Dozens of journalists on Monday marched in Bosnia’s capital of Sarajevo after thugs forced a radio station to remove a story from its website. Protesters gathered outside the offices of soccer club Sarajevo and then walked through the city center, demanding better protection and tougher penalties for attacks on the press. Police detained two people over Friday’s incident when assailants who said they were soccer fans of the club threatened the staff of the radiosarajevo.ba news portal until they removed the news that a Sarajevo fan was convicted in Belarus of cocaine possession. The media outlet said the editor was kept in a “de facto hostage situation,” his family was also threatened and he was forced to “physically remove the text from the system.” The suspects are facing legal proceedings but have been allowed to remain out of prison, according to Bosnian media. “It is very hard to be a journalist in Bosnia and it’s getting harder and harder,” said Faruk Vele, one of the editors of the radiosarajevo.ba website. “We wish to say: State, protect us!” The Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, Dunja Mijatovic, praised Bosnia authorities for their “prompt reaction” following the incident. “It is important …

Public pressure, including from famous faces in the Russian entertainment industry, has led to the release of a young actor in what observers say is a victory by civil society against state repression.  As Ricardo Marquina and Olga Pavlova report from Moscow, Russian authorities have, after massive street protests, overturned a three-and-a-half-year prison sentence for an actor accused, without substantial evidence, of assaulting a police officer. Steve Redisch narrates their story. …

Unseasonably cold and wet September weather didn’t deter thousands of protesters packing a central Moscow square on Sunday to voice their opposition to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Jamie Dettmer reports from the Russian capital. …

The Republican-led Senate on Thursday confirmed lawyer Eugene Scalia, a son of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, as President Donald Trump’s new labor secretary. The Senate voted along party lines, 53-44, to approve Scalia’s nomination. Republicans said his background in labor and employment law made him qualified for the post. Democrats said Scalia fought for corporations and against workers and was the wrong candidate for the Cabinet post. Sen. Lamar Alexander, chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said he received more than 30 letters of support for Scalia from small-business owners, workers, former career lawyers at the Labor Department, where Scalia once worked, and more. “It is important for the Department of Labor to create an environment to help employers and employees succeed in today’s rapidly changing workplace,” said Alexander, R-Tenn. Scalia spent the bulk of his career as a partner in the Washington office of the Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher firm, where he rang up a string of victories in court cases on behalf of business interests challenging labor and financial regulations. He also served for a year as the Labor Department’s top lawyer during the George W. Bush administration. “The president has …

The commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said Monday that destroying arch-rival Israel has become an “achievable goal” thanks to his country’s technological advances. “This sinister regime must be wiped off the map and this is no longer… a dream (but) it is an achievable goal,” Major General Hossein Salami said, quoted by the Guards’ Sepah news site. Four decades on from Iran’s Islamic revolution, “we have managed to obtain the capacity to destroy the imposter Zionist regime”, he said. Salami’s comments, while not unusual for Iranian officials, come amid particularly heightened international tensions over Iran’s nuclear program and a series of incidents that have raised fears of a confrontation between Tehran and its other main regional rival, Riyadh. The United States, which withdrew from a landmark nuclear deal between Iran and world powers in 2018, has imposed a campaign of “maximum pressure” — with vocal support from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The comments by the commander of Iran’s ideological army were given prominent coverage by the Tasnim and Fars news agencies, close to ultra-conservative political factions. The official IRNA agency also carried his remarks, but placed more emphasis on his assertion that Iran was growing stronger and would finally beat …

