Specialist labs in France and Sweden have confirmed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was poisoned with the Soviet-era nerve agent Novichok, the German government said Monday. A German military laboratory previously confirmed the substance in his samples.         German government spokesman Steffen Seibert said that the Hague-based Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons has also received samples and is taking steps to have those tested at its reference laboratories.  “Independently of the ongoing examinations by the OPCW, three laboratories have now confirmed independently of one another the proof of a nerve agent of the Novichok group as the cause of Mr. Navalny’s poisoning,” Seibert said in a statement.          He said Germany had asked France and Sweden for an “independent review” of the German findings using new samples from Navalny.         Navalny, the most visible opponent of Russian President Vladimir Putin, was flown to Germany two days after falling ill on Aug. 20 on a domestic flight in Russia. Berlin has demanded that Russia investigate the case.         Seibert on Monday renewed Germany’s demand that “Russia explain itself” on the matter. He added that “we are in close consultation with our European partners on further steps.”         The Kremlin has bristled at calls from Chancellor Angela Merkel and other world leaders for Russia to answer questions in the case, denying any official involvement and accusing the West of trying to smear Moscow.          Russian authorities have prodded Germany to share the evidence that led it to conclude “without doubt” that Navalny was poisoned with a military nerve agent from the Novichok group, the same class of Soviet-era agent that British authorities said was used on former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, England, in 2018. Berlin has rejected suggestions from Moscow that it is dragging its heels. Navalny was kept in an induced coma for more than a week as he was treated with an antidote, before hospital officials said a week ago that his condition had improved enough for him to be brought out of it.  It isn’t clear when Berlin’s Charite hospital will next issue an update on his condition. 
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Yoshihide Suga was elected as the new head of Japan’s ruling party on Monday, virtually guaranteeing him parliamentary election as the country’s next prime minister.         Suga received 377 votes in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party election to pick a successor to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who announced last month that he would resign due to health problems. The other two contenders received a combined 157 votes.  The expected victory in the party vote by Suga, currently the chief Cabinet secretary of Abe’s government, all but guarantees his election in a parliamentary vote Wednesday because of the majority held by the Liberal Democrats’ ruling coalition. Suga gained the support of party heavyweights and their wing members early in the campaign on expectations that he would continue Abe’s policies. That his victory appeared to be a done deal has raised criticism from inside and outside the party that the process is undemocratic and murky.          The closed-door politics also apparently led lawmakers to support Suga in hopes of getting favorable party and Cabinet posts in the new administration.  Suga has said his top priorities are fighting the coronavirus and turning around an economy battered by the pandemic. He repeatedly has noted achievements under the Abe-led government when asked about various policies.Former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida, left, Japan’s PM Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga and former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of Japan’s LDP election, Sep. 14, 2020.Despite his low-key image as Abe’s right-hand man, Suga is actually known for his iron-fist approach to getting jobs done as a policy coordinator and influencing bureaucrats by using the centralized power of the prime minister’s office.         Suga says that he is a reformist and that he has worked to achieve policies by breaking territorial barriers of bureaucracy. He has credited himself for those efforts in achieving a booming foreign tourism industry in Japan, lowering cellphone bills and bolstering agricultural exports.         Compared to his political skills at home, Suga has hardly traveled overseas, and his diplomatic skills are unknown, though he is largely expected to pursue Abe’s priorities.          In addition to the coronavirus and the economic fallout, Suga stands to inherit several other challenges, including China, which continues its assertive actions in the East China Sea. He also will have to decide what to do with the Tokyo Olympics, which were pushed back to next summer due to the coronavirus. And he will have to establish a good relationship with whoever wins the U.S. presidential race. 
