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Sustainable Thinking Requires Both Relative and Absolute Views of Reality
Robert Lilienfeld | Sep 07, 2021
https://www.plasticstoday.com/sustainable-practices/sustainable-thinking-requires-both-relative-and-absolute-views-reality
To understand the impact of microplastics in the ocean and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, we need to consider the relative and absolute impacts of plastic production, use, disposal, and reuse.
When it comes to marine debris, statistics indicate that consumer-based microplastics (household packaging and pellets) are actually a very small percentage of ocean litter (about 2.3%). Thus, some pundits have declared that we should be spending our time on the bigger picture — debris from washing textiles and erosion of tires, rather than worrying about the little bit of debris that consumer-based microplastics represent. Their argument goes on to state that even if animals — including fish and other marine life and humans — do ingest these materials, there is no proof of their negative impact.
Similarly, when it comes to climate change, there is an outspoken group of oil and gas personnel who state that we are actually in a carbon dioxide drought! They feel we need even more atmospheric CO2 to ensure vigorous plant growth. Their thinking is that CO2 represents only 0.04% of atmospheric gases, or 412 ppm, and that we can go to 1,000 ppm. Even then, they don’t believe that we’ll see any significant negative impact on humans or the environment.
Related: Is Carbon Neutrality the Next Big Sustainable Packaging Thing? https://www.plasticstoday.com/sustainable-practices/carbon-neutrality-next-big-sustainable-packaging-thing
It’s certainly true that packaging-based microplastics represent a small part of the microplastic universe, and that carbon dioxide represents a fraction of the volume of gases in the atmosphere.
But are those arguments strong enough by themselves to dissuade us of their potential to create significant environmental damage?
Let’s pretend that rather than eating or breathing microplastics, you go to a bar and watch the hometown Chicago Bears play Tampa Bay. During the second half, you pound down four beers. Your blood alcohol level is now about 0.8%, and you’re legally drunk. The percentage of your body weight that is made up of alcohol is around 0.011%. That’s nothing! You can still see the TV…sort of.
The game ends in a tie, and your excitement leads you to have two more beers in the next 30 or so minutes of OT before Brady finishes you off. Your blood alcohol level is now about 2.2, or 0.016% (sixteen thousands of 1%) of your body weight. Geez, that’s not so much! Yet, the next thing you know, you’re in the ER with alcohol poisoning.
Insights from a global warming expert.
Now, let’s consider the relative impact of CO2. I spoke with Dr. Spencer Weart, retired Director of the Center for History of Physics, American Institute of Physics, and author of The Discovery of Global Warming (Harvard University Press, 2008). I asked him to explain how a small percentage of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could generate such a big impact on the global climate.
While his answer is a bit complex, his last line (in italics below), sums it up nicely:
“The CO2 (water, methane, etc.) molecules do not act as the main locus of heating, they are more like catalysts. An infrared photon strikes the molecule and excites one of its rotational-vibrational modes...not much energy absorbed. Sometime the molecule gives up the energy in a collision and it's transformed into kinetic energy, so that level of the atmosphere heats up slightly...but this is trivial.
“The important process is what usually happens: the mode falls back to its ground state, re-emitting the energy as a new infrared photon. This is important when, as is often the case, the original photon was radiated up from Earth's surface and was intercepted instead of escaping into space. The new photon can be emitted in any direction, and nearly half the time it will be sent right back down to the surface. So instead of escaping into space, the energy is absorbed back on the surface. Which therefore gets warmer. In other words, greenhouse heating doesn't happen in the CO2, it happens in dirt and seawater.
This shows why it doesn't matter that the CO2 is only a tiny fraction of the atmosphere. A sheet of aluminum foil is very thin but can totally reflect a beam of light. Similarly, the CO2 and other molecules act to reflect energy back to the surface.”
So, although carbon dioxide currently represents only 0.04% of atmospheric gases, that amount (or the addition of significantly more) could generate a climate in which we would certainly have more foliage. However, it would also be one in which it might be too hot for mammals like us to exist in large numbers or in large parts of the globe.
Here’s the takeaway: Knowing the relative amount of a material found in a specific setting is important, and usually represents the first step in getting at its potential to cause systematic changes. However, it’s not the only step. Understanding the potential impact of the absolute amount of that material is just as meaningful, if not more so.
Robert (Bob) Lilienfeld has been involved in sustainable packaging for 25 years, working as a marketing executive, consultant, strategic planner, editor, writer, and communications expert. He’s President of Robert Lilienfeld Consulting, working with materials suppliers, converters, trade associations, retailers, and brand owners. He has also recently founded SPRING, The Sustainable Packaging Research, Information, and Networking Group. Reach him at bob.lilienfeld@gmail.com.
https://www.plasticstoday.com/sustainable-practices/sustainable-thinking-requires-both-relative-and-absolute-views-reality
House leader Kevin McCarthy threatened retaliation against tech companies that share records with the committee
Hugo Lowellin Washington
Mon 6 Sep 2021 07.00 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/06/republicans-6-january-investigation-intimidation
Top Republicans under scrutiny for their role in the events of 6 January have embarked on a campaign of threats and intimidation to thwart a Democratic-controlled congressional panel that is scrutinizing the Capitol attack and opening an expanded investigation into Donald Trump.
The chairman of the House select committee into the violent assault on the Capitol, Bennie Thompson, in recent days demanded an array of Trump executive branch records related to the insurrection, as members and counsel prepared to examine what Trump knew of efforts to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s election win.
House select committee investigators then asked a slew of technology companies to preserve the social media records of hundreds of people connected to the Capitol attack, including far-right House Republicans who sought to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
The select committee said that its investigators were merely “gathering facts, not alleging wrongdoing by any individual” as they pursued the records in what amounted to the most aggressive moves taken by the panel since it launched proceedings in July.
But the twin actions, which threatened to open a full accounting of Trump’s moves in the days and weeks before the joint session of Congress on 6 January, has unnerved top House Republicans, according to a source familiar with the matter.
The House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, decried the select committee’s investigation as a partisan exercise and threatened to retaliate against any telecommunications company that complied with the records requests.
“A Republican majority will not forget,” he warned, in remarks that seemed to imply some future threat against the sector.
The warning from the top Republican in the House amounted to a serious escalation as he seeks to undermine a forensic examination of the attack perpetrated by Trump supporters and domestic violent extremists that left five dead and nearly 140 injured.
But his remarks – which members on the select committee privately consider to be at best, harassment, and at worst, obstruction of justice – reflects McCarthy’s realization that he could himself be in the crosshairs of the committee, the source said.
Most of McCarthy’s efforts to undercut the inquiry to date, such as sinking the prospects of a 9/11-style commission to scrutinize the Capitol attack, have been aimed at shielding Trump and his party from what the select committee might uncover.
But deeply alarmed at the efforts by House select committee investigators to secure his personal communications records for the fraught moments leading up to and during the Capitol attack, McCarthy went on the offensive to pre-emptively protect himself, the source said.
McCarthy was among several House Republicans who desperately begged Trump to call off the rioters as they stormed the Capitol in his name, only to be rebuffed by Trump, who questioned why McCarthy wasn’t doing more to overturn the election.
Thompson previously told the Guardian in an interview that such conversations with Trump would be investigated by the select committee, raising the prospect that McCarthy could be forced to testify about what Trump appeared to be thinking and doing on 6 January.
The statement from McCarthy asserted, without citing any law, that it would be illegal for the technology companies to comply with the records requests – even though congressional investigators have obtained phone and communications records in the past.
The threat is unlikely to be viewed as a violation of federal witness tampering law, which, as part of a broader obstruction of justice statute, makes it a felony under some circumstances to try to dissuade or hinder cooperation with an official proceeding.
Congressman Jamie Raskin, a member of the select committee and the former lead impeachment manager in Trump’s second trial, said that he was appalled by McCarthy’s remarks, which he described as tantamount to obstruction of justice.
“He is leveling threats against people cooperating with a congressional investigation,” Raskin said. “Why would the minority leader of the House of Representatives not be interested in our ability to get all of the facts in relation to the January 6th attack?”
Meanwhile, other members on the select committee have also seized on McCarthy’s threat as a reminder that Republicans could not be trusted to engage in the inquiry in good faith, according to a source connected to the 6 January investigation.
It also underscored to them, the source said, the nervousness among top Republicans as the select committee ramps up its work, even though the inquiry is still in its early days and has yet to sift through thousands of pages of expected evidence.
Emboldened by McCarthy’s combative stance, Trump denounced the select committee as a “partisan sham”, while Republicans under scrutiny by the panel such as Marjorie Taylor Greene threatened any companies that complied with the records requests would be “shut down”.
The chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, Andy Biggs, is now also asking McCarthy to remove from the Republican conference Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger – the two vocal critics of Trump appointed to the select committee – whom he called “spies” for Democrats.
Biggs on Thursday suggested in a letter, first reported by CNN, that Cheney and Kinzinger should be ejected because they are involved in investigating Republicans over 6 January and the party should be able to strategize without having the pair present at conference meetings.
Still, McCarthy remains unable to shape an investigation likely to prove politically damaging to Trump and to Republicans at the ballot box at the midterms next year, a reality that has come largely as a result of his own strategic miscalculations.
