Tropical Storm Marco is swirling over the Gulf of Mexico heading for a possible hit on the Louisiana coast as a hurricane, while Tropical Storm Laura knocked utilities out as it battered Hispaniola early Sunday, following a track forecast to take it to the same part of the U.S. coast, also as a hurricane.It would be the first time two hurricanes appear in the Gulf of Mexico simultaneously, according to records dating to at least 1900, said Colorado State University hurricane researcher Phil Klotzbach.A hurricane watch was issued for the New Orleans metro area, which Hurricane Katrina pummeled in August 2005.The projected tracks from the U.S. National Hurricane Center late Saturday pointed to both storms being together in the Gulf on Monday, with Marco hitting Louisiana’s coast around midday and Laura making landfall in the same general area Wednesday. But there was still much uncertainty surrounding the forecasts for the two storms.”It’s entirely possible that the volatile shifts seen in the models could continue,” the hurricane center said.Laura was centered about 95 miles (150 kilometers) east of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Sunday morning, with maximum sustained winds of 45 mph (75kph). It was moving west-northwest at 18 mph (30 kph).Crews armed with megaphones in the Dominican capital of Santo Domingo had urged dozens of residents in flood-prone areas to evacuate before Laura’s heavy rains hit. The storm left more than 100,000 people without water in the Dominican Republic on Saturday night, while earlier it snapped trees and knocked out power to more than 200,000 customers in neighboring Puerto Rico. It was also whipping at Haiti, which shares Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic, and forecast to move over Cuba on Sunday night or Monday.Officials in the Florida Keys, which Laura might pass over on its route into the Gulf, declared a local state of emergency and issued a mandatory evacuation order for anyone living on boats, in mobile homes and in campers. Tourists staying in hotels were warned to be aware of hazardous weather conditions and consider changing their plans starting Sunday.Marco, meanwhile, was centered about 395 miles (635 kilometers) south-southeast of the mouth of the Mississippi River and was moving to the north-northwest at 13 mph (20 kph). It had maximum sustained winds of 70 mph (110 kph) and could become a hurricane sometime Sunday.New warnings were added Sunday morning — including a storm surge warning from Morgan City, Louisiana to Ocean Springs, Mississippi, and a hurricane warning from Morgan City to the mouth of the Pearl River. A tropical storm warning included Lake Pontchartrain in Louisiana, and metropolitan New Orleans.Storm surge up to 6 feet (2 meters) was forecast for parts of coastal Louisiana and Mississippi.Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards, who declared a state of emergency Friday, asked President Donald Trump for a federal emergency declaration. “The cumulative impact of these storms will likely have much of Louisiana facing tropical storm/hurricane force impacts for a much longer period of time than it would with any one hurricane,” he wrote.People in Louisiana headed to stores to stock up on food, water and other supplies. Raymond Monday of Gretna, though, had only a generator on his cart at Sam’s Club. “We’ve got a freezer full of food” at home, along with large containers of water, he said.Both storms were expected to bring 3 to 6 inches (8 to 15 centimeters) of rain to areas they were passing over or near, threatening flooding.The hurricane center said the storms were not expected to interact as the region faces an unusually active hurricane season.”We are in unprecedented times,” Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves said at a news conference Saturday as he declared a state of emergency. “We are dealing with not only two potential storms in the next few hours, we are also dealing with COVID-19.”
 
