lambert
For Taylor, who lost his job selling genomic tests to physicians in a round of layoffs in the summer of 2020, the breaking point came when his insurance coverage through his former employer was due to expire and his application for social security benefits was denied, his family said.
“It was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” his older brother Mark Taylor said.
Heidi Ferrer, a 50-year-old TV screenwriter originally from Kansas, killed herself in May 2021 to escape the tremors and excruciating pain that left her unable to walk or sleep after contracting COVID more than a year earlier, her husband Nick Guthe said.
Guthe, a filmmaker who has become an advocate for long COVID sufferers since his wife’s death, said that until this past winter, he had not heard of other suicides within the network of long COVID patients.
“They’re now coming on a weekly basis,” he added.
Survivor Corps, an advocacy group for long COVID patients, said it polled their membership in May and found that 44% of nearly 200 respondents said they had considered suicide.
Lauren Nichols, a board member at the long COVID support group Body Politic, said that through contact with family members on social media she was aware of more than 50 people with long COVID who had killed themselves, though Reuters was unable to independently confirm the cases.
Nichols, 34, a logistics expert for the U.S. Department of Transportation in Boston, says she herself has considered suicide several times because of long COVID, which she has suffered for more than two years.
Exit International advises English-speakers on how to seek help with assisted dying in Switzerland, where euthanasia is legal with certain checks. Fiona Stewart, a director, said the organization, which does not track outcomes after providing advice, had received several dozen inquiries from long COVID patients during the pandemic and was now getting about one a week.
LONG COVID AND OMICRON
The U.S. National Institutes of Health is tracking mental health impacts as part of its $470 million RECOVER study into long COVID. Early results on anxiety and depression rates are expected by early September, but information on suicide will take longer, said Dr. Stuart Katz, a lead researcher.
“What we do know is that persons with chronic illnesses are susceptible to suicidal thoughts, suicide attempts and suicide completion,” said Richard Gallagher, an associate professor of child psychiatry at NYU Langone Health, who is part of RECOVER.
On the question of whether the virus changes the brain, Gallagher said there was some evidence that COVID can cause brain inflammation – which has been linked to suicide and depression – even among people who had relatively mild disease.
“There may be direct, in some ways, toxic effects of the virus, and part of it will be inflammation,” he said.
Long COVID on average reduces overall health by 21% – similar to total deafness or a traumatic brain injury, the University of Washington’s IHME found.
Although some experts expected Omicron to be less likely to cause long COVID, official UK data released this month found that 34% of the 2 million long COVID sufferers in the country developed their symptoms after an Omicron infection.
A British government advisory group is studying the suicide risk for long COVID patients compared with the wider population while the state Office for National Statistics (ONS) is investigating whether it can assess upfront a long COVID patient’s risk of suicide as it does for people with other diseases, such as cancer.
“Health conditions that are disabling long-term may add to suicide risk, hence the concern over long COVID,” said Louis Appleby, a psychiatry professor at the University of Manchester and a UK government adviser.
Indeed, research in Britain and Spain found a six-fold increased risk of suicide among patients with myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), another post-viral illness with similar symptoms to long COVID, when compared with the general population.
Britain’s network of long COVID treatment centers is also drastically oversubscribed, adding to a sense of hopelessness for some; in June, the latest month on record, only a third of patients received an appointment within six weeks of being referred by their local doctor, and another third had to wait for more than 15 weeks.
Ruth Oshikanlu, a former midwife and health visitor in London turned pregnancy coach, said her long COVID health problems combined to push her close to the edge. When her business temporarily folded due to debt issues after she struggled to work, she felt her life was over.
“I was crying to the accountant, and the guy kept me on hold – I think he didn’t want to be the last person to talk to me,” the 48-year-old recalled.
“What COVID gives you is a lot of time to think,” she said. “I didn’t think of ending it, thankfully, because of my son. But I do know so many people who have had those suicidal thoughts.”
Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com
Reporting by Julie Steenhuysen in Chicago and Jennifer Rigby in London; Editing by Michele Gershberg and Pravin Char
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com
VATICAN CITY, Sept 3 (Reuters) – Pope Francis on Saturday dissolved the leadership of the Knights of Malta, the global Catholic religious order and humanitarian group, and installed a provisional government ahead of the election of a new Grand Master.
The change, which the pope issued in a decree, came after five years of often acrimonious debate within the order and between some top members of the old guard and the Vatican over a new constitution that some feared would weaken its sovereignty.
The group, whose formal name is Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of St. John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes and of Malta, was founded in Jerusalem nearly 1,000 years ago to provide medical aid for pilgrims in the Holy Land.
Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com
It now has a multi-million dollar budget, 13,500 members, 95,000 volunteers and 52,000 medical staff running refugee camps, drug treatment centres, disaster relief programs and clinics around the world.
The order has been very active in helping Ukrainian refugees and war victims.
It has no real territory apart from a palace and offices in Rome and a fort in Malta, but is recognised as a sovereign entity with its own passports and licence plates.
It has diplomatic relations with 110 states and permanent observer status at the United Nations, allowing to act as a neutral party in relief efforts in war zones.
Cardinal Silvano Tomasi, the pope’s special delegate to the order, told reporters at a briefing along with some members of the provisional government that the order’s new constitution would not weaken its international sovereignty.
But as a religious order, it had to remain under the auspices of the Vatican, said Cardinal Gianfranco Ghirlanda, a member of the working group that prepared the new constitution approved by the pope on Saturday.
Francis convoked an extraordinary general chapter for Jan. 25 to begin the process of electing a new Grand Master.
The last one, Italian Giacomo Dalla Torre, died in April.
“We hope this will re-establish unity in the order and increase its ability to serve the poor and the sick,” Tomasi said.
Tomasi and the Lieutenant of the Grand Master, Canadian John Dunlap, will lead the group to the general chapter. A new Grand Master is expected to be elected by March, officials said.
Under the previous constitution, the top Knights and the Grand Master were required to have noble lineage, something reformers said excluded nearly everyone except Europeans from serving in top roles.
The new constitution eliminates the nobility rule as well as the tradition of Grand Masters being elected for life.
“It will be more democratic. The question of nobility has now become secondary,” Tomasi said.
Future Grand Masters will be elected for 10-year terms, renewable only once, and will have to step down at age 85.
Reformers, backed by the Vatican, had called for a more transparent government to bring in fresh blood and allow the order to better respond to the massive growth it has seen in recent years.
Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com
Reporting by Philip Pullella, Editing by Louise Heavens
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
HONG KONG, May 11 (Reuters) – Cardinal Joseph Zen, one of the most senior Catholic clerics in Asia, and three others who helped run a now-disbanded Hong Kong fund for protesters were arrested by on charges of “collusion with foreign forces”, and later released on bail.
Zen, a 90-year-old former bishop of Hong Kong, was questioned for several hours on Wednesday at the Chai Wan Police Station close his church residence, before being released on police bail. The silver-haired Zen, wearing a white clerical collar, left without making any comment to the media.
Local police said in a statement that the national security department of the police force had arrested two men and two women, ranging from 45 to 90 years old for “collusion with foreign forces” on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com
Register
Police said they were suspected of asking for foreign sanctions. All were released on bail with their passports confiscated under the national security law, police said.
A legal source familiar with the matter had earlier told Reuters that five people had been arrested in connection with the case: Zen; senior barrister Margaret Ng, 74; activist and pop singer Denise Ho; former lawmaker Cyd Ho; and former academic Hui Po-keung.
Zen has long been an advocate of democratic causes in Hong Kong and mainland China, and has spoken out against China’s growing authoritarianism under President Xi Jinping, including a Beijing-imposed national security law, and the persecution of some Roman Catholics in China.
Hui had been arrested at the airport on Tuesday night, according to media reports, while Cyd Ho was already in prison over a separate case.
The five were trustees of the “612 Humanitarian Relief Fund” which helped protesters who had been arrested during pro-democracy, anti-China protests in 2019 to help pay their legal and medical fees.
