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Ukrainian officials say they uncovered a massive defense procurement scheme that saw tens of millions of dollars spent for weapons that never materialized. The discovery follows the downing of a Russian military plane said to have been carrying Ukrainian POWs. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi has this story.

Give us 5 minutes, and we'll give you the world. Around the clock, Voice of America keeps you in touch with the latest news. We bring you reports from our correspondents and interviews with newsmakers from across the world.

Give us 5 minutes, and we'll give you the world. Around the clock, Voice of America keeps you in touch with the latest news. We bring you reports from our correspondents and interviews with newsmakers from across the world.

Give us 5 minutes, and we'll give you the world. Around the clock, Voice of America keeps you in touch with the latest news. We bring you reports from our correspondents and interviews with newsmakers from across the world.

Give us 5 minutes, and we'll give you the world. Around the clock, Voice of America keeps you in touch with the latest news. We bring you reports from our correspondents and interviews with newsmakers from across the world.

Bamako — The military regimes in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger announced Sunday their immediate withdrawal from the West African bloc ECOWAS, saying it has become a threat to member states. The leaders of the three Sahel nations issued a statement saying it was a "sovereign decision" to leave the Economic Community of West African States "without delay." Struggling with jihadist violence and poverty, the regimes have had tense ties with ECOWAS since coups took place in Niger last July, Burkina Faso in 2022 and Mali in 2020. All three — founding members of the bloc in 1975 — were suspended from ECOWAS with Niger and Mali facing heavy sanctions as the bloc tried to push for the early return of civilian governments with elections. The sanctions were an "irrational and unacceptable posture" at a time when the three "have decided to take their destiny in hand" — a reference to the coups that removed civilian administrations. The three nations have hardened their positions in recent months and joined forces in an "Alliance of Sahel States." The leaders' joint statement added that 15-member ECOWAS, "under the influence of foreign powers, betraying its founding principles, has become a threat to member states and peoples". They accused the grouping of failing to help them tackle the jihadists who swept into Mali from 2012 and then on to Burkina and Niger. But leaving ECOWAS could make trade more difficult for the three land-locked nations, making goods more expensive, and could also see visa requirements re-imposed for travel. Under pressure from the military regimes, former colonial power France has removed ambassadors and troops and watched Russia fill the void militarily and politically. The French army's withdrawal from the Sahel — the region along the Sahara desert across Africa — has heightened concerns over the conflicts spreading southward to Gulf of Guinea states Ghana, Togo, Benin and Ivory Coast. 'Bad faith'  The prime minister appointed by Niger's regime on Thursday blasted ECOWAS for "bad faith" after the bloc largely shunned a planned meeting in Niamey. Niger had hoped for an opportunity to talk through differences with fellow states of ECOWAS which has cold-shouldered Niamey, imposing heavy economic and financial sanctions following the military coup that overthrew elected president Mohamed Bazoum. Niger's military leaders, wrestling with high food prices and a scarcity of medicines, have said they want up to three years for a transition back to civilian rule. In Mali, the ruling officers under Colonel Assimi Goita had pledged to hold elections in February this year, but that has now been pushed back to an unknown date. Burkina Faso, which has not been put under sanctions although Captain Ibrahim Traore seized power in September 2022, has set elections for this summer, but says the fight against the insurgents remains the top priority.     

Give us 5 minutes, and we'll give you the world. Around the clock, Voice of America keeps you in touch with the latest news. We bring you reports from our correspondents and interviews with newsmakers from across the world.

Give us 5 minutes, and we'll give you the world. Around the clock, Voice of America keeps you in touch with the latest news. We bring you reports from our correspondents and interviews with newsmakers from across the world.

Madrid — Spanish opposition parties demonstrated in Madrid on Sunday in a last gasp effort to stop an amnesty for Catalan separatists over their role in a 2007 secession bid.    About 45,000 people heeded the call by the Popular Party to gather in the capital's central Plaza de Espana, according to police estimates.    The amnesty bill, which was imposed by Catalan parties as a condition for agreeing to support Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez's coalition, will be presented Tuesday to the lower house of Spain's parliament.    Once approved and enacted, which could take several months, the law would block legal action against hundreds of Catalan activists who are being investigated or have been charged for their role in the attempted declaration of an independent Catalan state in 2007.    Sunday's march was attended by PP leader Alberto Nunez Feijoo and former prime minister Mariano Rajoy, as well as president of the Madrid region Isabel Diaz Ayuso.    The crowd carried numerous Spanish and European flags, as well as banners saying "No to amnesty" and "Sanchez traitor".    Silvia Sobral, 64, said she'd come to protest against "this traitor government" that wants to "destroy the Spanish nation".    She said the eventual return of Carles Puigdemont, the former head of the Catalan regional government who fled to Belgium after the aborted secession, was "an insult", unless he was returning "to go to jail".    For Diego Garcia, 72, it is "unacceptable" to pardon "people guilty of pure and simple terrorism".    The far-right party Vox has also held numerous protests against the amnesty bill, some of which have turned violent, especially in front of the Socialist party's headquarters.    Sanchez's government won a vote of confidence in parliament last November for another four-year term, but the shaky coalition needs the votes of two Catalan parties who insisted on the amnesty law as the price of their support. 

