Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a deeply controversial pledge on Tuesday to annex the Jordan Valley in the occupied West Bank if re-elected in September 17 polls.

“There is one place where we can apply Israeli sovereignty immediately after the elections,” Netanyahu said in a televised speech.

“If I receive from you, citizens of Israel, a clear mandate to do so … today I announce my intention to apply with the formation of the next government Israeli sovereignty over the Jordan Valley and northern Dead Sea.”

Congressional Democrats are pressing President Donald Trump to intervene with Senate Republicans and demand passage of a bipartisan bill to expand background checks for gun purchases.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said Trump’s “urgent, personal intervention is needed to stem the endless massacres of our fellow Americans by gunfire.”

They implored Trump in a letter released Monday to “seize this moment when your leadership and influence over Republicans in Congress on the issue of guns is so critical.” Trump must not “squander” the opportunity for meaningful action on gun violence “by acceding to NRA-backed proposals or other weak ideas that will do nothing to stop the continuing, horrific spread of gun violence,” the Democrats said.

The letter came as Congress returned to the Capitol from a six-week break, with gun violence legislation at the top of the agenda. A group of U.S. mayors, meanwhile, urged lawmakers to approve the House-passed background checks bill, which would expand background checks to cover private sales such as one that allowed a suspected west Texas gunman to purchase his weapon before killing seven people last month.
 
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has made it clear that he won’t take action on guns without Trump’s commitment to sign a bill into law.

But Trump has flip-flopped on guns, first suggesting he’d be open to background checks legislation or other measures to try to stem gun violence, only to backtrack after speaking to the National Rifle Association and others in the gun lobby. McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, wants to avoid a politically uncomfortable situation of forcing Republicans to vote on gun-control bills only to have Trump reject them.

Background checks

Dayton, Ohio, Mayor Nan Whaley, who has emerged as a leading gun-control advocate following a mass shooting that killed nine people in her city last month, said members of the U.S. Conference of Mayors are focusing on background checks as a first step to stem gun violence. A letter signed by 278 mayors from both parties urges Congress to act on the House-passed bill.

“We want an up-or-down vote on the House bill,” Whaley said in an interview before she and other mayors met with White House counselor Kellyanne Conway and other officials Monday.

Whaley, a Democrat, called prevention of gun violence an issue that crosses party lines.

“We want some Republicans to do the right thing here and [vote for] something that 90 percent of the American people say makes the most sense” to prevent gun violence, she said.

Bryan Barnett, the mayor of the Rochester Hills, Michigan, and president of the mayors’ conference, said he is optimistic Congress will act. Barnett, a Republican, said background checks have strong support in his Republican-leaning city.

“As I drop my kids off at school in a Republican region and in a line of minivans and SUVs … nine of out of 10 of those folks don’t have a problem with background checks,” he said. “It’s not something that curtails their ability to own and operate a gun freely. It’s something they understand that we have to do as Americans because we are part of a greater society.”

‘Time to act is now’

McConnell has not ruled out action on gun control, but said he is waiting for Trump to state what he will sign into law before putting the issue on the Senate floor.

Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt, a member of GOP leadership, also cited Trump as key to Senate action on gun control.

“The president needs to step up here and set some guidelines for what he would do,” Blunt said Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press.

Senators from both parties have been meeting privately among themselves and with the White House on possible areas of agreement.
 
Republican Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, who is working with Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin on a bill to expand background checks, said Trump “has a real interest in doing something in this area.” Still, Toomey said,” It’s hard to say how this will turn out.”

Democrats said the clock is ticking. At least 51 Americans were killed in mass shootings in August alone, Pelosi and Schumer said, and many others were killed “in the daily tragedy of gun violence in our communities.”

“The time for you to act is now,” they told Trump, “before more lives are lost.”

World War II veteran Henry Ochsner, who landed on the beach at Normandy on D-Day and later received the French government’s highest honor for his service, has died. He was 96.

Family friend Dennis Anderson says Ochsner died Saturday at his home in California City of complications from cancer and old age.

As part of the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division — known as the “Screaming Eagles” — Ochsner also fought at the Battle of the Bulge.

In 2017 Ochsner and nine other veterans were awarded France’s National Order of the Legion of Honor during a ceremony at Los Angeles National Cemetery.

Ochsner married Violet Jenson in 1947. He is survived by his wife, their four daughters and two granddaughters. Funeral plans are pending.

Vice President Hamilton Mourão will be Brazil’s acting president through Thursday while President Jair Bolsonaro recovers from abdominal surgery resulting from his stabbing at a political rally last year, his spokesman said on Sunday.

Bolsonaro was stable after a successful five-hour surgery, the presidential palace said in a statement.

Sunday’s surgery was to correct an incisional hernia due to a weakening of certain tissues from three previous surgeries in the president’s abdomen after he was stabbed in September 2018.

Presidential Spokesman General Otávio Barros told a news conference Mourão, a former army general, would act as president for five days starting on Sunday.

Chief Surgeon Antônio Macedo told reporters he expects Bolsonaro to be able to travel from São Paulo to the capital Brasília in a week to 10 days. An incisional hernia is a protrusion of tissue that forms at the site of a healing surgical scar.

Bolsonaro, 64, wrote on Twitter on Saturday night before the surgery: “I remain confident for the next surgery. May God bless us. Good night.” He tweeted after taking part in festivities to mark Brazil’s 197th Independence Day in Brasília.

Adélio Bispo de Oliveira, the man accused of attacking Bolsonaro, was acquitted after a judge in Minas Gerais ruled he was mentally ill. In a decision handed down in June, the court ordered his detention in a mental illness facility for an undetermined period of time.

Samples taken by the U.N. nuclear watchdog at what Israel’s prime minister called a “secret atomic warehouse” in Tehran showed traces of uranium that Iran has yet to explain, two diplomats who follow the agency’s inspections work closely say.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is investigating the particles’ origin and has asked Iran to explain the traces. But Tehran has not done so, according to the diplomats, stoking tensions between Washington and Tehran. U.S. sanctions have slashed Iranian oil sales and Iran has responded by breaching its 2015 nuclear deal with world powers.