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Tropical Storm Sally slowed down Sunday as it churned northward toward the U.S. Gulf Coast, increasing the risk of heavy rain and dangerous storm surge before an expected strike as a Category 2 hurricane in southern Louisiana. “I know for a lot of people this storm seemed to come out of nowhere,” said Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards. “We need everybody to pay attention to this storm. Let’s take this one seriously.” Forecasters from the National Hurricane Center in Miami said Sally is expected to become a hurricane Monday and reach shore by early Tuesday, bringing dangerous weather conditions, including risk of flooding, to a region stretching from Morgan City, Louisiana, to Ocean Springs, Mississippi.  Edwards urged people to prepare for the storm immediately. He also said there are still many from southwestern Louisiana who evacuated from Hurricane Laura into New Orleans — exactly the area that could be hit by Sally. “Based on all of the available information, we have every reason to believe this storm represents a significant threat,” he said, adding that the coronavirus adds a layer of complexity to storm preparations. There are still about 5,400 members of the state’s National Guard mobilized from Laura, and they will assist with Sally. In Mandeville, a city about 56 Kilometers north of New Orleans, resident Chris Yandle has purchased a week’s worth of groceries and moved all his patio furniture into his family’s house and shed in preparation for the storm. “I’m mostly trying to stay calm — especially with a family of four and a dog to worry about,” Yandle said. “I’ve lived through many hurricanes growing up in Louisiana, but I haven’t felt this anxious about a hurricane in my life.” Mississippi officials warned that the storm was expected to coincide with high tide, leading to significant storm surge. “It needs to be understood by all of our friends in the coastal region and in south Mississippi that if you live in low-lying areas, the time to get out is early tomorrow morning,” Gov. Tate Reeves said late Sunday. In Waveland, Mississippi, Joey Chauvin used rope to tie down a tall wooden post topped with a statue of a pelican serving as a marker at the driveway leading to his weekend camp. He said a matching pelican marker on the opposite side of the driveway was washed away in Tropical Storm Cristobal earlier this summer. That storm pushed more than 3 feet of water into the area.  “If this one hits the coast as a Cat 2, I’m thinking we’re gonna have at least 6 to 7 feet (1.8 to 2.1 meters)of water where we’re standing at,” Chauvin said. “So, yeah, we’re definitely not going to stay.” The system was moving west-northwest at 15 kph on Sunday evening. It was centered 265 kilometers south of Panama City, Florida, and 315 kilometers east-southeast of the mouth of the Mississippi River. On Sunday, Florida’s Gulf Coast was battered with windy, wet weather. Pensacola, on Florida’s Panhandle, was bracing for 25 to 38 centimeters of rain. Sally could produce rain totals up to 51 centimeters by the middle of the week, forecasters said. Its maximum sustained winds Sunday evening were 95 kph. “That system is forecast to bring not only damaging winds but a dangerous storm surge,” said Daniel Brown of the Hurricane Center. “Because it’s slowing down, it could produce a tremendous amount of rainfall over the coming days.” This isn’t the only storm in the Atlantic basin. Paulette gained hurricane status late Saturday and was expected to bring storm surge, coastal flooding and high winds to Bermuda, according to a U.S. National Hurricane Center advisory. On Sunday evening, it was about 195 kilometers southeast of Bermuda. Its maximum sustained winds were 137 kph. Once a tropical storm, Rene was forecast to become a remnant low Monday. Tropical Depression Twenty was expected to strengthen this week and become a tropical storm by Tuesday, forecasters said. “This week is essentially the peak of the hurricane season,” said Brown. “It is quite active across the tropics today.” 