Give us 5 minutes, and we'll give you the world. Around the clock, Voice of America keeps you in touch with the latest news. We bring you reports from our correspondents and interviews with newsmakers from across the world.

Give us 5 minutes, and we'll give you the world. Around the clock, Voice of America keeps you in touch with the latest news. We bring you reports from our correspondents and interviews with newsmakers from across the world.

Give us 5 minutes, and we'll give you the world. Around the clock, Voice of America keeps you in touch with the latest news. We bring you reports from our correspondents and interviews with newsmakers from across the world.

Macao — Macao is known as “the Las Vegas of Asia,” with its glitzy casinos and huge gaming industry surpassing that of its U.S. counterpart, but the region is also home to a unique ethnic group — the Macanese. Almost 25 years after the former Portuguese colony returned to Chinese sovereignty in 1999, this community of native-born mixed-race Chinese-Portuguese people is feeling the challenges of maintaining their population, language and culture. Their number — 13,021 people according to the latest census — as well as reduced use of the Portuguese language, is raising worries among Macanese that Macao may lose what’s unique about its identity — its Portuguese influences. In addition, the government last year confirmed that it has ended preferential treatment for Portuguese nationals wanting to move to the city. “This means our Portuguese culture will be weak for the next generation,” said Delfim Chacim, retiree from a Macanse family that has lived in Macao for four generations. His granddaughter speaks Portuguese, but he said many Macanese youngsters cannot, even though Portuguese is an official language along with Chinese, because hardly anyone speaks it anymore. Most people in Macao are ethnic Chinese and speak Cantonese. In recent years, fluency in English has become much higher than Portuguese, according to Macao’s Statistics and Census Service.  As time passes, Chacim and others fear, the only thing left will be colonial-era buildings, such as the landmark Ruins of Saint Paul's, a 17th Century Catholic religious complex. “All we’ll see will be the architecture built by the Portuguese people, such as the fortress, but they won’t know the real story,” Chacim said. Macao “will be no different from any other province in China” without its characteristic language and culture. Although the latest census conducted in 2021 showed the number of people who are either full or mixed Portuguese has increased by nearly 5,000 compared to 2011. Since 2001, shortly after the handover, the population has remained around 2 percent of the population. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Macau’s overall population lost about 10,000 residents, including Portuguese expatriates and migrant workers due to tough quarantine policies and border restrictions. It’s not clear how many of those who left have returned. Adding to the fears of a declining Macanese and Portuguese culture and population, Macao’s government quietly in recent years and officially last year stopped giving resident ID cards and a path to permanent residency to Portuguese nationals who want to live in the city. Previously, Portuguese nationals received the cards once they found a job in Macao and could become permanent residents after seven years.  Now, they are treated like other foreigners and given only a temporary work permit, unless they have special skills or family already in the city. “We want our next generation to be proud of what we are. We don’t want them to lose their culture, not knowing what it was like the last 20, 30, 50 years,” said Ivone de Jesus, a fifth generation Macanese who helps run her family’s popular restaurant Cozinha Aida, which serves home-cooked Macanese cuisine passed down through the generations. De Jesus said her late grandmother, Aida, who carefully saved the recipes before she passed away, was one of only 50 people who could speak the creole dialect called Patua in Macao. The dialect is derived from Portuguese mixed with Malay and Sinhalese, and later became strongly influenced by Cantonese, but it is almost extinct. De Jesus and others said the government has given support to maintaining Portuguese and Macanese cultures, including helping restaurants like her family’s preserve their cuisines. The government also encourages people to learn the language by providing funding to schools to teach Portuguese. But many Macanese and Portuguese disagree with ending preferential treatment for Portuguese nationals, pointing out that unless the population of Portuguese speakers grows, it will be hard to preserve Macao’s Portuguese identity and language. “First of all the Portuguese people are what’s giving Macao its culture here. … Let’s not talk about how good or bad the place was run. It is a very subjective matter, but Macao is Macao because they were here. It was ruled by them. It brings the flavor, the culture, the color, everything, even the food, the bloodline … so it would be really important that Portuguese people come back here,” de Jesus said. Miguel Senna Fernandes, president of the Macanese Association, said the government’s decision contradicts its policy of promoting Portuguese language fluency so that Macao can be a platform to promote relations between China and Portuguese-speaking countries. “Macao’s government should attract Portuguese to come and settle down in Macao, but they’re not doing this. They’re doing the opposite,” Fenandes said. “They’re giving this kind of image that they’re not welcoming them. … What’s the use of promoting Portuguese in the territory when you don’t want the people who speak it; it’s like wanting to promote Chinese but you don’t want Chinese people.” Jorge Menezes, a Portuguese lawyer in Macao, sees the cancellation of preferential treatment for Portuguese people as part of a trend. “The Portuguese are no longer special. … That’s of course a betrayal of the whole idea of the relationship between Portugal and Macao after the handover,” Menezes said. “The language is vanishing in official functions. …  It’s part of a trend of Macao being less autonomous towards China than it was meant to be under the bilateral treaty with Portugal and Macao’s Constitution.” VOA reached out to Macao authorities for comment about the concerns and why it decided to cancel preferential treatment for Portuguese people but has yet to receive a response. Over the years, the government has tried to protect architectural heritage and required casino operators’ winning concessions to invest in revitalizing old districts. The Macao Government Tourism Office, or MGTO, told VOA that it and other government agencies have been promoting the unique culture of Macanese cuisine. "Macao’s designation as a UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy in 2017 is highly relevant to help preserve Macao’s unique gastronomic cultural heritage. Immediately after the designation, MGTO together with other entities unfolded an array of initiatives, with the preservation of Macanese food as part of the city’s heritage as one of the main tasks," it said in a written reply. De Jesus said she doesn’t think the government is trying to reduce the Portuguese population, which was always small, even before the handover. “There’s a saying that China, this place, doesn’t want foreigners here. Actually, I see it differently. For the last 10, 20, 30 years, we’ve always had different foreigners from different countries here. They were workers, experts, professionals, business owners. I’m not sure, but my personal opinion is that what China wants to do is … they want job opportunities-wise to go back to local people,” de Jesus said. But De Jesus and other Macao residents agree it is the combination of the two cultures that makes Macao special. “I’m talking about Portuguese, Portuguese, Portuguese, but before the Portuguese were here, we were also Chinese, so the Chinese were part of the Portuguese culture and the Portuguese were part of the Chinese culture, so I think it’s important that we always maintain an identity of having both,” said de Jesus.

