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World

South Korea’s Yoon prepares to widen back-to-work order amid strike

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SEOUL (Reuters) — South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol on Sunday ordered preparations for widening a back-to-work order beyond the cement industry amid a prolonged truckers’ strike.

Thousands of South Korean truckers have been on strike for more than 10 days, with negotiators for the government and unions making no progress on disagreements over minimum pay rules.

Yoon, a conservative, on Tuesday invoked a “start work” order, the first in the country’s history, on 2,500 drivers in the cement industry, requiring them to return to the road or face penalties.

On Sunday Yoon called on government ministers to make preparations to issue a return-to-work order on such sectors as oil refining and steelmaking, where additional damage is expected, spokesperson Lee Jae-myoung said in a statement.

Yoon called for punishment of those violating laws during the strike, ordering ministers to take action to minimize damage, such as employing alternative drivers, military personnel and military equipment.

The Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, an umbrella group, is planning a general strike for Tuesday.

“I cannot but regard this planned strike as a politically motivated action, rather than one aimed at representing the workers’ rights,” Yoon said, according to Lee, signaling a potentially harsh reaction from the government.

“Holding the people’s living and national economy hostage at this time of economic difficulty makes the survival of weak, unorganized workers harder and deprives future generations and the general public of their future jobs,” Yoon said.

The strikes have disrupted South Korea’s supply chain, and cost 1.6 trillion won ($1.2 billion) in lost shipments over the first seven days, the industry ministry said on Thursday.

The government has said it would not expand a minimum pay system for truckers beyond a further three years. The union says it should be permanent and wider in scope.

Thousands demonstrated in downtown Seoul on Saturday in support of the truckers’ demands.



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World

China’s COVID epicentre shifts to Guangzhou as outbreaks widen

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  • Southern manufacturing hub fighting worst COVID-19 flare-up
  • Cases double in Zhengzhou, production base for Apple supplier
  • Chinese stocks, currency slip over virus fears

BEIJING, Nov 8 (Reuters) – New coronavirus cases surged in Guangzhou and other Chinese cities, official data showed on Tuesday, with the global manufacturing hub becoming China’s latest COVID-19 epicentre and testing the city’s ability to avoid a Shanghai-style lockdown.

Nationwide, new locally transmitted infections climbed to 7,475 on Nov. 7, according to China’s health authority, up from 5,496 the day before and the highest since May 1. Guangzhou accounted for nearly a third of the new infections.

The increase was modest by global standards but significant for China, where outbreaks are to be quickly tackled when they surface under its zero-COVID policy. Economically vital cities, including the capital Beijing, are demanding more PCR tests for residents and locking down neighbourhoods and even districts in some cases.

The sharp rebound will test China’s ability to keep its COVID measures surgical and targeted, and could dampen investors’ hopes that the world’s second-largest economy could ease curbs and restrictions soon.

“We are seeing a game between rising voices for loosening controls and rapid spreading of COVID cases,” said Nie Wen, a Shanghai-based economist at Hwabao Trust.

Considering how the nationwide COVID curbs are crushing domestic consumption, Nie said he had downgraded his fourth-quarter economic growth forecast to around 3.5% from 4%-4.5%. The economy grew 3.9% in July-September.

The rising case load dragged on China’s stock markets on Tuesday, but shares have not yet surrendered last week’s big gains.

Investors see China’s beaten-down markets as an attractive prospect as a global slowdown looms, and have focused on small clues of gradual change – such as more targeted lockdowns and progress on vaccination rates.

“No matter how harsh the letter of the law is…there is a little bit more loosening,” said Damien Boey, chief macro strategist at Australian investment bank Barrenjoey.

NO FULL LOCKDOWN YET

Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong province, reported 2,377 new local cases for Nov. 7, up from 1,971 the previous day. It was a dramatic jump from double-digit increases two weeks ago.

Surging case numbers in the sprawling southern city, dubbed the “factory floor of the world”, means Guangzhou has surpassed the northern Inner Mongolia city of Hohhot to become China’s COVID epicentre, in its most serious outbreak ever.

Many of Guangzhou’s districts, including central Haizhu, have imposed varying levels of curbs and lockdowns. But, so far, the city has not imposed a blanket lockdown like the one in Shanghai earlier this year.