The proposed 9/11-style commission into the Capitol attack had envisioned a panel with equal power between Democrats and Republicans, and McCarthy’s decision to boycott the select committee in a flash of anger inadvertently left Trump without any defenders.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/06/republicans-6-january-investigation-intimidation
Mike Lindell's meltdown begins: He recently sold a MyPillow plane to fund Dominion lawsuit
Exclusive: MyPillow guy has sold $2.5M private plane, is now "raising money" for legal defense, source tells Salon
By ZACHARY PETRIZZO - JON SKOLNIK
PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 1, 2021 6:00AM (EDT)
https://www.salon.com/2021/09/01/mike-lindells-meltdown-begins-he-recently-sold-a-mypillow-plane-to-fund-dominion-lawsuit/
MyPillow conspiracist Mike Lindell sells $2.5m plane to fund fraud lawsuit defence, report says
Businessman among those sued in $1.3bn Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit
Graeme Massie
Los Angeles
@graemekmassie
14 hours ago
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/mypillow-guy-mike-lindell-sells-plane-b1912786.html?utm_content=Echobox&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter#/comments
What does full approval of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine mean?
By MATTHEW PERRONE
today
https://apnews.com/article/business-health-coronavirus-pandemic-coronavirus-vaccine-061cccd14adcb85e5eab91ebc8b3a234
What does full approval of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine mean?
It means Pfizer’s shot for people 16 and older has now undergone the same rigorous testing and regulatory review as dozens of other long-established vaccines.
COVID-19 vaccines in the U.S. were initially rolled out under the Food and Drug Administration’s emergency use authorization, which allows the agency to speed the availability of medical products during public health emergencies.
Under the process, the FDA waived some of its normal data requirements and procedures to make the COVID-19 vaccines available months earlier than would have been possible under normal circumstances.
Pfizer’s vaccine — along with those from Moderna and Johnson & Johnson — still underwent testing in tens of thousands of people to establish safety and effectiveness against COVID-19. But the FDA initially required the companies to submit about only two months of safety monitoring data on study participants, the period when side effects are most likely to occur.
For full approval, the FDA required six months of follow-up data. FDA inspectors also visited the plants where the vaccines are made and reviewed each step of the production process for extra assurance that the shots are made under safe, sterile conditions.
Because vaccines are typically given to otherwise healthy individuals, they are generally subject to more regulatory scrutiny than other medical products, including prescription drugs. Full approval means the Pfizer vaccine now carries the FDA’s strongest endorsement of safety and effectiveness.
Public health experts hope the change will convince more unvaccinated people to get the shot and spur more employers to require vaccinations.
Moderna has also applied for full approval, and Johnson & Johnson has said it hopes to apply later in the year.
Pfizer’s shot still is available for 12- to 15-year-olds under emergency use authorization. The full approval also doesn’t apply to boosters. The agency will decide separately whether an extra shot is necessary for healthy people.
___
The AP is answering your questions about the coronavirus in this series. Submit them at: FactCheck@AP.org. Read more here:
Do I need a booster if I got the Johnson & Johnson vaccine?
Do the COVID-19 vaccines affect my chances of pregnancy?
Can I get ‘long COVID’ if I’m infected after vaccination?
https://apnews.com/article/business-health-coronavirus-pandemic-coronavirus-vaccine-061cccd14adcb85e5eab91ebc8b3a234
UK approves rollout of ‘first of its kind’ Covid antibody treatment
Ronapreve can be used to treat symptoms of acute infection after successful clinical trials
PA Media
Fri 20 Aug 2021 09.38 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/20/uk-approves-rollout-covid-antibody-treatment-ronapreve-clinical-trials
The medicines regulator has approved use of the first treatment in the UK using artificial antibodies to prevent and fight Covid-19.
The health secretary, Sajid Javid, said approval of the first drug designed specifically for coronavirus in the country is “fantastic news” and he hoped it could be rolled out for patients on the NHS as soon as possible.
The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) said the clinical trial data they had assessed had shown Ronapreve may be used to prevent infection, treat symptoms of acute Covid-19 infection and could reduce the likelihood of being admitted to hospital because of the virus.
Trials took place before widespread vaccination and before the emergence of virus variants. It is the first monoclonal antibody combination product approved for use in the prevention and treatment of acute infection from the virus for the UK.
Monoclonal antibodies are artificial proteins that act like natural human antibodies in the immune system.
The drug, developed by Regeneron and Roche, is given either by injection or infusion and acts at the lining of the respiratory system where it binds tightly to the virus and prevents it from gaining access to the cells, the MHRA says.
Javid said: “The UK is considered a world leader in identifying and rolling out life-saving treatments for Covid-19, once they have been proven safe and effective in our government-backed clinical trials.
“This is fantastic news from the independent medicines regulator and means the UK has approved its first therapeutic designed specifically for Covid-19. This treatment will be a significant addition to our armoury to tackle Covid-19 – in addition to our world-renowned vaccination programme and life-saving therapeutics dexamethasone and tocilizumab.
“We are now working at pace with the NHS and expert clinicians to ensure this treatment can be rolled out to NHS patients as soon as possible.”
The MHRA’s interim chief quality and access officer, Dr Samantha Atkinson, said: “We are pleased to announce the approval of another therapeutic treatment that can be used to help save lives and protect against Covid-19.
“Ronapreve is the first of its kind for the treatment of Covid-19 and, after a meticulous assessment of the data by our expert scientists and clinicians, we are satisfied that this treatment is safe and effective.
“With no compromises on quality, safety and efficacy, the public can trust that the MHRA have conducted a robust and thorough assessment of all the available data.”
The regulator said the government and NHS would confirm how the treatment would be deployed to patients in due course.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/20/uk-approves-rollout-covid-antibody-treatment-ronapreve-clinical-trials
U.S. FAA tops $1 mln in proposed fines for disruptive airline passengers
By David Shepardson
August 19, 2021 12:23 PM BST Last Updated 3 hours ago
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/us-faa-tops-1-mln-proposed-fines-disruptive-airline-passengers-2021-08-19/
WASHINGTON, Aug 19 (Reuters) - The Federal Aviation Administration said Thursday it was proposing $531,545 in civil penalties against 34 airline passengers over unruly behavior, bringing its total for the year to more than $1 million.
The United States has seen a significant jump in reported cases of passengers causing disturbances on airplanes. Numerous videos of confrontations have drawn wide public attention on social media.
Since Jan. 1, the FAA has received 3,889 reports of unruly passengers, including 2,867 reports of people refusing to comply with the U.S. federal face mask mandate.
In total, the FAA has proposed more than $1 million in fines this year for unruly passengers.
On Tuesday, the Transportation Security Administration said it would extend existing mask requirements for airports, airplanes, trains and transit hubs through Jan. 18.
This month, FAA Administrator Steve Dickson asked U.S. airports to assist in the effort to crack down on disruptive air passengers. In March, he indefinitely extended a “zero tolerance policy” on unruly air passengers.
Dickson noted that alcohol often contributes to unsafe behavior and urged airports to prevent passengers from taking alcoholic drinks on planes.
Among new FAA fines announced Thursday:
* $45,000 against a JetBlue (JBLU.O) passenger flying from New York to Florida in May, over throwing objects, "including his carry-on luggage, at other passengers; refusing to stay seated; lying on the floor in the aisle, refusing to get up, and then grabbing a flight attendant by the ankles and putting his head up her skirt." The passenger was placed in cuffs and the flight made an emergency landing in Virginia.
* $42,000 against a JetBlue passenger on a May flight from New York to San Francisco, over failing to comply with the face mask mandate and other misbehavior including "making stabbing gestures towards certain passengers; and snorting what appeared to be cocaine from a plastic bag, which the cabin crew confiscated." The flight diverted to Minneapolis, where police removed the passenger.
* $30,000 against a Frontier Airlines passenger on a January flight from Atlanta to New York who during deplaning "attempted to gain entry to the flight deck by physically assaulting two flight attendants, threatening to kill one of them, and demanding them to open the door."
Reporting by David Shepardson. Editing by Gerry Doyle
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/us-faa-tops-1-mln-proposed-fines-disruptive-airline-passengers-2021-08-19/
Daphne Caruana Galizia
Prosecutors seek life sentence for journalist's murder
National Court
Yorgen Fenech
Daphne Caruana Galizia
18 August 2021|Bertrand Borg and Ivan Martin
5 min read Updated 12.46pm
Yorgen Fenech has been indicted for the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia, meaning he will face a trial by jury for the journalist’s 2017 murder.
The business mogul faces charges of complicity in murder and criminal association, with prosecutors understood to be pushing for him to be sentenced to life in prison for the former crime and an additional 20 to 30-year sentence for the latter one.
Prosecutors filed a bill of indictment against Fenech in court on Wednesday.
The case was assigned to judge Aaron Bugeja, who however immediately abstained from the case. Bugeja had led an inquiry into claims made by Caruana Galizia about offshore company Egrant.
Filing the bill of indictment wraps up the compilation of evidence against Fenech - a lengthy legal process that kicked off when he was first charged in November 2019. The compilation stage can however be reopened should new evidence come to light.
One person, Vince Muscat, has already been sentenced to 15 years in prison after pleading guilty to murder.
The two other alleged hitmen, brothers George and Alfred Degiorgio will also face trial.
What is a bill of indictment?
A bill of indictment is a legal document in which a person or people is accused of specific crimes.
It cites evidence against the accused that has been presented at the compilation of evidence stage, lists witnesses and evidence presented, cites the specific crimes a person is accused of and outlines the sentence prosecutors are seeking.
No person can stand trial for their alleged crimes without having first been served with a bill of indictment.