MELBOURNE, Australia — Jannik Sinner rallied from two sets down to take the Australian Open final from Daniil Medvedev 3-6, 3-6, 6-4, 6-4, 6-3 on Sunday and clinch his first Grand Slam title. The 22-year-old Sinner was playing in a major final for the first time and got there by ending Novak Djokovic's long domination of the tournament in a semifinal upset. He's the first Italian to win the Australian Open title in what could be a generational shift in tennis. For 2021 U.S. Open champion Medvedev, the loss was his fifth in six major finals. The third-seeded Medvedev set a record with his fourth five-set match of the tournament and time on court at a major in the Open era, his 24 hours and 17 minutes surpassing Carlos Alcaraz's 23:40 at the 2022 U.S. Open. Medvedev lost back-to-back finals here to Djokovic in 2021 and to Rafael Nadal — after holding a two-set lead — the following year. He won three five-set matches to reach the championship match this time and had two comebacks from two sets down. Sinner only dropped one set through six rounds — in a third-set tiebreaker against Djokovic — until he lost two straight to Medvedev. It wasn't until a break in the sixth game of the fifth set that he really had a full grip on his first Grand Slam title. Medvedev started like a man who wanted to win quickly, after playing three five-set matches just to reach his sixth Grand Slam final. In two of those — a second-round win over Emil Ruusuvuori that finished at almost 4 in the morning, and a 4-hour, 18-minute semifinal win over No. 6 Alexander Zverev — he had to come back from two sets down. Nobody had done that on the way to an Australian Open final since Pete Sampras in 1995. The 27-year-old Russian had spent 20 hours and 33 minutes on court through six rounds. That was almost six hours longer than Sinner took to reach the final. Sinner didn't give Djokovic a look at a breakpoint as he ended the 10-time Australian Open champion's 33-match unbeaten streak at Melbourne Park dating to 2018. Against Medvedev, though, he was in trouble early. Medvedev broke in the third game and took the first set in 36 minutes. He had two more service breaks in the fourth and sixth games of the second set but was broken himself at 5-1 trying to serve it out. He was successful next try. The third set went with serve until the 10th game, when Medvedev was a point from leveling at 5-5 until three forehand errors gave Sinner the set, and the momentum. He won the fourth set, again with a service break in the 10th game, recovering immediately to win three points after mishitting a forehand so far out that it shocked the Rod Laver Arena crowd. And so the tournament equaled a Grand Slam Open era record set at the 1983 U.S. Open with a 35th match going to five sets. In the sixth game of the fifth set, Sinner had triple breakpoint against a fatiguing Medvedev. He missed with his first chance but converted with his next, a forehand winner, for a 4-2 lead. From there, he didn't give Medvedev another chance. Medvedev had faced either Djokovic or Rafael Nadal in all five of his previous major finals. He beat Djokovic to win the 2021 U.S. Open title but lost all the others, including the 2021 final in Australia to Djokovic and the 2022 final — after taking the first two sets — against Nadal. He changed up his usual style, going to the net more regularly in the first two sets and standing closer to the baseline to receive serve than he has done recently. Medvedev has been saying through the tournament that he has more stamina than he used to and is mentally stronger in the tough five-setters. He needed to be. Medvedev won his first six matches against Sinner but has now lost four straight.

Give us 5 minutes, and we'll give you the world. Around the clock, Voice of America keeps you in touch with the latest news. We bring you reports from our correspondents and interviews with newsmakers from across the world.