VATICAN CONCERNED
Hong Kong has long been one of the most important Catholic beachheads in Asia, home to an extensive network of aid agencies, scholars and missions that have supported Catholics in mainland China and elsewhere.
Beijing imposed the sweeping national security law in June 2020 that punishes terrorism, collusion with foreign forces, subversion and secession with possible life imprisonment.
The Vatican said on Wednesday it had learned of the arrest of Cardinal Joseph Zen in Hong Kong “with concern” and was following developments “with extreme attention”.
Reuters was not able to immediately reach the others for comment. The Hong Kong Catholic Diocese gave no immediate comment.
The “612 Humanitarian Relief Fund” was scrapped last year after the disbandment of a company that had helped receive donations through a bank account.
The arrests come after police said last September that they had begun investigating the fund for alleged violations of the national security law.
U.S. Indo-Pacific coordinator Kurt Campbell said the United States was concerned about the “clampdown” in Hong Kong, including in religious circles and academia.
“All I can tell you is that I think we’re increasingly troubled by steps in Hong Kong to pressure and eliminate civil society,” Campbell told an online event in Washington when asked about the arrests.
Hui, an associate cultural studies professor at Lingnan University, had once taught exiled democracy activist Nathan Law.
“If you want to punish someone, you can always find an excuse,” Law wrote on his Facebook page in response to Hui’s arrest.
Critics, including the United States, say the security law erodes the freedoms promised by China under a “one country, two systems” arrangement when Hong Kong was returned from British to Chinese rule in 1997.
Hong Kong authorities, however, say the law has brought stability to the city after the 2019 mass demonstrations.
Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com
Register
Reporting by Jessie Pang, James Pomfret, Greg Torode and Hong Kong newsroom; additional reporting by Philip Pullella in Rome, David Brunnstrom and Michael Martina in Washington; editing by Nick Macfie, Mark Heinrich and Alex Richardson
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
SHANGHAI, April 2 (Reuters) – Esther Zhao thought she was doing the right thing when she brought her 2-1/2-year-old daughter to a Shanghai hospital with a fever on March 26.
Three days later, Zhao was begging health authorities not to separate them after she and the little girl both tested positive for COVID-19, saying her daughter was too young to be taken away to a quarantine centre for children.
Doctors then threatened Zhao that her daughter would be left at the hospital, while she was sent to the centre, if she did not agree to transfer the girl to the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center in the city’s Jinshan district.
Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com
Register
Since her daughter was sent to the centre Zhao has had only one brief message that she was fine, sent through a group chat with doctors, despite repeated pleas for information from Zhao and her husband, who is in a separate quarantine site after also testing positive.
“There have been no photos at all… I’m so anxious, I have no idea what situation my daughter is in,” she said on Saturday through tears, still stuck at the hospital she went to last week. “The doctor said Shanghai rules is that children must be sent to designated points, adults to quarantine centres and you’re not allowed to accompany the children.”
Zhao is panicking even more after images of crying children at a Shanghai health facility went viral in China. The anonymous poster said these were children who had tested positive for COVID-19 and been separated from their parents at the Jinshan centre.
The photos and videos posted on China’s Weibo and Douyin social media platforms showed wailing babies kept three to a cot. In one video, a groaning toddler crawls out of a room with four child-sized beds pushed against the wall. While a few adults can be seen in the videos, they are outnumbered by the number of children.
Reuters could not immediately verify the images, but a source familiar with the facility confirmed they were taken at the Jinshan facility.
The Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center said, however, that the photos and videos circulating on internet were not of a “Jinshan infant quarantine facility” but were scenes taken when the hospital was moving its paediatric ward to another building to cope with a rising number of COVID paediatric patients.
This was done to “improve the hospital environment”, it said on its official WeChat account on Saturday, adding that it had organised for more pediatric workers and would strengthen communication with the children’s parents.
“Paediatric patients admitted to our hospital… are guaranteed medical treatment and their daily needs taken care of,” it said.
