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All of Africa has reached a very important milestone. The World Health Organization has declared that the entire continent is now free of the wild polio virus. VOA’s Carol Pearson reports that this is a time for celebration but not a time to rest.
Produced by: Bronwyn Benito 
 
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Fake news about the coronavirus can do real harm. Polygraph.info is spotlighting fact-checks from other reliable sources here​.Daily DebunkClaim: Study finds that children are “silent super-spreaders” of coronavirus.Verdict: Not proved by this study.Read the full story at: A cursor moves over Google’s search engine page on Aug. 28, 2018, in Portland, Ore.Circulating on social media: Claim that Google search results are evidence that the COVID-19 pandemic is a hoax.Verdict: FalseRead the full story at: Reuters Factual Reads on CoronavirusLockdown Let the Earth Breathe. What Do We Do Next?
COVID-19 could be a turning point in climate activism—but only if we play it right.
— The Walrus. August 24
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An independent report into Australia’s Black Summer bushfires has recommended sweeping changes to land clearing practices and the creation of an international research center to investigate extreme fire behavior. The 2019-2020 disaster was unprecedented in scale. The Gospers Mountain fire north of Sydney was the largest forest fire ever recorded in Australia, burning more than 500,000 hectares. More aggressive hazard reduction, or controlled burn-offs that can reduce the severity of future bushfires, would make Australia safer, according to an independent panel.However, previous research has shown that as conditions get hotter and drier, it becomes less effective.  But the report wants landowners in high-risk areas to increase prescribed burning.  It also said that climate change was one of many factors that made last summer “so extraordinary”. The fires were fueled by record-breaking temperatures and a long drought across southern and eastern Australia. New South Wales state premier Gladys Berejiklian says global warming is making the country more vulnerable. “The next fire season is already upon us, so the government has taken every action we can already in response to the recommendations that we received.  We do also have to also accept that in addition to the issues that have been canvassed this morning, our climate is changing and those who wrote the report actually acknowledge that our climate is changing,” Berejiklian said.  The New South Wales state government has accepted each of the panel’s 76 recommendations. The report has called for more scientific research into fighting fires, including the use of artificial intelligence and drones to help put them out quickly.   It said the answer was not more fire trucks or firefighters.  Critics of the inquiry have reportedly said it was lackluster and contained no significant recommendations.  The Black Summer fires killed more than 30 people and destroyed thousands of homes. For the first time ever catastrophic fire conditions had been forecast for Australia’s biggest city, Sydney.    Ominously, the panel warned that Australia should expect to see similar conditions, or worse, to happen again.  
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Arsonists set buildings  ablaze and torched much of the Black business district in a  second night of unrest in the city of Kenosha, Wisconsin,  triggered by the wounding of a Black man shot in the back by  officers as his three young sons looked on.
Smoke billowed over central Kenosha after police in riot gear clashed with protesters who defied a dusk-to-dawn curfew on Monday night and into Tuesday morning, blocks away from where  police gunned down Jacob Blake on Sunday.
Blake, 29, survived the shooting, which was captured on  video, and was in stable condition following surgery, his father  said.
But the incident, the latest in a litany of cases to focus  attention on police treatment of African Americans, unleashed  outrage in the lakefront city of Kenosha about 40 miles (65 km)  south of Milwaukee.
The shooting occurred three months after the death of George  Floyd, a Black man in Minneapolis who was pinned to the street  under the knee of a white police officer, sparking nationwide  protests against police brutality and racism in the United  States.
Unrest flared again elsewhere in the country on Monday.  Police in Portland, Oregon, the scene of weeks of protests that have sometimes turned violent, declared a riot late on Monday and arrested many demonstrators after fires were lit at the offices of the police association.
President Donald Trump’s administration last month deployed federal forces to Portland to crack down on the protests.
 Fires, Baseball bats
Black Lives Matter activists are demanding the immediate firing or arrest of the Kenosha officers, who have been placed  on administrative leave.
Hours into the curfew, the mostly peaceful demonstration turned violent. Commercial and government buildings were set ablaze, along with vehicles in car dealership lots.