In a speech a year ago Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who vehemently opposed the deal, called on the IAEA to visit the site immediately, saying it had housed 15 kg (33 lb) of unspecified radioactive material that had since been removed.

Reuters first reported in April that the IAEA, which is policing the nuclear deal, had inspected the site – a step it had said it takes “only when necessary” – and environmental samples taken there were sent off for analysis.

Israeli and U.S. media have since reported that the samples turned up traces of radioactive material or matter – the same vague language used by Netanyahu.

Those traces were, however, of uranium, the diplomats said – the same element Iran is enriching and one of only two fissile elements with which one can make the core of a nuclear bomb. One diplomat said the uranium was not highly enriched, meaning it was not purified to a level anywhere close to that needed for weapons.

“There are lots of possible explanations,” that diplomat said. But since Iran has not yet given any to the IAEA it is hard to verify the particles’ origin, and it is also not clear whether the traces are remnants of material or activities that predate the landmark 2015 deal or more recent, diplomats say.

The IAEA did not respond to a request for comment. Iranian officials were not available to comment.

Israel’s U.N. ambassador, Danny Danon, said on Twitter that the IAEA had verified Israel version. “The (Iranian) regime must be held to account and not given a free pass,” he tweeted.

NETANYAHU: “I’M NOT RELENTING”

In a live video chat on Facebook, ahead of an election next week, Netanyahu was asked about the Reuters report.

“I know the issue is being handled by the IAEA. I do not intend to discuss this today. It’s very possible that I will have something to say about it tomorrow,” Netanyahu said.

“But it is certainly an important issue – let me tell you, it’s the most important issue as far as our future is concerned. And I am not relenting for a moment.”

The 2015 nuclear deal, which Netanyahu opposed, imposed tight restrictions on Iran’s atomic program in exchange for sanctions relief, and was based on drawing a line under Iran’s past activities. Both the IAEA and U.S. intelligence services here believe Iran had a nuclear weapons program that it ended more than a decade before the deal.

Iran says its nuclear ambitions have always been peaceful.

Hawks such as Netanyahu, who has repeatedly accused Iran of seeking Israel’s destruction, point to Tehran’s past to argue that it can never be trusted. The Islamic Republic’s previous secrecy might explain why uranium traces were found at a location that was never declared to the IAEA.

The IAEA takes environmental samples because they can pick up telltale particles even long after material has been removed from a site. Uranium traces could indicate, for example, the former presence of equipment or material somehow connected to those particles.

Cornel Feruta, the IAEA’s acting director-general, met Iranian officials on Sunday. An IAEA statement said afterwards: “Feruta stressed that these interactions (on its nuclear commitments) require full and timely cooperation by Iran.”

The United States, pulled out of the nuclear deal last year by President Donald Trump, is trying to force Iran to negotiate a more sweeping agreement, covering Tehran’s ballistic missiles and regional behavior, than the current accord.

Iran says it will not negotiate until it is granted relief from U.S. sanctions, which France is trying to broker. In the meantime, Iran is breaching the deal’s restrictions on its nuclear activities step-by-step in response to what it calls U.S. “economic warfare”.

A quarterly IAEA report issued a week ago did not mention the sample results because inspection-related matters are highly confidential. But it did say Iran’s cooperation could be better.

“Ongoing interactions between the Agency and Iran…require full and timely cooperation by Iran. The Agency continues to pursue this objective with Iran,” the report said.

U.S. RAISING PRESSURE

It is far from the first time Iran has dragged its feet in its interactions with the IAEA over the agency’s non-proliferation mandate. The IAEA has made similar calls in previous reports, in relation to promptly granting access for inspections.

The IAEA has likened its work to nuclear accounting, patiently combing through countries’ statements on their nuclear activities and materials, checking them and when necessary seeking further explanations before reaching a conclusion, which can take a long time.

The process of seeking an explanation from Iran has lasted two months, the IAEA’s safeguards division chief told member states in a briefing on Thursday, diplomats present said. But he described what it was seeking an answer to far more generally as questions about Iran’s declaration of nuclear material and activities, since the details are confidential.

“It is not something that is so unique to Iran. The agency has these cases in many other situations,” a senior diplomat said when asked about the current standoff with Iran. “Depending on the engagement it can take two months, six months.”

That does not mean all member states will be happy to wait.

“IAEA Acting Director General going to Iran just as IAEA informs its Board that #Iran may be concealing nuclear material and/or activities,” U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton said on Twitter on Saturday. “We join with other @iaeaorg Board member states eager to get a full report as soon as possible.”

The IAEA’s policy-making, 35-nation Board of Governors holds a week-long quarterly meeting starting on Monday.

Rescuers were searching Sunday for four crew members of a cargo ship that overturned and caught fire near a port on the Georgia coast, but the efforts ran into trouble amid the flames and instability of the ship, the U.S. Coast Guard said.

The Golden Ray cargo ship’s problems began in the early morning when it listed heavily and rolled on its side in St. Simons Sound near the Port of Brunswick with 23 crew members and one pilot on board.

Coast Guard Capt. John Reed said 20 were safely evacuated from the ship before rescuers determined the situation, as smoke and flames appeared, was too risky to go further inside the vessel.

Reed said rescue teams Sunday were trying to stabilize the 656-foot vehicle carrier to continue their search for the missing crew, but they have been unable to determine if the fire has been extinguished.

“Once salvage professionals have determined the vessel to be stable, we will identify the best option to continue our rescue efforts for the four crew remembers who remain on board,” Reed said at a Sunday afternoon news conference.

Search and rescue operations involve federal, state and local agencies. Coast Guard Lt. Lloyd Heflin said rescuers remained on the scene.

