Israel starts a three-week national lockdown Friday after the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 reached a new high of almost 5,000 per day. Several hospitals report that they have no room for new coronavirus cases. While the virus infection is widespread around the country, the ultra-Orthodox Jewish and Arab Israeli communities are the hardest hit. Linda Gradstein reports for VOA from Jerusalem.
Camera: Ricki Rosen    Produced by: Mary Cieslak
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Michigan is one of several battleground states that could determine the outcome of the 2020 U.S. presidential election.  President Donald Trump narrowly won the state in 2016, but current polls show his opponent, Democrat and former Vice President Joe Biden, in the lead.  As VOA’s Kane Farabaugh reports, concerns about voter turnout and the pandemic weigh on the campaigns of both candidates.   
Camera: Kane Farabaugh  Produced by: Kane Farabaugh
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Social media companies are taking down videos and images that could be vital in prosecuting serious crimes, according to a new report from Human Rights Watch. Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are increasingly using artificial intelligence algorithms to remove material deemed offensive or illegal. Human Rights Watch says vital evidence is being missed or destroyed. Henry Ridgwell reports.
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Researchers on a quest to find life in the universe got promising news this week.  Space agencies are joining forces to defend the planet from an aggressive asteroid, and a look at one of the best places on Earth to view the stars.  VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us “The Week in Space.”Producer: Arash Arabasadi.
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The British auction house Christie’s announced this week that it would sell the largest and most complete known skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex in early October.The auction house said the dinosaur skeleton is nearly 12 meters long and just under 5 meters tall. It has been known as Stan, named after amateur paleontologist Stan Sacrison, who discovered it in the upper Midwestern U.S. state of South Dakota in 1987.Christie’s science and natural history specialist James Hyslop said scientists that looked at the bones initially misidentified them as belonging to a triceratops, a more common dinosaur discovery.It was not until Sacrison took the remains to the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research in 1992 that anyone realized what he had found.A detail of the teeth of Stan, one of the largest and most complete Tyrannosaurus rex fossils discovered, is pictured Sept. 15, 2020, at Christie’s in New York.Hyslop said the paleontologists from the institute carefully excavated and reassembled the skeleton, ultimately finding 188 of the estimated 300 total bones in a T. rex, more than for any previously found specimen.Hyslop said Stan eventually went on tour to Japan between 1995 and 1996, and he later went on permanent display in Hill City, South Dakota.Complete T. rex skeletons are very rare, and the last time one was put up for auction was in 1997, when the Field Museum in Chicago bought the now-famous Sue for $8.36 million. Hyslop said Christie’s hopes to beat that price when Stan goes up for auction October 6.Christie’s will display the dinosaur until mid-October at its Manhattan auction house, making Stan visible to the public through Christie’s windows.
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While former Democratic Vice President Joe Biden has held a steady six or seven-point lead over President Donald Trump in the national public opinion polls, Trump has held one clear advantage over Biden — on the question of who voters believe is best suited to handle a troubled economy.  As recently as mid-August, a CNN poll indicated that 53% of voters believed Trump, the one-time New York real estate magnate, was the better candidate for economic issues, with 45% in the survey preferring Biden. But even that advantage has begun to dissipate. Just two weeks later, the same poll found Trump with a razor-thin 49% to 48% advantage. Other polling has shown a similar narrowing. Early September polling from CBS News and Quinnipiac showed a virtual tie in voters’ beliefs about who would better handle the economy. The reasons for the change are not completely clear, analysts say, but some of the movement is likely related to Biden taking a much more aggressive posture in challenging the president’s handling of the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic. While Trump has boasted that the 8.4 percent August unemployment rate was “much better than expected” and was down from the jaw-dropping 14.7 percent in April and 10.2  percent in July,  the U.S. nonetheless is suffering historic economic hardship with roughly 14 million people out of work. FILE – Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden speaks at a campaign event on manufacturing and buying American-made products at UAW Region 1 headquarters in Warren, Michigan, Sept. 9, 2020.”We all know it didn’t have to be this bad,” Biden said in a fiery speech last week charging Trump with neglecting those most affected by the economic slowdown. “It didn’t have to be this bad if the president just did his job.” Trump has relied on his go-to strategy of hyperbolic warnings of disaster if anybody but him is in the White House. In rally speeches and all-caps tweets, Trump regularly ties Biden to the most radical elements of the political left, claiming that a Biden presidency would usher in “socialism” and would lead to economic disaster.  Polling evidence can vary. The Economist/YouGov poll, conducted weekly, asks voters whether they believe the economy would get better or worse under Trump or Biden. In that poll, Trump’s advantage had appeared to be shrinking, but polling out this week found that Trump has actually widened the gap. Of nearly 1,500 respondents, 39% said they believe the economy would improve under a second Trump term, while 38% believe it would get worse. The same poll found that 34% of respondents believe the economy would improve under Biden compared to 41% who said it would get worse. FILE – President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally in Winston-Salem, N.C., Sept. 8, 2020.From a big-picture perspective, the difference between the two candidates’ economic policies breaks down along fairly predictable party lines. Trump offers Republican-friendly promises of more tax cuts and reduced regulations, while Biden offers a more traditional Democratic line, with higher taxes on the wealthy and businesses and increased government spending on infrastructure and social welfare. Both men are proposing measures to entice businesses to hire more workers in the U.S. rather than offshoring jobs to lower-wage countries. Assessing the two candidates’ economic visions at a more granular level is difficult, in part because of the difference in detail that the two campaigns have offered. The Biden campaign has put out dozens of detailed position papers on economic policy issues, replete with specific proposals and figures. The Trump campaign, by contrast, has issued a set of bullet points with general themes and few specifics. Biden tax policyNowhere is this more apparent than in the area of tax policy — for both candidates arguably the most significant part of their economic agenda. The Biden campaign has issued more than 50 specific proposals on taxes alone, and the former vice president’s priorities are clear. He would raise the corporate tax rate to 28% from 21% and the top marginal income tax on individuals would go from 37% currently to 39.6%. Many of the tax increases the Biden campaign is proposing are tied to specific spending priorities, meant to fund things like expanded access to child care and major infrastructure projects. An analysis of Biden’s plans by the Tax Foundation, a leading independent tax policy nonprofit, found that over the coming decade, Biden’s plans would raise federal tax receipts by approximately $4 trillion, or about 1.5% of Gross Domestic Product. What Biden proposes would amount to a significant tax increase, but it is not, as Trump has repeatedly claimed, the largest in history. The rates Biden is proposing are also well within historical norms for the United States. And Biden says his tax hikes would target those making more than $400,000 a year. “Joe Biden is looking to primarily raise taxes on higher earners,” said Garrett Watson, a senior policy analyst at the Tax Foundation. “And that’s through higher tax rates on ordinary income, on income coming from investments, and business income.”  Trump tax policyTrump signed a major Republican tax cut and jobs bill in 2017 and more recently proposed additional tax cuts as part of his second term agenda. Experts say the new plan is light on specifics, although in general it would expand existing tax breaks, create credits for specific industries, and unspecified tax cuts for individuals.  “We have far less information on the details and the specifics of the Trump tax plan,” Watson said. The lack of detail coming from the Trump campaign is a real stumbling block for those searching for a clear picture of what an economic future under a second Trump term would look like. “For us as analysts, that provides a challenge,” said Janet Holtzblatt, a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center in Washington. While her organization has plans to release a comprehensive analysis of the Biden plan next month, she said developing one for Trump is proving difficult.  But the problem isn’t just for policy analysts, she pointed out. “It’s a challenge for voters who may be trying to compare the two plans.”
 