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There are almost 29 million COVID-19 infections worldwide. That reflects a record one-day increase of 307,930 cases, the World Health Organization reported Sunday.  The previous one-day new-case record was 306,857 on September 6, according to the WHO. The one-day record for deaths was 12,430 on April 17. The WHO says India, the United States and Brazil, the three countries that lead the world in infections, also showed the biggest increases in cases. Deaths increased by more than 5,500 to a total of more than 917,000 worldwide. India reported 94,372 new cases, the United States reported 45,523 and Brazil reported 43,718 Sunday. New cases are down 44% in the U.S. from a peak of more than 77,000 new cases reported on July 16. The U.S. and India each reported more than 1,000 new deaths and Brazil reported 874 in the past 24 hours. The United States remains the country with the most COVID-19 infections, with more than 6.5 million.   India has eclipsed Brazil to take over the second spot with 4.7 million cases.  Infections in India’s largest state, Maharashtra, home to financial capital Mumbai, topped 1 million Saturday, stifling the country’s attempts to reinvigorate its economy.People pack the Ipanema beach amid the new coronavirus pandemic in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Sept.6, 2020.Brazil has 4.3 million cases. An article in The New England Journal of Medicine suggests that universal face mask wearing “might help reduce the severity of disease and ensure that a greater proportion of new infections are asymptomatic.” If that premise is correct, the article suggested, face mask wearing could become a form of inoculation “that would generate immunity and thereby slow the spread of the virus” during the global wait for the development of a vaccine.   The daily number of new coronavirus cases reached an all-time high of 1,007 Saturday in the United Arab Emirates, surpassing levels during a May peak. Authorities warned residents last week to comply with preventive measures when daily infections jumped fivefold over a month ago. On the Greek Islands of Lesbos Saturday, asylum seekers peacefully protested the construction of a replacement camp after successive fires this week destroyed the overcrowded Maria camp, forcing them sleep in the open for a fourth consecutive night.  The protesters were demanding to leave the island after the camp, built to accommodate 2,750 people, became so overcrowded that the fires left more than 12,000 in need of emergency shelter. Officials said the fires were deliberately set by some camp residents angered about the imposition of new lockdown measures after 35 people tested positive for COVID-19. The British-Swedish pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca has resumed trials of its experimental COVID-19 vaccine after getting permission from safety monitors, the company announced Saturday. “Clinical trials for the AstraZeneca Oxford coronavirus vaccine, AZD1222, have resumed in the UK following confirmation by the Medicines Health Regulatory Authority that it was safe to do so,” the company said in a statement. The pharmaceutical company paused the trials Tuesday because a volunteer participant became ill after receiving the experimental drug. The company issued a statement that day saying the pause in testing was a “routine action, which has to happen whenever there is a potentially unexplained illness in one of the trials, while it is investigated, ensuring we maintain the integrity of the trials.” AstraZeneca’s drug is one of nine vaccine candidates in late stage Phase 3 human trials around the world. The company began enrolling 30,000 volunteers August 31, and the vaccine was being tested in smaller groups in Brazil and in other South American countries before the trials were suspended. 
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Wildfires continued to rage across large swaths of the Western U.S. on Sunday, with massive clouds of smoke enveloping the region and endangering the health of millions of residents.Air quality across the Pacific Northwest state of Oregon was characterized by state environmental officials as “hazardous” or “very unhealthy.” Dense smoke warnings were posted in Oregon and the neighboring state of Washington by the National Weather Service.In all, throughout the Western U.S., there were 24 fires in California, 15 in Washington, 14 in Oregon, 12 in Idaho and others in Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming.The blazes have killed at least 10 people in Oregon, with emergency workers expecting the death toll to increase. Some people in Portland, the state’s largest city, and elsewhere were fighting for breath as smoke filled the air. The fires have ravaged more than 400,000 hectares of land in the state.The San Francisco Bay Bridge and city skyline are obscured in orange smoke and haze as seen from Treasure Island in San Francisco, California, Sep. 9, 2020.In California, where the fires started sooner, at least 22 have died and about 1.3 million hectares charred. In the state of Washington, 269,000 hectares of land have burned.Officials throughout the region urged residents to stay indoors unless necessary.   Visibility was less than a half kilometer in some places, according to the National Weather Service, making it dangerous to drive.U.S. President Doanld Trump has largely avoided commenting on the wildfires, but he plans on visiting California on Monday for an update on the blazes, some of the worst in years.After days of hot, windy weather, on Saturday the winds calmed and shifted to the west, bringing cooler, more moist weather from the ocean to help firefighters. But the air quality remained hazardous.In Salem, the state capital of Oregon, the air quality index reading was 512 on Saturday morning, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s AirNow site. The scale tops out at 500. Anything above 200 is considered “very unhealthy,” and anything above 300 is deemed “hazardous.”In Paradise, California, a city devasted by wildfire in 2018, the reading was 592, according to the PurpleAir monitoring site.”Above 500 is literally off the charts,” said Laura Gleim, a spokesperson for the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality.