Police fired tear gas, rubber bullets and smoke bombs to disperse the crowd, which grew to several hundred, according to  protester Porche Bennett, 31, of Kenosha.
Fires destroyed much of the Black business district, Bennett said, adding that the instigators she saw were white.
“It’s people from out of town doing this. We’ve been shopping there since we were kids and they set it on fire,” Bennett said.
Social media images showed both white and Black agitators.  Black men swinging baseball bats broke traffic signals and street lamps. White and Black men with bats bashed in the headlights and windshields of a row of cars.
One white man riding a skateboard doused a government truck  with an accelerant and set it on fire. Heavily armed white civilians stood guard in front of one business to protect it from vandals.
Kenosha, a city of 100,000 people, is nearly 12 percent Black and about 67 percent white, according to U.S. Census data.
One large group of protesters skirmished in front of the courthouse with sheriff’s deputies firing tear gas and pepper balls into the crowd. Demonstrators hurled water bottles and firecrackers at the police.
At least one man was injured, shown on social media bleeding from the head as civilians administered aid.  The first night of clashes on Sunday prompted Governor Tony Evers to order in National Guard troops to help maintain order. Evers has condemned excessive use of police force and called for a special legislative session next week to consider police reforms, saying: “We must offer our empathy. We must see the trauma, fear and exhaustion of being Black in our state and our country.”
Video of the shooting taken by an onlooker showed Blake walking toward the driver’s side of a gray SUV followed by two officers with their guns drawn at his back. Seven gunshots are heard as Blake, who appears unarmed, opens the car door, one officer tugging at his shirt.
It was not known whether officers saw something inside the vehicle that prompted them to shoot.
His three young sons were inside the car, family attorney Ben Crump said.
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World-record sprinter and eight-time Olympic gold medalist Usain Bolt is self-quarantining at home in Jamaica, after testing positive for the coronavirus following a party celebrating his 34th birthday attended by several sports stars. Jamaica’s health ministry confirmed late Monday that Bolt tested positive, after he posted a video on social media earlier Monday saying he was waiting for the results.  Bolt, who took the test Saturday after his party said, he did not have any symptoms of the coronavirus, but he urged anyone who came in contact with him to quarantine just to be safe. Bolt has received well wishes and some have accused him of being careless in the midst of a pandemic. Bolt is part of the uptick in infections in Jamaica that officials blame on the reopening of international borders as well as recent celebrations marking Independence Day and Emancipation Day. Officials also say people are ignoring measures to keep themselves and others safe, including wearing masks and social distancing.  Jamaica has confirmed more than 1,600 infections and at least 16 deaths. “I’m having no symptoms so I am going to quarantine myself and wait on the confirmation, to see what is the protocol and how I should go about quarantining myself,” Bolt added. “Until then, I am saying anyone who has had contact with me should quarantine by themselves just to be safe, and just to take it easy.” 
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Millions of public-school students in Mexico are taking classes by way of a television broadcast after being idled for months because of the coronavirus outbreak. Both parents and teachers said, Monday’s return to class got off to a bumpy start.  Still, Reuters said nearly two million students from private schools are expected to join the public-school enrollment because of the crisis. In an effort to keep its students, private schools are offering discounts and other benefits, but it’s unclear if the incentives are changing the minds of parents concerned about paying tuition without in person classes.  The pandemic has eased some in Mexico, but the government said that infections are still too high to resume in person classes.  Mexico has confirmed more than 560,000 COVID-19 infections and more than 60,800 deaths. 