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Somali money transfer companies moved more than $3.7 million in cash between suspected weapons traffickers in recent years, including to a Yemeni under U.S. sanctions for alleged militant links, according to a report seen by Reuters.The findings by a Geneva-based research group, the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, could further complicate attempts by Somali transfer companies to retain access to international banking services.Though they provide a lifeline to millions in the anarchic Horn of Africa nation, few banks will do business with them because of the risk of falling foul of international transparency and anti-money laundering regulations.Asked about the report, the Central Bank of Somalia, which regulates money transfer firms, said it was unaware of the transfers but would investigate and was in general making progress in countering terrorism financing.Contacted by Reuters, the four companies each said they did their best to comply with global “know your customer” norms despite Somalia having no national identity card. The firms also said they maintained databases of internationally-sanctioned individuals.The Global Initiative analyzed nearly six years of transaction records from the city of Bossasso, matching them with mobile phone records provided by security sources and database searches.The report identified 176 transactions from the last six years that it said appeared to be linked to suspected weapons dealers in Somalia and Yemen. Nearly two-thirds were over the $10,000 threshold that should trigger an automatic report to regulatory authorities.They include two transfers totaling nearly $40,000 to numbers linked to Sayf Abdulrab Salem al-Hayashi after the U.S. Treasury sanctioned him in 2017 for allegedly providing weapons and financial support to al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and Islamic State in Yemen, the report said.Al Hayashi could not be reached for comment.Somalia-based Amal Express and Iftin Express handled the transactions, which used different combinations of his name and nickname, the report said.Amal Express said a transfer slip shown in the report and allegedly linked to al Hayashi was a forgery. Iftin Express said the transaction slip was a fake and added that it reported all transactions over $10,000 to Somali authorities.Multiple identities  The report did not find any instances where the other two companies, Dahabshiil and Taaj, made transfers to any sanctioned individuals. But it noted instances where individuals were able to make transfers with them using multiple names and numbers, a violation of Somali law.One man used 24 names between the four companies, the report said.All four companies said they did not allow customers to use multiple identities or phone numbers. Dahabshiil also said it has stopped doing transfers between Somalia and Yemen.The companies did not say whether the six men named in the report are in their databases.Apart from al Hayashi – the only one under U.S. sanctions – three others whose names appear in the suspect transactions were identified as suspected arms dealers in public reports by the United Nations panel of experts on Somalia.Two were flagged – one as a proxy for al Hayashi, and one as an arms trafficker – in a confidential annex to a 2018 report by the same panel.Few Somalis have bank accounts. Money transfer companies – often known as hawalas – are vital to economic activity and delivering humanitarian aid.Cutting companies off from banking is not the answer, said the report’s author, Jay Bahadur, former head of the U.N. panel of experts. “Excluding companies from international banking services will punish families that rely on them and drive financial flows underground,” he said.Identity card But he said companies must ensure their agents follow anti-money laundering laws and Somali authorities must improve enforcement.”Financial regulatory bodies in Somalia are understaffed, under-resourced, and aren’t trusted by domestic financial institutions,” he told Reuters. “They receive limited reporting data and aren’t able to take much action with what they do receive.”Abdirahman M. Abdullahi, governor of Somalia’s central bank, said cooperation was improving. Somalia is working with the World Bank on developing a national identity card, he told Reuters.He said arrests have been made for breaking anti-money laundering and terrorism financing law, citing the case of a trader convicted in August of running an unregistered bank.The Financial Reporting Center, a Somali government watchdog, did not respond to requests for comment.
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The U.S. Labor Department reported Thursday that 860,000 workers filed for unemployment compensation last week, a slight improvement from the week before but an indication that the coronavirus pandemic continues to wreak havoc on the American economy.   
 