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Fires have burned around 30,000 acres of forest as of Saturday, September 12, California’s wildfire authority, Cal Fire, said. The Bobcat Fire, which started September 6, is only 6% contained and has already razed 30,000 acres, including in the Angeles National Forest, Cal Fire reported on its website. In a video shared with Reuters, fierce flames engulfed trees near a picnic area at the forest. “This fire has mainly been driven by steep terrain and dry fuels, some of which have not seen fire activity in at least 60 years,” Angeles National Forest said on its website. In California, tens of thousands of firefighters were battling 28 major wildfires as of Saturday afternoon and improving weather conditions have helped them gain a measure of containment over most of the blazes, Cal Fire said. (Reuters)  
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 Landslides triggered by torrential rain swept through two villages in Nepal on Sunday, killing at least 12 people, a government official said.Ten people were killed and 21 are missing after a massive landslide swept away homes and people in Barahbise, 100 km (62 miles) east of Kathmandu near the border with the Tibet region of China, Nepali government official Murari Wasti said.Two others died in a landslide in Baglung in the northwest.Both landslides struck the villages before dawn and people could not escape to safety, rescuers said.”Rescuers are looking for those who are missing,” Wasti told Reuters.The latest fatalities took the death toll from landslides and flash floods in the June-September monsoon season to 314. At least 111 people remain missing and 160 have been injured, Wasti said.
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Seven weeks ahead of the U.S. national elections, President Donald Trump is contending he has done an “incredible job” dealing with the coronavirus pandemic and minimizing the country’s death toll.  Trump, campaigning in Nevada on Saturday, stated U.S. is “rounding the corner” in dealing with the coronavirus, a notion disputed by the country’s leading infectious disease expert, Anthony Fauci. At a political rally, Trump understated the country’s world-leading death toll of nearly 194,000, saying it was “like, around 180,000.” Even as about 35,000 new infections and 1,000 deaths a day are being recorded in the U.S., Trump wrote on Twitter Sunday, “Actually falling very steadily and fast. Deaths and hospitalizations way down, and even cases down despite far more Testing than any other country in the World, by far.” Actually falling very steadily and fast. Deaths and hospitalizations way down, and even cases down despite far more Testing than any other country in the World, by far. India second! https://t.co/dZQEh2F7Cf
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) FILE – Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden places a note card in his jacket pocket as he speaks at a campaign event in Warren, Mich., Sept. 9, 2020.Trump’s Democratic challenger, former Vice President Joe Biden, did not campaign Saturday, but said earlier that Trump misleading the public “was a life-and-death betrayal of the American people. It’s beyond despicable. It’s a dereliction of duty, a disgrace.” “He knew how deadly it was. He knew and purposely played it down,” Biden added. “Worse, he lied.”  But Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro defended the president’s public posture on the coronavirus in early 2020 when he compared it to nothing much worse than the seasonal flu. FILE – White House trade adviser Peter Navarro speaks during an interview at the White House, April 6, 2020, in Washington.“The president is absolutely right,” Navarro told CNN. “What he needed to do was be calm, hope for the best, but prepare for the worst” by attacking the virus. “That’s what we did.” One of the tapes recorded Trump in early 2020 telling Woodward, “I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.” Navarro said, “It’s a miracle what we’ve been doing on the vaccine.” Numerous research trials of a preventative treatment are under way and Trump has held out the possibility of approval of a vaccine before Election Day, November 3.  Fauci and other health experts say a vaccine is not likely to be available until the end of the year or into early 2021. Trump campaign aide Steve Cortes, on the “Fox News Sunday” show, credited the president with imposing partial travel bans on flights from China and Europe with curtailing the spread of the coronavirus, calling it “superb management of the virus.” Cortes said Trump did not reveal to Americans what he knew of the dangers of the coronavirus based on intelligence reports because “he didn’t want to panic the country.”  “What is not helpful is to tell the country there is fear,” Cortes said. “He was reassuring the country at the time he was taking decisive action.” A new Fox News poll shows Biden ahead Trump by a 51-to-46% margin, less than the average of 7.5 percentage points recorded in multiple polls by the Real Clear Politics web site. Other surveys show that in some battleground states far more registered Democrats than Republicans are requesting absentee ballots. Cortes acknowledged the absentee voting disparity favoring Biden. “We will probably see that the president will lag until Election Day and then win very big on Election Day,” Cortes said, with Democrats favoring absentee voting and Republicans in-person voting on Election Day. 