 Lyonel Desmarattes in Washington, Sony Louis in Leogane, Jaudelet Junior Saint-Vil in Fort Liberte and Hernst Eliscar in Les Cayes contributed to this report   WASHINGTON / PORT-AU-PRINCE – Hundreds of demonstrators protested across Haiti Monday, responding to calls by the opposition and anti-corruption militants to take to the streets and build roadblocks to force President Jovenel Moise to resign. In Port-au-Prince, police fired on protesters who were trying to burn down a police station in the Carrefour Aeroport neighborhood, wounding a local radio reporter. Protesters did manage to set fire to a police car. In the southern city of Les Cayes, protesters set ablaze a police station located in the southern part of the city. The local office of national electric company EDH was looted. In Fort Liberte, hundreds took to the streets early. Some wore costumes as they marched through the tow,n holding a casket draped in white fabric, adorned with black crosses and the words, “Goodbye Jovenel,” written in black marker on the sides. The Tet Ansanm pou Rebati Ayiti (Union to Rebuild Haiti) group, which includes various opposition organizations, Sunday called for the protests.      Opposition leader Andre Michel gives a press conference in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, …

The Treasury Department is targeting Russians suspected of trying to influence the 2018 U.S. midterm elections.   Treasury says, however, there is no indication that they were able to compromise election infrastructure in ways that would have blocked voters, changed vote counts or disrupted vote counting.    Monday’s action targets for sanctions four entities, seven individuals, three aircraft and a yacht that are all associated with the Internet Research Agency and its Russian financier, Yevgeniy Prigozhin.   Treasury says the IRA used fictitious personas on social media and disseminated false information to attempt to influence the 2018 U.S. midterm elections and try to undermine faith in U.S. democratic institutions.   …

President Donald Trump has congratulated Gen. Mark Milley on becoming chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff. Trump is attending a rainy welcome ceremony for Milley at a military base in Arlington, Virginia. Trump says he’s always heard that rain on a big event brings luck and tells Milley, “Mark, I think you’re going to be the luckiest general in history.”   The role of the Joint Chiefs chairman is to advise the president, defense secretary and the National Security Council on military issues.   Trump also calls Milley his friend and adviser and says he “never had a doubt” about nominating Milley for the position.   Milley, formerly the Army chief of staff, succeeds Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford.   Trump chose Milley over a candidate favored by former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis.     …

U.S. Rep. Chris Collins, a Republican congressman from western New York, is expected to plead guilty in an insider trading case accusing him of leaking confidential information in an urgent phone call made from a White House picnic, according to court records filed Monday. A federal judge in Manhattan has scheduled a hearing for Collins to enter a guilty plea to unspecified charges in the case Tuesday afternoon. A similar hearing has been scheduled Thursday for the congressman’s son, Cameron Collins. Collins’ congressional office declined to comment on Monday. His attorney didn’t immediately respond to a message. The U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan also declined to comment. Collins, who was among the first members of Congress to support President Donald Trump’s run for the White House, had been scheduled to go to trial next year on charges of conspiracy, securities fraud, wire fraud and making false statements to the FBI. Prosecutors accused him of sharing non-public information from a biopharmaceutical company with his son, allowing Cameron Collins and another man to avoid nearly $800,000 in stock losses. The case, filed in August of 2018, initially caused the 69-year-old Collins to drop a reelection bid, but he restarted his campaign a …

Signaling a shift in policy, Greece’s government said Monday it would accelerate efforts to move thousands of refugees and migrants from Aegean Sea islands to the mainland following a deadly fire at the country’s largest camp on the island of Lesbos. The decision was announced after Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis chaired a four-hour cabinet meeting, a day after a fire at the Moria camp left one asylum-seeker dead and 17 injured. More than 12,000 people — more than four times the site’s capacity — are currently housed in the camp and just outside its perimeter following a spike in migrant arrivals over the summer. Police said the fire gutted eight container homes in the camp and triggered rioting by camp residents who were dispersed by riot police using stun grenades. No sign of arson was found at the site — contradicting earlier statements by authorities on the island who said the fires may have been started deliberately by camp dwellers. Government officials unveiled plans Monday to evenly distribute camps nationally in all 13 regional authorities, mostly on the mainland, replacing a three-year-old practice of containing new arrivals on Lesbos and four other eastern islands facing the Turkish coast. “This is …

