FILE PHOTO: Sugar apples are displayed in a market in Recife, June 30, 2014. REUTERS/Tony Gentile
BEIJING, Sept 19 (Reuters) – China will suspend sugar apple and wax apple imports from Taiwan to prevent disease carried by a pest found on the fruits from entering the country, its customs office said on Sunday.
The General Administration of Customs in China had repeatedly detected pests called “Planococcus minor” in sugar apples, also known as sweetsops, and wax apples from Taiwan, it said in a statement on its website.
The authority had asked its Guangdong branch and all directly affiliated offices to stop customs clearance of those products from Sept. 20, it said.
China had banned imports of pineapples from Taiwan in February citing “harmful creatures” that could come with the fruit, although Taiwan had said there was nothing wrong with the pineapples and accused Beijing of playing politics. read more
Reporting by Min Zhang and Tony Munroe; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
AMSTERDAM, Sept 13 (Reuters) – Uber (UBER.N) drivers are employees entitled to greater workers’ rights under local labour laws, a Dutch court ruled on Monday, handing a setback to the U.S. company’s European business model.
It was another court victory for unions fighting for better pay and benefits for those employed in the gig economy and followed a similar decision this year about Uber in Britain.
The Amsterdam District Court sided with the Federation of Dutch Trade Unions, which had argued that Uber’s roughly 4,000 drivers in the capital are in fact employees of a taxi company and should be granted benefits in line with the taxi sector.
Uber said it would appeal against the decision and “has no plans to employ drivers in the Netherlands”.
“We are disappointed with this decision because we know that the overwhelming majority of drivers wish to remain independent,” said Maurits Schönfeld, Uber’s general manager for northern Europe. “Drivers don’t want to give up their freedom to choose if, when and where to work.”
The court found drivers who transport passengers via the Uber app are covered by the collective labour agreement for taxi transportation.
“The legal relationship between Uber and these drivers meets all the characteristics of an employment contract,” the ruling said.
The FNV hailed the ruling.
“Due to the judge’s ruling, the Uber drivers are now automatically employed by Uber,” said Zakaria Boufangacha, FNV’s deputy chairman. “As a result, they will receive more wages and more rights in the event of dismissal or illness, for example.”
Uber drivers are in some cases entitled to back pay, the court said.
The judges also ordered Uber to pay a fine of 50,000 euros ($58,940) for failing to implement the terms of the labour agreement for taxi drivers.
In March, Uber said it would improve workers’ rights, including the minimum wage, for all of its more than 70,000 British drivers after it lost a Supreme Court case in February.
Uber also faced a legal setback in the United States, where the Supreme Court in May rejected its bid to avoid a lawsuit over whether drivers are employees and not independent contractors. read more
($1 = 0.8483 euros)
Reporting by Anthony Deutsch and Toby Sterling;
Editing by Emelia Sithole-Matarise and Edmund Blair
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Aug 6 (Reuters) – Nichole Atherton couldn’t take it anymore.
The intensive care nurse watched helplessly last year as COVID-19 sufferers died in her Mississippi hospital – slowly, painfully and alone. Then in July she was again confronted with a wave of deathly ill patients, even though almost all likely could have saved themselves by getting the coronavirus vaccine.
“People want to argue about masks and vaccines and freedom. I just don’t want to watch anyone else die,” the 39-year-old mother of two wrote on Facebook a few days ago. “I see their faces in my nightmares. And it feels like it is never ending.”
As the United States grapples with rising infections, hospitalizations and deaths amid a surge of the virus’ Delta variant, exhausted and desperate health care workers are turning to social media to describe the grim reality they face.
For some, the writing is cathartic, a way of processing their grief and anxiety. Others see it as a responsibility, using their devastating encounters with death to try to convince skeptical Americans to take the pandemic seriously.
“I just wanted people to know that it’s real, and it’s scary, and it’s hard for us,” Atherton said in a phone interview. “The first wave was heartbreaking, because there was nothing people could do except stay away from the people they love. This time, there are options.”
New daily coronavirus cases in the United States have hit a six-month high, with the seven-day average reaching nearly 95,000. That rate is five times higher than it was less than a month ago, Reuters data shows. read more
Health officials have said the surge has been driven almost entirely by the unvaccinated. Vaccines are not widely available in many other countries, yet in the United States just 49% of the population of 330 million is fully vaccinated.
Doctors, nurses and hospital leaders interviewed by Reuters in six states described a workforce that is depleted and demoralized by wards overflowing with mostly unvaccinated patients.
The health providers who have waded into public forums in an effort to counter disinformation said they have sometimes been attacked online by anti-vaccine skeptics.
“There’s so much misinformation out there,” said Tiya Curtis-Morris, an emergency and intensive care nurse in southeastern Louisiana. “Maybe if I tell people, and they understand what we deal with everyday … but they don’t want to hear it.”
Louisiana’s governor reinstituted a mask mandate this week as the state set new daily hospitalization records and Curtis-Morris has been urging Facebook friends to wear them.
She is more careful discussing vaccines, saying she understands why some people are hesitant. The 46-year-old single mother of four daughters is vaccinated but held off until recently in having her younger children inoculated, in consultation with their pediatrician. Her mother has thus far refused, citing fears of side effects.
