BEIJING - A second person has died in China from a mysterious SARS-linked virus that has stricken dozens and appeared in two other Asian countries, with a new case reported in Thailand on Friday.

Local authorities said a 69-year-old man died on Wednesday in Wuhan, the central Chinese city believed to be the epicentre of an outbreak of a coronavirus from the same family as the deadly SARS pathogen.

No human-to-human transmission has been confirmed so far, but Wuhan's health commission has said the possibility "cannot be excluded".

The enigmatic illness has caused alarm because of its connection to SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome), which killed nearly 650 people across mainland China and Hong Kong in 2002-2003.

Pneumonia linked to the new virus has hit at least 41 people in China, with the outbreak centred around a seafood market in Wuhan.

Of these 12 have recovered and been discharged from hospital, according to the Wuhan health commission, while five others are in a serious condition.

The second man to die became sick on December 31 and his condition worsened two weeks ago, it said, with the disease causing pulmonary tuberculosis and damage to multiple organ functions.

Three other cases have been detected -- two in Thailand and one in Japan -- with health managers in both countries saying the patients had visited Wuhan prior to their hospitalisation.

Thailand reported its second case of the coronavirus on Friday: a 74-year-old Chinese woman who had arrived from Wuhan earlier this week.

Her condition is improving, said Thai health officials, who urged people not to panic as there was "no spread of the virus" in the Southeast Asian country.

The World Health Organization (WHO) said Thursday that "much remains to be understood about the new coronavirus".

Not enough was known to "draw definitive conclusions about how it is transmitted," a statement added.

The latest fatality comes as China prepares for its busiest travel season of the year next week, when millions of people take buses, trains and planes for Lunar New Year.

Wuhan is a main hub in China's vast railway network and connects train lines that crisscross the country's north-south and east-west axes, from Beijing to Guangzhou, Nanjing to Chengdu.

A WHO doctor has said it would not be surprising if there was "some limited human-to-human transmission, especially among families who have close contact with one another".

China has not announced any travel restrictions but authorities in Hong Kong have stepped up detection measures, including rigorous temperature checkpoints for inbound travellers.

The Wuhan health commission said one man who had been diagnosed worked at Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, but his wife, who also had the virus, reported "no history of exposure" at the facility.

The first case in Thailand had not reported visiting the seafood market, the WHO said Tuesday. The woman was reported to be in a stable condition earlier this week.

The patient in Japan, who was released from hospital, had also not visited the market. Japanese officials said it was possible that the man had been in contact with a person infected with the virus while in Wuhan.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued a Level 1 "Watch" alert for travellers to Wuhan, saying they should practise normal precautions and avoid contact with animals and sick people.

After the second death was reported, online discussion spread in China over the severity of the Wuhan coronavirus -- and how much information the government is hiding from the public.

Several complained about censorship of online posts, while others made comparisons to 2003, when Beijing drew criticism from the WHO for under-reporting the number of SARS cases.

"Scarier than panic is treating something too lightly," wrote a Chinese web-user on Weibo, the country's Twitter-like social media platform.

"It's so strange," wrote another, citing the overseas cases in Japan and Thailand. "They all have Wuhan pneumonia cases but (in China) we don't have any infections outside of Wuhan -- is that scientific?"(FA)

BEIJING - China's economy grew last year at its slowest pace in three decades, hit by weak domestic demand and trade tensions, but while officials warned of further headwinds, separate figures Friday suggest the downward trend is bottoming out.

The 6.1 percent rate is a sharp drop from the 6.6 percent the year before and marks the third straight drop, though it met the government's target and analysts said leaders were unlikely to open up the stimulus taps just yet.

The reading was also in line with AFP analyst forecasts.

And while the world's number two economy had been gradually losing steam over the first three quarters, growth held steady at 6.0 percent in October-December -- the same as the previous quarter, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.

Ning Jizhe, commissioner of the NBS, said momentum remained generally stable through the year and said the same could be expected in 2020.

"However, we should also be aware that the global economic and trade growth is slowing down," he said at a news conference, adding that there were more sources of instability and risk, with the economy facing "mounting downward pressure".

The figures were released days after Vice Premier Liu He and Donald Trump signed a much-vaunted "phase one" pact that marks a truce in their nearly two-year-old trade war.

The agreement will see the US slash import duties on Chinese goods worth billions of dollars, though levies remain in place on two-thirds of more than $500 billion of products.

