The United States will not seek the death penalty for two British members of an Islamic State execution squad nicknamed the “Beatles,” whose extradition the Justice Department is seeking, Attorney General William Barr said Wednesday.In a letter this week to Priti Patel, Britain’s interior minister, Barr said if Britain granted an extradition request for Alexanda Kotey and El Shafee Elsheikh, U.S. prosecutors would not seek the death penalty and would not carry out executions if they were to be imposed.Barr said Kotey and Elsheikh, captured in 2019, were being held by the U.S. military in an unidentified overseas location but that it was becoming untenable to continue to hold them.The pair were members of a four-person group in Islamic State that was known as the Beatles because they spoke English. The group is alleged to have detained or killed Western hostages in Syria, including U.S. journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff and aid workers Kayla Mueller and Peter Kassig.The Justice Department is asking British authorities to turn over evidence on Kotey and Elsheikh to allow them to be tried in the United States.Barr said if Britain did not turn over evidence by October 15, the United States would turn the men over for prosecution in the Iraqi justice system.
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Thousands of Californians were told to evacuate and smoke blanketed San Francisco on Wednesday as wildfires raged, sparked by a record-breaking heat wave, high winds and over 10,000 lightning strikes in just three days.Police and firefighters raced door-to-door Wednesday morning to urge Bay Area residents to evacuate. In Vacaville, a city of about 100,000 between San Francisco and Sacramento, fire officials said four people were injured and at least 100 structures were damaged or destroyed.”What has occurred over the last 72 hours has certainly stretched the resources of this state,” said Governor Gavin Newsom at a Wednesday press conference. Newsom said that California had been hit by 10,849 lightning strikes over the past 72 hours, which ignited many of the 367 known fires across the state.LIVE NOW: Governor @GavinNewsom provides an update on the state’s response to wildfires, the West Coast heat wave and the #COVID19 pandemic. https://t.co/2NYFtsJq3i
— Office of the Governor of California (@CAgovernor) August 19, 2020Newsom said that California had been hit by 10,849 lightning strikes over the past 72 hours, which ignited many of the 367 known fires across the state.The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, known as Cal Fire, issued and updated evacuation orders for several Northern California counties including Napa, Santa Cruz and Sonoma. Orders were in effect in several other counties. The National Weather Service announced a Red Flag Warning for large swaths of Northern California, which indicates that conditions are ideal for wildfires to both start and spread.#RedFlagWarning in effect for the Central Valley from Wednesday through Thursday evening and Northeastern CA through Wednesday evening due to gusty winds and low humidity. This is #CriticalFireWeather so use caution outdoors. More tips: https://t.co/upBwccxXFOpic.twitter.com/rEA3VnheP4
— CAL FIRE (@CAL_FIRE) An air tanker drops retardant as the LNU Lightning Complex fires tear through the Spanish Flat community in unincorporated Napa County, Calif., Aug. 18, 2020.Just over 347,000 acres, or 1,404 square kilometers, of land in California had burned by Wednesday. Over half a million acres of land, totaling nearly 2,300 square kilometers, have burned across the U.S. West. The most recent is the Ivory Fire, sparked Wednesday, which has burned 400 acres, or about 1.6 square kilometers. It was 0% contained by the afternoon, according to the Los Angeles Times tracker.The largest active fire is the Ohlone Fire, which started August 16. The fire, which is also 0% contained, has already burned over 97,000 acres of land, or almost 400 square kilometers.Newsom declared a statewide emergency Tuesday, making it easier to obtain federal resources.“We are deploying every resource available to keep communities safe as California battles fires across the state during these extreme weather conditions,” Newson said in a press release.  “California and its federal and local partners are working in lockstep to meet the challenge and remain vigilant in the face of continued dangerous weather conditions.”California received grants from the Federal Emergency Management Agency earlier this week to help combat the fires.Cal Fire’s website is down. Follow these handles to get latest on evacs/numbers… #BREAKING#LNULightningComplex – follow @CALFIRELNU#SCULightningComplex – follow @calfireSCU#CZULightningComplex – follow @CALFIRECZU#ButteLightningComplex – follow @CALFIRE_ButteCo
— Eric Shackelford (@ABC7Shack) August 19, 2020Cal Fire’s website was intermittently unavailable Wednesday. A notice on the otherwise-empty site cited “heavy traffic” and directed users to the department’s Twitter page for updates. Local news outlets and reporters shared resources on social media.  
