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Pro-democracy activists rallied outside the United States consulate in Hong Kong Sunday as they try to ramp up international pressure on Beijing following three months of huge and sometimes violent protests.

Millions have taken to Hong Kong’s streets over the last 14 weeks in the biggest challenge to China’s rule since the city’s handover from Britain in 1997.

The protests were ignited by a now scrapped plan to allow extraditions to the authoritarian mainland, seen by opponents as the latest move by Beijing to chip away at the international finance hub’s unique freedoms.

But after Beijing and city leaders took a hard line, the movement snowballed into a broader campaign calling for greater democracy, police accountability and an amnesty for those arrested.

A huge crowd, some waving the Stars and Stripes flag, rallied in a park in Hong Kong’s commercial district and marched to Washington’s nearby consulate.

They called on the U.S. to pressure Beijing to meet their demands and for Congress to pass a recently proposed bill that expresses support for the protest.

“More than 1,000 protesters have been arrested. We can’t do anything but come out onto the streets, I feel hopeless,” 30-year-old protester Jenny Chan, told AFP.

“I think aside from foreign countries, no one can really help us,” she added.
 

The director of a prestigious research lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology resigned Saturday, and the school’s president ordered an independent investigation amid an uproar over the lab’s ties to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.

Joi Ito, director of MIT’s Media Lab, resigned from both the lab and from his position as a professor at the Cambridge school, university President L. Rafael Reif said. The resignation was first reported by The New York Times.

Ito’s resignation comes after The New Yorker reported late Friday that Media Lab had a more extensive fundraising relationship with Epstein than it previously acknowledged and tried to conceal the extent of the relationship.

Epstein suicide

Epstein killed himself in jail Aug. 10 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. Federal prosecutors in New York had charged the 66-year-old with sex trafficking and conspiracy, alleging he sexually abused girls over several years in the early 2000s.

In a letter to the MIT community Saturday, Reif called the allegations in The New Yorker “deeply disturbing.”

“Because the accusations in the story are extremely serious, they demand an immediate, thorough and independent investigation,” Reif wrote. “This morning, I asked MIT’s General Counsel to engage a prominent law firm to design and conduct this process.”

Reif said last month that the university took about $800,000 from Epstein over 20 years. That announcement followed the resignation of two prominent researchers from Media Lab over revelations the lab and Ito took money from Epstein after he served time a decade ago for sex offenses involving underage girls.

The New Yorker reports Epstein arranged at least $7.5 million in donations, including $2 million from Microsoft founder Bill Gates and $5.5 million from investor Leon Black.

Although MIT listed Epstein as “disqualified” in its donor database, the Media Lab did not stop taking gifts from him and labeled his donations as anonymous, The New Yorker reported, citing emails and other documents it obtained.

Last week, Ito said Epstein gave him $525,000 for the Media Lab and another $1.2 million for his own investment funds.

Florida deal

Epstein’s July 6 arrest drew national attention, particularly focusing on a deal that allowed him to plead guilty in 2008 to soliciting a minor for prostitution in Florida and avoid more serious federal charges.

Epstein was a wealth manager who hobnobbed with the rich, famous and influential, including presidents and a prince.

He owned a private island in the Caribbean, homes in Paris and New York City, a New Mexico ranch and a fleet of high-price cars.

Phone and email messages seeking comment were left for Ito and Media Lab representatives Saturday.
 

China urged U.S.-led foreign troops Saturday to withdraw from Afghanistan in an “orderly and responsible” manner if a prospective peace deal is signed with the Islamist Taliban to end the 18-year war.

U.S. negotiators are in the final stage of their yearlong bilateral dialogue with the insurgent group. The peace process, being hosted by Qatar, could end America’s longest overseas military intervention.

“We call on the United States and the Taliban to continue with the negotiations and to implement the agreement after it is signed,” visiting Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told reporters in neighboring Pakistan.

The top Chinese diplomat spoke after attending a trilateral dialogue with Afghan Foreign Minister Salahuddin Rabbani and their host and Pakistani counterpart, Shah Mahmood Qureshi.

“In particular, we call on them [the U.S. and Taliban] to make good on their commitments regarding the troop drawdown and counterterrorism efforts so that the seeds of peace can be sown and take root,” Wang said. He reiterated China’s resolve to increase its economic and political engagement with Afghanistan to help in rebuilding efforts there.

Draft framework agreement ‘in principle’

U.S. chief negotiator Zalmay Khalilzad said Monday that he had reached “in principle” a draft framework agreement with the Taliban. The document outlines a foreign troop drawdown timetable in return for Taliban assurances they will not harbor transnational terrorist groups that threaten U.S. and allied nations.

Khalilzad, however, said the agreement would have to be reviewed and approved by U.S. President Donald Trump before it was signed.