Shanghai, currently not facing a COVID resurgence, went into a lockdown in April and May after reporting several thousand new infections daily in the last week of March.

“We have been working from home for the past couple of days,” said Aaron Xu, who runs a company in Guangzhou.

“Only a few compounds have been locked up so far. Mostly we are seeing disruptions in the form of public transit services being suspended and compound security barring couriers and food delivery. And we have to do PCR tests every day.”

RISING CASES

In Beijing, authorities detected 64 new local infections, a small uptick relative to Guangzhou and Zhengzhou, but enough to spark a new burst of PCR tests for many of its residents and a lockdown of more buildings and neighbourhoods.

“The lockdown situation has continued to deteriorate quickly across the country over the past week, with our in-house China COVID lockdown index rising to 12.2% of China’s total GDP from 9.5% last Monday,” Nomura wrote in a note on Monday.

Zhengzhou, capital of central Henan province and a major production base for Apple (AAPL.O) supplier Foxconn (2317.TW), reported 733 new local cases for Nov. 7, more than doubling from a day earlier.

In the southwest metropolis of Chongqing, the city reported 281 new local cases, also more than doubling from 120 a day earlier.

In the coal-producing region of Inner Mongolia, the city of Hohhot reported 1,760 new local cases for Nov. 7, up from 1,013 a day earlier.

Reporting by Ryan Woo, Bernard Orr, Liz Lee and Jing Wang; Additional reporting by Josh Ye in Hong Kong and Tom Westbrook in Singapore; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan, Stephen Coates and Raissa Kasolowsky

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Technology

Engineering Values Handbook – Widen Your Perspective > News

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“In designing our culture, we start from something like these baseline assumptions for Bungie:
  1. Everyone wants to be kind to each other and see each other be happy.
  2. Everyone wants Bungie to be successful and to become a better and better place to work.
  3. We want people to feel comfortable being goofy, authentic, and unguarded while at work. We want people to feel that they can bring their whole selves to work and express themselves freely, while feeling psychological safety.

By default, number three opens an incredibly wide space of acceptable behavior, while the combination of one and two gives us some safety buffer when something in three inadvertently offends (for any number of reasons, not limited to ID&E-related scenarios).

However, we don’t rely on that safety buffer for everything—we’re not building a culture where you can say anything you want and everyone has to tolerate it. This is explicitly unlike the broader US legal system (guaranteed free speech in public spaces, etc.) Bungie’s explicit intent is to pursue shared goals with high cohesion and trust, so we want to be a tighter-knit and less-combative group than the country at large, so we design and evolve our culture to support that goal. So, we go back to that wide open space of personal expression and we add some guardrails to reduce the potential for conflict and hopefully increase overall psychological safety. For example:

  • At Bungie it’s not OK to be unwelcoming in ways that are widely recognized as such in US culture.
    • For example, you’re expected to know that it’s not OK to use any racist slur.
  • At Bungie it’s not OK to be unwelcoming to people in ways that we know matter to them, even in ways that seem more accepted by broader US culture.
    • If someone at Bungie tells us “I personally find this unwelcoming,” we take that incredibly seriously.
    • This is closely related to the Platinum Rule: we treat others as they would like to be treated, rather than as we would like to be treated.
  • This isn’t only about traditional ID&E and URG scenarios, it’s also about following patterns that support a collaborative culture with high psychological safety—a culture that is deeply welcoming to human beings and their talents, and where it feels safe to be vulnerable and to make mistakes. Here are some examples of constraints we place on naive free expression to pursue that goal:
    • It’s not OK to tear down the morale and alignment of the people around you with cynicism. There’s lots of subtlety in the line between cynicism and candid criticism, which we do want!
    • Candid criticism is encouraged, even in groups, as long as it’s straightforward, respectful, constructive, and doesn’t ascribe evil motives or incompetence to others. If criticizing someone’s work helps make it better, that’s wonderful, but remember that you want them to be happy. Make sure that your style of criticism reflects that intention. Of course, it’s possible to take gentleness of criticism too far here—we don’t want to be a culture where we’re all talking in deeply-couched euphemisms about how the emperor might be a tad underdressed for the weather. You’ll want to tune your bar as you work with people—the typical loop is to try what you think is a friendly critique style for the situation, and then ask for feedback afterwards! Sometimes the person will say, “Yeah, that hurt my feelings a bit, I wish you’d done X,” and sometimes they’ll say, “You spent way more time on disclaimers than you needed to, you can be more direct!”
    • If you think that a leader’s decision is wrong, and you spread cynicism and FUD about that among your peers instead of escalating it to that leader in a professional way, that’s not OK.
    • If you catch someone in a mistake, and you call them out on it in a hurtful way, that’s not OK—we don’t want people to fear that negative emotional experiences will be the result of any mistakes, because that results in (a) excessive caution and (b) hiding mistakes rather than learning from them.
    • Demagogic point-scoring in groups is not OK (leveling a rhetorical attack that sounds compelling but is actually oversimplified or deceptive).
    • In virtually all cases, punching down is worse than punching up in these areas—there’s more of an onus on leaders to consistently create psychological safety because of their relative power and security. These guidelines do still apply across any pair of people in the company though—it would be much worse for the CEO to personally insult an associate engineer than vice versa, but neither is OK.
    • There are many more examples like this across our Values Handbook.