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Protesters in Portland broke out the windows of a county government building, sprayed lighter fluid inside and set a fire in a demonstration that started Tuesday night and ended Wednesday morning with clashes with police, officials said.The fire at the Multnomah Building damaged the county government’s office of community involvement, where Oregon’s first gay marriage took place and where protective gear has been distributed to try to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, said Multnomah County Chair Deborah Kafoury.”This is the heart of our County, where people in our community come to get married, get their passports, and celebrate their cultural traditions and diversity,” she said in a statement.Demonstrations that often turn violent have gripped Oregon’s biggest city for more than two months following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.  Participants have repeatedly broken into the offices of a police union headquarters building miles and last month clashed for weeks with federal agents dispatched to protect a U.S. courthouse targeted by protesters.Portland officers late Tuesday declared a riot outside the county building after demonstrators in a crowd of about 200 started fires in dumpsters, used rocks to smash first floor windows and tossed burning material inside that set the fire that set off fire alarms and the building’s sprinkler system, police said in a statement early Wednesday.The riot declaration allows officers to use crowd control methods such as tear gas or flash bang devices. Police said in their statement that some unspecified “crowd control munitions” were used to disperse the crowd but that officers did not use tear gas.Two protesters were arrested, and one police officer suffered minor injuries in scuffles as police broke up the demonstration, the statement said. A photo distributed by police showed one window of the building spray painted with a bull’s eye and the words “Aim Here.”The fire damaged the lobby where Oregon’s first gay marriage happened in 2004, Kafoury said.She asked residents to support the community involvement office, adding that “there is grave injustice in our world and there is a violent and tragic history of oppression in our County. I am committed to transformational change.”  “In such a difficult, uncertain time, our community needs all of us to work together,” Kafoury added.Police on Tuesday also identified a suspect accused of punching and kicking a man to the ground after he crashed his pickup truck on a sidewalk near ongoing demonstrations.Authorities received Sunday night of protesters chasing a truck a few blocks from the downtown federal courthouse. The driver crashed and was then assaulted, authorities said.Authorities are trying to track down the suspect, Marquise Love, 25, police said in a statement. The victim of the assault has been released from a hospital and is recovering.A social media account apparently connected to Love has been disabled and efforts to locate him for comment were not immediately successful. 
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Federal and local authorities have arrested nearly 1,500 people as part of a joint violent crime fighting initiative launched last month in major U.S. cities grappling with a rise in homicides and shootings, U.S. Attorney General William Barr announced Wednesday. The arrests were made under Operation Legend, a coordinated initiative named for LeGend Taliferro, a four-year-old shot and killed in late June as he slept at home in Kansas City. The effort was launched in Kansas City on July 8 and has since been expanded to eight other cities. Taliferro’s suspected murderer was arrested last week. FILE – President Donald Trump holds a photo of LeGend Taliferro during a news conference in the James Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House, Aug. 13, 2020.“This arrest will not bring LeGend back, but it again makes his case an example of how we can come together to take violent criminals off the street and make our communities more safe,” Barr said at a press conference in Kansas City attended by Taliferro’s mother and law enforcement officials from around the country. Operation Legend is unrelated to the more controversial deployment of federal law enforcement agents to Portland, Oregon. Officials say the agents were sent there to protect a federal courthouse from protesters whom the Trump administration had accused of attacking federal property and officers. Under Operation Legend, the federal government has sent more than 1,000 federal agents to the nine cities to work with local law enforcement officials, Barr said. The agents come from the FBI, DEA, ATF and U.S. Marshals Service. Of the nearly 1,500 arrested under Operation Legend, about 217 have been charged with federal crimes, according to the Justice Department. Chicago has seen the largest number of federal arrests, with 61 people charged with a variety of federal offenses ranging from firearms to drug crimes. Operation Legend was launched by Barr amid a spike in gun violence and homicides in major American cities in recent months. The overall U.S. crime rate, however, remains well below its peak in the early 1990s. Barr, who first served as attorney general from 1991 to 1993, attributed the decades-long decline in crime to initiatives he launched then that focused on drug organizations, gangs, and gun offenders as well as increased collaboration between federal and local authorities. During the final two years of the Obama administration, 2015 and 2016, Barr said, violent crime ticked up. But the Trump administration helped reverse the trend, Barr asserted. Most criminologists believe the fluctuations in the crime rate have little to do with federal policies, noting the federal government’s limited law enforcement role in a country with an estimated 18,000 agencies. Criminologists say several factors may be behind the recent spike in violent crime. Among them: warm summer weather; more people on the streets as states reopen their economies; and a growing erosion of public trust in law enforcement amid the continued protests over the May death of African American George Floyd while in police custody in Minneapolis. 
 
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Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Tuesday proposed punishing cities that cut police funding by freezing property tax revenue, the main funding source for local government services including schools, roads and law enforcement.