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Analysis from the black boxes of a downed Ukrainian passenger plane shows it was hit by two missiles 25 seconds apart and that passengers were still alive for some time after the impact of the first blast, Iran said on Sunday.The announcement by the head of Iran’s Civil Aviation Organization marks the first official report on the contents of the cockpit voice and data recordings, which were sent to France for reading in July.Tehran has said it accidentally shot down the Ukraine airliner in January, at a time of extreme tensions with the United States. All 176 people aboard the plane were killed.”Nineteen seconds after the first missile hit the plane, the voices of pilots inside the cockpit, indicated that the passengers were alive … 25 seconds later the second missile hit the plane,” Touraj Dehghani-Zanganeh was cited as saying by state television.Iran has been in talks with Ukraine, Canada and other nations that had citizens aboard the downed plane, and who have demanded a thorough investigation into the incident.”The data analysis from the black boxes should not be politicized,” Zanganeh said.Iran’s Revolutionary Guards shot down the Ukraine International Airlines flight with a ground-to-air missile on January 8, just after the plane took off from Tehran, in what Tehran later acknowledged as a “disastrous mistake” by forces on high alert during a confrontation with the United States.Iranian and Ukrainian officials have held talks on the compensation to families of the victims. Another round of talks is set for October. 
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United States-led international coalition troops withdrew from Iraq’s Taji military base on Sunday and handed it over to Iraqi security forces, Reuters witnesses and the coalition said.The base, 20 kilometers north of Baghdad, had been the site of frequent rocket attacks by Iran-backed militias targeting U.S.-led troops in recent months.”The movement of coalition military personnel is part of a long-range plan coordinated with the government of Iraq,” the coalition said in a statement, adding that Camp Taji has historically held up to 2,000 coalition members, most of whom have departed this summer.Remaining coalition troops will depart in the coming days after finalizing the handing over of equipment to Iraqi security forces, it added.This was the eighth transfer of a coalition portion of an Iraqi base back to Iraqi forces, it said.The withdrawal came days after U.S. President Donald Trump redoubled his promise to withdraw the few U.S. troops still in the country. The United States has had about 5,000 troops stationed in the country and coalition allies a further 2,500.Iraq’s parliament had voted this year for the departure of foreign troops from Iraq and U.S. and other coalition troops have been leaving as part of a drawdown.The vote came after a U.S. air strike on Baghdad airport killed Iranian general Qassem Soleimani and Iraqi militia leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis. 
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U.S. first lady Melania Trump hosted the official reopening of the White House Rose Garden on Saturday. President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence attended the event.“The changes you see tonight are the result of a thoughtful and collaborative process carefully crafted with the help of scholars and experts in architecture, horticulture, design, and historic preservation,” said the first lady, who is scheduled Tuesday to deliver her Republican National Convention speech from the garden.“The Rose Garden layout we have all come to know and treasure was designed during the [former U.S. President John F.] Kennedy administration by Bunny Mellon,” she said. “For 60 years, this space has served as the backdrop for many important events. The garden has also served as a peaceful outdoor escape for many administrations and their guests.”The late Mellon was a famed American horticulturalist and philanthropist.The revamping of the garden includes the planting of more pastel flowers and a limestone walking path. Other changes make the grounds more accessible to people with disabilities.The project was paid for by private donations, but the White House has not revealed the costs.  
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In New York City, locals are changing their daily routines to make them fit into the new reality. VOA’s Nina Vishneva went to Wall Street and popped by a fashion designer’s studio to find out how lifestyles and habits have changed since March. Anna Rice narrates her story. 
Camera: Vladimir Badikov, Natalia Latukhina, Michael Eckels  
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A leopard has chosen a farmer’s hut to give birth to four cubs in rural village of India’s western Nashik district, forest officials said, Tuesday, August 18.  Handout footage provided, Wednesday, August 19, by the Maharashtra Forest Department showed the four cubs meowing and pawing about in the small hut next to their mother. Forest officers told local media that the villagers have raised concerns about the hut’s new guests and have asked the forest department to remove them. One officer said the cubs cannot be removed because they are only newborns. Forest officials did not give an exact date for when the cubs were actually born, but they remain “safe.” (Reuters)  