“They continue to do what they can. It is a complex situation. We’re looking not just for the safety to be able to rescue the people that are on board, but also to be able to provide safety for our crew. It’s ongoing,” he said.

The Coast Guard said it was notified by a 911 call at about 2 a.m. Sunday of a capsized vessel in the sound.

The cause of the incident remains under investigation. Petty Officer 3rd Class Ryan Dickinson said it isn’t clear if weather conditions caused the ship to lurch. Hurricane Dorian brushed past the Georgia coast last week before being downgraded to a post-tropical cyclone.

The Coast Guard said the overturned ship hasn’t released any pollutants so far, but mitigation responses are ready in case they’re needed.

The Golden Ray, which the Coast Guard said was transporting cars, is flagged out of the Marshall Islands and was headed to Baltimore, according to the website vesselfinder.com. The ship’s registered owner is a South Korean company.

The Port of Brunswick is currently closed to vessel traffic, with an established emergency safety zone in St. Simons Sound. Vessels are not authorized within a half mile of the Golden Ray.

The port is one of the busiest U.S. seaports for shipping automobiles. Nearly 614,000 vehicles and heavy machinery units moved across its docks in the 2019 fiscal year that ended June 30, according to the Georgia Ports Authority.

“Grandpa Wong” holds a cane above his head as he pleads with riot police to stop firing tear gas — an 85-year-old shielding protesters on the front lines of Hong Kong’s fight for democracy.

Despite his age, Wong is a regular sight at Hong Kong’s street battles, hobbling toward police lines, placing himself in between riot officers and hardcore protesters, hoping to de-escalate what have now become near daily clashes.

“I’d rather they kill the elderly than hit the youngsters,” he told AFP during a recent series of skirmishes in the shopping district of Causeway Bay, a gas mask dangling from his chin.

“We’re old now, but the children are the future of Hong Kong,” he added.

Youth lead, but all march

The three months of huge, sometimes violent pro-democracy protests in the semi-autonomous Chinese city are overwhelmingly youth-led.

Research by academics has shown that half of those on the streets are between 20 and 30 years old, while 77 percent have degrees.

But the movement maintains widespread support across the public with lawyers, doctors, nurses, teachers and civil servants all holding recent solidarity rallies, even as the violence escalates.

Groups of elderly people — dubbed “silver hairs” — have also marched.

But Wong and his friend “Grandpa Chan,” a comparatively spry 73-year-old, are among the most pro-active of this older generation.

The two are part of a group called “Protect the Children,” made up of mostly senior citizens and volunteers.

Almost every weekend, they come out to try to mediate between police and demonstrators, as well as buy protesters time when the cops start to charge.

‘Stay peaceful’

As another volley of tear gas bounded down a boulevard in Causeway Bay, a street lined with luxury malls and fashion retailers, Chan gripped Wong’s hand tightly, stopping his old comrade from rushing back into the crossfire.

“If we die, we die together,” yelled Chan, who eschews helmets and instead always wears an eye-catching red hat daubed with slogans.

While “Protect the Children” turn up primarily to defend the youth, Wong said he tries to warn protesters not to provoke police.

“It’s wrong to throw stones, that’s why the police beat them up,” he lamented. “I hope that police won’t hit them and the children won’t throw stuff back.”

“Everyone should stay peaceful to protect the core values of Hong Kong,” he added.

As Hong Kong’s summer of rage has worn on, the violence on both sides has only escalated.

Each weekend has brought increasingly violent bouts, with a minority of black-clad protesters using molotovs, slingshots and bricks.

Police have also upped their violence, deploying water cannons and resorting to tear gas and rubber bullets with renewed ferocity.

More than 1,100 people have been arrested, ranging from children as young as 12 to a man in his mid-70s. Many are facing charges of rioting, which carry 10 years in jail.

Fears have risen for the fate for one veteran protester Alexandra Wong, known as “Grandma Wong,” who attended dozens of protests waving a large British flag.

She lives in Shenzhen, a city across the border on the Chinese mainland but has not been seen at the protests since mid-August when she appeared in videos looking injured after clashes with police inside a subway station.

‘Let the elderly look after you’

Grandpa Wong says he understands why youngsters feel they have no choice but to protest.

He has watched over the decades as mainland China has grown more wealthy and powerful while remaining avowedly authoritarian.

“If the Chinese Communist Party comes to Hong Kong, Hong Kong will become Guangzhou,” Wong sighed, referring to a nearby mainland city.

“The authorities can lock you up whenever they want,” he said.

Hong Kong’s protests were sparked by a controversial bill that would allow extradition to China, raising concerns over unfair trials given the mainland’s record of rights abuses.

But it soon morphed into a wider movement calling for democratic reform and police accountability.

Roy Chan, who organizes the “Protect the Children” group, says he respects what the elderly citizens do but is disappointed they feel they need to come out.

“They should have a good life at home during the last years of their lives,” he said. “But they are in a war and protecting the youth.”

Grandpa Wong’s presence at the Causeway Bay protest came to an end as riot police eventually cleared the usually bustling shopping district.

But the next day he was right back at it, this time at a protest near the city’s airport.

“Go home kiddos,” he hollered, brimming with renewed energy. “Let the elderly look after you.”

A senior minister of Britain’s ruling Conservative party has resigned because she does not think the prime minister is serious about creating a Brexit divorce deal. 

Work and Pensions Secretary Amber Rudd said late Saturday that Boris Johnson is not working to secure a Brexit withdrawal agreement. 

“There is no evidence of a deal,” Rudd said.  “There are no formal negotiations taking place.” 

Rudd said in her resignation letter: “I joined your cabinet in good faith: Accepting that ‘no deal’ had to be on the table, because it was the means by which we would have the best chance of achieving a new deal to leave on 31 October.” 

Rudd added: “The government is expending a lot of energy to prepare for ‘no deal’ but I have not seen the same level of intensity go into our talks with the European Union.” 

Home Secretary Sajid Javid said Sunday the government is “straining every sinew to get a deal.” 
 