Millions of workers remain unemployed in the United States, with the unemployment rate at 8.6% in early September, and economists saying the jobless figure could remain elevated for months. Only about half of the 22 million U.S. jobs lost in the pandemic have been recovered, with the world’s biggest economy adding 1.4 million jobs in August.  
 
Weekly initial claims for jobless benefits seemed to have stabilized somewhat below 900,000 in recent weeks. Last week’s 860,000 figure was down 33,000 from the week before.  
 
The recent weekly claims figures are well below the 6.9 million record number of claims filed in late March as the coronavirus swept into the United States but remain above the highest level before this year in records going back to the 1960s. 
 A ‘NOW HIRING’ is shown on the door of Padeli’s Street Greek restaurant, Sept. 10, 2020, in Salt Lake City.U.S. employers have called back millions of workers who were laid off during mandatory business shutdowns earlier this year, yet some hard-hit businesses have been slow to ramp up their operations again or have closed permanently, leaving workers idled or searching for new employment.  
 
In politically fractious Washington seven weeks from November’s presidential and congressional elections, President Donald Trump and Republican and Democratic lawmakers have been unable to reach an agreement on extending federal unemployment benefits and how much should be paid.  FILE – Motorists take part in a caravan protest asking for the extension of the $600 in unemployment benefits to people out of work because of the coronavirus in New Orleans, La., July 22, 2020.Until the end of July, the national government sent an extra $600 a week to unemployed workers on top of less generous state jobless benefits. The Republican-controlled Senate a week ago tried to win approval of $300-a-week payments through the end of the year, but Democrats blocked the proposal as too small and have continued to call for resumption of the $600 weekly payments.  
 