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Last May, Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani threatened that there would be a proportionate response to any U.S. attempt to block shipments of Iranian oil to Venezuela.“We will act in reciprocation,” FILE – The Iranian tanker Fortune is anchored at the El Palito refinery near Puerto Cabello, Venezuela, May 25, 2020. U.S. officials said Aug. 13, 2020, that the Trump administration had seized the cargo of four tankers taking fuel to Venezuela.Snapback is a provision in the multiparty Iran nuclear deal that any “participant state” can trigger to reimpose the United Nations’ sanctions on Iran. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo formally notified the U.N. Thursday that the U.S. was initiating the snapback of sanctions. Europeans say Washington no longer has the right to do that since it withdrew from the deal in 2017.Washington said it is resorting to snapback because members of the U.N. Security Council have refused to extend an arms embargo on Iran beyond its October 15 deadline.Unlikely bedfellowsThe recently strengthened relationship between Iran and Venezuela, experts say, is an example of how sanctions can make for unlikely bedfellows. Iran is a right-wing Islamic Republic, while Venezuela is a left-wing communist state.“The two sanctioned states have moved forward to bolster the ties,” said Yousof Azizi, a research assistant at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, adding that while oil-rich Venezuela needs gasoline because of its lack of refineries, Iran needs Venezuelan gold to shore up its weakened currency.Venezuela reportedly has paid in gold for fuel from Iran.Benjamin Friedman, a policy director at the Defense Priorities organization in Washington, has a more cynical view of Washington’s sanctions toward Caracas.“Neither the recent history of U.S. foreign policy nor Venezuela in particular give any ground to believe that the sort of economic pressure the U.S. is inflicting on Venezuela will encourage regime change,” he told VOA by email.“The resulting deprivation, in fact, seems to create more support for sanctioned governments, by making people more dependent on them, and by creating a nationalistic backlash against the sanctioning state that heightens the popularity of hardline governments,” he added.The U.S defends its maximum-pressure campaign against Iran and accuses the country of engaging in destabilizing activities in the region by propping up proxies in various countries.
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Iraqi state TV reported that government security forces blocked main arteries Saturday in the southern port city of Basra after protesters torched the local parliament building and a number of Shiite militia headquarters in response to the killings of protest leaders.Protesters with bulldozers in the southern city of Nasiriyah also attacked Shiite party offices after an explosion wounded 11 protesters overnight in the city’s central Haboubi Square, Iraqi state TV said.State TV said the local governor of Thi Qar province ordered police to investigate who was behind the explosion. Media reports said a bomb hidden in a motorbike was detonated near a crowd of protesters.In Basra, one protester accused pro-Iranian militias of killing demonstrators as the crowd around him torched the parliament building. Protesters were demanding that police investigate the killing this past week of protest leaders Riham Yaqoob and Tahseen Osamah.A Shiite member of parliament with ties to pro-Iranian parties, Kazem Siyadi, justified the killings on Iraqi TV: He called the killing of Yaqoob a “political elimination,” claiming that she was a “traitor” for going to a meeting at which U.S. diplomats were present.Paul Sullivan, a professor at the U.S. National Defense University in Washington, told VOA that “many Iraqis are fed up with Iran’s influence in their country, including Iraqi Shiites.”
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Medical staff were seen wheeling a life support machine back to the ambulance that brought gravely ill Russian opposition leader and Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny to a German hospital, Saturday, August 22. ––––––––– READ MORE: A plane carrying Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, who is in a coma after a suspected poisoning, touched down Saturday morning in Berlin, where he will receive medical attention at Charité Clinic, the city’s main hospital. Russian doctors announced earlier they had acquiesced to demands to allow Navalny medical treatment in Germany, ending a standoff over who would administer care to the politician following what Navalny’s family says was a deliberate attempt to poison him in Siberia earlier this week. “The patient’s condition is stable,” Dr. Anatoly Kalinichenko of Hospital No. 1 in the city of Omsk, where Navalny has been in a medically induced coma and ventilator, said Friday. “As we are in possession of a request from relatives to permit him to be transported, we have now taken the decision that we do not object to his transfer to another in-patient facility,” he added. Kalinichenko also said that “having received the request from relatives for transportation,” Navalny’s family would take “full responsibility.” ––––––––– LINK: https://www.voanews.com/europe/comatose-russian-opposition-leader-germany-treatment 
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West African envoys led by former Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan arrived Saturday in Mali’s capital city of Bamako to meet with the military junta that forced President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita’s resignation and the government’s disbanding earlier this week.
 