Dorian, now a post-tropical cyclone, is expected to move over or near the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador Sunday and then enter the North Atlantic.

The storm hit Canada’s Atlantic coast Saturday with heavy wind and rains that toppled a construction crane into the side of an apartment building under construction in Halifax, the provincial capital of Nova Scotia.

Nova Scotia Power told the Associated Press that 300,000 customers of Halifax, which has a population of 400,000, were without power late Saturday.

Before reaching Canada, Dorian moved over extreme southeastern Massachusetts and Maine in the U.S.

On Friday, Dorian made landfall over Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, after weakening into a Category 1 storm. It generated tornadoes, severe storm surges and flooding in coastal areas in North and South Carolina.

Steve Harris, a resident of North Carolina’s Ocracoke Island said, “We went from almost no water to 4 to 6 feet in a matter of minutes.”

Dorian was a Category 5 storm when it hit the Bahamas, creating a path of death and destruction, leaving an estimated 70,000 people in need of immediate humanitarian relief.

The official Bahamian death toll is 43, but officials say that will rise, because hundreds, perhaps thousands are missing.

The death toll will be “catastrophic and devastating,” Prime Minister Hubert Minnis said, while Health Minister Duane Sands said the final toll “will be staggering.”

The U.N. World Food Program warned Saturday that thousands of displaced people are living in “rapidly deteriorating” conditions in the worst-hit parts of the Bahamas in Dorian’s aftermath.

“The needs remain enormous,” WFP spokesman Herve Verhoosel said in an email Saturday.

“People have no food. People have no water, and it’s not right. They should have been gone,” Chamika Durosier told the French news agency AFP Saturday as she waited for a flight out of Abaco, one of the most badly damaged areas in the Bahamas. “The home that we were in fell on us,” she said. “We had to crawl — get out crawling. By the grace of God, we are still alive.”

“Our relief operation is growing, but we are also facing serious challenges in terms of delivering aid,” Red Cross spokeswoman Jennifer Eli told Reuters. “Even search-and-rescue choppers haven’t been able to reach some people because there’s no place to land. These challenges are affecting everyone.”
 

In Russia, elections are Sept. 8 for municipal and Duma deputies and regional governors. The vote was preceded by months of protests in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Authorities used different tactics to prevent the spread of discontent around the country and contain any opposition. Yulia Savchenko reports from Moscow on how authorities attempted to keep the unrest from spreading, and the strategies used by protesters to sidestep the suppression.
 

At a routine ultrasound when she was five months pregnant, Hevan Lunsford began to panic when the technician took longer than normal, then told her she would need to see a specialist.

Lunsford, a nurse in Alabama, knew it was serious and begged for an appointment the next day.

That’s when the doctor gave her and her husband the heart-wrenching news: The baby boy they decided to name Sebastian was severely underdeveloped and had only half a heart. If he survived, he would need care to ease his pain and several surgeries. He may not live long.

Lunsford, devastated, asked the doctor about ending the pregnancy.

“I felt the only way to guarantee that he would not have any suffering was to go through with the abortion,” she said of that painful decision nearly three years ago.

But the doctor said Alabama law prohibits abortions after five months. He handed Lunsford a piece of paper with information for a clinic in Atlanta, a roughly 180-mile (290-kilometer) drive east.

Lunsford is one of thousands of women in the U.S. who have crossed state lines for an abortion in recent years as states have passed ever stricter laws and as the number of clinics has declined.

Although abortion opponents say the laws are intended to reduce abortions and not send people to other states, at least 276,000 women terminated their pregnancies outside their home states between 2012 and 2017, according to an Associated Press analysis of data collected from state reports and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In New Mexico, the number of women from out of state who had abortions more than doubled in that period, while Missouri women represented nearly half the abortions performed in neighboring Kansas.

“The procedure itself was probably the least traumatic part of it,” Lunsford said. “If it would have been at my hospital, there would have been a feeling like what I was doing was OK and a reasonable choice.”

While abortions across the U.S. are down, the share of women who had abortions out of state rose slightly, by half a percentage point, and certain states had notable increases over the five-year period, according to AP’s analysis. 

In pockets of the Midwest, South and Mountain West, the number of women terminating a pregnancy in another state rose considerably, particularly where a lack of clinics means the closest provider is in another state or where less restrictive policies in a neighboring state make it easier and quicker to terminate a pregnancy there.

“In many places, the right to abortion exists on paper, but the ability to access it is almost impossible,” said Amy Hagstrom Miller, CEO of Whole Women’s Health, which operates seven abortion clinics in Maryland, Indiana, Texas, Virginia and Minnesota. “We see people’s access to care depend on their ZIP code.”

The numbers 

Nationwide, women who traveled from other states received at least 44,860 abortions in 2017, the most recent year for which data are available, according to the AP analysis of data from 41 states.

That’s about 10% of all reported procedures that year, but counts from nine states, including highly populated California and Florida, and the District Columbia were not included, either because they were not collected or reported across the full five years.

Thirteen states saw a rise in the number of out-of-state women having abortions between 2012 and 2017.

New Mexico’s share of abortions performed on women from out of state more than doubled, from 11% to roughly 25%. One likely reason is that a clinic in Albuquerque is one of only a few independent facilities in the country that perform abortions close to the third trimester without conditions.

Georgia’s share of abortions performed on out-of-state women rose from 11.5% to 15%. While Georgia has passed restrictive laws, experts and advocates still view it as more accessible than some neighboring states.

In Illinois, the percentage of abortions performed on non-residents more than doubled to 16.5% of all reported state abortions in 2017. That is being driven in large part by women from Missouri, one of six states with only a single abortion provider.

Even that provider, in St. Louis, has been under threat of closing after the state health department refused to renew its license.

Missouri lawmakers also passed a law this year that would ban almost all abortions past eight weeks of a pregnancy, but it faces a legal challenge.