Khalilzad explained the deal would require 5,000 American forces to immediately withdraw from five Afghan bases within the first 135 days, but he did not discuss the fate of the residual U.S. military force of roughly 8,600 service members.

Taliban political spokesman Suhail Shaheen told VOA this week, without elaborating, that all U.S. troops and their NATO allies would have to leave Afghanistan under the deal. Some reports said that could happen by the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

China’s Wang, however, cautioned against a hasty foreign troop withdrawal.

“The situation in Afghanistan is now at a critical stage. The withdrawal of foreign troops needs to be conducted in an orderly and responsible manner in order to ensure the smooth transition of the situation in Afghanistan,” Wang said.

Beijing’s increased regional involvement stems from concerns that fugitive anti-China militants could exploit continued instability in the neighboring country to threaten fragile security in western Chinese border regions.

Khalilzad has said the Taliban would also be bound under the deal to engage in peace negotiations with Afghan officials and other members of the turmoil-ridden Afghan society to discuss a cease-fire and the country’s political future.

But the Taliban refuse to engage in direct talks with the Afghan government, rejecting it as an American puppet.

Urged engagement

Wang supported U.S. calls for the insurgents to commit themselves to engaging in talks with government officials and other Afghan stakeholders to build a framework for intra-Afghan negotiations on a political arrangement that is acceptable to all parties in the event of foreign troop drawdown.

Afghanistan’s Rabbani, while addressing reporters, reiterated Kabul’s worries that the framework agreement Washington has reached with the Taliban could encourage the insurgents to try to militarily seize control of power if foreign forces leave the country.

“As the peace efforts continue, the Taliban have yet to show genuine commitment to peace. This is manifested by their decision to continue terrorist attacks, killing innocent Afghans from all walks of life on a daily basis,” Rabbani said.

The Taliban have intensified attacks across the country in recent days, killing scores of Afghan forces and bringing more territory under their control. The insurgents maintain that cessation of hostilities is not being discussed with the U.S., saying the issue will be on the agenda when intra-Afghan negotiations begin as an outcome of the deal with Washington.

China established the trilateral dialogue forum in 2017 with a mission to ease tensions between its two neighbors, Afghanistan and Pakistan, through increased bilateral security, political and economic cooperation. The tensions stem from long-running Afghan allegations that the Taliban leadership directs insurgent activities from alleged sanctuaries on Pakistani soil.

Islamabad rejects the charges, saying for the past decade its security forces have eliminated all militant infrastructures on the Pakistani side of the long, porous Afghan border. Pakistan also takes credit for arranging the ongoing U.S.-Taliban dialogue.

Pakistan’s Qureshi said Saturday that his country hoped the framework agreement being finalized between the U.S. and Taliban would lead to intra-Afghan negotiations for a sustainable and durable peace.

“In order for Pakistan to be peaceful, Afghanistan has to be peaceful,” Qureshi said. “We have undertaken serious [security] operations to clear our areas from terrorist activity … and there is international recognition for it.”

Bianca Andreescu displayed the same brand of big-serving, big-hitting, in-your-face tennis that Serena Williams usually does. 
 
And now the 19-year-old from Canada is a Grand Slam champion, earning her first such title while preventing Williams from collecting a record-tying 24th. 
 
Andreescu took charge early in the U.S. Open final, going up by a set and two breaks, then held off a late charge by Williams to win 6-3, 7-5 for the championship Saturday night. 
 
“Being able to play on this stage against Serena, a true legend in this sport, is amazing,” said Andreescu, who was appearing in her first major final, while Williams was in her 33rd. “Oh, man, it wasn’t easy at all.” 
 
This is the second year in a row that Williams has lost in the final at Flushing Meadows. This one had none of the controversy of 2018, when she got into an extended argument with the chair umpire while being beaten by Naomi Osaka.   

Still trails Court
 
Williams has now been the runner-up at four of the seven majors she has entered since returning to the tour after having a baby two years ago. The 37-year-old American remains stuck on 23 Grand Slam singles titles, one shy of Margaret Court’s mark for the most in history. 
 
“I’m just so proud that I’m out here and competing at this level. My team has been so supportive through all the ups and downs and downs and downs and downs,” Williams said. “Hopefully, we’ll have some ups soon.” 
 
Andreescu, the first player from Canada to win a major singles title, went up 5-1 in the second set and served for the victory there, even holding a match point at 40-30. But Williams erased that with a forehand return winner off a 105-mph serve. 
 
That launched a four-game run for Williams, who broke Andreescu again to make it 5-all. 
 
“I was just fighting at that point,” said Williams, a six-time U.S. Open champion. “Just trying to stay out there a little bit longer.” 
 
The Arthur Ashe Stadium crowd was overwhelmingly supporting Williams, not surprisingly, and spectators got so loud as she tried to put together a successful comeback that Andreescu covered her ears with her hands after one point. 
 