High winds swept across parts of central Europe on Monday, leaving two people dead, disrupting transport and causing power outages for thousands of households.   Slovak police said a 14-year-old girl was killed by a fallen tree in Nitra, east of Bratislava, and an unspecified number of her fellow students were injured, one of them seriously.   In eastern Germany, police said a 41-year-old driver was killed when a tree fell on his car near the town of Wittenberg.   In the Czech Republic, some 30,000 households were without electricity, while fallen trees disrupted roads and train travel.   Long-distance lines from Berlin to Hamburg and Hannover, and to Stralsund in the country’s northeastern corner, were among those closed on Monday morning and then reopened. In southern Germany, a fallen tree forced the closure of the Nuremberg-Augsburg line.   Near Wolfsburg, between Hannover and Berlin, a high-speed train ran into a tree that had fallen on the tracks. The driver was slightly injured.   Strong winds were expected in northern and eastern Germany through Monday afternoon. Berlin’s two zoos were closed for the day because of a risk of falling branches, and animals brought indoors.   Near Dortmund in western …

U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson faced political opposition and personal allegations Monday as he tried to fulfill his pledge to lead Britain out of the European Union in just over a month.   As he tried to energize Conservative members and lawmakers at the party’s annual conference, Johnson was forced to deny a journalist’s claim that he had grabbed her thigh at a private lunch two decades ago.  Sunday Times columnist Charlotte Edwardes says the incident took place when she worked at The Spectator, a conservative newsmagazine, while Johnson was its editor.   Asked Monday if the allegation was true, Johnson said: “No.”   Edwardes stood by her story, tweeting: “If the prime minister doesn’t recollect the incident then clearly I have a better memory than he does.”   Johnson also is under scrutiny for claims that an American businesswoman, Jennifer Arcuri, received money and perks from London coffers while Johnson was mayor of the British capital.   He also denies wrongdoing over Arcuri, who was given grants and places on overseas trade trips for her small tech start-up, saying everything was done “with full propriety.” The case has been referred to Britain’s police watchdog, which will decide whether to …

Thailand’s prime minister urged residents of Bangkok to wear face masks on Monday after smog covered parts of the capital in what some fear is a harbinger of more pollution to come. Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha warned in a statement on his Facebook page that the concentration of tiny dust particles called PM2.5 in the air had reached unsafe levels and said he has ordered government agencies to expedite anti-pollution measures. He also asked the construction and manufacturing sectors to reduce activities that release pollutants. Smog levels are expected to stay high for the next two or three days. The head of the country’s Pollution Control Department, Pralong Damrongthai, said the visibly dirty air was not caused by smoke originating from forest fires in Indonesia. Since last month, haze blown by monsoon winds from fires in Indonesia has affected nearby countries including the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia and parts of southern Thailand, raising concerns about aviation safety and health. Indonesian officials say they have made progress in containing the fires, including successful efforts at rainmaking, which they say reduced the number of fire “hotspots” from more than 5,000 about two weeks ago to 491 on Sunday. Thailand’s Pralong told Thai PBS …

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has announced an “income inequality” plan calling for tax increases on companies that pay CEOs far more than their workers’ median salaries.   The Vermont senator’s proposal, unveiled Monday, would raise taxes 0.5 percentage points on companies paying top executives more than 50 times the median salaries of workers. Tax penalties would rise up to 5 percentage points for firms whose highest-paid official earns 500-plus times median worker pay.   The plan would apply to all private and publicly held corporations with annual revenues of $100 million. Sanders’ campaign says it would raise $150 billion over the next decade, which he would use to eliminate medical debt nationwide.   Sanders says the public demands that profitable corporations “pay their fair share of taxes.”  …