The World Bank said in a report this month that weakening exports from China had compounded the impact of a slowdown in domestic demand. Policy uncertainty and higher tariffs on exports to the US also cast a pall on manufacturing activity and investor sentiment, it added.

Other data released Friday showed while industrial production and retail sales slowed over the year, both indicators outperformed in December, with the NBS pointing to a particularly strong showing in consumer spending.

"The latest ... data provides a very positive start to the Chinese New Year for China’s economy," Rajiv Biswas, of IHS Markit, said. "The outlook for 2020 is for continued robust growth, boosted by the phase one trade deal with the US and the continued positive impact of government monetary and fiscal policy stimulus measures."

But analysts note that China's slowdown is structural, as it becomes a more developed economy and faces demographic challenges such as a shrinking number of people of working age.

The NBS said China's birthrate fell to 10.48 per 1,000 people last year -- the lowest since the People's Republic of China was founded in 1949.

Faced with an ageing population, Beijing relaxed its one-child policy in 2016 to allow people to have two children, but it has not led to more births.

Still, Louis Kuijs, head of Asia economics at Oxford Economics, told AFP that Beijing considers the slowdown part of a "new normal" and that major easing is unlikely, given the improving global outlook and the US trade deal.

He noted policymakers likely want to keep their powder dry, aiming for a stabilisation rather than reigniting growth, adding: "What they don't want to see is a too-rapid slowdown."

Analysts and officials are expecting the economy to level out this year.

Kuijs noted the trade deal bodes well for exports, as well as sentiment on business investment and consumption. It also reduces the risk of escalation and "severe decoupling" in other dimensions such as restrictions on companies and finance.

But UOB economists Ho Woei Chen and Peter Chia said in a recent note that the deal is unlikely to catalyse a strong rebound in growth for China as the bulk of US tariffs remain in place.

Tommy Xie, head of Greater China Research at OCBC Bank, said more supportive state policies such as tax incentives have helped stabilise national growth.

But he noted a tailing off in the growth of infrastructure investment, which could prove problematic. With property investment slowing, the strength of China's growth this year will depend on whether infrastructure investment is able to offset this decline, he said.

Last month, the NBS said China would revise its historical regional GDP data under a unified accounting mechanism to be introduced early 2020.

This is expected to close a discrepancy between national and regional figures and enhance the credibility of government statistics, according to state media.

Economists have long suspected that Chinese economic data is massaged upward, often noting that full-year gross domestic product hits Beijing's targets with suspicious regularity.(FA)

BEIJING - China's birth rate has fallen to its lowest since the formation of the People's Republic of China 70 years ago - despite the easing of the one-child policy.

The birth rate was 10.48 per thousand in 2019 - the lowest since 1949, the National Bureau of Statistics said.

The number of babies born in 2019 dropped by 580,000 to 14.65 million.

The country's birth rate has been falling for years - posing a challenge for the world's second biggest economy.

Despite the birth rate falling, a lower death rate meant China's population hit 1.4 billion in 2019, inching up from 1.39bn.

But the falling birth rate is raising fears of a "demographic timebomb" - that is, a smaller working-age population having to support a bigger, retired population.

China's birth rate is lower than the US which stood at 12 per thousand people in 2017 (the most recent data available), but higher than Japan's figure of 8.

The overall global birth rate was 18.65 in 2017, according to the World Bank.

In 1979, the Chinese government introduced a nation-wide "one-child policy" - with various exceptions - to slow population growth.

Families that violated the rules faced fines, loss of employment and sometimes forced abortions.(FA)

BEIJING - Two rights groups that issued reports this week criticizing China’s treatment of minorities at home and its interference abroad are biased and distorting facts, foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said on Wednesday.

Geng made the comments responding to the reports at a daily news briefing.

In its annual report on Tuesday, New York-based Human Rights Watch condemned Beijing’s treatment of Uighur Muslims in the far western region of Xinjiang and warned of China’s growing efforts to influence and censor others abroad.

On Wednesday, U.S. democracy watchdog group Freedom House released a similar report that focused on China’s interference in media overseas.

WASHINGTON - he United States treated 11 of its troops for symptoms of concussion after an Iranian missile attack targeted an Iraqi base where US forces were stationed, the US military has said, after initially saying no service members were hurt.

The January 8 attack was retaliation for a US drone strike in Baghdad on January 3 that killed Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the elite Quds Force of Iran's Revolutionary Guard.

US President Donald Trump and the US military had said there were no casualties after the attack on the Ain al-Asad airbase in western Iraq and a facility in its northern Kurdish region.