“I just tried to block everything out,” Andreescu said afterward. “I’m just glad with how I managed, really.” 
 
Suddenly, this was a contest. 
 
Or so it seemed. 

Not Williams’ best
 
But as well as Andreescu handled everything — herself, her far-more-experienced and successful opponent, and even the moment — Williams was far from her best, especially while serving. She got broken for the sixth time in the final game. 
 
This was the largest age gap in a Grand Slam final, and it came almost exactly 20 years to the day since Williams won the U.S. Open for her first major title in 1999, a year before Andreescu was born. 
 
Andreescu is the first woman to win the trophy at Flushing Meadows in her main-draw tournament debut in the Open era, which started in 1968 when professionals were allowed into Grand Slam tournaments. She has participated in only four majors in her brief career. 

John Walker of VOA’s Afghanistan service contributed to this report. 

WHITE HOUSE — U.S. President Donald Trump says he has called off secret talks that were to be held Sunday at Camp David with Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani and “major Taliban leaders.” 

Unbeknownst to almost everyone, the major Taliban leaders and, separately, the President of Afghanistan, were going to secretly meet with me at Camp David on Sunday. They were coming to the United States tonight. Unfortunately, in order to build false leverage, they admitted to..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)

A senior Iraqi security official said Saturday that four bombs had exploded in Baghdad, wounding 14 people.

The official said the bombs targeted commercial districts in east, south, central and west Baghdad. The official spoke on condition of anonymity in line with regulations.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attacks.

Iraq declared victory against the Islamic State group in 2017, but the group continues to carry out attacks through sleeper cells.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu threatened Gaza’s Hamas rulers on Saturday with a “vigorous response” after militants used a drone to drop a bomb on the Israeli side of the Gaza-Israel perimeter fence.
 
This appeared to be the first-ever attempt to carry out an attack with a drone piloted from Gaza. The Israeli army said the drone released “what seems to be an explosive device” and lightly damaged an army vehicle near the fence.
 
The military said it retaliated with an airstrike against Palestinian militants responsible for the attack. There were no reports of injuries on the Palestinian side.

Re-election bid
 
Netanyahu is in the midst of a re-election campaign, with less than two weeks to go before a do-over vote after he failed to secure a parliamentary majority in April’s election.
 
“Hamas is responsible for everything coming out of Gaza and all attacks will be met with a vigorous response,” Netanyahu said in a statement.
 
Hamas, which has run Gaza since 2007, is known to be developing a drone program and has used it before for reconnaissance missions over the frontier and into Israel. Using drones for attacks was previously unheard of.
 
Earlier, an Israeli father and son were stabbed near the town of Qalqilya in the northern West Bank. Israeli medical services said the 17-year-old was in a serious but stable condition. The military said it was an attack by a Palestinian assailant and that soldiers were in pursuit. 

On Friday, Israeli forces shot dead two Gaza teenagers during regular weekend protests along the volatile perimeter fence. Militants in Gaza fired five projectiles into Israel in an apparent response to the deaths.

With the French back from summer vacation, the yellow vest movement is vowing to turn this month into a “black September” of protests. But there was little sign Saturday of the massive crowds that shuttered shops and disrupted France’s economy and politics not so long ago.  

“We’re here, we’re here,” some in yellow vests sang, crossing a busy street as cars screeched to a halt. “Even if [President Emmanuel] Macron doesn’t like it, we are here.”  

And so they were. But they counted in the thousands, not tens of thousands like before. At the Champs-Elysees, once a no-go zone on Saturdays, riot police vastly outnumbered a small group of yellow vests defying a ban to protest there. Stores once protectively boarded up against rioters were open and packed with tourists. 
 
A couple of miles away, a scrum of yellow vests waited on a corner for others to join them. Their small group had splintered earlier in their march, which authorities had approved. Police who might have clashed with them not so long ago helped them find the whereabouts of lost members. 
 
“My name is Antoine,” one marcher said. “I’m an engineering student in the center of France. We just come here to show some support to people who come here every weekend — to try to show people that everything is not yet over.” 
 
The protests were bigger elsewhere in France, where police clashed with crowds of yellow vests. But overall, the movement is a lot smaller and a lot quieter than before.  

One protester in Paris named Eric admitted he was disappointed by the turnout, but he said he thought things would gather steam again. Another yellow vest, Laurent Come, also said he thought the movement wasn’t over, pointing to the violence in towns like Rouen and Montpellier on Saturday. “We’re too nice,” he added. “We need to cause mayhem to be heard.” 
 
Since it started nearly a year ago, the grass-roots movement for economic justice has presented Macron’s government one of its biggest challenges to date. The French president held a national debate to find answers to the discontent. After hitting rock bottom, his approval rating has inched up. 
 