The rejected Republican coronavirus relief package would have cost between $500 billion and $700 billion, on top of the $3 trillion approved months ago at the height of the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S. 
 
On Wednesday, Trump went against his Republican colleagues in Congress and urged them approve more spending in another coronavirus aid deal. He said on Twitter, “Go for the much higher numbers, Republicans, it all comes back to the USA anyway (one way or another!).” Democrats are “heartless”. They don’t want to give STIMULUS PAYMENTS to people who desperately need the money, and whose fault it was NOT that the plague came in from China. Go for the much higher numbers, Republicans, it all comes back to the USA anyway (one way or another!).— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 16, 2020 
The top two congressional Democrats, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, praised Trump’s stance. 
 
“We look forward to hearing from the president’s negotiators that they will finally meet us halfway with a bill that is equal to the massive health and economic crises gripping our nation,” Pelosi and Schumer said.  FILE – House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of Calif., joined by Senate Minority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer of N.Y., speaks during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, Aug. 6, 2020.“By the end of the week, 200,000 Americans will have died from the coronavirus,” they said. “The lives and livelihoods of the American people depend on Republicans abandoning their obsession with doing as little as possible while the coronavirus rages through our nation.” 
 
Democrats have called for a $2.2 trillion relief package, but possibly could settle for less than that. Whatever figure, if any, is agreed on is likely to come in the next two weeks. Lawmakers want to leave Washington soon to return to their home states for a month of campaigning for re-election ahead of the November 3 presidential and congressional elections.  
 FILE – U.S. President Donald Trump shows signed executive orders for economic relief during a news conference amid the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), at his golf resort in Bedminster, New Jersey, Aug. 8, 2020.As the first round of unemployment payments expired in July, Trump signed an executive order calling for $400 a week in extra payments for a few weeks. But not all states delivered the reduced payments to jobless workers, and now that money is running out.  
 
The coronavirus pandemic has now killed nearly 197,000 people in the United States, according to Johns Hopkins University figures, and caused the economy to plummet.   
 
While the U.S. has been adding more jobs in recent months, the pace of the recovery seemed to slow as a second wave of coronavirus infections in the U.S. surged in June and rose still more by mid-July, forcing employers to close their businesses again.   
 
The 1.4 million jobs added in August includes the Census Bureau’s temporary hiring of about 240,000 workers to help conduct the once-a-decade count of the U.S. population.    
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Authorities in Sudan say 41 people have been arrested for possessing a large amount of explosive materials.Sudan Attorney General Tagelsir al-Hebr told reporters Wednesday the suspects had enough explosives to destroy the capital, Khartoum.A spokesperson for the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces said an August investigation into the activities of terrorist groups led to the arrests.Jamal Jumaa, said there is concern some Sudanese people will turn to carrying out bombings after the suspects were found with a stockpile of explosives that could cause destruction similar to the blast in Lebanon last month.The explosion of tons of ammonium nitrate at Beirut’s port killed at least 190 people and left a large section of the city in rubble.Jumaa also warned that the smuggling of explosive materials to other countries could derail the peace process in Sudan, where a transitional government has been in power since the ouster of longtime leader Omar al-Bashir in April of last year. 
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Asian markets sustained losses across the board Thursday after the U.S. Federal Reserve failed to offer a new pandemic economic stimulus plan.Japan’s benchmark Nikkei index finished 0.6% lower. Both the S&P/ASX index in Australia and South Korea’s KOSPI index closed down 1.2%. Shanghai’s Composite index lost 0.4%, while Taiwan’s TSEC index dropped 0.8%.In late afternoon trading, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index was 1.6% lower, while Mumbai’s Sensex was down 0.7%.Europe was also off to a rough start of its trading day, as London’s benchmark FTSE index and the DAX index in Frankfurt were 0.9% lower, while the CAC-40 in Paris is down 0.8%.In commodities trading, gold was trading at $1,949.90 an ounce, down 1%. Crude oil was trading at $39.86 per barrel, down 0.7%, and Brent crude oil was selling at $41.97 per barrel, down 0.5%.Wednesday’s announcement by Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell that interest rates would remain near zero until at least 2023, while offering no additional stimulus measure, shook U.S. indices, with the S&P 500 losing 0.4% and the tech-heavy Nasdaq dropping 1.3%. The Dow ticked up slightly by 0.1%.All three U.S. indices were trending negatively in futures trading.
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