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Thousands of protesters gathered in the Belarus capital Minsk Sunday for another demonstration after longtime leader Alexander Lukashenko extended his rule following a disputed election last month. Protests have been ongoing since the August 9 vote that opposition parties, the United States and the European Union allege was rigged. On Saturday, thousands demonstrated to demand the release of opposition leader Maria Kolesnikova, who was jailed this week after she resisted expulsion from the country. Video broadcast by Polish-funded satellite TV channel Belsat and independent outlet Tut.by showed masked Belarusian riot police violently detaining at least 40 women who were thrown into vans as scuffles erupted in the city’s central Freedom Square. An elderly woman rips the mask off a police officer during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus, Sept. 12, 2020.Some of the women protesters chanted “Bring back our Masha,” referring to Kolesnikova, while others beat saucepans. A woman wears a T-shirt with a sign of an old Belarusian flag during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus, Sept. 12, 2020.Lukashenko, who denies the August 9 vote was fraudulent, accuses council members and activists of colluding with Western nations to try to create a parallel government. Thousands of people have been detained over five weeks of protests triggered by the contested election. At least three people have been killed and hundreds hurt as police have aggressively dispersed peaceful protesters with rubber bullets, clubs and stun grenades. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Tuesday said the U.S. and other countries are considering bringing sanctions against “those involved in human rights abuses and repression in Belarus.”  
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With tensions between NATO allies Greece and Turkey rising, Greece has announced plans to purchase a grab bag of new warplanes, frigates, helicopters and weapons systems. Greece’s defense shopping spree comes amid a new diplomatic scramble with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visiting Cyprus to ease an energy standoff in the eastern Mediterranean.Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis announced the defense upgrade, saying it stemmed from the need to offset what he called Turkey’s destabilizing moves in the region.Along with its longstanding air and sea claims in the Aegean, Ankara is now torpedoing peace in the eastern Mediterranean, Mitsotakis said. Turkey is threatening southeast Europe and is undermining security at a crucial crossroads between East and West, he said.Greece and Turkey are locked in an increasingly tense and dangerous standoff in the Aegean Sea and eastern Mediterranean over hydrocarbon drilling rights and delineation of their maritime boundaries.In a speech at a trade fair, Mitsotakis said Greece would obtain 18 new warplanes from France to replace its aging fleet of Mirage 2000 fighters. The shopping list will also include four new navy helicopters and an equal number of frigates. Existing battleships will also be refurbished.Details of the deals were not announced but it is not the first instance this year in which Greece has shown an interest in substantially upgrading its defenses.Greece and the U.S. are already in talks for the procurement of at least 24 fifth-generation F-35 warplanes for $3 billion.Having finalized its intent, the new acquisitions, experts say, would give Athens a significant qualitative edge in its air defense against Turkey, which is facing problems in procuring new aircraft and upgrading its existing fleet.The United States suspended Turkey from the F-35 Fighter program after it moved to acquire advanced Russian S-400 air defense missile systems last year.Mitsotakis’ announcement comes amid a new diplomatic effort in the region by U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to convince Greece and Turkey to back off from their monthlong standoff in the eastern Mediterranean.After talks with Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades and other officials, Pompeo said the United States remains deeply concerned by Turkey’s continuing operations surveying for natural resources in areas over which Greece and Cyprus both assert jurisdiction in the eastern Mediterranean.U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, left, and Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades make statements during a press conference at the Presidential Palace in Nicosia, Cyprus, Sept. 12, 2020.Pompeo added that, “Countries