About 10 miles (16 kilometers) from St. Louis, across the Mississippi River, is the Hope Clinic in Granite City, Illinois, which has seen a 30% increase in patients this year and has added two doctors, deputy director Alison Dreith said.

About 55 percent of its patients come from Missouri, and it also sees women from Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio. All those states have mandatory waiting periods to receive an abortion, a requirement Illinois does not have.

Dreith called it a scary time for women in states with highly restrictive laws and few clinics.

“The landscape that we’re seeing today did not happen overnight, and it was not by accident,” she said.

And Illinois isn’t the only place Missouri women are heading for abortions.

In 2017, Missouri women received 47% of all abortions performed in Kansas. That is in large part because the only access to the procedure throughout western Missouri, particularly the greater Kansas City area, is across the state line in Overland Park, Kansas.

Legislative action 

Between 2011 and May 31 of this year, 33 states passed 480 laws restricting abortion, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports abortion rights.

In 2019 alone, lawmakers approved 58 restrictions, primarily in the Midwest, Plains and South — almost half of which would ban all, most or some abortions, the group said.

The most high-profile laws, which face legal challenges that could eventually test the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, would ban abortion after a fetal heartbeat can be detected — as early as six weeks.

Advocates say that if the Supreme Court upholds the latest restrictions, it will become more common for women to seek abortions in other states.

“The intent of these lawmakers is to completely outlaw abortion and force people not to have abortions. But in reality, it pushes people farther and wider to access the care they want and need,” said Quita Tinsley, deputy director of Access Reproductive Care Southeast.

ARC Southeast is part of the National Network of Abortion Funds, a collective of 70 abortion support groups for women in six Southeast states. Some provide money to women to pay for abortions, while others also help with transportation, lodging and child care.

A third of women calling the group’s hotline for help end up traveling out of state for abortions, Tinsley said. Many choose Georgia because it’s convenient to get to and considered slightly less restrictive than some other states in the South.

In Georgia, which has a mandatory waiting period, a woman is not required to come to a clinic twice, as they are in Tennessee. But if Georgia’s new fetal heartbeat law survives a court challenge, it would have one of the earliest state-imposed abortion bans.

That would force many women to go even farther from where they live to terminate their pregnancies.

Increase in New Mexico 

Of all states, New Mexico has seen the biggest increase in the number of women coming from elsewhere for an abortion — a 158% jump between 2012 and 2017, according to AP’s analysis.

The New Mexico Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice helps an average of 100 women a year but is on track to assist 200 this year. Some of its 55 volunteers open their homes to women coming from out of state.

Executive director Joan Lamunyon Sanford said her group is doing what faith communities have always done: “Care for the stranger and welcome the traveler.”

Lamunyon Sanford said the need is growing as barriers increase and women are unable to access care where they live.

“They have to figure out so many details and figuring out how they are going to get the funding for everything,” she said. “Sometimes it’s just too much. And then they become parents.”

The coalition helped Beth Vial, who didn’t learn she was pregnant until she was six months along after chronic medical conditions masked her symptoms.

As a 22-year-old college student living in Portland, Oregon, Vial was beyond the point when nearly every abortion clinic in the country would perform the procedure.

Vial’s only option for an abortion was New Mexico, where a volunteer with the New Mexico Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice drove her to and from the clinic in Albuquerque and brought her meals.

The support she received inspired her to join the board of Northwest Access Abortion Fund, which helps women in Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Alaska.

“To have people I didn’t even know support me in ways that I didn’t even really know I needed at the time was unlike anything I have ever experienced,” said Vial, now 24. “It has encouraged me to give back to my community so other people don’t have to experience that alone.”

Hoping for cultural shift 

Abortion opponents say the intent of laws limiting the procedure is not to push women to another state but to build more time for them to consider their options and reduce the overall number of abortions.

“I have been insistent in telling my pro-life colleagues that’s all well and good if the last abortion clinic shuts down, but it’s no victory if women end up driving 10 minutes across the river to Granite City, Illinois, or to Fairview Heights,” said Sam Lee, director of Campaign Life Missouri and a longtime anti-abortion lobbyist.

Anti-abortion activists also hope a broader cultural shift eventually makes these issues disappear.

“We are seeing this trend toward life and a realization of what science tells us about when life begins,” said Cole Muzio, executive director of the Family Policy Alliance of Georgia, who advocated successfully for new abortion limits there. “Just because something is legal does not mean that it is good.”

Before the recent wave of legislation focused on limiting when an abortion can be performed, opponents largely worked to regulate clinics. Critics say those regulations contributed to more clinics closing in recent years, reducing access to abortion in parts of the country and pushing women farther for care.

Texas lost more than half its clinics after lawmakers in 2013 required them to have facilities equal to a surgical center and mandated that doctors performing abortions have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital.

Even though the U.S. Supreme Court struck down key provisions of the law in 2016, most clinics have not reopened.

Candice Russell was among those who felt the impact. When she sought an abortion in Dallas in 2014, she was told she would have to wait more than two weeks because of an influx of patients from other parts of Texas where clinics had closed.

She feared she would not be able to miss work for back-to-back appointments, required under Texas’ mandatory waiting period, so she told the bar where she worked that a relative had died and took out a payday loan to buy an airplane ticket to California. She had the procedure the next day.

“Even though I had to take on that horrendous loan and entered a debt spiral that lasted until about two years ago, I am really, really lucky,” said Russell, now 36 and working as deputy director of the Yellowhammer Fund, which helps women in Alabama seeking abortions. “There are a lot of people who just can’t do that. They can’t get on a plane and fly 1,500 miles for an abortion.”

Nationwide, 168 independent abortion clinics have closed since 2012, and just a handful opened over that time, according to the Abortion Care Network, a clinic advocacy group.

Some resulted from providers retiring and an overall decline in unplanned pregnancies, but advocates say many shut down because of restrictive laws.

“It’s not about safety of patients,” said Nikki Madsen, executive director of the Abortion Care Network. “It’s about closing clinics.”