With those kinds of guardrails constraining the space of acceptable personal expression, our initial wide space of tolerance-of-expression is now a good bit smaller, but we believe that this makes our culture stronger, especially for the purpose of combining our strengths to make great games!”
     Excerpt from the Tone and Inclusivity Guidelines for Bungie Engineering & Test

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World

Russia takes small cities, aims to widen east Ukraine battle

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KRAMATORSK, Ukraine (AP) — As Russia asserted progress in its goal of seizing the entirety of contested eastern Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin tried to shake European resolve Saturday to punish his country with sanctions and to keep supplying weapons that have supported Ukraine’s defense.

The Russian Defense Ministry said Lyman, the second small city to fall to Russia this week, had been “completely liberated” by a joint force of Russian soldiers and Kremlin-backed separatists, who have waged war for eight years in the industrial Donbas region bordering Russia.

Ukraine’s train system has ferried arms and evacuated citizens through Lyman, a key railway hub in the country’s east. Control of it also would give Russia’s military another foothold in the region; it has bridges for troops and equipment to cross the Siverskiy Donets river, which has so far impeded the Russian advance into the Donbas.

The Kremlin said Putin held an 80-minute telephone call Saturday with the leaders of France and Germany in which he warned against the continued transfers of Western weapons to Ukraine and blamed the conflict’s disruption to global food supplies on Western sanctions.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and French President Emmanuel Macron urged an immediate cease-fire and a withdrawal of Russian troops, according to the chancellor’s spokesperson. Both urged Putin to engage in serious direct negotiations with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to end the fighting, the spokesperson said.

A Kremlin readout of the call between Macron, Putin and Scholz said the Russian leader affirmed “the openness of the Russian side to the resumption of dialogue.” The three leaders, who had gone weeks without speaking during the spring, agreed to stay in contact, according to the readout.

But Russia’s recent progress in Donetsk and Luhansk, the two provinces that make up the Donbas, could further embolden Putin. Since failing to occupy Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, Russia has set out to seize the last parts of the region not controlled by the separatists.

“If Russia did succeed in taking over these areas, it would highly likely be seen by the Kremlin as a substantive political achievement and be portrayed to the Russian people as justifying the invasion,” the British Ministry of Defense said in a Saturday assessment.

Russia has intensified efforts to capture the larger cities of Sievierodonetsk and nearby Lysychansk, which are the last major areas under Ukrainian control in Luhansk province. Zelenskyy called the situation in the east “difficult” but expressed confidence his country would prevail with help from Western weapons and sanctions.

“If the occupiers think that Lyman or Sievierodonetsk will be theirs, they are wrong. Donbas will be Ukrainian,” he said.

The governor of Luhansk reported that Ukrainian fighters repelled an assault on Sievierodonetsk but Russian troops still pushed to encircle them. Speaking on Ukrainian TV later Saturday, Gov. Gov. Serhii Haidai said the Russians had seized a hotel on the outskirts of Sievierodonetsk.