Other top Texas Republicans joined Abbott in announcing what they promised would be a priority during the 2021 legislative session. The announcement came days after the Austin City Council voted to slash its police budget over the next fiscal year as the U.S. continues reckoning with racial injustice in law enforcement.
Details of the proposal were thin, including what would constitute a city “defunding” its police department, and the legislation is far from a done deal.
The proposal by the state’s top Republicans also comes less than three months before an Election Day that is expected to be the closest in decades in America’s biggest red state. President Donald Trump has zeroed in on a law and order message to boost his own reelection prospects, and on Monday called former Vice President Joe Biden a “puppet of left-wing extremists” who are out to “eliminate our police.”
Democrats need to win only nine seats in November to take control of the Texas House for the first time since 2002, a scenario that would all but extinguish Abbott’s proposal even before the Legislature returns in January. Abbott, Patrick and Bonnen blasted the announcement as an attempt shift attention away from the governor’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic that on Monday surpassed 10,000 deaths in Texas.
“When crime is on the rise, the last thing we should do is defund law enforcement,” Abbott said during a press conference in Fort Worth, adding that he hopes Austin leaders will reverse their decision if his proposal becomes law. “We will ensure that these communities continue to be protected. ”
In his own press conference, Austin Mayor Steve Adler countered that Abbot should focus on protecting Texans from COVID-19, and he held a moment of silence for the dead.
Even with a recent increase in homicides, Adler said, Austin is a safe city. Budget changes, he said, were reflective of community conversations.
In a unanimous vote Thursday, the City Council shifted about $150 million, or one-third, of next year’s $434 million police budget in favor of spending more money on social services, following moves of other cities in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd.
Adler reiterated that the changes would affect unfilled police positions. Some duties will be shifted to mental health, first responder and social worker jobs.
The mayor himself responded to some community pushback and referred only to $21 million as a cut, saying the other $129 million would be used to “move certain functions to civilian control.”
Sherri Greenberg, a former Texas representative and public policy professor at the University of Texas, said the state Constitution requires bills addressing taxes originate in the House, where it will be sent to a committee for review.
This kind of proposal is not unusual, Greenberg said, pointing to a bill from the 2019 legislative session that was approved and lowered the amount cities are allowed to collect from property tax.
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A political opponent of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko urged European Union leaders Wednesday not to recognize the country’s recent presidential election, declaring it was rigged in favor of Lukashenko.Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya issued the appeal from exile in neighboring Lithuania before European Union leaders hold an emergency summit to discuss the Belarus crisis. “I call on you not to recognize these fraudulent elections,” Tsikhanouskaya said. “Mr.  Lukashenko has lost all legitimacy in the eyes of our nation and the world.”Tsikhanouskaya says she is the winner of the election and has called for new elections under international supervision.Workers in Belarus began striking in recent days as part of a campaign to oust the authoritarian president after he extended his 26-year term in an election detractors contend was rigged. Lukashenko denies manipulating the election.Lukashenko Declared Winner in Belarus Election for 6th Straight Term   Protests erupted challenging the results; rights groups say one person was killed, dozens injured, and several hundred arrests were made Unrest in the country began to escalate after Lukashenko dismissed demands to resign following a severe police crackdown on peaceful protesters days after the August 9 election.EU members have suggested they would place sanctions on Belarusian officials they consider responsible for election fraud and a crackdown on protests that resulted in the deaths of at least two people, the injuring of hundreds of others and the detention of nearly 7,000 people.Russian President Vladimir Putin has offered military assistance to Lukashenko, a close ally. Putin spoke by phone Tuesday with European Council President Charles Michel, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron.Putin warned Merkel and Macron not to interfere in Belarusian affairs.Swedish Foreign Minister Ann Linde has offered to visit Belarus as the incoming head of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which frequently mediates disputes on the continent. Western nations and former states of the Soviet Union are members of the OSCE.
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Asian markets are mostly higher Wednesday. The Nikkei index in Tokyo finished 0.2% higher.  Sydney’s S&P/ASX index was up 0.2% at its close.  The KOSPI index in Seoul gained 0.5%, while the TSEC index in Taipei dropped 0.7%. In late afternoon trading, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index is down 0.8%, the Shanghai Composite is 1.1% lower, and the Sensex in Mumbai is up 0.4%. In commodities trading, gold is trading at $1,994.50 an ounce, down 0.9%.  U.S. crude oil is selling at $42.58 per barrel, down 0.7%, and Brent crude is selling at $45.09 per barrel, down 0.8%. All three major U.S. indices are flat in futures trading. 