For Lunsford, it took two years before she could begin managing the grief of losing her son, compounded by the hurdles she faced to carry out that painful decision — the drive to Atlanta, staying in a hotel and going to a clinic with doctors she didn’t know.

Lunsford, now 31, said she thinks about how she couldn’t hold her baby, an intimate goodbye that might have been possible if she had the abortion at a hospital. Before she left Atlanta, she asked the clinic’s staff to use the inkpad and paper she brought so she could keep her son’s footprints and handprints.

“Most of the laws I navigated, there was no reason for them,” she said. “None of them prevented my abortion. It just made it where I had to travel out of state.”

Venezuela opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez is forming a shadow government from his refuge at the Spanish Embassy in Caracas, despite an agreement that prohibited him from engaging in political activity when the embassy granted him asylum five months ago.

Lopez sought the protection of Spain’s diplomatic mission after he led a failed coup against embattled President Nicolas Maduro in April. He was backed in the effort by parliamentary president Juan Guaido, who is recognized as the transitional head of state by the United States and 50 other countries.

Guaido says that he has named Lopez to form a “center of government,” or shadow cabinet, to prepare for an eventual takeover by the opposition, as U.S. sanctions bite into Maduro’s remaining lifelines.

Spain says the conditions under which they took in Lopez have not changed. But Maduro’s growing isolation and Venezuela’s deteriorating economy may be forcing the hand of EU governments, which have been trying to broker a deal between Maduro and his opponents on terms for new elections.

“The conditions on which protection was granted have not varied nor are they affected by the decision of president Juan Guaido to name Lopez General Coordinator for the creation of a center of government,” Spain’s foreign ministry told VOA in a written statement.

In what opposition spokesmen say could be a fatal blow for the Maduro administration, China’s national oil company announced this week that it is suspending oil production in Venezuela due to growing logistical complications and tightened U.S. sanctions. China and Russia have been Maduro’s largest customers.

The Spanish Embassy does not allow Lopez to give interviews. Nor is he permitted to hold political meetings. But he is in daily contact with his father, Leopoldo Lopez Gil, a Spanish national and member of the European Parliament. Speaking to VOA by phone from Brussels, Lopez Gil said his son is busy online with other members of the “shadow cabinet” appointed by Guaido.

“He receives reports and interfaces electronically with economists, jurists, engineers and other experts formulating plans to deal with the desperately urgent problems that a new government would face,” Lopez Gil said.

“We want to be positioned to take the bull by the horns without falling in the mud as happened in Panama,” he said, referring to the days of heavy fighting that followed the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama to topple Gen. Antonio Noriega.

Exiled Venezuelan retired admiral Ivan Carratu, who maintains a network of contacts inside Venezuela’s military, says that Lopez’s project is unlikely to attract support from Venezuela’s armed forces, who hold the key to any peaceful transition of power.

“The main purpose of the shadow government is to project the figure of Lopez as future president in whatever scenario unfolds,” Carruto said.

Even if Maduro is ousted, Lopez Gil said, outside military assistance may be needed to counter armed resistance that is likely to develop from radical pro-Maduro “colectivos” headed by Cuban advisers and linked with Colombian leftist guerrilla groups controlling vast chunks of Venezuelan territory.

Lopez Gil said a “reactivation” of guerrilla activity announced last week by FARC leader Ivan Marquez — who is based in Venezuela — is “highly worrying.”

Colombian security analyst Jose Marulanda Marin believes the effort to form a parallel government is likely to have “little effect,” but he worries about attempts to assassinate key participants who are now living in exile in Colombia. Those include former parliamentary speaker Julio Borges, who was named last week as foreign minister in the shadow cabinet.

U.S. coordination with the shadow government is being handled through a Venezuelan Affairs Unit (VAU) at the American Embassy in Colombia. The unit is directed by U.S. diplomats who were expelled from Venezuela after being accused of supporting coup plots last year.

“The VAU will continue to work for the restoration of democracy …the security and well-being of the Venezuelan people …interacting with the government of interim president Juan Guaido,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said.

 

A major prisoner swap between Russia and Ukraine is underway — with multiple reports citing the transfer of prisoners out of Moscow’s Lefortovo Prison as well as the arrival of a Ukrainian state-emblemed plane to Vnukovo airport in the Russian capital Saturday morning.  

While the exact number, list, and timing of the exchange is not yet publicly known, the leaders of both countries have insisted a significant exchange was imminent in recent days.  

“We will finalize our talks on the exchange, and I think it will be rather large-scale,” said Russian President Vladimir Putin while addressing the issue at an economic forum in the far eastern city of Vladivostok on Thursday.  

“And also it will also be a good step forward toward the normalization” of relations, added Putin.

Putin’s comments followed Ukraine’s release of Volodymyr Tsemakh, a former commander of Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine, by a court in Kyiv on Thursday.  

The release was not without controversy: Ukrainian security services have identified Tsemakh as a key witness to the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17, which was shot down over east Ukraine in July of 2014, killing all 298 people aboard.

Dutch prosecutors investigating the tragedy had urged the government in Kyiv to prevent Tsemakh’s extradition, saying he is “a person of interest” in their work.

Yet recently elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy came to power promising to bring Ukrainian prisoners in Russia home and end the conflict in East Ukraine.

In July, Putin and Zelenskiy held their first phone talks since the new Ukrainian leader took office.

At the time, a Kremlin spokesman said the two leaders discussed a stalled peace agreement for Ukraine’s Donbas region as well as the possibility of prisoner exchanges “from both sides.”

 

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.”

Trump administration officials will meet next week to discuss whether to further restrict the number of refugees accepted into the U.S., according to a senior administration official.

Some administration officials believe that the cap should be smaller because of the number of asylum-seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border and other protections afforded to migrants who live in war-torn countries or those devastated by natural disasters. Some have argued for the number to be 15,000 or fewer, according to two other administration officials. The officials were not allowed to speak publicly and spoke to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

Nothing has been decided. Senior leaders will meet in the Situation Room Tuesday to discuss the cap, which is set by the president and must be decided before the fiscal year begins Oct. 1. The New York Times first reported the meeting.