At least 100 people have died in northern India over the last three days in unusually heavy late monsoon rains which have submerged streets, hospital wards and houses, officials said Monday. Dozens of boats were pressed into service on streets overflowing with gushing rain water in Patna, the capital of the eastern state of Bihar, after torrential downpours far stronger the normal. At least 27 people have lost their lives across the state and another 63 in neighboring Uttar Pradesh since Friday, authorities said. With more rain predicted, weather experts say September could end as the wettest in more than a hundred years. “Patna alone has recorded some 226 millimeters [8.9 inches] of rainfall since Friday,” Bihar disaster response official M. Ramachandru told AFP. Patients and their relatives rest in beds as they wade through floodwaters during heavy monsoon rain at waterlogged Nalanda Medical College and Hospital in Patna in the northeastern state of Bihar, India, Sept. 28, 2019. Photos showed patients lying on hospital beds in dirty rain water at the state-run Nalanda Medical College and Hospital in Patna. It has also been raining heavily in southern India and in the western state of Gujarat. The annual monsoon usually …

Gabon is one of the greenest countries in the world, with 88 percent of its land covered by forest. A historic agreement between Gabon and Norway is seeking to ensure it stays that way.  Through the U.N.-backed Central African Forest Initiative (CAFI), Norway will pay Gabon up to $150 million over 10 years in exchange for Gabon reducing its carbon emissions and to give value to the forests’ role in absorbing carbon dioxide.  In an interview with Voice of America, Lee White, Gabon’s Minister of Forests, said the agreement is groundbreaking because it is making it nearly as valuable for countries to preserve forests as to chop them down. “In all of the deals we’ve seen over the years, forest carbon has been worth $5 a ton. And in this one, subject to meeting best practice, they’ve gone to $10. So overnight we doubled the price of forest carbon. It gives a lot of hope to all the other forest nations,” he said.  In a statement, CAFI said the deal will allow Gabon to achieve its goal of preserving 98 percent of its existing rainforest for the future. Across Central Africa, forests store as much as 70 billion tons of carbon …

China has developed a giant new offshore oil exploration platform for possible use in disputed tracts of sea, a move that would anger Vietnam and extend years of energy-related disputes between the two Asian neighbors. The platform dubbed Haiyang Shiyou 982 sits over the sea now, ready to seek oil deposits up to 9,000 meters deep, a Chinese social media account run by the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission reported Wednesday.  Boats from Vietnam and China rammed one another in 2014 after China allowed an offshore oil firm to position the platform’s predecessor, Haiyang Shiyou 981, in disputed waters. Earlier this year, Vietnam asked a Chinese survey vessel to leave Vanguard Bank, a maritime feature where the Southeast Asian country is looking for fuel under the seabed. Expect more resistance if Haiyang Shiyou 982 ruffles Vietnam, analysts warn. “They will have some kind of reaction for sure, because the South China Sea is by no means cool in terms of temperature,” said Alan Chong, associate professor at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore. “It can flare up at any moment.” Embed

Along the shores of Lake Malawi, poverty and food shortages are chronic problems, due to declining fish catches in the lake. Women facing hunger, or trying to feed their families, sometimes resort to having sex with fishermen in order to get something to eat.  Women carrying buckets each morning to buy fish at Lake Malawi is a common sight in the Makawa area.   A less fortunate common sight is many of the women paying for the fish with sex.  Cecelia Iman is secretary of the Village Beach Committee, responsible for taking care of lake resources in the area. “[The practice] really happens here. Most fishermen came to the lake with a mission that they will find women right here. But the relationships do not last, they only bring problems to village women,” Iman said. The women are lured into transactional sex when they don’t have enough money to buy fish, or when they accept an overture from fishermen, say local officials. “For example, one can have MK 2,000 but want go to the lake to buy some fish and there, one fisherman offers her free fish. Taking into account that she didn’t eat last night together with her child, …

Along the shores of Lake Malawi, poverty and food shortages are chronic problems, due to a declining fish catches in the lake. Women facing hunger, or trying to feed their families, sometimes resort to having sex with fishermen in order to get something to eat. Lameck Masina has the story from the town of Mangochi. …