At the time of the attack, most of the 1,500 US soldiers at the base had been tucked away in bunkers, after advance warning from superiors.

"While no US service members were killed in the January 8 Iranian attack on al-Asad airbase, several were treated for concussion symptoms from the blast and are still being assessed," Captain Bill Urban, spokesman for US Central Command, said in a statement on Thursday.

As a measure of caution, some service members were taken to US facilities in Germany or Kuwait for "follow-on screening," he added.

"When deemed fit for duty, the service members are expected to return to Iraq."

Reporting from Washington, DC, Al Jazeera's Gabriel Elizondo said many of the troops were screened for concussions, which the US authorities say is common.

"The blast from missiles can cause buildings to shake and rattle and can cause potentially, concussions even for people who are outside of the immediate impact zone," Elizondo said.(FA).

PANAMA CITY - The bodies of seven people have been found in a mass grave in an indigenous area of Panama where members of a religious sect were believed to be performing exorcisms, officials say.

The victims included a pregnant woman, 32, and five of her children, aged one to 11. The sixth was a neighbour, 17.

Fifteen other people were freed.

Ten people have been arrested on suspicion of murder. The suspects and all victims were thought to belong to the Ngäbe-Buglé indigenous community.

The grave was discovered after three villagers escaped and made their way to a local hospital last weekend, prosecutor Rafael Baloyes said. They then alerted authorities about several families being held by an indigenous-run sect.

On Wednesday, police raided the community, located in a jungle region in north-west Panama some 250km (155 miles) from the capital Panama City.

"They were performing a ritual inside the structure. In that ritual, there were people being held against their will, being mistreated," said Mr Baloyes. "All of these rites were aimed at killing them if they didn't repent their sins".

Inside the makeshift church, officers found a naked woman, machetes, knives and a ritually sacrificed goat, Mr Baloyes said. The site was controlled by a religious sect called the New Light of God, believed to have been operating in the region for about three months.

According to Mr Baloyes, the kidnapping and torture started last Saturday after one of the members claimed to have received "a message from God". The victims were then kidnapped from their homes, beaten and killed.

The suspects, who include a minor, are expected to appear in court on Friday or Saturday. One of them is the father of the pregnant woman found in the grave, located some 2km from the makeshift church.

Those rescued had bodily injuries and reportedly included at least two pregnant women and some children.(FA)

By Leonardo Benassatto

XINGU INDIGENOUS PARK, Brazil - Brazilian indigenous tribes and rubber tappers joined forces on Wednesday to oppose steps by Brazilian far-right President Jair Bolsonaro that they say are destroying the Amazon forest they depend on.

Some 450 members of 47 tribes met for a second day to discuss how to resist Bolsonaro’s moves to weaken public agencies that are meant to protect the environment and native land rights. Bolsonaro has said tribes have too much land and he wants to open up the reservations to commercial mining and agriculture to develop the Amazon and lift indigenous people from poverty.

Protected tribal lands have seen increasing invasions by illegal loggers and miners since Bolsonaro became president last year, leading to a rise in deforestation, fires and deadly clashes on several reservations.

Bolsonaro has vowed to integrate Brazil’s roughly 900,000 indigenous people into the broader economy and society, while tapping the mineral riches and commercial farming potential of their 462 reservations.

Environmentalists say such a move will speed up clearing of the Amazon jungle, the world’s largest tropical rainforest, which is considered vital for slowing global climate change.

Kayapó chief Raoni Metuktire, who called the meeting in his village on the Xingu river, called on Brazil’s Congress to block the president’s policies.

“We are here to defend our land and to tell him to stop talking badly about us,” said Raoni, who became a global reference for his environmental campaigning in the 1980s with musician Sting at his side. He said he would never accept mining on his ancestral lands.

Among those attending the meeting was Angela Mendes, daughter of rubber tapper, trade union leader and environmentalist Chico Mendes who was killed by a rancher in 1988 for his efforts to protect the rainforest.

“United we can resist. They have the power of the state, but we have the force of the waters, the flowers and ancestral land,” she said at a news conference.

The existence of non-indigenous extractivist communities that live off rubber tapping and selling the fruits of the forest is being endangered by deforestation, she warned.

Mendes struck an alliance with Sonia Guajajara, head on the APIB umbrella, Brazil’s largest organization of tribes.

“This is a very grave moment in our history. It looks like a war scenario,” Guajajara said, accusing Bolsonaro of serving the interests of Brazil’s powerful agribusiness and farming sectors that have advanced into the Amazon region.

