Exxon Mobil and Chevron reported hefty losses in the latest quarter Friday as the weakened economic outlook because of the coronavirus pandemic pressures the industry to double down on cost cuts.”We’ve never seen a market demand crash so far so deep,” said Neil Chapman, Exxon Mobil senior vice president.While he noted early signs of recovery in motor fuel demand, a recovery in jet fuel is “likely to be much slower,” Chapman said, pointing to a dearth of international flights.Exxon Mobil reported a loss of $1.1 billion in the second quarter, the biggest since the Exxon-Mobil merger in 1999.Chevron lost $8.3 billion in the same period, as it slashed the value of assets on expectations that commodity prices would stay down longer.The figures incorporated a downgrade to the value of assets in Venezuela.Weak economic conditions could weigh on Chevron’s results “into the third quarter” because of “significantly reduced” demand for petroleum-based products, Chief Executive Mike Wirth warned.”Given the uncertainties associated with economic recovery, and ample oil and gas supplies, we made a downward revision to our commodity price outlook which resulted in asset impairments and other charges,” he said.FILE – A Chevron gas station sign is shown in Cardiff, California, Jan. 25, 2016.And Chevron’s chief financial officer, Pierre Breber, said on a conference call that the company was preparing for oil prices that are “lower for longer.”More deals ahead?The losses came on the heels of similar reports Thursday from Royal Dutch Shell, Total and Eni and underscored the depressed state of affairs globally for a sector tied closely to the real economy.Exxon Mobil’s revenues fell by more than 50% to $32.6 billion in the quarter, while Chevron’s revenues fell by almost two-thirds to $13.5 billion.FILE – A customer holds a gas pump handle at an Exxon station in Vancouver, Wash.Although oil prices have returned to around $40 a barrel, they were still significantly below the same period of 2019. That led to losses at both companies in exploration and production.  Weak demand also weighed on downstream operations, although Exxon Mobil’s international refining arm was profitable thanks to lower expenses and improved operations compared with the 2019 period.Chapman, in a conference call with analysts, said the company was reevaluating its oil price assumptions, but signaled it would rein in spending and not take on any more debt.The company in April slashed its capital spending plan to $23 billion from $33 billion.Chapman said the company would reduce its rig fleet in the Permian Basin in Texas in the second half of 2020. He also said the 2021 capital budget would be under $19 billion.However, he defended the dividend to investors of $0.87 a share as a major priority and said the view on energy demand in the longer term had not changed.In comparison, rival Royal Dutch Shell slashed its dividend in May. The Anglo-Dutch company has also pledged to be carbon-neutral by 2050.Deal-making often accelerates in the oil industry as stronger companies gobble up financially strapped competitors.Chevron earlier this month announced it would acquire U.S. shale producer Noble Energy for $5 billion, the biggest petroleum acquisition amid the downturn.
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China recently issued new draft rules aimed at toughening oversight of foreign teachers in the country, requiring them to undergo ideological training sessions and creating a new social credit rating system to monitor their conduct.Arrests and deportations of foreign teachers in China have soared since 2018 amid a broad crackdown on teachers without proper work visas and Beijing’s push for a more patriotic education system.Analysts told VOA this is partly due to the deterioration of U.S.-China relations and China’s relations with other English-speaking countries. Yet parents say they are still interested in having their children learn English.Draft regulationThe FILE – A Chinese teacher writes English words on a blackboard at a class in Shanghai, April 26, 2002.What about learning English?English teaching has a huge market in China. The China Science News reported that more than 300 million people in China are learning English. English classes, mandated by the Ministry of Education, cost nearly 164 billion RMB (about $24 billion) annually.Yet as China’s relationship with the U.S. and other major English-speaking countries worsens, some worry the situation will mirror what happened in the 1960s, when passion to learn Russian sharply decreased after ties between Beijing and Moscow deteriorated.Commentator Qin Weiping said there’s a possibility that English might be less important if China keeps its aggressive foreign policy and is further isolated by the U.S. and other major economies down the road.Professor Zhan Jiang disagreed, saying that the current situation was temporary.“Some kids can’t go abroad, and some international students can’t come back. There are lot of reasons — COVID-19, Sino-U.S. relations. But I think most Chinese students will still learn English as their second language. That trend won’t change,” he told VOA.Li Ping, parent of a Beijing student, told VOA that he still wanted his child to learn English well, so he has the opportunity to go to the U.S. for further education. He added that he thought China’s current foreign policy and international environment would change one day. “We must invest in education,” he said.
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U.S. President Donald Trump alleged again Friday that the November election could be rigged because of mail-in votes.  “It’ll be fixed, it’ll be rigged,” Trump told reporters on the South Lawn of the White House before traveling to Tampa, Florida. Without providing any evidence, the president said Russia and China could forge U.S. paper ballots and said, “This is going to be the greatest election disaster in history.”  President Donald Trump speaks with reporters on the South Lawn of the White House, July 31, 2020.The comments come one day after Trump suggested delaying this year’s presidential election, alleging on Twitter that mailed ballots, which take longer to count, would make the 2020 presidential balloting the “most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history.” The president added, “It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???” Trump told reporters at the White House later Thursday that he does not want to delay the vote but also does not want to wait “weeks, months or even years” for the results of the election because of problems he predicts will occur with mailed-in ballots. The president does not have the power to delay the election, which lies solely with Congress. Lawmakers, including both Republicans and Democrats, were quick Thursday to reject any suggestion that the election would be delayed.  Trump has criticized voting by mail since April. However, representatives for the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) and the National Association of State Election Directors (NASED) told VOA in July that if there is any evidence to support Trump’s claims of potential mail-in ballot fraud, the administration has yet to share it with them. Most states offer some form of mail-in voting, so-called absentee ballots, but because of the coronavirus pandemic, some states have moved to expand the use of mail-in ballots for the November election. Five states conduct all of their elections completely by mail: Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington and Utah. Steve Herman contributed to this report.
 