A regional Chinese diplomat has rebuked the United States for being “ignorant” about his country’s ongoing key economic contributions and cooperation with Afghanistan. Arrangements are being worked out to enhance the cooperation with Kabul even under Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), Yao Jing, the Chinese ambassador to neighboring Pakistan told VOA. He hailed Saturday’s successful Afghan presidential election, saying China hopes they will boost peace-building efforts in a country wrecked by years of conflicts. “We hope that with the election in Afghanistan, with the peace development moving forward in Afghanistan, Afghans will finally achieve a peaceful period, achieve the stability,” said the Chinese diplomat, who served in Kabul prior to his posting in Islamabad. Earlier this month, U.S. officials and lawmakers during a congressional hearing in Washington sharply criticized China for its lack of economic assistance to Afghan rebuilding efforts. “I think it’s fair to say that China has not contributed to the economic development of Afghanistan. We have not seen any substantial assistance from China,” Alice Wells, U.S. Acting Assistant Secretary for South and Central Asia, told lawmakers. Wells, however, acknowledged that Beijing has worked with Washington on a way forward on peace as have other countries, including …

Clashes between two Turkish-backed rebel groups in the northwestern Syrian town of Afrin have left at least two fighters dead and about a dozen wounded, according to reports Sunday. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitor group that has researchers across Syria, reported that fierce fighting between the al-Majd Legion and al-Sham Legion in Afrin erupted Saturday night following a disagreement over property. “Our sources have confirmed that the infighting erupted after a dispute over the ownership of a house just outside of Afrin,” Rami Abdulrahman, director of the Syrian Observatory, told VOA. Local news said the disputed house belonged to a Kurdish civilian that armed groups reportedly had seized months ago. Frequent clashes Armed confrontations among Syrian rebel factions have reportedly increased since Turkish military and allied Syrian rebels took control of Afrin after a two-month-long military campaign that ousted the Kurdish People Protection Units (YPG) from the region in March 2018, rights groups said. “This is not the first time that such clashes take place over property and revenue-sharing among rebel groups,” the Syrian Observatory added. Infighting among rebel groups has become a common issue in the region.  “There is almost one occurrence like this one …

About 350,000 treasure hunters from all over the world, have been scouting out a large area in the Rocky Mountains stretching from Northern New Mexico to Montana, looking for a hidden treasure. As the story goes, all one needs to do to find the loot, is to decipher the nine clues in a poem written by wealthy art collector and entrepreneur Forrest Fenn, who says he collected and hid the treasure years ago. Its lore became wildly popular after he had written a book called “The Thrill of the Chase,” talking about his life and the treasure.  While many believe the treasure is real, others think it’s a hoax. VOA’s Penelope Poulou visited the area and spoke with Fenn about the meaning of it all …

A fleet of luxury, high-performance cars seized from the son of Equatorial Guinea’s president have been auctioned off for more than $23 million. The 25 cars were seized by Swiss authorities after an investigation into money laundering.   They once belonged to Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, who is also vice president to Equatorial Guniea’s 40-year ruler President Theodora Obiang. Among the cars sold Sunday were Lamborghinis, Ferraris, Bentleys, Rolls Royces and a McLaren. A rare white Lamborghini Veneno Roadster, one of only nine built, sold  for $8.3million to an anonymous buyer. Proceeds from the auction will go to a charity to fund social programs in the tiny oil-rich Central African country. Obiang’s luxury lifestyle has draw foreign ire before. Last year, Brazilian officials seized $16 million in cash and high-end watches from a delegation traveling with Obiang. He was given a three-year suspended sentence by a French court for spending millions of dollars of public funds on a Paris apartment, a private jet and a fleet of luxury cars. Earlier, he entered into a $30 million settlement with U.S. authorities who accused him of using looted public funds to buy a California mansion and a vast collection of Michael Jackson memorabilia, …