According to Maltese law, suspects must be served with a bill of indictment within 20 months of facing charges or else be eligible for bail. That 20-month period, however, was suspended at various points during the compilation of evidence against Fenech.
Once a bill of indictment is issued the 20-month period closes. However, a fresh 30-month term begins, during which the accused must stand trial.
Fresh requests for bail can be made during this time.
What is Yorgen Fenech accused of?
According to the bill of indictment, on October 16, 2017, at 2.58pm, “a powerful explosion shook the peaceful and rural Bidnija”.
The explosion, the bill reads, came just moments after journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, 53, said goodbye to her son Matthew and told him that she was on her way to a bank appointment.
“What she did not know, however, was that her life was about to be taken away in the most cowardly, violent, and brutal way,” the bill reads.
It alleges that in April 2017, Yorgen Fenech called his associate Melvin Theuma, a taxi driver and asked him to meet him to discuss a matter that should not be said over the telephone.
“Yorgen Fenech wanted Melvin Theuma to find someone willing to kill Daphne Caruana Galizia,” the bill reads.
It adds that Fenech had mentioned known criminal George Degiorgio known as ic-Ciniz. And said Caruana Galizia had to be murdered as she had damning information on his uncle Ray Fenech.
Theuma went on to make contact with the alleged hitman’s brother Alfred Degiorgio, known as il-Fulu.
The price set: €150,000, of which €30,000 were to be paid out as an irrefundable deposit.
The bill says that on May 1, 2017, a general election was announced by then prime minister Joseph Muscat.
At that point, on June 3, Fenech contacted theuma and told him to put the murder “on hold”.
Some two weeks later, Fenech informed him that he wished to proceed with the plan and gave the taxi driver a packet contained €150,000 in cash.
Theuma handed the Degiorgio brothers a €30,000 deposit from this amount, who informed him that the murder would be carried out by themselves and their associate Vincent Muscat, known as il-Kohhu.
In the months after the deposit was paid, Fenech became anxious and badgered Theuma to pile pressure on the Degiorgio to get on with the assassination, the document claims.
The Degiorgios are alleged to have stalked Caruana Galizia’s movements, and eventually found the opportunity to get at her leased car and place an explosive device beneath the driver’s seat.
“Shortly before the stroke of 3pm, on October 2017, the journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, ignorant of the blood-drenched deed that had been ordered and paid for by Yorgen Fenech, said goodbye to her son, left her home, got in her car, and drove towards the bank,” the indictment reads.
Out at sea on his boat, George Degiorgio, sent the fatal text message #rel1=on, detonating the device and murdering the journalist, the court document alleges.
The indictment says that a few days after the murder, Alfred Degiorgio called on Melvin Theuma in a garage at Marsascala and was handed €120,000, which was the balance remaining from the €150,000 which Fenech had handed Theuma for the murder to be carried out.
Degiorgio requested a further €5,000 from Theuma to cover unexpected costs including the purchase of sophisticated binoculars in preparation for the murder. Fenech handed over the extra money too, the indictment says.
It also alleges that in the months after the murder, until Melvin Theuma was arrested on November 14, 2019, Fenech issued thousands of euro to finance the legal defence of Alfred and George Degiorgio, who, along with Vincent Muscat had been arrested, arraigned, and accused of having carried out the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia.
Correction: A previous version misstated the year of the assassination in a quote from the bill of indictment.
https://timesofmalta.com/articles/view/yorgen-fenech-to-stand-trial-for-murder-of-daphne-caruana-galizia.894148#.YRzMFfw-fRc.twitter
US Capitol rioter sentencing delayed after online sleuths uncover new footage of alleged police assault
By Marshall Cohen and Hannah Rabinowitz
Updated 1948 GMT (0348 HKT) August 18, 2021
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/08/18/politics/robert-reeder-capitol-riot-sentencing/index.html
(CNN)The sentencing for one of the January 6 US Capitol rioters was abruptly postponed Wednesday after new videos emerged of the man allegedly fighting with police, an unexpected twist in the case because prosecutors hadn't previously accused him of committing violence that day.
Robert Reeder of Maryland was charged in February with four misdemeanors. He pleaded guilty to unlawfully demonstrating inside the Capitol and was set to be sentenced on Wednesday afternoon, with prosecutors asking for two months in jail, partially due to his lack of remorse.
But on Wednesday morning, the online group known as the Sedition Hunters tweeted newly discovered clips and photos, apparently showing Reeder fighting with police on January 6. Sedition Hunters is one of several online collectives, many comprised of anti-Donald Trump activists, who have combed through footage from the Capitol attack to identify rioters. The Justice Department has cited their work in many cases.
Prosecutors said during the truncated hearing that they notified the judge, as well as Reeder's defense attorneys, about the new footage on Wednesday morning. Prosecutors planned to go forward with sentencing and request the maximum six-month jail term, but after reviewing more of the videos, they asked to delay the hearing. He is now scheduled to be sentenced on October 8.
US District Judge Thomas Hogan said he was "concerned" about the new videos because Reeder was previously portrayed as "more as an observer than a participant" in the violence. Reeder's attorney in court said that "on first blush, the clip is problematic" but said there might be other footage that could help his defense arguments. Reeder is seeking a sentence of probation.
"The @SedtitionHunters team are extremely grateful for all the challenging work the FBI and the DOJ are putting into each individual case and their willingness to accept the assistance from our community of researchers," the group told CNN in a statement. "The quick response to last minute discovery of images showing a suspected assault clearly shows the dedication by all involved."
A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment about the case or the new video.
The plea deal prosecutors signed with Reeder gives the Justice Department a path to charge him with the alleged assault, if it chooses to. It says, "the United States expressly reserves its right to prosecute your client for any crime of violence ... if in fact your client committed or commits such a crime of violence prior to or after the execution of this Agreement."
Reeder is one of the rioters who pleaded guilty but remains defiant about key aspects of the January 6 insurrection. These cases are being watched closely as more rioters learn their punishment for participating in a grave attack on American democracy, and the Justice Department has said it'll seek harsher sentences for unrepentant defendants.
Questions of contrition
Reeder argued in court filings that he should get probation because he only went in the Capitol to find water after getting pepper sprayed and faulted police for ineffectively guarding the building. He claimed he stayed inside -- even while alarms blared, and police officers squared off with violent rioters -- because he "was struck by the awe and the beauty of the Rotunda."
Prosecutors cited Reeder's apparent lack of remorse as one reason why he should be sentenced to two months in jail. That is a stiffer punishment than most of the other rioters who pleaded guilty to the same misdemeanor. In similar cases involving nonviolent rioters, the Justice Department has asked for house arrest or probation, but never any jail time.
Reeder offered "a self-serving rewrite of history that sought to portray himself as a hapless tourist, absolve himself of any wrongdoing (and) place blame on others," prosecutors wrote their recommendation, where they slammed him for criticizing the police response on January 6.
They also rebuked Reeder for claiming in an April FBI interview that the riot was "a plan to allow people in" so the media could "demonize the Trump people" -- a conspiracy theory that 55% of Republicans believe is true, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll that was conducted in April.
In recent court filings, Reeder said he is a registered Democrat who "did not care much for President Trump." But on social media, he was a member of multiple pro-Trump groups on Facebook, wrote that a "civil war is coming," posted memes about the voter-fraud myth, and even submitted an online request to the Supreme Court for an investigation into the election.
More than seven months after the attack, prosecutors have secured guilty pleas from 37 of the roughly 575 people facing criminal charges. Seven defendants were already sentenced, and they received punishments ranging from probation to house arrest to eight months in prison.
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/08/18/politics/robert-reeder-capitol-riot-sentencing/index.html
Court rejects 'shockingly low' 4-year sentence for NY woman who aided Islamic State
By Jonathan Stempel
August 18, 2021 5:07 PM BST Last Updated 19 hours ago
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/court-rejects-shockingly-low-4-year-sentence-ny-woman-who-aided-islamic-state-2021-08-18/
NEW YORK, Aug 18 (Reuters) - A U.S. federal appeals court on Wednesday threw out what it called a "shockingly low" four-year prison term for a Brooklyn woman who admitted to supporting Islamic State, and ordered that she be resentenced.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan said late U.S. District Judge Jack Weinstein abused his discretion in finding Sinmyah Amera Ceasar's need for educational and mental health support after a lifetime of emotional, physical and sexual abuse justified the sentence.
While "not without sympathy" for Ceasar, Circuit Judge Robert Sack said the four-year term "shocks the conscience," failing to balance her need for rehabilitation against the needs to ensure just punishment and promote respect for the law.
"We further conclude that in comparison with sentences for similar terrorism crimes, Ceasar's sentence of 48 months' imprisonment was shockingly low and unsupportable as a matter of law," Sack wrote for a three-judge panel.
Prosecutors had sought a 30- to 50-year prison term, calling the 26-year-old Ceasar a "committed recruiter" for Islamic State who, using the name "Umm Nutella," tried to connect supporters in the United States with operatives in other countries.
Ceasar was sentenced in June 2019, and has been free since July 2020 after receiving credit for time served.
A public defender representing Ceasar did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The office of Acting U.S. Attorney Jacquelyn Kasulis in Brooklyn declined to comment.
Ceasar was arrested in November 2016 at New York's Kennedy Airport while preparing to leave the country.
She began cooperating with prosecutors and pleaded guilty to conspiring to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization.