‘IT DIDN’T HAVE TO BE LIKE THIS’
Nichole Atherton, an intensive care nurse who has seen a fresh wave of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) patients at the hospital where she works, gives a thumbs-up in this undated handout photo in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, U.S., Nichole Atherton/Handout via REUTERS
Read More
Earlier this week, ICU nurse Kathryn Ivey, 28, spent her break time at a Tennessee hospital crafting an emotionally raw Twitter thread.
“It is so much worse, this time,” she wrote. “We all have so much less to give. We are still bearing the fresh and heavy grief of the last year and trying to find somewhere to put all this anger. But the patients don’t stop coming. And the anger doesn’t stop coming.
“It didn’t have to be like this,” she concluded.
The thread went viral.
Ivey said in an interview that she put her feelings down in writing for the sake of her mental health. A rash of patients – younger and younger, she said – have flooded her hospital, virtually all unvaccinated.
She expressed little hope that her words would make a difference. People who are most adamantly against vaccines will only be convinced if they see their loved ones sick, she said.
“That just breaks my heart: that people need to go through this hurt to understand,” said Ivey, who began her career during the pandemic. “I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that if these people knew what COVID was, they would not risk it. But ignorance is a powerful thing.”
Despair drove Atherton, the Mississippi nurse, to speak out.
On Facebook this week, she described in harrowing detail an unvaccinated woman struggling to breathe and scared of leaving her children behind without a mother.
At one point, the woman was desperate for a sip of water, and Atherton – despite her misgivings – agreed to remove her oxygen for a few seconds to offer her a drink. Soon after, the woman was intubated, having seen her family for the last time via video call.
“I wonder if I hadn’t let her have that sip of water if she would still be alive,” Atherton wrote. “My rational side knows she was too sick. She wouldn’t have made it anyway. My emotional side will never stop wondering.”
Three people have messaged her to say they will get vaccinated, Atherton said.
But the accumulated strain of seeing so much death has become too much for Atherton, who told her hospital last week she is resigning.
She plans to work as a nurse elsewhere, she said. She just can no longer bear witness to COVID-19’s daily toll on members of her own community.
Reporting by Joseph Ax in Princeton, New Jersey; Additional reporting by Sharon Bernstein in Sacramento, California, and Brad Brooks in New Orleans; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Grant McCool
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Abramovich didn’t buy Chelsea to corrupt West – lawyer
Rosneft says it didn’t expropriate Yukos assets
LONDON, July 28 (Reuters) – Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich is not President Vladimir Putin’s “cashier” and nor did he buy Chelsea FC as a vehicle to corrupt the West, his lawyer told England’s High Court in a defamation hearing over a book about Putin’s Russia.
In the 2020 book, British journalist Catherine Belton chronicles Putin’s rise to power and how many of his associates from the former Soviet spy services rose to positions of wealth and influence after he won the top Kremlin job in 1999.
A lawyer for Abramovich told the court that passages in the book “Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and then Took on the West”, published by HarperCollins, were clearly defamatory. Abramovich is suing both HarperCollins and Belton.
“The claimant is described in the book as Putin’s cashier and the custodian of Kremlin slush funds,” Hugh Tomlinson, a lawyer for Chelsea FC owner Roman Abramovich, told the High Court about the book.
“What is said to be happening is that Mr Abramovich is making his wealth available to Putin… secretly to Putin and his cronies – that is the view the reasonable and ordinary reader would take,” Tomlinson said of Belton’s book.
HarperCollins has said it would “robustly defend this acclaimed and ground-breaking book and the right to report on matters of considerable public interest”.
Belton is a former Financial Times Moscow correspondent and now a Reuters special correspondent. Belton, who attended the hearing, declined to comment. Law firm Wiggin is representing HarperCollins.
ROSNEFT
Tomlinson said Belton’s book relied on what he cast as “unreliable” sources such as Sergei Pugachev, a Russian businessman who later fell foul of the Kremlin.
He said the book alleged that Putin ordered Abramovich to purchase Chelsea soccer club as “part of a scheme to corrupt the West” and to “build a bulkhead of Russian influence.”
“The ordinary and reasonable reader would inevitably come out with the view that Roman Abramovich was instructed to buy Chelsea… so he was being used as the acceptable face of a corrupt and dangerous regime,” Tominlinson said.
Lawyers for Rosneft, Russia’s biggest oil company, said in documents submitted to court that they took issue with passages in the book which said the company expropriated the YUKOS oil company and purchased the assets at a rigged auction.
Rosneft’s lawyers argued that the book alleged that Rosneft used Russia to engage in “organised theft” of Yukos, once Russia’s biggest oil company which was carved up and sold off after owner Mikhail Khodorkovsky fell foul of the Kremlin.
Russia, “with the connivance of several judges subjected to improper pressure, illicitly expropriated assets formerly held by OAO Yukos Oil Company (“Yukos”) and its ultimate owners,” Rosneft said of one of the book’s claims.
“And combined with Rosneft to allow the latter to purchase the Yukos assets at an unfair price in a farcically rigged auction,” Rosneft’s lawyers said of the book’s claims.
Rosneft and CEO Igor Sechin did not respond to written requests for comment on the case when contacted by Reuters.
Lawyers for Rosneft took issue with passages in the book which claimed that Sechin was behind the attack on Yukos.
Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge in London and Vladimir Soldatkin and Tatiana Ustinova in Moscow; Editing by Giles Elgood and Jon Boyle
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.