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Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya has called on the European Union to not recognize what she called “fraudulent elections” last week in which she lost to longtime President Alexander Lukashenko. In a video message ahead of an emergency EU summit on the issue Wednesday, Tsikhanouskaya said, “Lukashenko has lost all legitimacy in the eyes of our nation and the world.”In this Tuesday, Aug. 18, 2020 file photo Belarusian opposition supporters gather for a protest rally in front of the government building at Independent Square in Minsk, Belarus, with a Soviet era sculptures in the foreground.Official election results showed Lukashenko winning with 80% of the votes, and he has denied allegations that the voting was rigged. Tsikhanouskaya rejected the results, as did protesters who have gathered for mass rallies across the country to voice their opposition to Lukashenko. 
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Only a handful of contact tracers working to slow COVID-19 in 125 communities near Chicago speak Spanish, despite significant Hispanic populations. Churches and advocacy groups in the Houston area are trying to convince immigrants to cooperate when health officials call. And in California, immigrants are being trained as contact tracers to ease mistrust. The crucial job of reaching people who test positive for the coronavirus and those they’ve come in contact with is proving especially difficult in immigrant communities because of language barriers, confusion and fear of the government. The failure of health departments across the U.S. to adequately investigate coronavirus outbreaks among non-English speakers is all the more fraught given the soaring and disproportionate case counts among Latinos in many states. Four of the hardest-hit states — Florida, Texas, Arizona and California — have major Spanish-speaking populations. In the ZIP code with the highest number of COVID-19 cases in Maryland, 56% of adults speak Spanish. But only 60 of Maryland’s 1,350 contact tracers speak Spanish. And the language barriers go beyond Spanish: Minneapolis needs tracers who also speak Somali, Oromo and Hmong, Chicago needs Polish speakers and Houston’s Harris County is grappling with a population that includes Vietnamese, Chinese and Hindi speakers. But even when health officials overcome language barriers, they still must dispel the deep suspicions raised among immigrants when someone with the government calls to ask about their movements in an era of hardline immigration enforcement under President Donald Trump. “It should come as no surprise that people may be afraid to answer the phone,” said Dr. Kiran Joshi, senior medical officer at the Cook County Department of Public Health, which serves 2.4 million people in communities just outside Chicago.  Exacerbating the challenges even further is the lag in getting COVID test results around the U.S., with waits routinely exceeding a week. The nation also is averaging more than 60,000 new cases a day, which has overwhelmed many laboratories.  All that can significantly affect tracers’ ability to reach 75 percent of a patient’s contacts within 24 hours of a positive test, a threshold that experts say is necessary to control outbreaks. Officials say it’s especially difficult to meet that threshold in immigrant communities.Joseph Ortiz, a contact tracer with New York City’s Health + Hospitals battling the coronavirus pandemic, disinfects his tablet after leaving a potential patient’s home Thursday, Aug. 6, 2020, in New York.Contact tracers take pains to reassure patients that nothing will be passed along to immigration officials, that they don’t have to provide Social Security or insurance information, and that their contacts won’t know who shared their names and phone numbers.  Still, “there are a lot of rumors and myths,” said Hevert Rosio-Benitez, who oversees contact tracing for Harris County Public Health. “We do try to train our staff to be convincing enough to establish trust and tell them what the contact-tracing process is about, but we can only do so much with that.” So, every week, the health department meets with clergy, lawmakers and advocacy groups to get feedback and answer questions about immigrants’ concerns “and tell them that we need the community participation so that we can be successful in curbing the virus,” Rosio-Benitez said. Many of those being approached are essential workers who worry about being sidelined for days or weeks awaiting test results, while others fear how members of their community will react to contracting the virus, said Fernando Garcia, founder and executive director of the El Paso, Texas-based Border Network for Human Rights. “I believe there’s a growing stigma about people being sick, so if you’re infected you don’t want to tell,” said Garcia, whose group works with farm laborers.  The University of California-Irvine is trying to help counties by training people from low-income, minority areas to be contact tracers in their own communities, said Daniel Parker, an infectious disease epidemiologist and assistant professor of public health. Tracers are provided with loose scripts to help with their calls, but “they already have the intuition (about) the best way to get the information and what to ask,” he said. “They have the same lived experiences and know how to approach the community better.”  In Maryland, state health officials have created public service announcements for both English and Spanish-language TV stations imploring people to pick up the phone when contact tracers call.  “The personal information we’re asking for is totally protected,” Dr. Michelle LaRue assures viewers in Spanish.  LaRue is a manager at CASA de Maryland, an immigration advocacy group that has partnered with health officials in Prince George’s County just outside of Washington. D.C., to make the calls to Spanish speakers. She said earning trust begins with hiring contact tracers who not only speak Spanish but also intimately understand immigrant communities.  Ruth Rivera, who is from Puerto Rico, fits that mold.  “I feel the connection right away,” said Rivera, a bilingual contact tracer with a company called HealthCare Dynamics International. “I know their fears.”  In Illinois, Joshi said Cook County is planning to use a $3 million state grant to expand its tracing program in the coming months, including public communication. The department plans to partner with local organizations to help ensure that people in all communities know they could receive a phone call from health officials, that the caller ID will indicate clearly who’s calling, and that “it’s really important for the health of the public that folks pick up the phone,” Joshi said. Rosio-Benitez said his tracers’ success rate currently is 40 to 50 percent because of a lack of cooperation overall — especially in immigrant communities. Some of the patients “are very forthcoming,” but others may identify people they’ve come in contacts but won’t provide a phone number, he said. Rosio-Benitez said about one-third of Harris County’s 300 contact tracers speak Spanish, but that more are needed because the area’s Hispanic population has been disproportionately affected by COVID-19. Joshi said his department has few Spanish-speakers among its 25 tracers but plans to hire more, as well as people who speak Polish, Arabic and other languages. “If the caller … speaks one’s own language, they’re more likely to answer honestly and feel comfortable,” he said. 