A yellow vest protester named Malika believed the movement had made a difference, just by bringing people together to talk about issues and propose solutions. 
 
The government is now discussing unpopular pension reforms, which may again drive French to the streets. 

Cambodia has launched a campaign to end child labor in the brick industry by 2020, a move industry observers cautiously welcome while expressing doubts the goal will be achieved, and calling for more structural changes.

The industry drew international attention last year when a report, Blood Bricks: Untold Stories of Modern Slavery and Climate Change from Cambodia, asserted poverty, often caused by climate change, forced tens of thousands of Cambodians into debt bondage at brick kilns, and again in March when a 9-year-old girl lost her arm working in one of the factories.

The government fined the factory and issued a directive barring children from brick kiln production line compounds. Children often live with their families in accommodation provided for by the brick factory, which often is in the direct vicinity of the kilns.

The government said Aug. 31 that the director of the Labor Ministry’s Child Labor Department, Veng Heang, had started the campaign August 26 in cooperation with local authorities.

 “According to the department director, any brick factory found having child labor will be severely penalised without any excuse,” the state news agency Agence Kampuchea Presse reported.

One of the authors of the Blood Bricks report, Laurie Parsons, welcomed the initiative, saying child labor was still prevalent in the industry and estimating that the number of children working in brick factories ranged “in the thousands.”

Parsons said the government had denied the issue for years and as late as last year, despite multiple reports by nongovernmental organizations, but now had started to acknowledge the issue because of increased international media attention.

“Although the issue has been known, it hasn’t been internationally known,” Parsons said.

He welcomed the initiative but called just focusing on child labor a “symptom-led approach” not likely to address the root causes of the problem. He said that poverty pushes people into debt-bondage at the brick kilns, poor working conditions, and brick kiln contracts barring workers from employment elsewhere.

“It’s a focus which won’t necessarily produce any long-term tangible change, [which] is very much a kind of symptom-led focus with what we see as being an undue focus on the issue of child labor, which is obviously a very evocative topic,” he said. “It’s something that gets a lot of attention. But to us, the child labor is essentially part of the wider structural problem.”

“The reason that these conditions exist is essentially because people are desperate enough to keep bonding themselves into work in the brick industry,” he said.

The ministry remained evasive, however, about what concrete measures would be taken to combat child labor. Asked what the government would do once the inspection was done, ministry spokesman Heng Sour said: “I would like to inform you that our labor inspectors are still on their mission to inspect all brick factories across the country, which will conclude in late October. We will publish the report in this November.”

Sour did not answer questions about further details of the campaign and what steps the government would take.

Parsons said the success of the campaign depends on the concrete measures that have been taken, and whether the brick kiln owners’ claims they don’t directly employ children but only buy bricks will be tolerated. “It has to have a really sweeping overhaul of the entire industry,” he said.

Sou Chhlonh, vice director of the Building and Wood Workers Trade Union Federation of Cambodia, agreed.

Chhlonh said it would be easy for brick factories to avoid being fined if inspections were conducted on a one-off basis. Factories could easily have no children on site for one week, for example, and revert to children working there after the inspection was done, he said.

To make matters more complicated, he said, children were largely not employed by the factory owners directly, but rather helped – voluntarily or involuntarily – their parents instead of going to school to lighten their parents’ debts. Sometimes, brick kiln owners tell parents to get their children to work to pay their debts, he said, but this was not always the case.

Sour told VOA the government would show “zero tolerance” on the issue.

“The main mission is zero tolerance to child labor, and debt bondage in the brick factory,” he said. “So, the labor inspector is doing such inspection, education, and raising awareness among the workers who work in the brick factory.”

Chhlonh said training those inspectors is crucial for the success of the campaign, and raised doubts that child labor could be erased by the government’s deadline.

 “It’s so fast,” he said. “We should train more inspectors [first].”

Pointing to the comparatively small size of the industry – Parsons estimated that about 10,000 people were involved in about 450 kilns in the country – the researcher said significant improvements could be made quickly.

However, “in practice, of course, it’s not going to happen by 2020,” he said, “because resources won’t be put in place, and the kind of structural attitude won’t be there.” 
 

India’s top national security adviser said Saturday that a large number of suspected militants are trying to infiltrate Kashmir and accused Pakistan of trying to foment trouble in the region.
 
“About 230 terrorists are ready to infiltrate into different parts of Kashmir,” Ajit Doval, national security adviser to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, told reporters. “A large number of weapons are being smuggled and people in Kashmir are being told to create trouble.”
 
Military officials said the information was based on radio intercepts and ground intelligence.  
 
India has long accused Pakistan of supporting and training militants to foment a separatist insurgency in Kashmir, charges Islamabad denies.