in the region need to resolve disagreements – including on security and energy, resource and maritime issues – diplomatically and peacefully. Increased military tensions help no one but adversaries who would like to see division in transatlantic unity.”Pompeo’s visit to Cyprus comes hot on the heels of a similar visit by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.Greece has refused to engage in negotiations with Turkey until it stops searching for eastern Mediterranean gas reserves.However, Sunday, just hours after Pompeo shuttled to Cyprus for high-level talks, hopes of a breakthrough seemed to emerge.Turkey called its top research vessel back to base, leaving an opening for a potential start to crucial negotiations. 
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Wearing a face mask during the COVID-19 pandemic could be a more important part of the arsenal against the virus than previously thought.An article in The New England Journal of Medicine suggests that universal face mask wearing “might help reduce the severity of disease and ensure that a greater proportion of new infections are asymptomatic.”If that premise is correct, the article suggested, face mask wearing could become a form of inoculation “that would generate immunity and thereby slow the spread of the virus” during the global wait for the development of a vaccine.The journal cited two recent outbreaks of COVID-19 in U.S. food-processing plants where workers were required to wear masks every day.“The proportion of asymptomatic infections among the more than 500 people who became infected was 95%, with only 5% in each outbreak experiencing mild-to-moderate symptoms,” the medical journal said.The article also said “case-fatality rates in countries with mandatory or enforced population-wide masking have remained low, even with resurgences of cases after lockdowns were lifted.”Dr. Monica Gandhi, one of the authors of the article, who is an infectious disease physician at the University of California, San Francisco, told the British newspaper The Telegraph, “It is true that the proportion of asymptomatic infection being increased by masking might increase the proportion of the population who achieve at least short-term immunity to the virus while we await a vaccine.”She cautioned, however, that more studies about the efficacy of mask wearing are needed.        
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Americans’ interest in voting by mail has surged this year as the coronavirus pandemic rages on. Allegations of double voting in the southern U.S. state of Georgia have further fueled a politically fraught debate over voter fraud ahead of the November presidential election.This week, Georgia’s top election official announced that as many as 1,000 voters may have double voted in the state’s primary elections in June, showing up at the polls to vote after mailing in their ballots.Although the attempted double voting was caught and did not change voting tallies, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, said he wanted each case investigated and prosecuted if determined to be illegal.Scrutiny of double voting – a felony in Georgia as in most other states – comes amid a larger debate over voter fraud and whether efforts to combat it constitute a safeguarding of the democratic process or partisan voter suppression.President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that voting by mail is prone to widespread fraud that would benefit his opponent, Democrat Joe Biden. Indeed, Trump has urged his supporters to attempt to vote twice in the November 3 general election – once by mail and again at the polls on Election Day – to demonstrate such fraud is feasible.But voting rights advocates say there is little evidence of rampant voter fraud. During Georgia’s chaotic primary elections, they say, confusion may have led officials to incorrectly count some votes as “voting twice.”“We wholeheartedly agree that people who intentionally vote twice should be subject to the usual criminal penalties for election law violations,” Aunna Dennis, executive director of Common Cause Georgia, said in a statement. “But we are concerned that voters who were simply trying to vote may get caught up in the dragnet.”While Democrats and voting rights groups say voter fraud is exceedingly rare, many Republicans contend it is more prevalent than is commonly known and dilutes the will of legitimate voters at the ballot box.Here are four things you need to know about the debate over voter fraud:What is voter fraud?Voter fraud covers many actions, from casting illegitimate ballots to vote