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Young voters span two generations — older Gen Z voters and younger Millennial voters. 
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Botswana has put its capital, Gaborone, back into a two-week lockdown starting Friday, closing schools and restricting movements, after confirmed local COVID-19 transmissions doubled this week.Botswana’s health minister, Dr. Lemogang Kwape, said a return to lockdown was needed after the capital saw what he called a “worrying rise” in local cases of COVID-19.”I now regret to inform you that the situation has worsened in the last 24 hours,” he said. “Botswana has recorded 30 new positive cases of COVID-19, with the majority of the cases emanating from schools in the greater Gaborone.”Students walk near a school as classes are cancelled in response to a surge of new COVID-19 cases, in Gaborone, Botswana. (Mqondisi Dube/VOA)Authorities closed schools in Gaborone on Friday and, except for essential workers, resumed requiring temporary permits for anyone to move around.Schools elsewhere in Botswana remain open.Confirmed, local transmissions of the virus in Gaborone doubled in the last week, from 70 to 140, most of them recorded in schools. Kwape said contact tracing had become more complex.He said some transport operators were failing to keep a passenger register, as required by COVID-19 regulations.”During the course of this week the disease has taken an unexpected turn. This now requires that we place the greater Gaborone zone under lockdown for a minimum period of two weeks to enable us to contain the disease,” Kwape said.Soldiers and police monitor a roadblock in the capital, Gaborone, which is under a two-week lockdown, July 31, 2020. (Mqondisi Dube/VOA)This is the second time Botswana has returned the capital to lockdown after lifting the restrictions since the pandemic began.Botswana, with 804 recorded cases of COVID-19 and two deaths, has been relatively unscathed by the virus, compared to other African countries.Botswana’s neighbor, South Africa, is the worst-hit on the continent, with confirmed COVID-19 cases approaching half a million.The majority of Botswana’s confirmed cases were along the border – and most of them foreigners.
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In a fiery eulogy for longtime U.S. Representative John Lewis on Thursday, former President Barack Obama took a series of thinly veiled shots at the actions of his successor that he said tore at the legacy of the Black civil rights icon being laid to rest.  
 
The funeral for Lewis, who played an instrumental role in passing the Voting Rights Act of 1965, came on the same day Republican President Donald Trump suggested the Nov. 3 election could be delayed. Trump has also waged a war against mail-in ballots, a tactic critics say is aimed at suppressing votes.
 
“We no longer have to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar in order to cast a ballot,” Obama said in the eulogy, referring to one way Black people were once disqualified at the ballot box.
 
