FX NewsPaper - World News and breaking news

Leaders in Europe, the Middle East and the Americas rolled out bans on big gatherings, and stricter travel restrictions as cases of the new coronavirus spread around the world.

The United States on Saturday reported its first death from the disease, a Washington state man in his 50s. Two of the state's three cases have links to a nursing home, state officials said, where dozens of residents have symptoms of the disease.


US President Donald Trump and top officials said in a White House press briefing that travellers from South Korea and Italy would be subject to additional screening, and warned Americans against travelling to coronavirus-affected regions in both countries.

US Vice President Mike Pence said a ban on travellers from Iran entering the country would be expanded to include any foreign nationals who have visited Iran in the last 14 days. The United States may also restrict travel on its southern border with Mexico, officials said.

However they encouraged Americans to travel around the country, including to states where some of the country's more than 60 cases of the disease have been recorded.

The outbreak is disrupting demand for flights and many airlines have suspended or modified services in response. After Saturday's press conference, the White House held a call with airlines to discuss new travel restrictions.

NEW CASES

Ecuador on Saturday reported its first case, in a woman who had travelled from Madrid, while Mexico reported four cases, all in people who had visited Italy.

Brazilian officials confirmed that country's second case, a patient in São Paulo who recently visited Italy.

As governments worldwide stepped up efforts to halt the spread of the virus, France announced a temporary ban on public gatherings with more than 5,000 people in confined spaces. It reported 16 new cases for a total of 73, and cancelled a half-marathon of 40,000 runners scheduled for Sunday.

Switzerland said it is banning events expected to draw more than 1,000 people.

More than 700 tourists remain quarantined at a hotel in the Canary Islands, after several Italian guests there tested positive for coronavirus.

Schools and universities in Italy, which is experiencing Europe's worst outbreak of the disease, will stay closed for a second consecutive week in three northern regions. The country has reported some 900 cases and 21 deaths.

Analysts have warned that the outbreak looks set to shunt Italy's fragile economy into its fourth recession in 12 years, with many businesses in the wealthy north close to a standstill and hotels reporting a wave of cancellations.

FOCUS ON IRAN

Iraq reported five new cases of the disease, bringing its total to 13, and Qatar reported its first Saturday, leaving Saudi Arabia as the only Gulf state not to have signalled any coronavirus cases.

The majority of infections in other Gulf countries have been linked to visits to Iran or involve people who have come into contact with people who had been there.

Tehran has ordered schools shut until Tuesday and extended the closure of universities and a ban on concerts and sports events for a week. Authorities have also banned visits to hospitals and nursing homes as the country's case load hit nearly 600.

One Iranian lawmaker, elected in Feb 21 polls, has died from the disease along with more than 40 other Iranians, and several high-ranking officials have tested positive for the virus.

Azerbaijan said on Saturday it had closed its border with Iran for two weeks to prevent the spread of coronavirus. Two Azerbaijanis who travelled to Iran have tested positive for the disease and quarantined.

Mainland China reported 573 new confirmed coronavirus cases on Feb. 29, up from 427 on the previous day, the country's health authority said. The number of deaths stood at 35, down from 47 on the previous day, and bringing the total death toll in mainland China to 2,870.

The epidemic, which began in China, has killed almost 3,000 people worldwide, the ministry said.

President Donald Trump has left no doubt that his first priority in Afghanistan is a peace treaty that would enable him to claim that he is fulfilling his vow to withdraw US troops.

But a parade of his former national security aides said he is far less interested in an actual Afghan peace.


And that creates an enormous risk for Trump and for Afghanistan: that, like President Richard Nixon’s peace deal with North Vietnam in January 1973, the accord signed Saturday will speed a US exit and do little to stabilise an allied government. In the case of Vietnam, it took two years for the “decent interval,” in Henry Kissinger’s famous phrase, to expire and for the South Vietnamese government to be overrun.

“Trump would not be the first president to exaggerate the meaning of a truce in an election year,” said Joseph Nye, an emeritus professor at Harvard whose newest book, “Do Morals Matter? President and Foreign Policy From FDR to Trump,” examines the Vietnam precedent.

Three successive US presidents have promised victory in Afghanistan, even if they each defined it differently. Each experienced failures of political will and on the battlefield.

President George W. Bush began the Afghan war to hunt down Osama bin Laden in the months after the Sep 11, 2001, attacks. Yet he soon turned his attention to Iraq and, despite denials by the White House at the time, bled resources from the Afghan effort to fuel his next war.

President Barack Obama called Iraq a strategic mistake but pledged that the US would not lose the “good war” in Afghanistan. Yet his brief “surge” failed to strike a decisive blow. Strategy was soon turned over to a small group inside his White House that was aptly nicknamed the “Afghan Good Enough” committee.