Sievierodonetsk Mayor Oleksandr Striuk said Friday that some 1,500 civilians in the city with a prewar population of around 100,000 have died there during the war, including from a lack of medicine or because of diseases that could not be treated.

The advance of Russian forces raised fears that residents would experience the same horrors as people in the southeastern port city Mariupol in the weeks before it fell. Residents who had not yet fled faced the choice of risking it now or staying behind.

Just south of Sievierodonetsk, AP reporters saw elderly and ill civilians bundled into soft stretchers and slowly carried down apartment building stairs Friday in Bakhmut, a city in northeast Donetsk province.

Svetlana Lvova, the manager of two buildings in Bakhmut, tried to convince reluctant residents to leave but said she and her husband would not evacuate until their son, who was in Sieverodonetsk, returned home.

“I have to know he is alive. That’s why I’m staying here,” Lvova, 66, said.

On Saturday, people who managed to flee Lysychansk described intensified shelling, especially over the past week, that left them unable to leave basement bomb shelters at all.

Yanna Skakova said she left the city on Friday with her 18-month-old and 4-year-old sons. She cried as she sat on a train bound for western Ukraine. She said her husband stayed behind to take care of their house and animals.

“It’s too dangerous to stay there now,” she said, wiping away tears.

A nearly three-month siege of Mariupol ended last week when Russia claimed complete control of the city. Mariupol became a symbol of mass destruction and human suffering, as well as of Ukrainian determination to defend the country.

Mariupol’s port has reportedly resumed operations after Russian forces finished clearing mines in the Azov Sea off the once-vibrant city. Russian state news agency Tass reported that a vessel bound for the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don entered Mariupol’s seaport early Saturday.

The Kremlin said that Putin had emphasized to Macron and Scholz that Russia was working to “establish a peaceful life in Mariupol and other liberated cities in the Donbas.”

Germany and France brokered a 2015 peace agreement between Ukraine and Russia that would have given a large degree of autonomy to Moscow-backed rebel regions in eastern Ukraine. However, the agreement stalled long before Russia’s invasion in February. Any hope that Paris and Berlin would anchor a renewed peace agreement now appears unlikely with both Kyiv and Moscow taking uncompromising stands.

Ukrainian authorities have reported that Kremlin-installed officials in seized cities have started airing Russian news broadcasts, introduced Russian area codes, imported Russian school curriculum and taken other steps to annex the areas.

Russian-held areas of Ukraine’s southern Kherson region have switched to Moscow time and “will no longer switch to daylight-saving time, as is customary in Ukraine,” Russia’s state RIA Novosti agency quoted Krill Stremousov, a Russian-installed local official, as saying Saturday.

The war in Ukraine has caused global food shortages because the country is a major exporter of grain and other commodities. Moscow and Kyiv have traded accusations over which side was responsible for keeping shipments tied up in ports, with Russia saying Ukrainian sea mines prevented safe passage and Ukraine citing a Russian naval blockade.

The press service of the Ukrainian Naval Forces said two Russian missile carriers “capable of carrying up to 16 missiles” were ready for action in the Black Sea. It said that only shipping routes which had been established through multilateral treaties could be considered safe.

As Ukraine attempts to fend off the Russian invasion, the country’s officials have pressed Western nations for more sophisticated and powerful weapons. The U.S. Defense Department would not confirm a Friday CNN report saying the Biden administration was preparing to send long-range rocket systems to Ukraine.

Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Anatoliy Antonov, on Saturday branded such a move as “unacceptable” and called on the Biden administration to “abandon statements about the military victory of Ukraine.”

A Telegram post published on the Russian embassy’s official channel cited Moscow’s top diplomat in Washington as saying “the unprecedented pumping of weapons into Ukraine significantly increases the risks of an escalation of the conflict.”

Moscow is also trying to spook Sweden and Finland’s determination to join NATO. Russia’s Defense Ministry said its navy successfully launched a new hypersonic missile from the Barents Sea. The ministry said the recently developed Zircon hypersonic cruise missile had struck its target about 1,000 kilometers away.

If confirmed, the launch could spell trouble for NATO voyages in the Arctic and North Atlantic. Zircon, described as the world’s fastest non-ballistic missile, can be armed with either a conventional or a nuclear warhead, and is said to be impossible to stop with current anti-missile defense systems.