“But even as we sit here, there are those in power doing their darnedest to discourage people from voting by closing polling locations and targeting minorities with restrictive ID laws and attacking our voting rights with surgical precision.”
 
Obama also referred to reported moves to undermine “the postal service in the run-up to an election that could be dependent on mail-in ballots so people don’t get sick.”
 
Obama, joined at the funeral by two fellow former presidents, Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Bill Clinton, spoke of Lewis’s rise from humble beginnings on a Troy, Alabama, farm to become a leader of the 1960s struggle for equal rights for Black Americans. Ultimately, the man known as the “conscience of Congress” never gave up his drive to make “good trouble” in the cause of justice, Obama said.
 
Obama and others spoke or sang in front of his casket draped in the American flag at the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, where the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. once preached. King, who was assassinated in 1968, had been a mentor to Lewis.
 
Lewis, who was first elected in 1986 to represent Georgia in the U.S. House of Representatives, died on July 17 at age 80 after a battle with pancreatic cancer. His death came at a time of reckoning across the United States over racial injustice ignited by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25.  
 
Obama – a Democrat who was the nation’s first black president and who awarded Lewis the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011 – argued that the man whose sharecropping parents “picked someone else’s cotton” now should be counted among the Founding Fathers.
 
“America was built by John Lewis. He as much as anyone in our history brought our country closer to its highest ideals,” the Democratic former president said.
 
In his speech, Bush remembered joining Lewis in Selma, Alabama, for the 50th anniversary of the watershed 1965 march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. “The story that began in Troy isn’t ending here today, nor is the work.”
 
The funeral capped a week of memorial services. Lewis’s coffin was escorted across the bridge on Sunday, decades after his beating there drew a national spotlight to the struggle for racial equality, including suppression of the Black vote in the South. And on Monday his casket was taken to the U.S. Capitol in Washington where it lay in state through Tuesday.
 
Eric Terrell, 65, of Atlanta, sat outside the church in his wheelchair, in the heat and thick air of an Atlanta summer morning, waiting to get a glimpse of former Presidents Clinton and Bush, but especially Obama. He was camped out before 6:30 a.m. so he could bow his head as Lewis’s funeral procession rolled by.
 
And he held his homemade sign until his arms got tired. It read, “Get your ass out and vote.” “He put his life on the line in Selma so we could vote,” said Terrell, who is Black. “So we better do it,” he said before joining the throng of onlookers outside the church watching the services on a Jumbotron.
 
In an essay written shortly before his death and published in the New York Times on Thursday, Lewis called on the younger generation to get into “good trouble,” using perhaps his most famous utterance about the importance of challenging inequality.
 