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A parade of Republicans is set Monday night to acclaim President Donald Trump at the Republican National Convention and call for his reelection. But the main event is the finale for the evening, Trump himself unleashing attacks on his Democratic opponent, former vice president Joe Biden. Party stalwarts renominated Trump earlier Monday for a second four-year term, with the U.S. leader appearing shortly after at the convention site in Charlotte, North Carolina. He called the November 3 vote “the most important election in the history of our country.” He contended that the only way Democrats could defeat him is through a rigged election using mail-in ballots sent to voters.  “They’re trying to steal the election,” Trump declared without evidence. “Suppose they don’t mail them to Republican neighborhoods.”  Trump’s speech Monday night is the first of four straight evenings he plans to speak to the mostly virtual convention, in Charlotte and Washington, culminating Thursday with his renomination acceptance speech at the White House. FILE – Donald Trump Jr. speaks before President Donald Trump arrives, at Dream City Church in Phoenix, June 23, 2020.His oldest son, Donald Trump Jr., one of the U.S. leader’s staunchest defenders, is addressing the convention Monday night, as are Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, the lone Black Republican in the U.S. Senate, and Nikki Haley, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Trump, as president, has been a vocal supporter of gun ownership rights as sanctioned by the 2nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. But as many Democrats call for limitations on gun ownership, Republicans are bringing the issue to the fore with a pair of controversial speakers, Mark and Patricia McCloskey, a St. Louis, Missouri, couple who brandished guns at Black Lives Matter protesters as they walked past their mansion in a June demonstration against racial injustice.The McCloskeys said they felt threatened by the protesters, but a St. Louis prosecutor charged both with a felony, unlawful use of a weapon. Other speakers include three Republican congressmen, Steve Scalise of Louisiana, Matt Gaetz of Florida and Jim Jordan of Ohio, all of them among Trump’s most fervent conservative advocates on Capitol Hill. Democrats last week conducted their convention entirely virtually, with a collection of taped and live presentations, to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Delegates gather for the first day of the Republican National Convention, August 24, 2020, in Charlotte, N.C.Republican delegates in Charlotte are subject to regular temperature checks and daily testing for COVID-19. All were required to be tested before they left their states, and throughout the convention they are wearing devices to enable contact tracing. A total of 336 delegates gathered at the convention to renominate Trump.The size of the Republican gathering is downscaled from past conventions, just not as much as the Democrats’ conclave. Gone at both party conventions are the thousands of delegates who have crammed into arenas and stadiums at quadrennial gatherings in years past.”I live 15 minutes from the arena, and yet I’m not going to be part of it,” Sarah Reidy-Jones, the vice chairman of the Mecklenburg County GOP, told VOA. Reidy-Jones was one of North Carolina’s delegates to the convention, but because of the downscaling, the closest she would get to the convention center was dropping off a fellow delegate there Sunday morning. “It’s really emblematic of everything shutting down right now across the country,” she said.Biden, as he accepted his party’s presidential nomination last week, contended that Trump had created a “season of darkness in America” in which he had failed to control the unrelenting pandemic while millions of workers have lost their jobs. “We will choose hope over fear, facts over fiction, fairness over privilege,” Biden said. Trump claimed that “the Democrats held the darkest and angriest and gloomiest convention in American history.” He accused them of “attacking America as racist and a horrible country that must be redeemed.” But he wasted no time in attacking Biden after the delegates cast their votes to renominate him. As he has often done in recent times, Trump attacked his Democratic opponent as a puppet of the radical left, warning that if the former vice president is elected in November, “Your American dream will be dead.” Republicans are billing their convention “Honoring the Great American Story.” The Trump campaign said that each night will include remarks from political leaders as well as “everyday Americans whose stories are filled with hope and patriotism.” People wait to hear President Donald Trump speak at Asheville Regional Airport, August 24, 2020, in Fletcher, N.C.All three living former Democratic presidents – Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama – along with 2004 nominee John Kerry and 2016 nominee Hillary Clinton, spoke on behalf of Biden at the Democratic convention. But neither former Republican President George W. Bush nor 2012 nominee Mitt Romney, who now is a Utah senator and a Trump critic, is on the Republican convention schedule.  More than two dozen former Republican lawmakers announced their support for Biden as the Republican convention started. Democrats released an ad mocking the Republican convention just as Republicans staged counter events last week while the Democrats met. “Welcome to the RNC, Republican National Chaos,” the narrator says in the 30-second spot, which opened with a scene of downtown Charlotte. “Because Trump is meeting the COVID moment with job-destroying incompetence and deadly mismanagement, students and teachers are left to themselves, the jobless left without a lifeline, grandparents left to die alone, an economy left to perish. “Because Trump has no plan for COVID, nothing will change, because Trump won’t change,” the narrator continues. “Enjoy the convention.”  
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