Later on Saturday the Shanghai rumour buster WeChat account, which is backed by China’s cyberspace watchdog, published four photos that it said showed the children’s current situation at the Jinshan centre.
One of the photos showed young children sitting in and standing around beds that were arranged neatly in two rows, though no adults were pictured. In another photo, a hazmat-suited person attends to a baby lying in a cot. Only one other adult, also in a hazmat suit, can be seen in the two other photos.
The Shanghai government referred Reuters to the hospital’s statement and declined to comment further.
A Shanghai health official said last week that hospitals that were treating COVID-positive children maintained online communications with their parents.
POST DELETED
By Saturday, the original post had been deleted from Weibo, but thousands of people continued to comment and repost the images. “This is horrific,” said one. “How could the government come up with such a plan?,” said another.
In some cases children as young as 3 months old are being separated from their breastfeeding mothers, according to posts in a quarantine hospital WeChat group shared with Reuters. In one room described in a post, there are eight children without an adult.
In another case, more than 20 children from a Shanghai kindergarten aged 5 to 6 were sent to a quarantine centre without their parents, a source familiar with the situation said.
Since Shanghai’s latest outbreak began about a month ago, authorities have locked down its 26 million people in a two-stage process that began on Monday.
While the number of cases in Shanghai is small by global standards, Chinese authorities have vowed to stick with “dynamic clearance”, aiming to test for, trace and centrally quarantine all positive cases.
The U.S., French and Italian foreign consulates have warned their citizens in Shanghai that family separations could happen as Chinese authorities executed COVID curbs, according to notices seen by Reuters.
Shanghai on Saturday reported 6,051 locally transmitted asymptomatic COVID-19 cases and 260 symptomatic cases for April 1, versus 4,144 asymptomatic cases and 358 symptomatic ones on the previous day.
Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com
Register
Reporting by Brenda Goh and Engen Tham, Additional reporting by Winni Zhou; Editing by Christian Schmollinger, William Mallard and Clelia Oziel
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk speaks next to the company’s newest Model S during the Model S Beta Event held at the Tesla factory in Fremont, California October 1, 2011. REUTERS/Stephen Lam/File Photo
Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com
Register
SAN FRANCISCO, Feb 14 (Reuters) – Tesla chief executive Elon Musk donated a total of 5,044,000 shares in the world’s most valuable automaker to a charity from Nov. 19 to Nov. 29 last year, its filing with U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) showed on Monday.
The donation was worth $5.74 billion, based on the closing prices of Tesla shares on the five days that he donated the stocks.
The filing did not disclose the name of the charity.
Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com
Register
Late last year, the billionaire sold $16.4 billion worth of shares after polling Twitter users about offloading 10% of his stake in the electric-car maker.
He tweeted last year that he would pay more than $11 billion in taxes in 2021 due to his exercise of stock options set to expire this year.
He also traded barbs with politicians Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren who called on wealthy people to pay more taxes.
Analysts have said there would be a tax benefit for Musk potentially gifting Tesla stock. This is because shares that are donated to charity are not subject to capital gains tax, as they would be if they were sold.
“His tax benefit would be huge. He’d save between 40% and 50% of the $5.7 billion in tax, depending on whether he could take the deduction against his California income and he’d avoid the gains tax he would have to pay if he sold the stock,” Bob Lord, an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies who studies tax policy, said.
He said Musk might have contributed the stock to intermediaries such as “donor-advised funds”, not outright to charitable groups.
Tesla was not immediately available for comment.
MUSK FOUNDATION
Musk’s public philanthropy gestures have so far trailed other billionaires. Musk and Amazon.com Inc founder Jeff Bezos have donated less than 1% of their net worth, whereas Warren Buffett and George Soros had given away more than 20% of their net worth as of early September, according to Forbes.
In 2001, he set up the Musk Foundation, offering grants for the “development of safe artificial intelligence to benefit humanity” among other causes, according to its website. Musk’s foundation has over $200 million in assets.