The rise in violence against Brazil’s 850,000 indigenous people due to land conflicts with farmers and illegal mining and logging on reservations threaten the tribes’ future, she said.

Brazil’s indigenous affairs agency, Funai, run by a police officer appointed by Bolsonaro, said the meeting in the Xingu was a “totally private event” that it could not support because it was not “in line” with government policy.

According to a draft seen by O Globo newspaper, legislation drafted by the government would not just open up reservation to mining, but also to oil and gas exploration, the building of new hydroelectric dams and commercial farms with genetically modified crops currently banned by law on tribal lands.

Indigenous communities would be consulted on economic projects, as stipulated in Brazil’s Constitution, but they would not have the power to veto projects decided by the government, O Globo reported on Saturday.

The Bolsonaro government, which declined to comment on the O Globo report, has said it is attending to tribal leaders seeking economic development who are ignored by high-profile indigenous advocates.

WASHINGTON/ LONDON - U.S. President Donald Trump said he agreed with a comment by British Prime Minister Boris Johnson that a “Trump deal” should replace the Iran nuclear deal.

“Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, @BorisJohnson, stated, ‘We should replace the Iran deal with the Trump deal,’” Trump said in a posting on Twitter late on Tuesday. “I agree!”

Johnson, who has praised Trump as a great dealmaker, called on Tuesday for the president to replace the Iranian nuclear deal with his own new pact to ensure the Islamic Republic does not get an atomic weapon.

WASHINGTON - The Ukrainian gas company at the centre of President Donald Trump's impeachment was successfully hacked by Russian military agents in November, a US cybersecurity firm has said.

Area 1 Security said it was not clear what the hackers were searching for when they hacked Burisma Holdings.

Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden's son Hunter Biden was previously on the board of the firm.

Burisma, the US government and Russia's Ministry of Defence are yet to respond.

Area 1 linked the hack - a "phishing" attack - to Russia's military intelligence unit known commonly as the GRU.

President Trump was impeached in December over allegations that he improperly pressured Ukraine's leader Volodymyr Zelensky to launch an investigation into Burisma and its links to the Bidens.

The security firm also drew parallels between November's hack and another that was carried out against Democrats in 2016, before the US presidential election.

In its eight-page report, California-based firm Area 1 said the GRU hackers behind the Burisma breach are known by the alias "Fancy Bear" among cybersecurity researchers.

The hackers used "phishing" emails that are designed to steal usernames and passwords, the California-based security firm said.

In this case, Burisma employees were sent what looked like internal company emails and fake websites that looked like the sign-in pages of Burisma subsidiaries.

Using this tactic, the hackers managed to get into Burisma's servers, it added.

Area 1 said it became aware of the hack after its email security scanning product found suspicious evidence online, including "decoy domains" for the fake websites.

A source close to Burisma told Reuters news agency that the company's website had been subject to a number of break-in attempts over the past six months.

Burisma, a Ukrainian energy firm, is at the heart of the impeachment proceedings against President Trump.

In a phone call in July 2019, President Trump pushed for Ukrainian President Zelensky to announce an investigation into Burisma and the Bidens.(FA)

TEHRAN - Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has defended the country's military after it admitted shooting down a passenger plane by mistake.

He said the Revolutionary Guard - the elite unit responsible for the disaster - "maintained the security" of Iran.

Widespread protests and criticism from abroad have put growing pressure on Iran over its handling of the incident.

But the ayatollah tried to rally support as he led Friday prayers in Tehran for the first time since 2012.

He called for "national unity" and said Iran's "enemies" - a reference to Washington and its allies - had used the shooting down of the plane to overshadow the killing of senior Iranian general Qasem Soleimani in a US drone strike.

"Millions in Iran and thousands in Iraq mourned [Soleimani]," he said.

The Ukraine International Airlines Boeing 737-800 was travelling to Kyiv from Tehran on 8 January when it crashed shortly after take-off. All 176 passengers on board, including dozens of Iranians and Canadians, were killed.

The Iranian authorities initially denied responsibility but, after international pressure mounted, the hardline Revolutionary Guard admitted that the plane had been mistaken for a "cruise missile" during heightened tensions with the US.

Hours before it was shot down, and in response to the killing of Soleimani, Iranian missiles targeted two airbases in Iraq that housed US forces. Washington initially said no US troops had been injured but it later said 11 people had been treated for concussion.

Ayatollah Khamenei, 80, addressed the nation from the Mosalla mosque in the capital. The last time he did so was in 2012 on the 33rd anniversary of the country's Islamic Revolution.