Cap currently 30,000

Right now, the cap is set at 30,000, and 28,501 refugees were accepted between Oct. 1, 2018, and Sept. 6. Last budget year the cap was 45,000 and 22,491 were admitted. That’s one-quarter of the number allowed to enter two years ago and the lowest since Congress passed a law in 1980 creating the modern resettlement system.

Behind the reductions were more stringent security protocols for citizens of 11 countries designated by the administration as presenting the greatest potential threat.

The State Department acknowledged that the screening and vetting procedures have resulted in fewer refugee admissions in 2018.

Rigorous screening process

The tighter screening of refugees reflects one of Trump’s signature issues. He imposed a travel ban on people from seven majority Muslim countries as one of his first actions upon taking office in January 2017.

The Department of Homeland Security has since made it harder to enter the U.S. entirely, with more rigorous interviews and background checks. Administration officials say refugee applicants are now subject to the strictest, most comprehensive background check process for any group seeking to come to the U.S.

Officials collect more data on refugee applicants and conduct higher-level security vetting. Officers have been given training on how to determine credibility. Fraud detection and national security officers now come overseas with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services teams who are processing refugees.

Administration officials have said the U.S. remains at the forefront of helping those fleeing persecution, and they note that from the 2008 budget year to 2017, the U.S. gave lawful permanent resident status to 1.7 million people for humanitarian reasons.

Officials in Hong Kong are limiting transportation services to the airport Saturday to try to prevent any demonstrations from taking place there this weekend.

Authorities say an airport train from downtown Hong Kong will depart as scheduled Saturday but will skip all stations in between and instead only stop at the airport terminal.

Some protesters called earlier this week for renewed demonstrations at Hong Kong’s airport; however, it is not clear whether they will take place.

Hong Kong’s airport was forced to close in August when protesters occupied terminals. China called the behavior “near-terrorist acts” and some protesters later issued an apology.

Violence broke out at protests late Friday after demonstrators besieged a police station and a subway stop, leading police to fire tear gas and rubber bullets.

Earlier this week, Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam announced that her government will formally withdraw an extradition bill that would have allowed Hong Kong residents to face trial in mainland China.

The extradition bill sparked the mass protest movement in June. Since then, however, demonstrators’ goals have expanded to include demands for full democracy.

Felicity Huffman and her lawyers pleaded Friday for probation, community service and a fine instead of jail time for her role in the college admissions scandal, buoyed by letters of support from her famous husband, William H. Macy, and her “Desperate Housewives” co-star Eva Longoria.

Huffman, in a three-page letter filed Friday with the federal court in Boston that is handling the sweeping bribery scheme, said she has “a deep and abiding shame” for her actions.

She said she has found motherhood to be “bewildering” and had turned to the scheme in the hopes of giving her oldest daughter a chance to pursue her dream of acting.

Huffman said in the letter that her daughter has a diagnosed learning disability and struggles with math.

“In my desperation to be a good mother, I talked myself into believing that all I was doing was giving my daughter a fair shot,” Huffman wrote to U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani. “I see the irony in that statement now because what I have done is the opposite of fair. I have broken the law, deceived the educational community, betrayed my daughter, and failed my family.”

U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling, meanwhile, argues that Huffman should spend 30 days in jail because she knew the scheme was wrong and participated anyway.

“Her efforts weren’t driven by need or desperation, but by a sense of entitlement, or at least moral cluelessness, facilitated by wealth and insularity,” his office wrote in its filing Friday. “Millions of parents send their kids to college every year. All of them care as much she does about their children’s fortunes. But they don’t buy fake SAT scores and joke about it (‘Ruh Ro!’) along the way.”

Huffman used the Scooby-Doo catchphrase in an email after her daughter’s high school tried to make her take the exam with its own proctor instead of one preferred by the consultant she was paying.

Huffman’s filing also included more than two dozen letters of support, among them pleas from Macy and Longoria.

Macy, who wasn’t charged in the scheme, said in his own letter to the judge that their family has struggled since his wife’s arrest.

Huffman has rarely left the house and hasn’t received an audition or job offer since her arrest six months ago, he said.

Their oldest daughter is taking a gap year and not attending college for now, Macy said. And the family, which also includes a younger daughter in high school, is also seeing a therapist together.

“Felicity’s only interest now is figuring out how to make amends,” Macy wrote, “and help her daughters heal and move on.”

Longoria, in her two-page statement, recalls Huffman had a “gentle character” and “kind heart” while the two starred in “Housewives.”

“When I began the TV show, I was very new to the business and industry as a whole. Felicity was the first one to take me under her wing,” she wrote. “I know I would not have survived those years if it wasn’t for the friendship of Felicity.”

Longoria also wrote: “She always leads with her heart and has always put others first.”

Huffman is among 51 people charged in a scheme in which prosecutors say wealthy parents paid an admissions consultant to bribe coaches and test administrators to help their children get into prestigious colleges.

She pleaded guilty in May to fraud charges for paying $15,000 to have a proctor correct her daughter’s SAT exam answers. She is scheduled to be sentenced Sept. 13.

The amount she paid is among the smaller bribes alleged in the scheme. Fellow actress Lori Loughlin and her fashion designer husband, Mossimo Giannulli, for example, are charged with paying $500,000 for their two daughters to get into college. Unlike Huffman, they are fighting the charges.

Huffman’s lawyers are arguing for one year of probation, 250 hours of community service and a $20,000 fine. They say in their filing that fraud cases involving standardized tests “almost always” result in probation and that incarceration is “exceptionally rare.”

They also argue that a sentence including 250 hours of community service would be significantly more than judges typically hand down.

Huffman’s lawyers say the 56-year-old Emmy Award-winning actress proposes completing those service hours with organizations that work with at-risk youth in the Los Angeles area, where she lives.