Members of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) delegation also will meet with the ousted president, Keita, along with government and military officials detained by the rebel soldiers, an ECOWAS source told AFP.
 
The envoys’ visit comes one day after thousands crowded into Mali’s capital in a raucous show of support for the military junta.Demonstrators in Bamako – some raising banners touting the National Committee for the Salvation of the People, the junta’s name for itself – also denounced the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) for condemning the coup and for closing Mali’s borders to neighbors in the regional bloc’s 14 other member nations.The military junta’s leaders said Friday they have reopened air and land borders.Malians supporting the recent overthrow of President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita gather to celebrate in the capital Bamako, Mali, Aug. 21, 2020.Keita and at least a dozen other officials were seized Tuesday by military personnel and taken to an army officers’ training facility in the town of Kati, about 15 kilometers from the capital. Keita, who announced his resignation late that evening on national television, has been transferred back to the capital, where he has been placed under house arrest. The 75-year-old deposed leader has been allowed to meet with his personal physician, his relatives and with officials of the U.N. mission in Mali.Malian President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita appears on state television to announce his resignation Aug. 18, 2020.The United Nations, the African Union, the European Union and many others in the international community have condemned Keita’s overthrow.Junta leaders met Friday in Kati with members of the former majority Rally for Mali party, who also denounced the coup but said they were ready to discuss next steps. Junta leaders also have met with civil society groups.Colonel Assimi Goita has emerged as the junta’s leader. On Friday, the Pentagon acknowledged that Goita previously has participated in training with U.S. Africa Command and its special forces as part of multinational efforts to counter violent extremism in the region.Colonel Assimi Goita speaks to the press at the Malian Ministry of Defense in Bamako, Mali, Aug. 19, 2020.But the Pentagon also condemned the mutiny, which it said runs counter to the training it has provided.“Colonel Goita and many other Malians have participated in Colonel-Major Ismael Wague, center, spokesman for the soldiers identifying themselves as National Committee for the Salvation of the People, speaks during a press conference at Camp Soudiata in Kati, Mali, Aug. 19, 2020.“This gives an assurance that they’re not here to remain in power,” said Yeah Samake, a leader of the Malian opposition coalition known as the Movement of June 5-Reassembly of Patriotic Forces (M5-RFP).Samake said he was encouraged by their plan for a transition team in which the military would hold six of 24 seats and then would be forming a unity government.“They are working with the people,” Samake said.The opposition leader said he considers the coup “a turning point from corruption, from ill governance, to a more efficient leadership,” but he cautioned the junta leaders to stay true to their pledge to cede control.“The people of Mali are going to remain mobilized and vigilant, making sure that the power belongs to the people – and that power is for the well-being and the welfare of the people of Mali.”Opposition supporters attend a rally to celebrate the ousting of President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, at Independence Square in Bamako, Mali, Aug. 21, 2020.A more pessimistic view comes from John Campbell, who served twice as U.S. ambassador to Nigeria and now is a senior fellow for African policy studies with the Council on Foreign Relations.“A way to think about the coup is that it essentially occurred in the political class. Mali has been run for a long time by a political class and the military, and the two interpenetrate,” Campbell told VOA. “So, it was not a coup against those that have been running the country, but rather more or less among those that have been running the country.”Despite the celebratory nature of Friday’s demonstration in Bamako, the coup likely “won’t mean very much in terms of addressing the fundamental problems that Mali faces,” Campbell said, elaborating on a recent blog post.Mali confronts sizeable challenges, with half of its 19 million people living in poverty. It also faces deep ethnic divisions and threats from Islamist jihadists in the country’s north.
 VOA’s Pentagon correspondent Carla Babb contributed to this report, which originated with the Bambara Service in VOA French to Africa. Other contributors are English to Africa’s Peter Clottey and Adam Phillips, and the Somali Service’s Harun Maruf.
 
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Facebook’s India chief said Friday the social media giant denounces hate and bigotry in the wake of a controversy sparked by a media report alleging it failed to remove hate-speech posted by members linked to the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party over fears of damaging its business in the country.   
 
“We’ve made progress on tackling hate speech on our platform, but we need to do more,” Facebook India’s managing director Ajit Mohan said in an online post that denied any bias.  
 
Facebook executives have been ordered to appear before a parliamentary panel to answer questions on how the company regulates content in the country.  
 
The company is under scrutiny after an Aug. 14 Wall Street Journal report quoted unnamed former and current Facebook executives saying a senior public policy executive had “opposed applying hate-speech rules” to a BJP legislator and at least three other Hindu nationalist individuals and groups linked with the BJP although they had been flagged by staff.  
 
The Journal report referred specifically to T. Raja Singh, a BJP legislator in the southern Telangana state, who in Facebook posts and public appearances had said that mainly Muslim Rohingya refugees from Myanmar should be shot, called Muslims traitors, and threatened to raze mosques.
The newspaper reported that staff members policing the platform flagged the posts in March this year as violating the company’s hate speech rules but were told punishing violations by politicians from India’s ruling party would damage the company’s business prospects in the country.  
 