Ceasar was freed on bail in April 2018, but bail was revoked three months later after she resumed reaching out to Islamic State supporters.
Prosecutors said Ceasar lied in a subsequent FBI interview about her communications and use of Facebook and email.
Weinstein, known for his independent streak, died in June. A different judge will resentence Ceasar.
Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Howard Goller
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/court-rejects-shockingly-low-4-year-sentence-ny-woman-who-aided-islamic-state-2021-08-18/
Taliban mark Afghan independence as challenges to rule rise
By AHMAD SEIR, RAHIM FAIEZ, KATHY GANNON AND JON GAMBRELL
an hour ago
https://apnews.com/article/lifestyle-taliban-bd853cac9eee5e4f0cd4b76580f27b53
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — The Taliban celebrated Afghanistan’s Independence Day on Thursday by declaring they beat the United States, but challenges to their rule ranging from running a country severely short on cash and bureaucrats to potentially facing an armed opposition began to emerge.
With many ATMs out of cash and worries about rising food prices in this nation of 38 million people reliant on imports, the Taliban face all the challenges of the civilian government they dethroned without the level of international aid it enjoyed. Meanwhile, opposition figures gathering in the last area of the country not under Taliban rule talked of launching an armed resistance under the banner of the Northern Alliance, which allied with the U.S. during the 2001 invasion.
Still, it was not clear how serious a threat they posed given that the militants overran nearly the entire country in a matter of days with little resistance from Afghan forces. Many fear the Taliban will succeed in erasing two decades of efforts to expand women’s and human rights in Afghanistan and remake the country.
The Taliban so far have offered no specifics on how they will lead, other than to say they will be guided by Shariah, or Islamic, law. They are in talks with senior officials of previous Afghan governments. But they face an increasingly precarious situation.
“A humanitarian crisis of incredible proportions is unfolding before our eyes,” warned Mary Ellen McGroarty, the head of the World Food Program in Afghanistan. Beyond the difficulties of importing food, she said that drought has seen over 40% of the country’s crop lost. Many who fled the Taliban advance now live in parks and open spaces in Kabul.
“This is really Afghanistan’s hour of greatest need, and we urge the international community to stand by the Afghan people at this time,” she said.
At Kabul’s international airport, military evacuation flights continued, according to flight-tracking data. However, access to the airport remained difficult for those wanting to flee. On Thursday, Taliban militants fired into the air to try to control the crowds gathered at the airport’s blast walls, trying to get inside. Men, women and children fled.
Overnight, President Joe Biden said that he was committed to keeping U.S. troops in Afghanistan until every American is evacuated, even if that means maintaining a military presence there beyond his Aug. 31 deadline for withdrawal.
Thursday marked Afghanistan’s Independence Day, which commemorates the 1919 treaty that ended British rule in the central Asian nation.
“Fortunately, today we are celebrating the anniversary of independence from Britain,” the Taliban said. “We at the same time as a result of our jihadi resistance forced another arrogant power of the world, the United States, to fail and retreat from our holy territory of Afghanistan.”
Unacknowledged by the insurgents, however, was their violent suppression of a protest Wednesday in the eastern city of Jalalabad, which saw demonstrators lower the Taliban’s flag and replace it with Afghanistan’s tricolor. At least one person was killed.
In Khost province, Taliban authorities instituted a 24-hour curfew after violently breaking up a similar protest, according to information obtained by journalists monitoring from abroad. The militants did not immediately acknowledge the demonstration or the curfew.
They have urged people to return to work, but most government officials remain in hiding in their homes or are attempting to flee the Taliban. Questions remain over Afghanistan’s $9 billion in foreign reserves, the vast majority now apparently frozen in the U.S. The head of the country’s Central Bank warned that the supply of physical U.S. dollars is “close to zero,” which will batter the currency, the afghani, and raise the prices of much-needed food.
“The afghani has been defended by literally planeloads of US dollars landing in Kabul on a very regular basis, sometimes weekly,” said Graeme Smith, a consultant researcher with the Overseas Development Institute. “If the Taliban don’t get cash infusions soon to defend the afghani, I think there’s a real risk of a currency devaluation that makes it hard to buy bread on the streets of Kabul for ordinary people.”
Still, Smith, who has written a book on Afghanistan, said the Taliban likely won’t ask for the same billions in international aid sought by the country’s fallen civilian government — large portions of which were funneled off by corruption.
“You’re much more likely to see the Taliban positioning themselves as sort of gatekeepers to the international community as opposed to coming begging for billions of dollars,” he said.
That could limit the power of the international community’s threat of sanctions.
Hafiz Ahmad, a shopkeeper in Kabul, said some food has flowed into the capital, but prices have gone up. He hesitated to pass those costs onto his customers but said he had to.
“It is better to have it,” he said. “If there were nothing, then that would be even worse.”
Two of Afghanistan’s key border crossings with Pakistan, Torkham near Jalalabad and Chaman near Spin Boldak, are now open for trade. Hundreds of trucks have passed through, Pakistani Interior Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed has said. However, traders still fear insecurity on the roads and confusion over customs duties that could push them to price their goods higher.
Already, the Taliban are charging over $2,400 per truck coming across from Pakistan with scrap metal, said Abdul Nasir Reshtia, the chief executive of the Afghan steel production factories association. President Ashraf Ghani, who fled the country and is now in the United Arab Emirates, previously banned the scrap metal trade to boost the country’s steel production.
There has been no armed opposition to the Taliban. But videos from the Panjshir Valley north of Kabul, a stronghold of the Northern Alliance militias that allied with the U.S. during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, appear to show potential opposition figures gathering there. That area is in the only province that has not fallen to the Taliban.
Those figures include members of the deposed government — Vice President Amrullah Saleh, who asserted on Twitter that he is the country’s rightful president, and Defense Minister Gen. Bismillah Mohammadi — as well as Ahmad Massoud, the son of the slain Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud.
In an opinion piece published by The Washington Post, Massoud asked for weapons and aid to fight the Taliban.
“I write from the Panjshir Valley today, ready to follow in my father’s footsteps, with mujahideen fighters who are prepared to once again take on the Taliban,” he wrote.
___
Faiez reported from Istanbul, Gannon from Guelph, Canada, and Gambrell from Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Associated Press writers Tameem Akhgar in Istanbul, Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations and Munir Ahmed in Islamabad contributed to this report.
https://apnews.com/article/lifestyle-taliban-bd853cac9eee5e4f0cd4b76580f27b53
Web page praising Trump's 'historic' peace deal with Taliban disappears from RNC website
The web page, which was published in September 2020, also said that Trump’s election rival, Joe Biden, had a 'history of pushing for endless wars'
Author of the article: National Post Staff
Publishing date:Aug 18, 2021 • 4 hours ago • 2 minute read
https://nationalpost.com/news/world/web-page-praising-trumps-historic-peace-deal-with-taliban-disappears-from-rnc-website
A web page on the Republican National Committee’s (RNC) site that praised former U.S. President Donald Trump’s peace deal with the Taliban has disappeared following the toppling of the Afghan government over the weekend.
The page, which was first posted on the RNC’s website during the 2020 presidential election, hailed Trump’s “historic peace agreement with the Taliban,” as well as the normalization of relations between Serbia and Kosovo.
The page also went on to say that Trump’s election rival, and the current president, Joe Biden, had a “history of pushing for endless wars” — listing the number of times he had called for more troops to be deployed in Afghanistan.
While the RNC did not respond to initial requests for comment from the Independent, its Deputy Chief of Staff later pushed back against the claim that the organization had removed the web page following the events in Afghanistan over the weekend.
“This is so dishonest. We launched a new website last week… some of the old posts haven’t been carried over yet. Go look,” wrote Deputy Chief of Staff Mike Reed in a tweet. “But good try attempting to divert attention from the folks actually in charge of this disaster.”
How quickly can the politics around Afghanistan change? Here's a section on the RNC's website in June; click it now and you get a 404 error. (Rest of page was about Kosovo/Israel-Arab deals.)
https://gop.com/president-trump-is-bringing-peace-to-the-middle-east-rsr/
THREAD
How quickly can the politics around Afghanistan change? Here's a section on the RNC's website in June; click it now and you get a 404 error. (Rest of page was about Kosovo/Israel-Arab deals.) https://t.co/kDJo95QfiF pic.twitter.com/HkZok9mgJW
— David Weigel (@daveweigel) August 15, 2021
Bodybuilder Rioter Seen Dragging Capitol Cop Down Stairs Is Finally Arrested
Lawrence Ukenye Breaking News Intern
Published Aug. 17, 2021 1:52PM ET
https://www.thedailybeast.com/logan-barnhart-bodybuilder-rioter-seen-dragging-capitol-cop-down-stairs-is-arrested?via=newsletter&source=CSPMedition
Seven months after the attack on the U.S. Capitol, a high-profile suspect has finally been arrested by the FBI, HuffPost reports. Photos and footage from Jan. 6 allegedly showed a man in sunglasses and a Caterpillar hoodie dragging a Capitol police officer down the stairs. He became a “white whale” target for Sedition Hunters, a group of citizen sleuths who have combed through footage from the riot and tracked down the identifies of participants. Sleuths found footage of the man from earlier in the day on Jan. 6 without sunglasses, then used facial recognition to match it to photos of a man named Logan Barnhart on bodybuilding sites and cheap romance novels. They then found old images of Barnhart on his Instagram wearing the same Caterpillar hoodie and carrying the same American flag he had on Jan. 6.