The U.S. attorney’s office also seeks a year of probation after jail and a $20,000 fine.
It argues that a one-month jail sentence recognizes that Huffman quickly accepted responsibility after being arrested and charged. Under federal sentencing guidelines, prosecutors could have sought up to six months’ incarceration.

The values that Americans view as important have shifted over the last two decades, as younger Americans place less significance on patriotism, religion and having children.

A recent poll shows that 42% of Millennials and Generation Z (ages of 18-38) view patriotism as “very important” compared to almost 79% of people over age 55. 

Hard work is the attribute all Americans value the most with 89% of respondents saying it’s a very important quality. Tolerance for others, financial security and self-fulfillment also topped the list.

Overall, about half of people — 48% — say religion is very important to them, down from 62 percent in 1998. While 67% of older Americans view religion or a belief in God as very important, just 30% of the younger group felt the same.   

Click on graphic to enlarge

When it comes to having children, 43% say it’s very important. That’s down from 20 years ago, when 59% of people said that becoming a parent was very important.

Forty percent of people say increasing diversity and tolerance of different cultures and races is a step forward, 14% see it as a step backward, while the biggest majority, 43%, say it is both a step forward and a step backward.  

Issues like religion and patriotism have traditionally been politically important. However, the changing views of the emerging generation suggest those topics might not be at the forefront in the coming years and politicians will have to adjust their platforms and strategies accordingly. 

The NBC News Wall Street Journal survey of 1,000 adults was conducted from August 10 to August 14.

Main photo courtesy of Flickr user Rob Briscoe via Creative Commons license.

 

Three words resonated like a refrain during Pope Francis’ tour of Mozambique this week: hope, peace and reconciliation. Tens of thousands of faithful from across the continent packed a stadium Friday to hear that message and take it with them.  
 
Neither driving rain nor biting cold nor immense distances kept 50,000 people from packing the stadium outside Maputo to receive the blessing of the leader of the Catholic Church. The Mass was the pope’s final blessing in Mozambique before he proceeded to Madagascar, the second stop on his Africa tour. 
 
It was a whirlwind three days for the pope in Mozambique, packed with issues that straddled faith and politics. He was greeted Wednesday night by President Filipe Nyusi, who is running for re-election in October in a campaign that is already shaping up to be a rough one. 
 
The pope’s main theme was reconciliation, after leaders in the country recently signed a peace deal aimed at ending decades of low-level conflict that followed a brutal 16-year civil war. 
 
The pontiff also met with HIV and AIDS patients at a church-run hospital outside Maputo. He also touched on the effects of climate change. 
 

“I would like my first words of closeness and solidarity to be addressed to all those struck by Cyclones Idai and Kenneth, whose devastating effects continue to be felt by so many families, especially in those places where it is not yet possible to rebuild, because they require this special attention,” he said. 

In this deeply religious nation — which is predominantly Christian, with Catholics having the largest share — many said this was a once-in-a-lifetime event. Pensioner Ligia Alfeu Mapatse wrapped herself in a colorful capulana — a traditional Mozambican cloth — bearing the pope’s face. 
 
“I’m here to thank the pope, our leader,” she said, “in order to have peace.” 

And lifelong Catholic Mantsane Rantekoa took an overnight bus from the tiny nation of Lesotho to see the pontiff. 
 
“Mozambique is not unique. Lesotho has its problems, and we felt that coming to join Mozambique with the visit of the pope, we’ll get lucky the second time around and that he can visit Lesotho. Because we need him, we need his prayers,” Rantekoa said. 
 
After Madagascar, the pope will continue to the final stop on his Africa tour, the island nation of Mauritius. 

KHARTOUM — As Sudan awaits formation of a new government following a landmark political deal, hundreds of thousands of houses across the country remain under water.

The rainy season, which causes the Nile to flood every year, hit particularly hard this year. And fuel shortages — the main motivation behind the initial protests last year which ousted longtime President Omar al Bashir — have continued to exacerbate the problem.

“The main issue is draining the water — the pump needs diesel all the time and there’s no diesel,” said Abdul el-Azzem Majid, a resident of the flooded Al Azoozab suburb of Khartoum.

“We need it more than — we can provide everything else but not the diesel,” said Majid.

While the one pump functioning in Al Azoozab drains water out of the town, residents and volunteers fill sandbags in an attempt to reinforce a cracked barricade that, in previous years, had kept flooded Nile waters out of their homes.

According to U.N. numbers released last week, 62 people have been killed in the recent floods.  State news agency SUNA reported that 35,000 homes in 17 out of Sudan’s 18 states had been affected.

On Aug. 17, Sudan’s opposition coalition Forces for Freedom and Change signed a historic political agreement with members of the military. A prime minister and cabinet have been named, but the government is still forming a legislative body.

The power-sharing agreement calls for a three-year transitional period leading to elections for a civilian-led government.

As Sudan’s new government continues to settle, local aid organizations are unsure how and when state aid will be made available.

“Sadly this happens every year — it’s a problem of infrastructure, city planning, and sanitation,” said Hassan Mustafa, a volunteer at local aid organization, Nafeer.

“Government intervention is still very slow,” he added. “Political turmoil has already affected the process, and as there’s no government formed yet, that also changes the situation.”

Nafeer, which means collective or community aid, is made up of volunteers who assess damage, collect water and medicine, and sometimes help evacuate victims out of affected areas.

Though Nafeer was created a few years ago, some victims like Mohamed Salah say that as the country waits for its legislative body to be formed in the wake of months of protests, the general sense of community in the country has increased.

“The political change that occurred had resulted in social change — we’ve seen a more collaborative approaches and an increase in younger volunteers as an alternative to our government,” Salah said, standing outside his flooded home as his wife and children look on from the top floor.

“They have been opposing the regime but they can fulfill the government’s role in its absence. The youth have done great work in this chapter of our history.”