Moscow’s claims, which could not be immediately verified, came a week after Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu announced that Russia would form new military units in the west of the country in response to Sweden and Finland’s bids to join NATO.

___

Karmanau reported from Lviv, Ukraine. Andrea Rosa in Kharkiv, Ukraine, Andrew Katell in New York and AP journalists around the world contributed.

___

Follow AP’s coverage of the Ukraine war at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

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World

Japan set to widen COVID-19 curbs as Omicron drives record infections

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TOKYO, Jan 19 (Reuters) – Japan was poised on Wednesday to widen COVID-19 curbs to the capital, Tokyo, and a dozen regions covering half the population, as the Omicron variant of coronavirus drives record new infections.

Already in effect in three regions, the measures, set to run from Friday until Feb. 13, are expected to be approved by the prime minister after getting the sign-off from an expert panel.

The quasi-emergency measures, as they are called, permit governors to limit mobility and business activities, by shortening the operating hours of bars and restaurants, and barring sales of alcohol.

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“While the measures won’t be as effective as when numbers were smaller, I think they still can mitigate things,” said Gautam Deshpande, a doctor at St. Luke’s International Hospital in Tokyo.

“The horse is only half out of the barn at the moment.”

Japan added more than 32,000 new COVID-19 infections on Tuesday, a tally by national broadcaster NHK showed, exceeding an August high soon after Tokyo hosted the Summer Olympics.

Tokyo set a daily record on Wednesday with 7,377 new infections, as did the western prefecture of Osaka, with more than 6,000.

Although Omicron is more infectious than previous variants it appears to cause less serious illness, but public health experts still worry that a wave of such cases could overwhelm the healthcare system.

Japan has declared states of emergency four times during the pandemic, and vaccinated about 80% of its population of 126 million, although its booster dose programme has reached just 1.2%.

Authorities have “dragged their feet with boosters,” Deshpande added.

Japan rolled out quasi-emergency curbs this month in three regions hosting U.S. military facilities, after it appeared that base outbreaks of Omicron spilled into surrounding communities. read more

Tokyo’s occupancy rate of hospital beds for COVID-19 patients, a figure closely monitored by authorities, rose to 25.9% on Wednesday. An increase to 50% would warrant escalation to a full state of emergency, officials have said.

In a sign that the pandemic is weighing on the economy, Toyota Motor Corp (7203.T) said it cancelled a factory line shift in Toyota City after eight workers there tested positive.

And the Japan National Tourism Organisation said last year’s 245,900 overseas visitors were the fewest on record, going back to 1964.

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Reporting by Rocky Swift, Kantaro Komiya, Chang-Ran Kim; Editing by Clarence Fernandez

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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World

Havana Syndrome Attacks Widen With CIA Officer’s Evacuation From Serbia

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WASHINGTON—The CIA evacuated an intelligence officer serving in Serbia in recent weeks who suffered serious injuries consistent with the neurological attacks known as Havana Syndrome, according to current and former U.S. officials.

The incident in the Balkans, which hasn’t been previously reported, is the latest in what the officials describe as a steady expansion of attacks on American spies and diplomats posted overseas by unknown assailants using what government officials and scientists suspect is some sort of directed-energy source.

Still more suspected attacks have occurred overseas and in the U.S., the current and former officials said, along with recently reported ones in India and Vietnam.

“In the past 60 to 90 days, there have been a number of other reported cases” on U.S. soil and globally, said

Dr. James Giordano,

a Georgetown University professor of neurology who is advising the U.S. government on the issue. “They are seen as valid reports with verified health indicators.”

The continuing attacks, which may cause dizziness, memory loss and other health issues, have sparked frustration within the U.S. government and sapped morale at the State Department and Central Intelligence Agency, the current and former officials said. Some professional diplomats and spies have become reluctant to take overseas postings for themselves and their families, the officials said.

CIA Director William Burns has tripled the number of medical staff focused on Havana Syndrome, the agency says.