“In my life I have done all I can to demonstrate that the way of peace, the way of love and nonviolence is the more excellent way,” he wrote, before invoking a famous line from King: “Now it is your turn to let freedom ring.”
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The United States has denounced the killing inside a courtroom of a naturalized U.S. citizen on trial for blasphemy in Pakistan.Tahir Ahmed Naseem, a 47-year-old resident from Illinois, was shot several times in front of the judge during a Wednesday hearing in the northwestern city of Peshawar. He was on trial for allegedly claiming to be a prophet of Islam, a crime punishable by death under Pakistan’s blasphemy laws.“We are shocked, saddened, and outraged that American citizen Tahir Naseem was killed…inside a Pakistani courtroom,” the U.S. State Department said in a statement issued on Thursday.The judicial proceedings against Naseem had been under way since 2018, when he was arrested for allegedly claiming to be the “last messenger of God” in online conversations with his Facebook friends in Pakistan.“Mr. Naseem had been lured to Pakistan from his home in Illinois by individuals who then used Pakistan’s blasphemy laws to entrap him,” the U.S. statement lamented.It noted that the U.S. government had been providing consular assistance to the victim and his family and “called the attention of senior Pakistani officials to his case to prevent the type of shameful tragedy that eventually occurred.”Pakistani police swiftly arrested the young assailant, who later took responsibility for killing Naseem for having committed blasphemy and for being an enemy of Islam.“We grieve with the family of Mr. Naseem. We urge Pakistan to immediately reform its often-abused blasphemy laws and its court system, which allow such abuses to occur, and to ensure that the suspect is prosecuted to the full extent of the law,” the U.S. State Department said.Security is usually tight around the court during cases related to blasphemy offenses because it is an extremely sensitive issue in Pakistan. Police said an investigation was underway to determine how the assailant managed to carry the weapons into the courtroom.Sam Brownback, U.S. Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom, said he was disturbed by reports that a U.S. citizen was murdered while standing trial for blasphemy. “We call on @PakPMO and the Government of Pakistan to ensure the perpetrator is held accountable and investigate this egregious courtroom security lapse,” Brownback tweeted.The latest act of violence associated with Pakistan’s blasphemy laws has renewed calls for reforming them to prevent their misuse and to deter such incidents. But attempts by successive governments to reform the laws have failed under pressure from Islamic groups in the country.Domestic and international human rights groups maintain blasphemy charges are often fabricated by influential people in Pakistan to intimidate religious minorities and settle personal feuds with rival Muslim groups.Dozens of people are known to have been killed for allegedly committing blasphemy in Pakistan. Even mere accusations in certain instances have triggered mob lynchings of suspected blasphemers. The victims include doctors, teachers, lawyers and high-profile political figures.In a landmark 2018 judgment, the country’s Supreme Court acquitted a Christian woman, Asia Bibi, of blasphemy charges after she spent eight years on death row in a case that drew global attention.Bibi has since secured asylum in Canada along with her family, to escape death threats from Islamists in Pakistan after her acquittal.
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Dr. Anthony Fauci returns to Capitol Hill on Friday to testify before a special House panel investigating the coronavirus pandemic. His testimony comes at a time when early progress on combating the virus seems to have been lost and uncertainty clouds the nation’s path forward.The government’s top infectious disease expert is testifying alongside Dr. Robert Redfield, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Admiral Brett Giroir, a Health and Human Services official and physician serving as the “testing czar.”The panel, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, is divided about how to reopen schools and businesses, mirroring divisions among Americans.A rebound of cases across the South and West has dashed hopes for a quick return to normal life. Problems with the availability and timeliness of testing continue to be reported. And the race for a vaccine, though progressing rapidly, has yet to deliver a breakthrough.Fauci’s public message in recent days has been that Americans can’t afford a devil-may-care attitude toward COVID-19, and individuals need to double down on basic measures such as wearing masks in public, keeping their distance from others, and avoiding crowds and indoor spaces such as bars. That’s echoed by Redfield and Giroir, though they are far less prominent.Fauci’s dogged persistence has drawn the ire of some of President Donald Trump’s supporters and prompted a new round of calls for his firing. But the veteran of battles against AIDS and Ebola has stuck to his message, while carefully avoiding open confrontations with the Trump White House.In an interview with The Associated Press earlier this week, Fauci said he was “disturbed” by the flat-out opposition in parts of the country to wearing masks as a public health protective measure.”There are certain fundamentals,” he said, “the staples of what you need to do … one is universal wearing of masks.”Public health experts say masks help prevent an infected person who has yet to develop symptoms from passing the virus to others. For the mask wearer, there’s also some evidence that they can offer a degree of protection from an infected person nearby.Fauci said in his AP interview that he’s concerned because the U.S. has not followed the track of Asian and European nations also hit hard by the coronavirus.Other countries that shut down their economies knocked back uncontrolled spread and settled into a pattern of relatively few new cases, although they continued to experience local outbreaks.The U.S. also knocked back the initial spread, but never got the background level of new cases quite as low. And the resurgence of COVID-19 in the Sunbelt in recent weeks has driven the number of new daily cases back up into the 60,000-70,000 range. It coincided with economic reopening and a return to social gatherings, particularly among younger adults. Growing numbers of emergency room visits, hospitalizations and deaths have followed as grim consequences.Nearly 4.5 million Americans have been sickened since the start of the pandemic, and more than 150,000 have died.Fauci said there’s evidence the surge across the South may be peaking, but upticks in the Midwest are now a concern.”They’ve really got to jump all over that because if they don’t then you might see the surge we saw in some of the Southern states,” he told AP.Though Fauci gets push-back from White House officials, other medical experts in the administration are on the same page when it comes to the public health message.Giroir, the testing czar, told reporters Thursday: “I think it’s very important to make sure that we all spread the public health message that we can control all the outbreaks occurring right now.”He said controlling the outbreaks will require people to wear masks, avoid crowded indoor spaces and wash their hands frequently.  
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