Others who were with Barnhart on Jan. 6 have been arrested including a man who allegedly beat a Capitol cop with a U.S. flag. Prior to being arrested on Tuesday, Barnhart had mocked the FBI’s riot investigation in online posts.
Read it at HuffingPost
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/logan-barnhart-trump-capitol-attack-fbi-arrest_n_6086e1b3e4b02e74d21d4a28
https://www.thedailybeast.com/logan-barnhart-bodybuilder-rioter-seen-dragging-capitol-cop-down-stairs-is-arrested?via=newsletter&source=CSPMedition
‘Please Don’t Leave Us Behind. We Will Be Great Americans.’
An interview with a U.S.-trained Afghan Air Force pilot, now hiding from the Taliban.
by THE EDITORS
AUGUST 16, 2021 5:41 PM
https://www.thebulwark.com/please-dont-leave-us-behind-we-will-be-great-americans/
As the world watched the United States pull out from Afghanistan and Taliban forces take over the country, we spoke by text message with an Afghan Air Force pilot, now in hiding along with several other pilots and hoping to be evacuated.
Who are you? Can you tell us a little bit about your background?
I was born in Kunar, Afghanistan and joined the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF) in 2005. I’m married with seven beautiful children. Unfortunately, we are currently separated, because the Taliban took Kabul.
I’m at an undisclosed location with other Afghan Air Force (AAF) pilots, hiding from the Taliban. They are hunting us.
Actually, they’ve been hunting us for years, but this really increased over the last year. The AAF, along with the Afghan National Army Special Operations Corps (ANASOC), were the best fighters for the Afghan government. The AAF was very good. Because we were very good, the Taliban hunted us relentlessly over the last year. I lost many friends to Taliban assassins.
They’ve already executed a few pilots over the weekend.
What was your career with the Afghan Air Force like?
I was very proud to be an AAF pilot. I was a commander. I spent years in the United States, learning to speak English and going through undergraduate pilot training. I visited San Antonio, Fort Rucker, and a lot of other places, too. I like Texas the best. I thought the people were very friendly.
I started at the Defense Language Institute, then moved onto undergraduate pilot training, and then eventually more advanced pilot training for my aircraft. I have so many fond memories of my time in the United States. However, I loved working with my American Air Force advisors the most. They were incredible men and women. When they left [Afghanistan] in May, I was very scared that this day would come.
However, we fought for a long time, and it was the loss of the contractors that really hurt us. Although we have a lot of really good pilots, it takes a very long time to train maintainers. Although we had made great strides, especially with the Mi-17s, we weren’t ready to do it alone without the contractors. A lot of the American-made aircraft are very sophisticated and they take years of training to maintain them adequately.
What’s your current situation?
Like I said, I’m currently in hiding. We are hoping to get out. If we are not rescued, then the Taliban will execute us.
The AAF and the Afghan Special Operations Forces are not the same as regular rank-and-file soldiers. We are very well known. We were celebrated by the Afghan people, so everyone knows us. It’s a very big deal to be an Afghan pilot or a commando.
Anyway, we are hoping that the Americans will take us, and our families, to safety. We spent decades fighting alongside American forces.
Anything you want the American public to know?
Many Afghan soldiers died bravely. I’ve been fighting for over fifteen years. We did not all just give up and quit. Yes, some did. Once the Americans left, we weren’t ready to start doing all the logistics. The logistics, the maintenance, and corruption really hurt us.
I know people in the U.S. are upset that we didn’t fight longer. But we’ve been fighting for decades—and some of us, even longer. When the U.S. left, it really affected morale, especially how quickly it happened. We woke up one day, then Bagram was gone. Everyone got scared. It got out of control.
I’m mad at many of the senior leaders who lined their pockets and simply vanished from the country. However, thousands of Afghan officers were not responsible for that. We were simply doing the best we could.
There are a lot of Afghans who trusted the United States. Not just translators. Not just civil society activists, but also Afghan soldiers. We loved fighting alongside Americans.
Please don’t leave us behind. Please. We will be great Americans.
https://www.thebulwark.com/please-dont-leave-us-behind-we-will-be-great-americans/
Senator mistakenly lists 30,000 US troops in Taiwan
US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence member erroneously announces troops in Taiwan
By Keoni Everington, Taiwan News, Staff Writer
2021/08/17 16:14
https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4271640
TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) on Tuesday (Aug. 17) mistakenly listed the U.S. as having 30,000 troops stationed in Taiwan, a country that has not seen an American military presence in over 40 years, leading to widespread criticism on Twitter.
In the wake of the disastrous collapse of the Afghan government following the rushed withdrawal of U.S. troops from the country, many politicians are arguing that the relatively small force that the U.S. had in place maintained stability in the nation at a comparatively low cost in terms of lives and money.
To illustrate this point, Cornyn took to Twitter on Tuesday to list other current U.S. troop deployments around the world that are much higher than the 2,500 stationed in Afghanistan as recently as two months ago.
Among the countries listed with major troop contingents were South Korea, Germany, Japan, and Taiwan, where he cited 30,000 soldiers in place. However, the U.S. has not stationed troops in Taiwan since 1979, when former President Carter severed diplomatic relations with the country.
Many Twitter users were aghast that a member of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence could get such basic information wrong. Others joked that Cornyn had accidentally leaked top-secret information about U.S. forces clandestinely stationed in Taiwan.
The last time the U.S. had 30,000 soldiers based in Taiwan was in the midst of the Vietnam War in the late 60s and early 70s. Many speculated that Cornyn may have obtained the number from a Wikipedia page on the defunct United States Taiwan Defense Command, which operated in Taiwan from Dec. 1954 to April 1979 and had 30,000 combined U.S. military personnel at its peak.
Senator John Cornyn
@JohnCornyn
US Troops today in:
South Korea - 28,000
Germany - 35,486
Japan - 50,000
Taiwan - 30,000
Africa - 7,000
Afghanistan (month or 2 ago) - 2,500
12:03 AM · Aug 17, 2021·Twitter for iPad
https://twitter.com/JohnCornyn/status/1427405666868674561
https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4271640
Andy Netherwood @AndyNetherwood Replying to @AndyNetherwood I just want to finish with a hat tip to the crew of Reach 871 who lifted 640 people out of Kabul on Sunday night. A gutsy call in difficult circumstances for the Aircraft Commander - I hope they get the credit they deserve. They undoubtedly saved many lives.
11:45 AM · Aug 17, 2021·Twitter Web App
THREAD
https://twitter.com/AndyNetherwood/status/1427582305313431555
Taliban announces ‘amnesty,’ urges women to join government
By AHMAD SEIR, TAMEEM AKHGAR, KATHY GANNON and JON GAMBRELL
22 minutes ago
https://apnews.com/article/technology-joe-biden-middle-east-kabul-taliban-1d4b052ccef113adc8dc94f965ff23c7
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — The Taliban declared an “amnesty” across Afghanistan and urged women to join their government Tuesday, seeking to convince a wary population that they have changed a day after deadly chaos gripped the main airport as desperate crowds tried to flee their rule.
Following a blitz across Afghanistan that saw many cities fall to the insurgents without a fight, the Taliban have sought to portray themselves as more moderate than when they imposed a brutal rule in the late 1990s. But many Afghans remain skeptical.
Older generations remember the Taliban’s ultraconservative Islamic views, which included severe restrictions on women as well as stonings, amputations and public executions before they were ousted by the U.S-led invasion that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
While there were no major reports of abuses or fighting in the capital of Kabul as the Taliban now patrol its streets, many residents have stayed home and remain fearful after the insurgents’ takeover saw prisons emptied and armories looted. Many women have expressed dread that the two-decade Western experiment to expand their rights and remake Afghanistan would not survive the resurgent Taliban.
Germany, meanwhile, halted development aid to Afghanistan over the Taliban takeover. Such aid is a crucial source of funding for the country — and the Taliban’s efforts to project a milder version of themselves may be aimed at ensuring that money continues to flow.
The promises of amnesty from Enamullah Samangani, a member of the Taliban’s cultural commission, were the first comments on how the Taliban might govern on a national level. His remarks remained vague, however, as the Taliban are still negotiating with political leaders of the country’s fallen government and no formal handover deal has been announced.
“The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan with full dignity and honesty has announced a complete amnesty for all Afghanistan, especially those who were with the opposition or supported the occupiers for years and recently,” he said.
Other Taliban leaders have said they won’t seek revenge on those who worked with the Afghan government or foreign countries. But some in Kabul allege Taliban fighters have lists of people who cooperated with the government and are seeking them out.
Samangani also described women as “the main victims of the more than 40 years of crisis in Afghanistan.”
“The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan doesn’t want the women to be the victims anymore,” he said. “The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan is ready to provide women with environment to work and study, and the presence of women in different (government) structures according to Islamic law and in accordance with our cultural values.”
That would be a marked departure from the last time the Taliban were in power, when women were largely confined to their homes. Samangani didn’t describe exactly what he meant by Islamic law, implying people already knew the rules. He added that “all sides should join” a government.
In another sign of the Taliban’s efforts to portray a new image, a female television anchor on the private broadcaster Tolo interviewed a Taliban official on camera Tuesday in a studio — an interaction that once would have been unthinkable. Meanwhile, women in hijabs demonstrated briefly in Kabul, holding signs demanding the Taliban not “eliminate women” from public life.