Photo:

jim lo scalzo/Shutterstock

“The lights are blinking red now. This is a crisis for VIP travel, officers overseas,” said Marc Polymeropoulos, a veteran CIA operations officer who retired from the CIA in 2019 due to persisting symptoms he suffered following a 2017 visit to Moscow and has been critical of the federal government’s response.

Overall, the Biden administration has made finding the source of the attacks a “top priority,” an administration official said. Spokespersons for the CIA and State Department also said the issue was a primary concern and declined to discuss the Serbian case or other specific incidents.

“We take each report we receive extremely seriously and are working to ensure that affected employees get the care and support they need,” the State Department spokesman said.

The CIA spokesperson said that the agency is doing all it can to protect its officers. CIA Director William Burns has made leadership changes in the agency’s Office of Medical Services and tripled the number of medical staff focused on the issue, the spokesperson said. This summer, he tapped a veteran of the agency’s decadelong hunt for

Osama bin Laden

to lead a task force searching for the cause of the incidents.

The CIA in recent weeks also recalled the chief of the agency’s station in Vienna, where a large number of attacks have taken place, over management issues, including the individual’s handling of personnel who believe they had been struck, a source familiar with the issue said. The Washington Post first reported the recall.

Some recent attacks have come close to the top echelons of the Biden administration. When Mr. Burns traveled to India earlier this month, a member of his team reported symptoms consistent with Havana Syndrome and received medical attention, a U.S. official said. The incident was first reported by CNN.

In August, Vice President Kamala Harris temporarily delayed her arrival in Vietnam after the State Department made her office aware of a “possible anomalous health incident”—the U.S. government’s formal name for Havana Syndrome—in Hanoi.

Vice President Kamala Harris visited in Hanoi, Vietnam, in August after a temporary delay due to concerns over Havana Syndrome.



Photo:

evelyn hockstein/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

The unexplained health incidents are known as Havana Syndrome because they first surfaced among U.S. diplomats and intelligence officers in Cuba in late 2016. The symptoms include dizziness, headache, fatigue, nausea, anxiety, cognitive difficulties and memory loss.

Since then, attacks have been reported in China, Colombia, Austria and Germany, along with those in Serbia, India and Vietnam. While about 200 U.S. government employees have been affected, officials caution that a precise count is difficult to determine because each case must be medically verified and some individuals’ symptoms end up having other explanations.

Five years after the first symptoms emerged, the U.S. government has yet to determine who is behind the attacks and what mechanism or mechanisms are being used.

“In terms of have we gotten closer? I think the answer is yes—but not close enough to make the analytic judgment that people are waiting for,” CIA Deputy Director

David Cohen

said earlier this month at the annual Intelligence and National Security Summit.

In December, a panel of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine said that the abrupt onset of symptoms was most consistent with “a directed radio frequency (RF) energy attack” rather than inadvertent or environmental exposure. But it also said that more research was needed.

Director of National Intelligence

Avril Haines

has convened a task force made up of intelligence officers and outside scientists to try to pinpoint the mechanism or device used in the attacks. Its report is due later this fall, although it is unclear what will be made public.

Georgetown’s Dr. Giordano said the culprit could be some form of ultrasonic or acoustic device; a rapidly-pulsed microwave; or a laser-based system. The intent of those using it is also unclear, he said. They could be employing an electronic surveillance system with unusual side effects, or “a discrete form of disruptive instrument,” Dr. Giordano said.

“That’s a nice way of saying this is a weapon,” he said.

Avril Haines, the director of National Intelligence, has convened a task force to try to pinpoint the method of attack that causes Havana Syndrome.



Photo:

Bill Clark/Zuma Press

Earlier this month, the House passed and sent Mr. Biden legislation to sign which authorizes the CIA and State Department to provide financial compensation to employees who suffer brain injuries while on assignment.

“For so long, we suffered the moral injury of a silent wound, where the [U.S. government] medical staff did not believe us. This all changes now, and it is a watershed moment for the victims,” Mr. Polymeropoulos said.

The bill, he said, offers both a statement by the U.S. government that the attacks are real and remuneration “for victims who have spent thousands of dollars out of pocket for healthcare.”

The Biden administration’s efforts in dealing with the attacks include ensuring “any affected individuals get the care they need,” the administration official said. “In certain cases, these incidents have upended the lives of U.S. personnel who have devoted their careers to serving our country.”