Leading Friday prayers in the capital is a symbolically significant act usually reserved for times when Iran's highest authority wishes to deliver an important message, says Mehdi Khalaji of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Historically, Iranian leaders have left this task to loyal clerics with strong oratorical skills, he adds.(FA)

KHAMIR, Yemen - Widow Samirah Nasser and her eight children tried to return to their Yemeni village but were forced by relentless air strikes to return to the relative safety of a refugee camp.

Shivering through yet another camp winter, she is one of 3.6 million Yemenis - around 12% of the population - displaced during a nearly five-year war that has spawned what the United Nations says is the world’s most urgent humanitarian crisis.

“When we returned (to our village), planes were in the sky. They hit the market full of kids,” Nasser said. “I banned the children from going to school, fearing the warplanes.”

The air strikes have deterred Nasser over the past three years from attempting another return to her native region of Saada, heartland of the Iran-aligned Houthi movement that has been battling a Saudi-led military coalition since March 2015.

“The war there does not stop. Our houses are destroyed, we don’t have anywhere to stay, nothing,” said Houriya Muhammad, a 40-year-old mother-of-three also unable to return to Saada, where she used to sell pots.

Both women now live in a refugee camp in Khamir, some 2.5 hours by road from the capital Sanaa. Life is very hard in the camps, where facilities are rudimentary.

“We are dying of the cold,” said Muhammad. “My kids and I sleep wedged together with three or four blankets on us.”

Children, with runny noses, warm themselves near open fires. Water leaks through holes in the makeshift tents.

The war in Yemen pits the Saudi-led coalition, backed by the West, against the Iran-aligned Houthis, who still control Sanaa and other major urban centers.

More than 100,000 people have been killed in the conflict, which has crippled basic services and infrastructure and ravaged the economy. More than 11 million people struggle to find enough food, and 240,000 people are living in famine-like conditions, according to The World Food Programme (WFP).

IMPROVEMENTS

Nor are the refugee camps as safe as aid organizations would want.

“Fighting is taking place less than 10 kilometers (six miles) from some of the main camps,” said Sultana Begum of the Norwegian Refugee Council.

People trying to reach safety can be hampered either by Yemen’s mountainous terrain or a lack of money and identification papers, Begum said.

Yemenis continue to be displaced from fresh conflict areas, with almost 400,000 people driven from their homes in 2019.

But it is not all bad news. Food security has improved over the past year and the WFP now feeds 12 million people a month.

Diplomatic initiatives have led to a decrease in air strikes in recent months and a semblance of normality has returned to some larger cities.

“We can sleep and our children can go to school without fear,” said Abd Rahman Shouei, 28, a resident of the major port city of Hodeidah who ekes out a living by washing cars.

“True, there is no work, roads are closed and we have no electricity, but the situation in Hodeidah is better now because there is no fighting or bombing.”

Hodeidah is the entry point for most of Yemen’s imports and a lifeline for millions. A truce in the Houthi-held city has largely held for more than a year, though a withdrawal of troops agreed last year has stalled and there are intermittent clashes.

In another flashpoint city, the port of Aden, residents also report some modest improvements in daily life despite continued tensions between Yemen’s internationally recognized government and southern separatists.

“Electricity has improved, but water and sewage still fill the streets,” said Muhammad Omar a 56-year old government worker. “We live in a state of neither war nor peace.”

BEIRUT - Lebanese politicians are watching on as the economy collapses, the senior U.N. official in Lebanon said on Wednesday, rebuking a political elite that has failed to form a government as the country sinks deeper into economic and financial crisis.

Jan Kubis, U.N. special coordinator for Lebanon, also noted that central bank (BDL) governor Riad Salameh had requested extraordinary powers to manage the economy — an apparent reference to his request for extra authorities to regulate controls being implemented by commercial banks.

“Lebanon is truly unique — the BDL Governor requesting extraordinary powers to at least somehow manage the economy while those responsible watch it collapsing. Incredible,” Kubis wrote in a Twitter post.

NEW DELHI - Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said on Wednesday the country’s 2015 nuclear deal signed with major powers - China, Russia, France, Britain, the United States and Germany - to curb its nuclear program is ‘not dead’.

“No, it’s not dead. It’s not dead,” Zarif told Reuters on the sidelines of an event in New Delhi.

U.S. President Donald Trump in 2018 abandoned the nuclear deal reached under predecessor Barack Obama, arguing it was too weak and that new sanctions would force Iran to accept more stringent terms. Iran says it will not negotiate with sanctions in place.