India is Facebook’s biggest market by number of users – it has over 300 million users, more than in any other country.  FILE – Indian commuters pass a poster of a Facebook ad campaign, in Bangalore, India, March 22, 2018.”Over the last few days, we have been accused of bias in the way we enforce our policies. We take allegations of bias incredibly seriously, and want to make it clear that we denounce hate and bigotry in any form,” Mohan, wrote in his online post.
 
“The decisions around content escalations are not made unilaterally by just one person,” the post said. “The process comes with robust checks and balances,” it said.  
 
He said the platform will remove content posted by public figures in India when it “violates our Community Standards.”
 
Platforms such as Facebook and WhatsApp have become primary campaigning tools for the BJP and other political parties – with the spread of smartphones in the country the reach of social media has expanded exponentially. In particular, the spectacular rise of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP in India is partly credited to sophisticated digital campaigns by the party.
 
The Journal report has triggered a political storm, with the opposition Congress Party accusing the social media company of favoring the BJP and the party denying allegations of preferential treatment.
 
In the wake of the newspaper report, Congress Party leader Rahul Gandhi tweeted that “BJP & RSS control Facebook & Whatsapp in India. They spread fake news and hatred through it and use it to influence the electorate.” “RSS” refers to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a Hindu nationalist organization often called the BJP’s ideological parent.  
 
In a reference to Gandhi’s tweet, Information Technology Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, told a press conference that “losers who cannot influence people even in their own party keep cribbing that the entire world is controlled by BJP.”
 
After the Journal report turned the spotlight on how the social media giant regulates political content in India, a parliamentary panel on information technology has summoned Facebook executives on Sept. 2 to question them about prevention of misuse of social and online news media platforms. Facebook has not commented on the parliamentary summons.  
 
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The Associated Press reported Friday that half the COVID-19 deaths in the United States were people of color – Blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans and Asian Americans.An analysis by The Associated Press and The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the criminal justice system, found that while people of color make up just under 40% of the U.S. population, they accounted for approximately 52% of all the “excess deaths” above normal through July. The report defined excess deaths as the number of people above the typical fatality number who died in the United States during the first seven months of 2020, based on figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.The U.S. has more coronavirus cases and deaths than any other country, with 5.6 million infections and more than 175,000 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University.  Brazil has 3.5 million cases and India is approaching the 3 million mark.There are nearly 23 million global COVID-19 cases and almost 800,000 deaths, Johns Hopkins reported Saturday.The World Health Organization’s emergencies chief Mike Ryan said Friday the scale of the pandemic in Mexico is “under-recognized” and that testing there is limited.He told a Geneva briefing that Mexico was testing about 3 people per 100,000, compared with about 150 tests per 100,000 people in the United States.Mexico had nearly 550,000 cases of the virus early Saturday and more than 59,000 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins.South Korea is considering a nationwide shutdown after nine days of triple-digit growth in newly confirmed COVID-19 cases. On Saturday, 322 new cases were recorded.  The greater Seoul region is already on lockdown.Several European countries have been reporting new surges of COVID-19 cases.“There should be no confusion: things are not going well,” Fernando Simón, Spain’s health emergency chief, said this week. “If we continue to allow transmission to rise, even if most cases are mild, we will end up with many in hospital, many in intensive care and many deaths.” The number of COVID-19 cases admitted to hospitals last week in Spain was double the admission numbers from the previous week.Berlin experienced a COVID-19 outbreak after its schools opened. Hundreds of students and school personnel are now in quarantine.French schoolchildren are set to return to school even after the country recorded 4,700 new cases Thursday and more than 4,500 Friday.In Germany, officials warned Friday against travel to the Belgian capital of Brussels because of its high rate of coronavirus infections.Britain said Friday it plans to start regular, populationwide testing for COVID-19 by the end of the year to help suppress the spread of the virus. The country has the highest death toll in Europe, with more than 41,000 fatalities.The head of the World Health Organization says he hopes the coronavirus pandemic will end in under two years – less time than it took to stop the 1918 Spanish flu.Speaking Friday at his regular briefing in Geneva, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the key to stopping the virus is for countries around the world to “pool our efforts.” 
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