A thorny question, the officials and policy specialists said, is how Washington should react if it pins the blame on a foreign adversary. Some current and former officials say they suspect Russia is behind the attacks, although no public evidence of that has emerged and Moscow has denied the allegations.

Jason Killmeyer, a counterterrorism and foreign policy expert formerly with Deloitte Consulting LLP, said the U.S. should act now and not wait for attribution. He called for increasing defensive measures, making Havana Syndrome a bigger issue in its diplomacy and upping the pressure on adversary intelligence services to see how they react.

“We’re five years into this thing,” he said. “There’s no ‘smoking gun’ coming.”

Write to Warren P. Strobel at Warren.Strobel@wsj.com

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Business

Japan’s Moderna vaccine contamination woes widen as 1 mln more shots withdrawn

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  • Total of over 2.6 mln Moderna shots pulled in Japan
  • Contaminants found in vaccines in Gunma and Okinawa

TOKYO, Aug 30 (Reuters) – Moderna Inc’s (MRNA.O) COVID-19 vaccine contamination woes in Japan have widened with another million doses being suspended, after foreign substances were found in more batches and two people died following shots from affected lots.

The suspension of Moderna supplies, more than 2.6 million does in total, comes as Japan battles its worst wave of COVID-19 yet, driven by the contagious Delta variant, with new daily infections exceeding 25,000 this month for the first time amid a slow vaccine rollout.

The latest reports of vaccine contamination came from the Gunma prefecture near Tokyo and the southern prefecture of Okinawa, prompting the suspension of two more lots in addition to the 1.63 million doses already pulled last week.

A tiny black substance was found in a Moderna vaccine vial in Gunma, an official from the prefecture said, while in Okinawa, black substances were spotted in syringes and a vial, and pink material was found in a different syringe.

The fresh suspensions followed a government report on Saturday that two people died after receiving Moderna shots that were among lots later suspended.

The government had said that no safety or efficacy issues had been identified and that the suspension was a precaution. The causes of death are being investigated.

“It is unlikely, in my opinion, that contamination of foreign substances led directly to sudden deaths,” said Takahiro Kinoshita, a physician and vice chair of Cov-Navi, a vaccine information group.

“If the contaminated substances were dangerous enough to cause death for some people, probably many more people would have suffered from some symptoms after the vaccination.

“However, further investigations are definitely needed to evaluate the harm of the particular doses in question.”

‘LOOK AT THE BIGGER PICTURE’

Japan earlier halted the use of 1.63 million Moderna doses, shipped to 863 vaccination centres nationwide after the domestic distributor, Takeda Pharmaceutical (4502.T), received reports of contaminants in some vials.

Some 500,000 people received shots from those supplies, Taro Kono, the minister in charge of the vaccine push, has said.

Moderna and Spanish pharma company Rovi (ROVI.MC), which bottles Moderna vaccines for markets other than the United States, said at the time that the contamination could be due to a manufacturing issue in one of Rovi’s production lines.

Takeda said on Monday that the investigation is ongoing.

The affected vaccines in Gunma are from a Moderna lot that is different from those whose use has already been suspended, the Gunma official said.

Vaccines from the same lot have been administered to 4,575 people in Gunma, but the prefecture has heard no reports of ill health, the official said.

The contamination “is a serious problem” and there is need to investigate, but given rising COVID-19 cases, Moderna vaccinations should “continue with appropriate precautions”, said Nicholas Rennick, an Australian doctor practicing at the NTT Medical Centre in Tokyo.

Severe COVID-19 cases are at record levels in Japan, leaving many people to recuperate at home amid a shortage of critical care beds. Only 44% of its population has been fully vaccinated, lagging vaccination rates of several developed countries.

Japan is looking into the possibility of mixing shots of AstraZeneca’s (AZN.L) vaccine with those developed by other drugmakers to speed up vaccination.

“We’ve got thousands of Delta variant patients around Japan as we speak, spreading the virus, and so many of the population remain unvaccinated and unprotected,” Rennick said.

“We have to look at the bigger picture.”

Reporting by Kiyoshi Takenaka and Rocky Swift in Tokyo; Editing by Himani Sarkar

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