Rupert Colville, a spokesman for the United Nations’ high commissioner for human rights, noted both the Taliban’s vows and the fear of those now under their rule.
“Such promises will need to be honored, and for the time being — again understandably, given past history — these declarations have been greeted with some skepticism,” he said in a statement. “There have been many hard-won advances in human rights over the past two decades. The rights of all Afghans must be defended.”
Germany suspended development aid to Afghanistan, estimated at 250 million euros ($294 million) for 2021. The German news agency dpa described Afghanistan as the nation that received the most development aid from Berlin. Other funding separately goes to security services and humanitarian aid.
Swedish Development Aid Minister Per Olsson Fridh, meanwhile, said his government would slow down aid to the country in an interview with the Dagens Nyheter newspaper. But Britain committed to an increase.
British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said humanitarian aid could rise by 10%. He said the aid budget would be reconfigured for development and humanitarian purposes and that the Taliban would not get any money previously earmarked for security — but he said aid would not be conditioned on how the Taliban govern.
Meanwhile, Kabul’s international airport, the only way out for many, reopened to military evacuation flights under the watch of American troops.
All flights were suspended on Monday when thousands of people rushed the airport, desperate to leave the country. In shocking scenes captured on video, some clung to a plane as it took off and then fell to their deaths. At least seven people died in chaos at the airport, U.S. officials said.
Stefano Pontecorvo, NATO’s senior civilian representative to Afghanistan, posted video online Tuesday showing the runway empty with U.S. troops on the tarmac. What appeared to be a military cargo transport plane could be seen in the distance.
“I see airplanes landing and taking off,” he wrote on Twitter.
Overnight, flight-tracking data showed a U.S. military plane taking off for Qatar, home to the U.S. military Central Command’s forward headquarters. A British military cargo plane, headed to Kabul, took off from Dubai.
Still, there were indications that the situation was still tenuous. The U.S. Embassy in Kabul, now operating from the airport, urged Americans to register online for evacuations but not come to the airport before being contacted.
The German Foreign Ministry said a first German military transport plane landed in Kabul, but it could only take seven people on board before it had to depart again due to continued chaos.
Across Afghanistan, the International Committee of the Red Cross said thousands had been wounded in fighting as the Taliban swept across the country in recent days. However, in many places, security forces and politicians handed over their provinces and bases without a fight, likely fearing what would happen when the last American troops withdrew as planned at the end of the month.
A resolute U.S. President Joe Biden on Monday said he stood “squarely behind” his decision to withdraw American forces and acknowledged the “gut-wrenching” images unfolding in Kabul. Biden said he faced a choice between honoring a previously negotiated withdrawal agreement or sending thousands more troops back to begin a third decade of war.
“After 20 years, I’ve learned the hard way that there was never a good time to withdraw U.S. forces,” Biden said in a televised address from the White House.
Talks continued Tuesday between the Taliban and several Afghan government officials, including former President Hamid Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah, who once headed the country’s negotiating council. Discussions focused on how a Taliban-dominated government would operate given the changes in Afghanistan over the last 20 years, rather than just dividing up who controlled what ministries, officials with knowledge of the negotiations said. They spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss confidential details of the talks.
President Ashraf Ghani earlier fled the country amid the Taliban advance and his whereabouts remain unknown.
___
Akhgar reported from Istanbul, Gannon from Guelph, Canada, and Gambrell from Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Associated Press writers Rahim Faiez in Istanbul, Kirsten Grieshaber in Berlin, Jan Olson in Copenhagen, Denmark, Pan Pylas in London, and Aya Batrawy in Dubai contributed to this report.
https://apnews.com/article/technology-joe-biden-middle-east-kabul-taliban-1d4b052ccef113adc8dc94f965ff23c7
Ron Filipkowski @RonFilipkowski Now this is interesting. Jeffrey Buongiorno, who is apparently a MAGA ‘America First’ GOP candidate for Congress, has just posted that he was with Mike Lindell at the time he claims he was attacked, and Lindell is lying.
2:56 AM · Aug 17, 2021·Twitter for iPhone
THREAD
Now this is interesting. Jeffrey Buongiorno, who is apparently a MAGA ‘America First’ GOP candidate for Congress, has just posted that he was with Mike Lindell at the time he claims he was attacked, and Lindell is lying. pic.twitter.com/i9N29DGx4V
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) August 17, 2021
Gorbachev, leader who pulled Soviets from Afghanistan, says U.S. campaign was doomed from start
Reuters
August 17, 202110:51 AM BST Last Updated 2 hours ago
https://www.reuters.com/world/india/gorbachev-leader-who-pulled-soviets-afghanistan-says-us-campaign-was-doomed-2021-08-17/
MOSCOW, Aug 17 (Reuters) - Mikhail Gorbachev, the leader who oversaw the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan in 1989 after Moscow's failed decade-long campaign there, said on Tuesday that NATO's own deployment to the country had been doomed from the start.
Gorbachev, 90, regarded the Soviet presence in Afghanistan as a political mistake that was sapping precious resources at a time when the Soviet Union was living through what turned out to be the twilight of its own existence.
The Soviet-backed authorities in Afghanistan survived for three years after the withdrawal by Moscow of its main forces but never recovered from a Russian decision to cut aid to them after the Soviet collapse in January 1992 and fell later that year.
Gorbachev was cited by Russia's RIA news agency as saying that NATO and the Americans had no chance of success and had badly mishandled their own Afghan campaign.
"They (NATO and the United States) should have admitted failure earlier. The important thing now is to draw the lessons from what happened and make sure that similar mistakes are not repeated," Gorbachev told RIA.
"It (the U.S. campaign) was a failed enterprise from the start even though Russia supported it during the first stages," he added.
"Like many other similar projects at its heart lay the exaggeration of a threat and poorly defined geopolitical ideas. To that were added unrealistic attempts to democratise a society made up of many tribes."
Reporting by Andrew Osborn Editing by Tom Balmforth
https://www.reuters.com/world/india/gorbachev-leader-who-pulled-soviets-afghanistan-says-us-campaign-was-doomed-2021-08-17/
Exclusive: Title, cover and details of new Trump book from Bob Woodward and Robert Costa revealed
By Jamie Gangel and Elizabeth Stuart, CNN
Updated 3:32 PM ET, Mon August 16, 2021
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/08/16/politics/bob-woodward-robert-costa-trump-book/index.html
(CNN) First it was "Fear," then it was " Rage," now it is "Peril." That is the title of the highly-anticipated third book about President Trump from legendary journalist Bob Woodward, this time written with co-author Robert Costa, a Washington Post national political reporter.
"Peril" is scheduled for release on September 21, and will closely examine the tumultuous time spanning the November 2020 election, the January 6 insurrection, and President Biden's inauguration. According to details exclusively obtained by CNN, the book will reveal how the transition period was "far more than just a domestic political crisis" and "one of the most dangerous periods in American history."
The book will be published by Simon & Schuster, which published Woodward's first two bestselling books on Trump.
According to sources familiar with the book, Woodward and Costa interviewed more than 200 insiders for "Peril," resulting in more than 6,000 pages of transcripts. CNN obtained the book's jacket, which says it "takes readers deep inside the Trump White House, the Biden White House, the 2020 campaign, and the Pentagon and Congress, with eyewitness accounts of what really happened."
Woodward and Costa obtained "never-before-seen material from secret orders, transcripts of confidential calls, diaries, emails, meeting notes and other personal and government records," sources familiar with the book told CNN.
"Peril" also goes behind the scenes during the earliest days of the Biden administration, just weeks after the attack at the Capitol and as the coronavirus pandemic continued to rage throughout the country. The book's title comes from a line in Biden's inaugural address, according to sources familiar with the book.
"Over the centuries through storm and strife, in peace and in war, we have come so far. But we still have far to go. We will press forward with speed and urgency, for we have much to do in this winter of peril and possibility," Biden said on the steps of the Capitol on January 20.
Woodward is known for his bombshell reporting, with explosive details in his 2020 book "Rage" that revealed Trump understood how contagious and deadly the Covid-19 virus was long before the American people were made aware.
Woodward's first book on Trump, 2018's "Fear," detailed the extraordinary measures taken by top officials and White House aides to prevent what they saw as a president "unhinged" and unable to control his own impulses.
The book jacket for "Peril" also includes an intriguing quote about Trump's presidential ambitions for 2024.
"He had an army. An army for Trump. He wants that back," Brad Parscale, Trump's former campaign manager, said privately in July 2021. "I don't think he sees it as a comeback. He sees it as vengeance."
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/08/16/politics/bob-woodward-robert-costa-trump-book/index.html
Analysis: The titanic hubris of Lindsey Graham
CNN August 16, 2021
https://dnyuz.com/2021/08/16/analysis-the-titanic-hubris-of-lindsey-graham/
Sen. Lindsey Graham thinks pretty highly of himself.
So highly, in fact, that the following two paragraphs were written about him in a lengthy New York Times profile over the weekend:
“He alone can fix the former president, he believes, and make him a unifying figure for Republicans to take back both houses of Congress next year and beyond. To that end, he says, he is determined to steer Mr. Trump away from a dangerous obsession with 2020.
“‘What I say to him is, ‘Do you want January the 6th to be your political obituary?’ he said. ‘Because if you don’t get over it, it’s going to be.’”
Lindsey Graham thinks he can “fix” Donald Trump, turning the former president from a narcissistic obsessive about nonexistent fraud in the 2020 election into a powerful force for good within the Republican Party.
Which, in a word, HA!