buying to impersonating a voter.Yet there is no universally agreed-upon definition of the practice.Voting rights activists have a relatively narrow definition. According to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, voting fraud “occurs when individuals cast ballots despite knowing that they are ineligible to vote, in an attempt to defraud the election system.”Conservatives prefer a more expansive definition. The Government Accountability Institute, a think tank co-founded by conservative political strategist Steve Bannon, defines it as “illegal interference in the process of an election” and lists things like “fraudulent addresses” and “registration fraud” among voter fraud types.This lack of consensus means that what election integrity advocates may see as an instance of fraud, voting rights advocates might view as a clerical error or an honest mistake.Types of voter fraudVoter fraud can take many different forms. The conservative Heritage Foundation has tracked nine different types of election fraud.The most common type in the foundation’s voter fraud database is voting by people ineligible to vote, such as noncitizens and convicted felons.Another common voter fraud type: absentee ballot fraud or obtaining an absentee ballot and filling it out without the knowledge of the actual voter.Other types of election fraud in the database include voter impersonation, vote buying, ballot petition fraud, duplicate voting and false registrations.How widespread is voter fraud?This is a politically charged question.The Heritage Foundation’s database includes 1,296 “proven instances of voter fraud” out of the hundreds of millions of votes cast going back to 1992. Of those cases identified, 1,120 resulted in criminal convictions.The cases include a North Carolina Republican operative and several others who were accused of ballot tampering in connection with a 2018 congressional race. Not included in the database is the recent indictment in North Carolina of 19 noncitizens accused of illegally voting in the 2016 election.Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a former member of Trump’s now-defunct election integrity commission, says the database is merely “the tip of the iceberg.”“There’s actually more fraud occurring out there than actually gets reported and prosecuted,” von Spakovsky said.Yet little hard evidence of widespread voter fraud has turned up.After the 2016 election, Trump alleged that as many as 5 million illegal votes had been cast for his opponent, Democrat Hillary Clinton. But an election integrity commission he formed to investigate the matter did not turn up evidence of widespread fraud. Multiple independent studies by academic researchers and news outlets similarly found no proof of rampant fraud in the election.“It doesn’t happen often at all,” said Justin Levitt, a law professor Loyola Law School and a voting expert. “But when it happens it’s a one-off: One person decides to file a false ballot or something like that.”Levitt keeps track of voter impersonation and says it’s extremely rare.“I’m up to 45 since 2000, and in that time there has been more than a billion and a half votes cast,” Levitt said.Other types of voting fraud such as voting by noncitizens are equally rare, according to researchers.Last year, Texas officials announced that they’d found the names of nearly 100,000 “possible noncitizens” on their voter registrations rolls and that as many as 58,000 of them may have voted in elections over the previous 22-year period.  But the state dropped a review of the cases in the face of legal challenges.Voting by mailTrump and his Republican allies oppose voting by mail, saying ballots in the mail system can be stolen, fabricated and otherwise fraudulently used.But voting rights advocates say this doesn’t mean voting by mail is any less secure. Five states – Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah and Washington – have successfully adopted universal mail balloting while detecting only a small amount of double voting or voter impersonation.“Despite (a) dramatic increase in mail voting over time, fraud rates remain infinitesimally small,” the Brennan Center said in a recent report. “None of the five states that hold their elections primarily by mail has had any voter fraud scandals since making that change.”
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The Afghan government and the Taliban started intra-Afghan talks Saturday in Doha, Qatar. Afghan civilians say that both sides should agree to an immediate cease-fire. VOA’s Hikmat Sorosh reports from Kabul. 
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