US President Donald Trump showed a map of Hurricane Dorian's projected path on Wednesday that appeared to have been altered with a Sharpie pen to include the state of Alabama, which was never in harm's way.
In a White House video released on Wednesday, Mr Trump points to an official weather chart dated August 29 showing the states that could be hit in what the National Hurricane Center calls the "cone of uncertainty."
A curved line had been added to the cone on the chart to show a risk that Dorian could move from Florida to Alabama.
"It was going to hit not only Florida, but Georgia, it could have, it was going towards the Gulf, that was what we, what was originally projected...," Mr Trump says in the video.
Dorian was never projected to be heading toward the Gulf of Mexico, where Alabama has a coastline.
Mr Trump at the weekend in a tweet had named Alabama as one of the states that could be hit. The National Weather Service denied that in its own tweet 20 minutes later.
"Alabama will NOT see any impacts from #Dorian. We repeat, no impacts from Hurricane #Dorian will be felt across Alabama. The system will remain too far east," the National Weather Service in Alabama tweeted.
When reporters later asked Trump whether the chart had been drawn on with a Sharpie pen, the president said: “I don’t know; I don’t know.”
______________
Hurricane Dorian kills 20 in Bahamas as US evacuates south-east coast
Iran's dirty tricks to dodge sanctions
There’s increased scrutiny on the tricks being used to keep commodities flowing to and from blacklisted countries. Here’s a description of how some work.
1 Going Dark
A common method to transport Iranian oil with stealth is to turn off the Automatic Identification System, an electronic device that pinpoints a ship’s location. Known as going dark, a vessel flicks the switch before berthing and typically reappears days later, masking the location of its load or discharge port.
2. Ship-to-Ship Transfers
A first vessel will take its clandestine cargo away from the country in question before transferring it to a waiting ship, all of this happening out of sight. The vessels will then sail in different directions. For about a third of Iranian exports, more than one tanker typically handles a load before it’s delivered to its final destination, analysts say.
3. Fake Destinations
Signaling the wrong destination to load or unload is another technique. Ships that intend to take cargo from Iran may indicate their loading ports in sanction-free places like Iraq. Ships can keep changing their destinations and end up not berthing at any of them.
4. Rebranded Barrels
Iranian barrels can also be rebranded as oil from a nation free from sanctions such as Iraq. The countries share fields along their border and the crude has similar characteristics. Oil from these deposits can be trucked out to another port and documents forged to hide Iran as the origin.
* Bloomberg
PAKISTAN SQUAD
Abid Ali, Fakhar Zaman, Imam-ul-Haq, Shan Masood, Azhar Ali (test captain), Babar Azam (T20 captain), Asad Shafiq, Fawad Alam, Haider Ali, Iftikhar Ahmad, Khushdil Shah, Mohammad Hafeez, Shoaib Malik, Mohammad Rizwan (wicketkeeper), Sarfaraz Ahmed (wicketkeeper), Faheem Ashraf, Haris Rauf, Imran Khan, Mohammad Abbas, Mohammad Hasnain, Naseem Shah, Shaheen Afridi, Sohail Khan, Usman Shinwari, Wahab Riaz, Imad Wasim, Kashif Bhatti, Shadab Khan and Yasir Shah.