A month after India brought its only Muslim-majority territory under its direct control, scrapped its semi-autonomous status and deployed thousands of troops to prevent violent protests, residents in Kashmir continue to face curbs on travel and communications restrictions.  Although most landlines are functioning, the internet and mobile phone services have still not been restored.

“We would like to see all restrictions go, but it depends on how Pakistan behaves,” Doval said. “If Pakistan starts behaving, terrorists don’t intimidate and infiltrate, Pakistan stops sending signals through its towers to operatives, then we can lift restrictions.”

He cited an attack that injured three persons including an apple merchant and a two-year-old girl when unidentified persons opened fire in the apple-growing region of Sopore on Saturday. Police called it “a merciless act of terrorism.”  

Officials say that 90 percent of the Kashmir valley is free of restrictions during the daytime and hundreds of schools and government offices have re-opened.

But attendance by students in schools has been thin, commercial areas in the capital, Srinagar, still remain largely shuttered and the city’s streets continue to be deserted, defying efforts by Indian officials to return the region to normalcy.
 
The spokesman of the Jammu and Kashmir government, Rohit Kansal, has blamed “anti-national” forces for preventing shops from opening.
 
The region has also witnessed sporadic demonstrations by stone-throwing protesters, most of them in Srinagar. According to unconfirmed reports, scores of civilians and security persons have been wounded in the protests.    
 
Rights group Amnesty International this week launched a campaign urging New Delhi to lift the communications blockade. “It has grossly impacted the daily lives of Kashmiri people, their emotional and mental well-being, medical care, as well as their access to basic necessities and emergency services,” according to Aakar Patel, head of Amnesty India.
 

North Korea’s call on the United Nations to cut its international staff involved in humanitarian work there could be a move to gain leverage over sanctions relief, a human rights expert said Thursday.

Pyongyang told the U.N. in an August 21 letter it wants the world body to slash the number of aid workers inside the country by the end of the year because U.N. programs have been ineffective, according to a Wednesday report  by Reuters.  The news service quoted Kim Chang Min, secretary general for North Korea’s National Coordinating Committee for the U.N., as writing that “U.N. supported programs failed to bring the results as desired due to the politicization of U.N. assistance by hostile forces” in the letter.

The letter comes at a time when talks between Pyongyang and Washington have been stalled since their Hanoi summit in February failed due to their difference over denuclearization and sanctions relief.  The United States rejected North Korea’s proposal for sanctions relief in exchange for partial denuclearization while asking it to carry out complete denuclearization.

Greg Scarlatoiu, executive director of the Washington-based Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, however, called the letter “an insidious way of blackmailing the international community.”  Scarlatoiu wrote in a Thursday email that North Korea is essentially saying unless sanctions are eased “we will punish you by restricting your access to those North Korean people who need assistance.”

Scarlatoiu said North Korea is “politicizing and weaponizing humanitarian aid” and “using its vulnerable people as hostage and leverage” to obtain sanctions relief.

“The North Korean regime focuses on the sanctions as the root cause of its precarious humanitarian situation,” Scarlatoiu said.  “This is a serious distortion of the truth.  It is the regime’s deliberate policy of human rights denial that results in severe human insecurity in North Korea.”

The U.N. Security Council began ratcheting up sanctions on North Korea in 2006 in response to its nuclear test in the same year, and in 2016, started imposing sanctions targeting North Korea’s key export commodities such as coal and seafood to cut off funds that flow into its nuclear and missile programs.   The United Nations has been granting sanctions exemptions to humanitarian groups to provide aids to North Korea.

Russia’s U.N. Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia said Tuesday that sanctions on North Korea are impeding humanitarian work there.

Scarlatoiu, though, said, “Humanitarian operators may be negatively affected by some unintended side effects of the sanctions regime,” but that the sanctions “do not target the people of North Korea.”

“The perennial human insecurity affecting the people of North Korea has persisted for three decades…[and is] are systematic,” he said, “What North Korea needs is comprehensive economic, political, and social reform.”

Daniel Jaspers, public education and advocacy coordinator for Asia at the American Friends Service Committee, said the North Korean letter “points to an issue that humanitarian groups have been raising for a number of years – namely that sanctions are impeding humanitarian operations and aid delivery” in an email to VOA on Thursday.  He continued, “These obstacles in aid delivery are despite U.N. regulations which clearly state that sanctions are not meant to interfere with humanitarian work.”  

U.N. spokesperson Stephane Dujarric told reporters Thursday that the United Nations had received the letter, and said it is currently talking with North Korea.  He said the U.N. already has “a light footprint on ground” and that keeping the current number of humanitarian staff in North Korea is “vital” in mobilizing resources to support U.N.’s food, water, and nutrition programs in the country.
 