Trump has long lamented the cost of “endless wars,” and by the time he took up direct negotiations with the Taliban, he knew US voters were interested mostly in one thing: ending participation in a war that has now dragged on for more than 18 years, its objectives always shifting.

When historians look back at the moment, they may well conclude that Washington ended up much like other great powers that entered Afghanistan’s rugged mountains and punishing deserts: frustrated, immobilised, no longer willing to bear the huge costs. The British retreated in 1842 after suffering 4,500 killed, amid massacres that preceded the invention of the roadside bomb. They gave up their sovereignty over the country in 1919 in another retreat that heralded the beginning of the unwinding of an empire.

The Soviet Union abandoned its decadelong effort to control the country in 1989, months before the fall of the Berlin Wall marked the collapse of the Communist superpower. That led to the chaos and power vacuums that bin Laden exploited and that the United States vowed it would never again allow to fester.

The US-led attack began Oct 7, 2001, with the name “Operation Enduring Freedom.” Bush, in an address to the nation from the Treaty Room of the White House, promised to “win this conflict by the patient accumulation of successes, by meeting a series of challenges with determination and will and purpose.”

After the destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center, a plane that hit the Pentagon and another that crashed in a field in Pennsylvania, the country was behind him. While a few warned of the dangers of entering the “graveyard of empires,” it seemed more a war of retribution and justice seeking than an effort at nation-building.

Yet inevitably, mission creep set in.

After bin Laden was hunted down in Pakistan in May 2011, and with al-Qaida a much-diminished threat, politicians struggled to explain what US troops were fighting to accomplish. More than 2,400 service members have died in combat since the invasion, according to the website icasualties.org. Neither Obama nor Trump could make a plausible case that after nearly two decades the United States had much of a role to play other than prop up a weak democracy.

For a while, at least, that role seems likely to continue.

The accord signed Saturday — with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo overseeing the moment but not actually signing it himself — will initially bring down US troop levels to about 8,600 from about 12,000 now. That is almost exactly where they were three years ago at the end of Obama’s term. That is the minimum number of Special Operations forces, intelligence officers and support and security personnel that the Pentagon and CIA believe are necessary to hold the capital, Kabul; battle militants of the Islamic State; and advise an Afghan military that remains, at best, a fractured, inconsistent fighting force after close to two decades of training and billions of dollars in US and NATO investment.

If the Afghan government can reach its own accord with the Taliban — in a so-called intra-Afghan process that is now supposed to begin — the US troop levels may drop further, officials said. But just as the South Vietnamese were not part of the Paris peace talks a half-century ago, the Afghan government, whose survival is at stake, was excluded from the long negotiations with the Taliban.

That explains why President Ashraf Ghani was so suspicious of, and often furious with, the negotiating process — and made clear during the Munich Security Conference this year that he had little confidence that the next step in the accord would come to pass.

It was telling that he was not at the signing ceremony in Doha, Qatar; instead, Defense Secretary Mark Esper was dispatched to Kabul for a separate ceremony with Ghani and the secretary-general of NATO to signal the allied support of the government. The only party missing was the Taliban, whose leaders on Friday refused to meet with an informal Afghan negotiating team.

The purpose of the Kabul ceremony was to reassure Ghani that the US and NATO troops would not go anywhere until the Afghan government and the Taliban reach their own accord. But the Afghans have reason to fear they will be abandoned.

“One risk here is that the president wakes up one morning and decides that he is just going to pull out the rest of the American troops,” said Douglas Lute, a former Army general who served first as Bush’s coordinator on Afghanistan for the National Security Council and then stayed on for several years in a similar role for Obama before becoming US ambassador to NATO.

“The odds of this breaking down or coming to gridlock are significant,” Lute said in an interview. “And if the Americans truly left, there’s reason to be concerned” that the Taliban could ultimately take Kabul, just as the North Vietnamese took Saigon.

It is exactly that concern that led more than 20 Republicans and Democrats to send a letter this past week to Pompeo and Esper warning that “the Taliban is not a de facto counterterrorism partner, and pretending that they are ignores their longtime jihadist mission and actions.” It added, “They have never publicly renounced al-Qaida or turned over al-Qaida leaders living in their safe havens” or “apologised for harbouring the terrorists who carried out the September 11 attacks.”

When Rihanna started a lingerie collection in 2018, she teamed up with the startup behind Kate Hudson’s athleisure line Fabletics.

Taking up exercise could alter our feelings about food in surprising and beneficial ways, according to a compelling new study of exercise and eating. The study finds that novice exercisers start to experience less desire for fattening foods, a change that could have long-term implications for weight control.