Earlier last year, Musk and his foundation offered to give $100 million prizes to those who can come up with a technology to help remove carbon from the atmosphere. He said last year he was donating $20 million to schools in Cameron County, Texas where a Space X rocket launch site is located and $10 million to the City of Brownsville.
Musk has also flirted with more ambitious philanthropy goals. He tweeted last year that “if (the United Nations World Food Programme) can describe … exactly how $6 billion will solve world hunger, I will sell Tesla stock right now and do it.”
Musk was responding to a plea for a donation from David Beasley, the World Food Programme’s executive director.
In January last year, he asked Twitter users about “ways to donate money that really make a difference (way harder than it seems.)”
Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com
Register
Reporting by Hyunjoo Jin in San Francisco, Additional reporting by Bhargav Acharya; Editing by Kim Coghill and Raju Gopalakrishnan
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
CEO Lam says election process had widespread support
‘Democracy with Hong Kong characteristics’ – Liaison Office
HONG KONG, Dec 20 (Reuters) – Pro-Beijing candidates swept to victory in an overhauled “patriots”-only legislative election in Hong Kong that critics deemed undemocratic, with turnout hitting a record low amid a crackdown on the city’s freedoms by China.
The 30.2% turnout, about half that of the previous poll in 2016, was seen by pro-democracy activists as a rebuke to China after it imposed a broad national security law and sweeping electoral changes to bring the city more firmly under its authoritarian grip.
Almost all seats were taken by pro-Beijing and pro-establishment candidates, some of whom cheered on stage at the vote counting centre and chanted “guaranteed win”.
Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com
Register
Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam told a news conference on Monday the turnout was indeed low but that she was not able to give specific reasons for it.
“But 1.35 million coming out to vote – it cannot be said that it was not an … election that did not get a lot of support from citizens,” Lam said.
When asked if the low turnout meant that her party lacked a public mandate, Starry Lee, the head of the pro-Beijing Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong (DAB) that won half of the directly elected seats, said the patriots-only rules would improve governance.
“It needs some time for people to get adapted to this system,” she told reporters at the vote counting centre.
The election – in which only candidates vetted by the government as “patriots” could run – has been criticised by some foreign governments, rights groups, and mainstream Hong Kong pro-democracy parties, which did not participate in the polls, as undemocratic.
Most of the dozen or so candidates who called themselves moderates, including former democratic lawmaker Frederick Fung, failed to gain a seat, succumbing to pro-Beijing rivals.
“It’s not easy to push people (to vote). I think they are feeling indifferent,” Fung told Reuters.
The previous record low for a legislative election held after the city’s 1997 return from British to Chinese rule was 43.6% in 2000. About 2% of the votes cast on Sunday were invalid, a record high, according to local media calculations.
Candidates celebrate after winning in the Legislative Council election in Hong Kong, China, December 20, 2021. REUTERS/Lam Yik
Read More
China’s Liaison Office in Hong Kong, the Beijing government’s representative in the territory, described the election as “successful practice of democracy with Hong Kong characteristics.”
The Hong Kong branch of China’s foreign ministry said the electoral system was an internal affair and urged “foreign forces” not to interfere.
In a 57-page white paper published on Monday, the Chinese government said it had provided constant support to Hong Kong in developing its “democratic system” and criticised the often-violent 2019 pro-democracy protests. read more
Lam, who visits Beijing this week for her annual report to state leaders, said the document was a timely rebuttal of criticism of the elections by foreign governments and media.
HK-STYLE ‘DEMOCRACY’
Political analysts say the turnout is a barometer of legitimacy in an election where pro-democracy candidates are largely absent, and a crackdown under the security law and other legislation has jailed scores of democrats who had originally wanted to run, and forced others into exile. read more
Under the electoral shake-up announced by China in March, the proportion of directly elected seats was reduced from around half to less than a quarter, or 20 seats. read more
Forty seats were selected by a committee stacked with Beijing loyalists, while the remaining 30 were filled by professional and business sectors such as finance and engineering, known as functional constituencies.