U.S. President Donald Trump heads to North Carolina late Monday, aiming to swing a congressional race in the 2020 election battleground state that could provide insight into his re-election chances.

Trump’s rally aims to persuade voters in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District to head to the polls Tuesday to vote for Republican candidate Dan Bishop. His opponent, Democrat Dan McCready, will be trying to flip a district that Trump won in 2016 with 54% of the vote.

The special election could provide an early test of whether highly educated women voters in suburban areas will throw their support to Democrats in marginally Republican districts as they did in a number of House races in the 2018 midterm elections.

North Carolina is one of a handful of states seen by analysts as a possible swing state in the 2020 presidential election. This early race, fueled by heavy spending on the national level by both political parties, will be a key early indicator on a number of levels.

Michael Bitzer, a professor of politics and history at Catawba College in North Carolina, said the election, “could serve in some ways as a canary in the coal mine if we’re looking at the national narrative of college-educated, white suburban women, and how they may view the Republican Party under President Trump, and whether they are supportive of him and the party, or they’ve been turned off by his rhetoric.”

‘Competitive election’

In this relatively safe Republican district, “bringing in the president and the vice president seems to indicate that Republicans are looking at this as a competitive election,” Bitzer said.

Vice President Mike Pence will also campaign for Bishop on Monday.

The 9th Congressional District has sent a Republican representative to Congress since 1963. Congressman Robert Pittenger, whose retirement from seat triggered this special election, won by 58% of the vote two years ago.

The effort to fill Pittenger’s seat has been anything but business as usual in this district.

Last November, McCready ran against Republican Mark Harris, whose election win was invalidated by the state board of elections after allegations of ballot tampering and election fraud. Support for Harris, who initially appeared to have won his election by 905 votes, eroded, leading him to decline to run in the new Republican primary held this February.

Bishop, the state senator who ultimately secured the nomination, appears to be lagging behind McCready in bipartisan polling. In a survey conducted Aug. 26-28, McCready leads Bishop by a margin of 46% to 42%. When voters leaning Democratic are included, McCready’s margin increases to 49 percentage points.

Primarily urban, suburban

According to Bitzer, non-Hispanic/Latino white women make up 30% of the district’s 501,000 registered voters. The district is primarily composed of urban and suburban areas that vote Republican, including outlying areas of Charlotte, the city selected for the 2020 Republican National Convention.

Democrats took back the House in 2018 by winning over traditionally Republican suburbs like the neighborhoods in the 9th District.

“It is a referendum on Trump and that’s because Trump and Dan Bishop have made it such,” said Susan Roberts, a political science professor at Davidson College in North Carolina. “That’s the theme the NRCC [National Republican Congressional Committee] and the surrogates for Trump have made it. [Donald Trump, Jr.] came and talked about the Hamas wing of the Democratic Party supporting Dan McCready.”

Bishop’s campaign ads have characterized McCready as a Washington insider with socialist views. The accusations imply McCready would fit in with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other members of the so-called “Squad,” a high-profile group of female freshman House Democrats.

McCready is mounting a localized campaign, capitalizing on the fact that he has been running for this congressional seat for the past 2½ years.

“The feeling from the voters that I’ve talked to is that they’re sort of ignoring the noise,” said Sharon Toland, a door-to-door canvasser for the McCready campaign. “Dan’s been campaigning in the district for years now. I think they feel like they know and they have a pretty good idea of who he actually is, he’s a moderate candidate.”

‘Conservative district’

Recent mass shootings in Dayton, Ohio, El Paso, Texas and Odessa, Texas, might not have much of an impact on the race.

“It’s such a conservative district in terms of guns,” said Sarah Taber, a member of the Cape Fear Indivisible, a Democratic activist group in the eastern part of the district.

Fort Bragg, the world’s largest military base, is nearby, and many military families live in the 9th Congressional District. Taber said many military voters are gun owners who support common sense measures but don’t engage with the issue as deeply as solutions for solving health care.

Political scientist Roberts said the district’s long-running saga of voter fraud and multiple elections in a relatively short amount of time may have a significant impact on voter turnout.

“Even a narrow win by Bishop is going to seem encouraging to the Democrats because it should be a red district,” Roberts said. “Anything you should win and don’t win is a big deal and anything you barely win is a big deal.”

People around the world are living longer according to the World Health Organization.  By 2020 there will be more people who are 60 or older than children younger than 5. Many adult children are painfully seeing their parents experience cognitive decline and symptoms of dementia.  What if virtual reality, or VR, can help prevent or delay the onset of cognitive decline?  VOA’s Elizabeth Lee visits one VR lab at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles with the details.
 

Satellite images appear to show the once-detained Iranian oil tanker Adrian Darya-1 near the Syrian port of Tartus, despite U.S. efforts to seize the vessel. 

Images obtained by The Associated Press early Saturday from Maxar Technologies showed the vessel there. 