There’s lots of reasons why Graham’s belief that he can fundamentally alter Trump is deeply misguided. Let’s go through them.
1) Trump remains totally focused on nonexistent election fraud: While the former president no longer has Twitter — he was permanently banned from the platform after his reaction to the January 6 riot at the US Capitol — he is still issuing a slew of statements every week via his “Save America” PAC. And the common theme in the majority of them is that the 2020 election was somehow stolen from him — and that the truth will emerge sometime soon.
“It is time for Joe Biden to resign in disgrace for what he has allowed to happen to Afghanistan, along with the tremendous surge in COVID, the Border catastrophe, the destruction of energy independence, and our crippled economy,” Trump said Sunday. “It shouldn’t be a big deal, because he wasn’t elected legitimately in the first place!”
“Why are RINOs standing in the way of a full Forensic Audit in Michigan?” Trump said late last week. “The voters are demanding it because they have no confidence in their elections after the Rigged 2020 Presidential Election Scam.”
Yeah, that totally seems like a guy who is ready to move on! He’s totally coming to terms with losing the 2020 election!
2) There is NO Trump 2.0: Remember when Trump promised — after it became clear he would be the Republican nominee in 2016 — that he would be “so presidential [that] you will be so bored. You’ll say, ‘Can’t he have a little more energy?’” How’s that promise looking with five years of hindsight?
The truth is — and always has been — that there is no pivot possible. There is not other gear that Trump can go to, some other side of his personality he hasn’t shown yet. He’s a 75-year-old man who has behaved the same way — boorishly, crudely and utterly without introspection — for his entire adult life. The idea that he will suddenly change — because Lindsey Graham told him to! — is beyond ridiculous.
3) Graham isn’t the boss of their relationship: Even if you discount the two points above — and you shouldn’t — there’s still no chance that Graham can bring his vision of Trump to fruition. Why? Because even by Graham’s own admission, he’s not that guy!
This, from the Times, is illuminating on that point:
“Mr. Graham, 66, has from his school days chosen to ally himself with protective figures he calls ‘alpha dogs,’ men more powerful than himself…
“…’To be part of a football team, you don’t have to be the quarterback, right?’ Mr. Graham said in the interview. ‘I mean, there’s a value in being part of something.’”
Sure! But the left guard doesn’t tell the quarterback what to do. Or suggest how the QB can change himself in order to be a better team player.
That Graham thinks he can change Trump, then, speaks to two things: His own towering sense of self-importance and his fundamental misreading of who Donald Trump is (and always has been). There is no “new” Trump waiting to be discovered by Graham (or anyone else). There’s just Trump. Take him or leave him.
https://dnyuz.com/2021/08/16/analysis-the-titanic-hubris-of-lindsey-graham/
Afghanistan: striking image appears to show 640 people fleeing Kabul in packed US military plane
Hundreds of people crammed into a US carrier in a desperate attempt to escape Kabul after Taliban forces took control of the capital
Guardian staff with agencies
Tue 17 Aug 2021 02.51 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/17/afghanistan-striking-image-appears-to-show-640-people-fleeing-kabul-in-packed-us-military-plane
Image obtained by Defense One shows hundreds of Afghans inside US military cargo plane C-17 Globemaster III, flown from Afghanistan to Qatar on 15 August 2021, following the fall of the capital Kabul to the Taliban Photograph: Courtesy of Defense One
An extraordinary image has emerged that appears to show hundreds of Afghans packed into a US military cargo plane, in a desperate attempt to flee Kabul after the fall of the capital to the Taliban.
The picture obtained by US defence and security news site Defense One is believed to show 640 people crammed into a C-17 Globemaster III, among the highest number of people ever carried in such an aircraft.
US defence officials reportedly said the passengers – among them women and children – on the flight were safely evacuated from Kabul to Qatar on Sunday.
The flight had not intended to take such a large load but some panicked Afghans pulled themselves on to the C-17’s half-open ramp, Defense One reported.
The flight was one of several that was able to take off with hundreds on board, and others may have carried even more passengers.
The desperation of many other Afghans was seen at Kabul airport on Monday, as people clung to the side of moving military planes and at least two apparently fell to their deaths from the undercarriage soon after takeoff.
Video footage showed hundreds of people running alongside a military carrier as it travelled along the runway.
The airport – secured by the US military – was the only feasible route out after the Islamist group took control of the country’s land borders.
But US forces had to shut down the airport on Monday in an effort to contain the chaos and crowds. The airport reopened in the early hours of Tuesday, a US general said, adding that US personnel were now in charge of air traffic control.
With Agence France-Presse
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/17/afghanistan-striking-image-appears-to-show-640-people-fleeing-kabul-in-packed-us-military-plane
A conservative cardinal who criticized the vaccine caught covid. Days later, he was put on a ventilator.
By Jaclyn Peiser
Today at 6:22 a.m. EDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/08/16/cardinal-raymond-burke-ventilator-covid/
Most days during the coronavirus pandemic, Cardinal Raymond L. Burke could be found strolling down the streets of Rome maskless and carrying rosary beads. The 73-year-old conservative cardinal was an early critic of social distancing and, later, an unabashed skeptic of the vaccine.
On Tuesday, Burke announced he had tested positive for the coronavirus. Now, the cardinal is in a hospital bed in his native Wisconsin, breathing with the help of a ventilator.
“Doctors are encouraged by his progress,” Burke’s press team tweeted Saturday night. "[His Eminence] faithfully prayed the Rosary for those suffering from the virus. … Let us now pray the Rosary for him.”
The Vatican did not immediately respond to a request for comment late Sunday.
A former archbishop of St. Louis, Burke made a name for himself as an outspoken conservative figure in the mid-2000s. In 2004, he refused to give Communion to then-Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kerry because the Democrat was an abortion rights advocate. In 2007, Burke resigned from the board of a Catholic hospital in protest of its invitation for Sheryl Crow, who is also an advocate, to play at a benefit concert.
Two years later, he excoriated the University of Notre Dame for giving former president Barack Obama an honorary degree. In an interview, Burke said that Catholics who voted for Obama “collaborated with evil.”
During the global pandemic, Burke spoke out against vaccine mandates, claiming the practice “violates the integrity of its citizens.”
“While the State can provide reasonable regulations for the safeguarding of health, it is not the ultimate provider of health. God is,” he said during a May 2020 address.
Burke also repeated false information about vaccines, claiming that some believe there should be a “microchip … placed under the skin of every person, so that at any moment he or she can be controlled by the state regarding health and about other matters which we can only imagine.”
The cardinal further condemned the use of abortion-derived cells in vaccine development as “rightly abhorrent,” saying it is “never morally justified to develop a vaccine through the use of the cell lines of aborted fetuses.”
Burke’s comments were misleading — both Pfizer and Moderna used cell lines derived from fetal tissue taken from elective abortions in the 1970s and 1980s to test whether the vaccines worked. In a statement last December, the Vatican called the vaccines “morally acceptable.” Pope Francis received the Pfizer vaccine, and in February, the Vatican City governor said employees who do not take a vaccine could be fired.
Burke did not reveal whether he got the vaccine.
The cardinal’s conservative opinions propelled his career in the past, catching the attention of then-Pope Benedict XVI, who appointed Burke to run the Vatican’s highest court in 2008, making him the church’s most senior-ranking American. Benedict promoted Burke to cardinal in 2010.
Burke’s influence in the Vatican was ephemeral, though. He soon clashed with Francis, who is known for his more progressive views on some issues. In an interview with BuzzFeed News in October 2014, Burke criticized Francis, claiming he had “done a lot of harm.” He noted Francis’s comments on homosexuality: “The pope is not free to change the church’s teachings with regard to the immorality of homosexual acts.”
In an interview that same month with Vida Nueva, a Spanish Catholic publication, Burke questioned Francis’s leadership.
“Many have expressed their concerns to me. At this very critical moment, there is a strong sense that the church is like a ship without a rudder,” Burke said.
By November 2014, Francis demoted Burke from overseeing the high court and gave him a ceremonial title as the patron of the charity the Sovereign Order of Malta.
Burke continued to speak out on controversial topics. In 2015, he criticized the modernization of the Church and said he feared that it was becoming too feminine. He said men had been alienated by decisions to let women take part in ceremonial activities, such as the move to allow female altar assistants starting in 1983.
“The activities in the parish and even the liturgy have been influenced by women and become so feminine in many places that men do not want to get involved,” he said. “Men are often reluctant to become active in the church. The feminized environment and the lack of the church’s effort to engage men has led many men to simply opt out.”
In 2015, Burke said in an interview with LifeSiteNews, an antiabortion website, that gay people and divorcées are as bad as “the person who murders someone.”
“If you are living publicly in a state of mortal sin there isn’t any good act that you can perform that justifies that situation: the person remains in grave sin,” he continued.
During a homily in December, Burke called covid the “Wuhan virus,” a phrase referring to the city where the coronavirus originated and made popular by former president Donald Trump and his allies that is now considered derogatory. Burke also claimed “it has been used by certain forces, inimical to families and to the freedom of nations, to advance their evil agenda.”
He went on to criticize fellow members of the Church for not believing they’d be protected from the virus by believing in Jesus.
Burke, who lives in Rome, was visiting Wisconsin when he contracted the virus. In his tweet announcing the diagnosis, the cardinal asked for prayers.
“Thanks be to God, I am resting comfortably and receiving excellent medical care,” he wrote. “Please pray for me as I begin my recovery. Let us trust in Divine Providence. God bless you.”