The study also shows, though, that different people respond quite differently to the same exercise routine and the same foods, underscoring the complexities of the relationship between exercise, eating and fat loss.

I frequently write about exercise and weight, in part because weight control is a pressing motivation for so many of us to work out, myself included. But the effects of physical activity on waistlines are not straightforward and coherent. They are, in fact, distressingly messy.

Both personal experience and extensive scientific studies tell us that a few people will lose considerable body fat when they start exercising; others will gain; and most will drop a few pounds, though much less than would be expected given how many calories they are burning during their workouts.

At the same time, physical activity seems to be essential for minimising weight gain as we age and maintaining weight loss if we do manage to shed pounds.

Precisely how exercise influences weight in this topsy-turvy fashion is uncertain. On the one hand, most types of exercise increase appetite in most people, studies show, tempting us to replace calories, blunting any potential fat loss and even initiating weight creep.

But other evidence suggests that physical fitness may affect people’s everyday responses to food, which could play a role in weight maintenance. In some past studies, active people of normal weight displayed less interest in high-fat, calorie-dense foods than inactive people who were obese.

Most of those studies examined the preferences of men and women who already were or were not fit, however. They did not look at whether altering people’s exercise habits might also transform their feelings about food.

So, for the new study, which was published in November in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, researchers at the University of Leeds in England and other institutions decided to ask a group of sedentary men and women about how they felt about food and to begin working out.

The researchers wound up recruiting 61 volunteers, most of them middle-aged and inactive; all were overweight or obese. The study participants completed detailed questionnaires and online tests of their food preferences and behaviours, picking, for instance, between rapid-fire, on-screen pictures of different foods and also answering questions about bingeing on food and whether they found it hard to not overeat.

Fifteen of the volunteers then were asked to continue with their normal lives as a control group, while the other 46 began exercising, working out on exercise machines at a university facility five times a week for about 45 to 60 minutes or until they had burned about 500 calories per session. They continued this training for 12 weeks, eating as they liked at home.

Then everyone returned to the lab for weigh-ins and to repeat the original tests. Most, but not all, of the exercisers had shed a few pounds, while some of those in the control group had gained weight.

The men and women in the control group also showed little alteration in their feelings about food. But the exercisers’ reactions to pictures of and questions about high-calorie, fatty foods were new. They no longer found them quite so irresistible. In psychological terms, they showed less “wanting” for the most fattening foods.

Interestingly, their scores on measures of “liking,” or how much they expected to enjoy those same foods, remained unchanged and strong. They still felt that they would enjoy a cookie but did not feel quite the same drive to seek one out. They also reported fewer instances of recent binge eating.

Taken as a whole, these results suggest that, in addition to making us healthier, “exercise might improve food reward and eating behaviour traits linked to the susceptibility to overconsume,” said Kristine Beaulieu, a research fellow and dietitian at the University of Leeds, who led the new study.

In other words, working out for a period of time could nudge us to rethink the kinds of foods we want to eat.

But the researchers did not monitor what their volunteers actually opted to eat at home, so they do not know if their eating habits shifted in real life. They also do not know if results would be different if people tried other types or amounts of exercise or how the exercise in this experiment affected food preferences, although they suspect it changed the workings of certain parts of the brain that regulate eating behaviour.

Perhaps most frustrating, they cannot explain why the final outcomes varied so much from one exerciser to another, with some developing far more disinterest in fatty foods than others. Genetics might be involved, or personality, lifestyle, body composition or other factors. The researchers hope to explore some of those issues in future studies.

But for now, the study reinforces the idea that exercise should be part of our efforts to manage our weight.

“People still liked high-fat foods to the same extent,” after four months of training, Beaulieu pointed out, “but they wanted to eat them less, which we view as a favourable outcome.”

The hospitals in Bangladesh have finally had a day without any dengue patient after 11 months.

Australia reported its first death of a coronavirus patient in a hospital in the western city of Perth early on Sunday, health official Andrew Robertson said.

The 78-year-old had been in quarantine after being evacuated from the Diamond Princess cruise ship in Japan, among more than 150 Australians taken off the vessel.



"Our condolences are with his family and unfortunately he's the first death we've had from coronavirus in Australia," Robertson, the chief health officer of Western Australia state, told journalists.

The man's wife also caught the virus, but is in stable condition, authorities said.

Australia's tally of virus infections stands at 25, the latest government figures show.

On Saturday, Australia said it would deny entry to all foreigners travelling from Iran because of the spreading virus in the Islamic republic.

There have been more than 85,000 virus infections worldwide, the majority in China, the World Health Organisation said. Outside China, it has spread to 53 countries, with more than 6,000 cases and 86 deaths.