Iranian officials haven’t acknowledged the ship went to Syria. The ship turned off its Automatic Identification System late Monday. 

The new images matched a black-and-white image earlier tweeted by John Bolton, the U.S. national security adviser.

Anyone who said the Adrian Darya-1 wasn’t headed to #Syria is in denial. Tehran thinks it’s more important to fund the murderous Assad regime than provide for its own people. We can talk, but #Iran’s not getting any sanctions relief until it stops lying and spreading terror! pic.twitter.com/saar05T8wt

— John Bolton (@AmbJohnBolton) September 6, 2019

Authorities in Gibraltar had seized the ship in July over concerns it would break European Union sanctions on Syria. They later released it after they say they received a promise from Iran that the vessel wouldn’t go there.

A tight U.S. labor market and booming demand in industries with an abundance of female workers is drawing more women back into the workforce, helping to shrink the longstanding gap in the labor participation rate between men and women to the narrowest on record.

Other parts of a report released by the Labor Department on Friday showed that the longest economic expansion on record is leading to improvements for workers who are often left on the sidelines. Not only did the unemployment rate for African Americans drop to a record low of 5.5% in August, it narrowed to being 1.62 times the white unemployment rate, the smallest gap ever.

The share of women aged 25 to 54 who either have jobs or are looking for work rose by a full percentage point in August to 76.3%, according to the report. The gain helped to lift the overall labor participation rate to 63.2%, one of the bright spots in a monthly jobs report otherwise riddled with signs of a softening U.S. economy.

“What we’re seeing is the benefits of a strong labor market,” said Nick Bunker, an economist at the Indeed Hire Lab.

“Workers who in the past have been shut out of the labor market, including women, workers of color and workers with disabilities have seen increasing gains.”

While the share of men who are working or looking for jobs is still higher at 89%, participation has been growing more strongly for women over the past several years.

Women are benefiting because they have a stronger presence in rapidly growing sectors such as health care and education, Bunker said. The education and health services sector, where women hold roughly three of every four jobs, added 32,000 jobs in August, topped only by the professional services and government sectors. However, many of those jobs are often low paying, contributing to the overall gender wage gap.

The labor participation rate for men, in contrast, has stalled since the recession because men tend to work disproportionately in sectors such as manufacturing, which suffered greatly during the downturn, said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics.

The labor participation rate for men is now 12.7 percentage points higher than women, down from 13.4 percentage points a year earlier, and the lowest since 1950.

That gap could continue to shrink as women benefit from college degrees, which they are more likely to hold than men, Zandi said.

The labor participation rate for women increased steadily after the 1950s as more women entered the workforce, but the trend stopped in 2000 when the labor force participation rate for women peaked at 77%.

Progress stalled in the United States as some women were hindered by expensive child care and other long-standing challenges, including the gender pay gap, Zandi said.

After bottoming at 73% in 2015, the participation rate for women is rising again and finally approaching the highs seen almost two decades ago.

“This highlights why it’s so important to have a strong economy because it helps those that really have struggled for many decades,” Zandi said.

Typhoon winds toppled trees, grounded planes and left thousands of South Korean homes without electricity Saturday as a powerful storm system brushed up against the Korean Peninsula.

Strong winds and rain from Typhoon Lingling caused power outages in about 17,000 homes on the southern resort island of Jeju and in southern mainland regions, South Korea’s Ministry of the Interior and Safety said.

The typhoon was 184 kilometers (114 miles) southwest of the southern mainland city of Gunsan Saturday morning, moving north at 45 kilometers (28 miles) per hour with winds of up to 140 kilometers (87 miles) per hour, the Korea Meteorological Association said.

More damage expected

It is expected to affect a broader part of the country as it passes off South Korea’s west coast later Saturday before making landfall in North Korea in the evening.

The storm toppled trees and streetlamps and damaged traffic signs in Jeju overnight, caused airports to cancel 89 flights and forced 38 people to evacuate from their flooded homes in a city near Seoul. There were no immediate reports of injuries.

National parks were closed, as were southern ports on the mainland and major cross-sea bridges. South Korea’s weather agency has warned of flooding, landslides and structure damaged caused by strong rain and winds expected nationwide until early Sunday.

Kim berates North Korean officials

North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency said leader Kim Jong Un “urgently convened” an emergency meeting Friday to discuss disaster prevention efforts and scolded government officials who he described as “helpless against the typhoon, unaware of its seriousness and seized with easygoing sentiment.”

Kim called for his military to drive national efforts to minimize damage from the typhoon, which he said would be an “enormous struggle” that would require the entire country to step up, KCNA said.

Police on Hawaii’s Big Island have arrested two people as crews demolished a small house built by demonstrators near the place where they are blocking construction of a giant telescope.