Turnout for these professional groups also fell to 32.2% from 74% in 2016. Some sectors whose voters have traditionally leaned pro-democracy, including education, social welfare, and law, had the lowest rates.
In 2019, the last major citywide election for district councils seats, the turnout was 71% with around 90% of the 452 seats won by democrats.
State agency Xinhua said the results demonstrated “the true will of the people,” while pro-Beijing newspaper Ta Kung Pao described the vote as “the most successful” since the 1997 handover.
Democrat Sunny Cheung, who moved to the United States to escape prosecution under the security law, said most of Hong Kong had “consciously boycotted the election to express their discontent to the world.”
Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com
Register
Additional reporting by Jessie Pang and James Pomfret; writing by James Pomfret and Marius Zaharia; Editing by Stephen Coates and Toby Chopra
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Chinese President Xi Jinping speaks at a meeting commemorating the 110th anniversary of Xinhai Revolution at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China October 9, 2021. REUTERS/Carlos Garcia Rawlins/File Photo
Register now for FREE unlimited access to reuters.com
Register
China will not ‘bully’ smaller countries – Xi
Duterte slams Chinese behaviour in South China Sea
Myanmar not represented at summit
BEIJING, Nov 22 (Reuters) – Chinese President Xi Jinping told leaders of the 10-country Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) at a summit on Monday that Beijing would not “bully” its smaller regional neighbours, amid rising tension over the South China Sea.
Beijing’s territorial claims over the sea clash with those of several Southeast Asian nations and have raised alarm from Washington to Tokyo.
But Xi said China would never seek hegemony nor take advantage of its size to coerce smaller countries, and would work with ASEAN to eliminate “interference”.
Register now for FREE unlimited access to reuters.com
Register
“China was, is, and will always be a good neighbour, good friend, and good partner of ASEAN,” Chinse state media quoted Xi as saying.
China’s assertion of sovereignty over the South China Sea has set it against ASEAN members Vietnam and the Philippines, while Brunei, Taiwan and Malaysia also lay claim to parts.
The Philippines on Thursday condemned the actions of three Chinese coast guard vessels that it said blocked and used water cannon on resupply boats headed towards a Philippine-occupied atoll in the sea.
The United States on Friday called the Chinese actions “dangerous, provocative, and unjustified,” and warned that an armed attack on Philippine vessels would invoke U.S. mutual defence commitments. read more
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte told the summit hosted by Xi that he “abhors” the altercation and said the rule of law was the only way out of the dispute. He referred to a 2016 international arbitration ruling which found China’s maritime claim to the sea had no legal basis. read more
“This does not speak well of the relations between our nations,” said Duterte, who will leave office next year and has been criticised in the past for failing to condemn China’s conduct in the disputed waters.
ASEAN groups Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.
MYANMAR NO SHOW
Xi told the summit that China and ASEAN had “cast off the gloom of the Cold War” – when the region was wracked by superpower competition and conflicts such as the Vietnam War – and had jointly maintained regional stability.
China frequently criticises the United States for “Cold War thinking” when Washington engages its regional allies to push back against Beijing’s growing military and economic influence.
U.S. President Joe Biden joined ASEAN leaders for a virtual summit in October and pledged greater engagement with the region. read more
The summit was held without a representative from Myanmar, Malaysia’s Foreign Minister Saifuddin Abdullah said on Monday. The reason for the non-attendance was not immediately clear, and a spokesperson for Myanmar’s military government did not answer calls seeking comment.
ASEAN sidelined Myanmar junta leader Min Aung Hlaing, who has led a bloody crackdown on dissent since seizing power on Feb. 1, from virtual summits last month over his failure to make inroads in implementing an agreed peace plan, in an unprecedented exclusion for the bloc.
Myanmar refused to send junior representation and blamed ASEAN for departing from its non-interference principle and caving to Western pressure.
China lobbied for Min to attend the summit, according to diplomatic sources. read more
Register now for FREE unlimited access to reuters.com
Register
Reporting by Gabriel Crossley, Rozanna Latiff and Martin Petty; Editing by Stephen Coates
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.