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President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita resigned late Tuesday night, hours after he was arrested by mutinous soldiers following months of massive protests. The 75-year-old Keita said he wished to avoid any bloodshed in a resignation speech delivered on state television.  Keita and Prime Minister Boubou Cisse were arrested Tuesday at Keita’s house in the capital of Bamako. A reporter for VOA’s French to Africa service says soldiers took Keita  and Cisse to a military camp in Kati.  The West African economic bloc ECOWAS ( Economic Community of West African States) sealing member states’ borders with Mali after Keita and Cisse’s arrest, and suspended all financial transactions between Mali and its 14 other members and is, for now, removing Mali from its decision-making bodies.   ECOWAS officials have called for sanctions on those it calls “putschists and their partners and collaborators.”A man wears a national flag as he celebrates with others in the streets in the capital Bamako, Mali, Aug. 18, 2020.An  African Union Commission spokesman says Chairperson Moussa Faki Mahamat strongly condemns the arrests of Keita and Cisse and strongly rejects any attempted unconstitutional change of government in Mali.        United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is calling for the immediate restoration of constitutional order and the rule of law in Mali. Council members France and Niger have called for a closed-door meeting of the Security Council Wednesday.  Another reporter in Mali told VOA that soldiers in Kati “went on the rampage, got to the arsenals, got the guns, started shooting in the air, went out and cut off access to the camp.”     Kati is the same camp where the 2012 coup that overthrew President Amadou Toumani Toure began.      No casualties have been reported from Tuesday’s uprising and as of late Tuesday, soldiers were reported to be moving freely through Bamako.     Opposition supporters in Mali have held a number of large protests since June, demanding  Keita’s resignation. Clashes between security forces and protesters in July killed at least 11 people.    
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Police on Mauritius have arrested the captain of the Japanese carrier that ran aground off the coast last month, spilling 1,000 metric tonnes of oil and causing possible irreparable damage to coral reefs.Sunil Kumar Nandeshwar, the Indian captain of the MV Wakashio, was charged Tuesday with “endangering safe navigation.” He faces a bail hearing next week.The ship’s first officer was also arrested, and investigators say they are interviewing all crew members.The investigation will center on why the Wakashio went off course. It was supposed to stay at least 16 kilometers from the shore but was about two kilometers away when it ran aground on a coral reef.“The route set five days before the crash was wrong and the boat navigation system should have signaled that to the crew, and it seems the crew ignored it. The boat did also fail to send out an SOS (when it ran aground) and did not respond to attempts by the coast guard to get in touch,” a maritime official told Reuters.The Wakashio became disabled July 25 and started leaking oil almost two weeks later. Mauritius Prime Minister Pravind Jugnauth says bad weather is the reason crews didn’t start pumping oil from the ship almost immediately.About 1,000 metric tonnes leaked into the Indian Ocean surrounding Mauritius and another 3,000 was pumped out before the ship broke in two.The oil spilled into the precious waters of the Mahebourg Lagoon, and environmentalists fear the endangered reefs along the coast may be damaged forever.Half of the ship will be towed out to sea and allowed to sink while the other half will be towed away for scrap – a process officials say is likely to take months.Mauritius has declared an environmental emergency. Experts from Japan, the United Nations and France are working to clean up the oil. Mauritius is a former French colony.The spill is also likely to damage the island’s tourism industry, which is already under strain because of the coronavirus pandemic.
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