Hawaii County Managing Director Wil Okabe says officers arrived at Mauna Kea on Friday morning to clear the way for crews to take down the structure. He did not have details about why the arrests happened.

Officials say protesters who oppose the planned telescope near Mauna Kea’s summit constructed the wooden building in a lava field near their protest camp without a permit. Some Native Hawaiians consider the telescope site sacred.

The Department of Hawaiian Home Lands said this week that the building would be removed.

India’s space agency says it has lost communication with its unmanned spacecraft that was set to touch down Saturday on the moon’s south pole.

“Communications from lander to ground station was lost,” said K Sivan, chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization. “The data is being analyzed.”
 
It is not clear if the mission had failed.

A successful landing would make India just the fourth country to land a vessel on the lunar surface, and only the third nation to operate a robotic rover there.

The roughly $140 million mission, known as Chandrayaan-2, is intended to study permanently shadowed moon craters that are thought to contain water deposits that were confirmed by the Chandrayaan-1 mission in 2008.

Dozens of people trapped on a scuba diving boat that caught fire off the Southern California coast appear to have died from smoke inhalation, not burns, authorities said Friday.

“The indicators are from the preliminary examination of the bodies that the victims died prior to being burned,” Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown said. “The burn damage to the victims was post-mortem.”

More than half the 34 people killed as they slept in bunks below deck early Monday have been positively identified through DNA, and their family members around the world are being notified, Brown told reporters. Divers are searching for the one body that still has not been found.

Five crew members jumped overboard after trying to rescue the 33 scuba divers and one crew member whose escape routes were blocked by fire, federal authorities and the boat’s owner said. The crew, including the captain, said they were driven back by flames, smoke and heat.

Multiple investigations into the disaster are focused on determining what happened and have not become a criminal probe, though Brown said charges are possible.

Notifying families that their loved ones were aboard the Conception and gathering DNA to identify remains burned beyond recognition has taken an extraordinary worldwide effort.

A mother in Japan was told Thursday that her child was on the boat. The FBI also had to deliver the news to a family in Singapore and relatives from India who flew into California, Brown said.

The remains of 18 people have been positively identified, and the sheriff released the names of nine whose families have been notified.

A salvage crew working with the Coast Guard was trying to recover the ship that sank in 60 feet (18 meters) of water off the rugged Channel Islands, where the boat took a three-day excursion.

Speculation has grown about whether the captain and four other crew members who survived had tried to help the others before jumping from the flaming vessel. But they said that by the time they saw flames, it was too late.

The crew members told investigators a “harrowing story” about the moments after the blaze erupted before dawn Monday as it lay at anchor, Jennifer Homendy of the National Transportation Safety Board said Thursday.

They jumped from the bridge area to the main deck — one breaking a leg in the effort — and tried to get through the double doors of the galley, but they were on fire.

That cut off both escape routes from the sleeping quarters: a stairway and an escape hatch that exited in the galley area. The crew then tried, but failed, to get into windows at the front of the vessel.

“At that point, due to heat, flames and smoke, the crew had to jump from the boat,” Homendy said.

Captain Jerry Boylan stayed aboard trying to send radio distress calls and was last in the water, said Glen Fritzler, co-owner of Truth Aquatics Inc. of Santa Barbara, which operated Conception.

“The other crew at a certain point when the flames had engulfed the boat and they were in the water, they could see Jerry jump from the upper deck, a long jump. And there was a trail of smoke following him. They thought he was on fire,” Fritzler told KEYT-TV in Santa Barbara.

“Within minutes, they would’ve been consumed,” he said. “So they did their best. They did re-enter the vessel from the back of the boat after they swam around it. They could not get to firefighting equipment because everything was engulfed.”

The survivors used a skiff at Conception’s stern to reach a nearby boat, and two of them then returned to see if they could rescue any other survivors, Homendy said. They found no one.

Fritzler said the experience has traumatized the survivors.

“They’re breaking down,” he said. “They’re seeking counseling. It’s a very tough time for them.”

Meanwhile, Truth Aquatics filed a lawsuit Thursday in federal court that uses a pre-Civil War provision of maritime law to limit their liability from any victims’ claims. The lawsuit argues that the company and its owners made the boat seaworthy and it was properly manned and equipped.

Coast Guard records show the boat passed its two most recent inspections with no safety violations. And previous customers said Truth Aquatics and the captains of its three boats were very safety conscious.

The NTSB is just a few days into what will be a lengthy investigation that seeks to determine the fire’s cause and identify potential safety enhancements to avoid future disasters.

Investigators are examining potential ignition sources for the fire, including electronics, kitchen stoves and the vessel’s wiring systems. Investigators know photography equipment, batteries and other electronics were stored and plugged in on the Conception.

“We are not ruling anything out at this point,” Homendy said.