By Jaclyn Peiser
Jaclyn Peiser is a reporter on the Morning Mix team. She previously covered the media industry for the New York Times. Twitter
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/08/16/cardinal-raymond-burke-ventilator-covid/
US officials say 7 killed in Kabul airport evacuation chaos
By AHMAD SEIR, RAHIM FAIEZ, KATHY GANNON AND JOSEPH KRAUSS
an hour ago
https://apnews.com/article/afghanistan-taliban-784681c4400b097cf73b93cec34c5c61
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Thousands of Afghans rushed onto the tarmac of Kabul’s international airport Monday, some so desperate to escape the Taliban capture of their country that they held onto an American military jet as it took off and plunged to death in chaos that killed at least seven people, U.S. officials said.
The crowds of people rushing the airport came as the Taliban enforced their rule over the wider capital after a lightning advance across the country that took just over a week to dethrone the country’s Western-backed government. While there were no major reports of abuses, many stayed home and remained fearful as the insurgents’ advance saw prisons emptied and armories looted.
The Taliban swept into Kabul on Sunday after President Ashraf Ghani fled the country, bringing an end to a two-decade campaign in which the U.S. and its allies had tried to transform Afghanistan. The country’s Western-trained security forces collapsed or fled, ahead of the planned withdrawal of the last American troops at the end of the month.
Residents raced to Kabul’s international airport, where the “civilian side” was closed until further notice, according to Afghanistan’s Civil Aviation Authority. The U.S. military and other Western forces continued to organize evacuations.
Videos circulating on social media showed hundreds of people running across the tarmac as U.S. troops fired warning shots in the air. One showed a crowd pushing and shoving its way up a staircase, trying to board a plane, with some people hanging off the railings.
In another video, hundreds of people could be seen running alongside a U.S. Air Force C-17 transport plane as it moved down a runway. Some clung to the side of the jet just before takeoff. Another video showed several falling through the air as the airplane rapidly gained altitude over the city.
Senior military officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the ongoing operation, told The Associated Press that the chaos left seven dead, including several who fell from the flight.
The storming of the airport, seen from space by passing satellites, raised questions about how much longer aircraft would be able to safely take off and land.
Shafi Arifi, who had a ticket to travel to Uzbekistan on Sunday, was unable to board his plane because it was packed with people who had raced across the tarmac and climbed aboard, with no police or airport staff in sight.
“There was no room for us to stand,” said the 24-year-old. “Children were crying, women were shouting, young and old men were so angry and upset, no one could hear each other. There was no oxygen to breathe.”
After a woman fainted and was carried off the plane, Arifi gave up and went back home.
The U.S. Embassy has been evacuated and the American flag lowered, with diplomats relocating to the airport to aid with the evacuation. Other Western countries have also closed their missions and are flying out staff and nationals.
Afghans are also trying to leave through land border crossings, all of which are now controlled by the Taliban. Rakhmatula Kuyash, 30, was one of the few people with a visa allowing him to cross into Uzbekistan on Sunday. He said his children and relatives had to stay behind.
“I’m lost and I don’t know what to do. I left everything behind,” he said.
A senior U.S. official said “it’s heartbreaking” to see what’s happening in Kabul, but that President Joe Biden “stands by” his decision to pull out because he didn’t want the war there — already the longest in U.S. history — to enter a third decade.
In interviews with U.S. television networks, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan blamed the Afghan military for the Taliban’s rapid takeover, saying it lacked the will to fight.
The ease with which the Taliban took control goes beyond military prowess, however, the Texas-based private intelligence firm Stratfor wrote.
“The speed of the Taliban’s final advance suggests less military dominance than effective political insurgency coupled with an incohesive Afghan political system and security force struggling with flagging morale,” it said.
The lightning Taliban offensive through the country appears to have stunned American officials. Just days before the insurgents entered Kabul with little if any resistance, a U.S. military assessment predicted it could take months for the capital to fall.
The rout threatened to erase 20 years of Western efforts to remake Afghanistan that saw tens of thousands of Afghans killed as well as more than 3,500 U.S. and allied troops. The initial invasion drove the Taliban from power and scattered al-Qaida, which had planned the 9/11 attacks while being sheltered in Afghanistan. Many had hoped the Western-backed Afghan government would usher in a new era of peace and respect for human rights.
As the U.S. lost focus on Afghanistan during the Iraq war, the Taliban eventually regrouped. The militants captured much of the Afghan countryside in recent years and then swept into cities as U.S. forces prepared to withdraw ahead of an Aug. 31 deadline.
Under the Taliban, which ruled in accordance with a harsh interpretation of Islamic law, women were largely confined to their homes and suspected criminals faced amputation or public execution. The insurgents have sought to project greater moderation in recent years, but many Afghans remain skeptical.
Suhail Shaheen, a Taliban spokesman, tweeted that fighters had been instructed to protect “life, property and honor,” and the group has also said it will stay out of the upscale diplomatic quarter housing the U.S. Embassy complex.
Meanwhile, the head of U.S. Central Command met face-to-face with senior Taliban leaders in Qatar and won their agreement to establish an arrangement under which evacuation operations at the airport can continue without interference, a U.S. defense official said. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive talks not yet announced publicly.
But some worried those promises are hollow. On Monday, Nillan, a 27-year-old resident of Kabul, said she didn’t see a single woman out on the streets during a 15-minute drive, “only men and boys.”
“It feels like time has stopped. Everything’s changed,” she told The Associated Press. She said even the most independent Afghan women now have to worry about the simplest things, such as how to get groceries in the absence of a male escort.
Nillan, who spoke on condition that she only be identified by her first name out of fear for her safety, said the Taliban ran TV ads urging people to return to work, without mentioning women.
“We don’t know what to do, we don’t know if we still have jobs,” she said. “It feels like our life and our future has ended.”
___
Faiez reported from Istanbul, Krauss from Jerusalem and Gannon from Guelph, Canada. Associated Press writers Jon Gambrell in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, Samya Kullab in Baghdad, Daria Litvinova in Moscow, Robert Burns in Washington, James LaPorta in Boca Raton, Florida, and Zeina Karam in Beirut contributed.
https://apnews.com/article/afghanistan-taliban-784681c4400b097cf73b93cec34c5c61
'The die was cast': UK defense minister unloads on Trump for giving 'momentum' to the Taliban
Matthew Chapman
August 16, 2021
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-afghanistan-2654663943/
On Monday, Business Insider reported that British Defense Minister Ben Wallace placed the blame for the Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan squarely on the shoulders of former President Donald Trump.
"The die was cast when the deal was done by Donald Trump, if you want my observation," said Wallace on BBC Breakfast. "President Biden inherited a momentum, a momentum that had been given to the Taliban because they felt they had now won, he'd also inherited a momentum of troop withdrawal from the international community, the US."
"I think in that sense, the seeds of what we're seeing today were before President Biden took office," said Wallace. "The seeds were a peace deal that was [effectively] rushed, that wasn't done in collaboration properly with the international community and then a dividend taken out incredibly quickly."
Trump has sought to blame Biden for the current chaos, claiming that he had a "plan" for ensuring the security of Afghanistan.
However, experts have noted that Trump accelerated the current crisis by making a generous deal with the Taliban, proposing a Camp David meeting with Taliban leaders while excluding the then-Afghan government from the process, and releasing a number of Taliban prisoners including Mullah Abdul Baradar, the current self-proclaimed leader.
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-afghanistan-2654663943/
‘No guarantee for our security’: Afghan women fear the worst under Taliban rule
Concern grows that two decades of educational, social and political rights are about to be curtailed
Najmeh Bozorgmehr in Tehran AUGUST 16 2021
https://www.ft.com/content/acb69a3a-51ee-4484-8dad-e04b2c711f89
Afghanistan updates
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Shortly after her 12th birthday, Ameneh — not her real name — was forced to get engaged to her adult, bearded cousin and move into the house of her uncle, a businessman who traded with the Taliban.
That was two decades ago. Back then, the Islamist movement was at the height of its power, controlling Afghanistan through fear and intimidation, while enforcing strict religious rule that meant women rarely ventured outside — if they did they had to be covered from head to toe in a burka and accompanied by a male relative. Young girls such as Ameneh were prevented from attending normal schools, and instead pushed into arranged marriages.
But after the 2001 US-led invasion of Afghanistan, the teenager discovered a freedom that would have been unimaginable. Emboldened by the Taliban’s loss of power, she fled the home of her uncle, who was the family’s patriarch after the death of her father years earlier, and tossed off her burka. With her mother’s support, she went to a civil court and annulled her engagement. She went to school, worked in business and human rights, chose to remain single and enjoyed an active social life.
Today, Ameneh says her childhood nightmares have returned now the Taliban is back in power after a week-long blitz by its forces across the country.
“Along with my sisters and mother, we took all our documents, left our house, and hid at a friend’s. We fear that the first man who will show up at our doorstep is our uncle,” Ameneh told the Financial Times.
“I threw out my burka 20 years ago and am not going to accept that humiliation ever again nor can I be forced to marry anyone,” she added, bursting into tears on the telephone.
The concern for Ameneh, and women like her, is that after the US withdrawal and the spectacular collapse of the Afghan government, the civil liberties they have enjoyed over the past two decades will be swiftly reversed and their lives will be plunged back into darkness.
The Taliban, which seized Kabul on Sunday after Afghan president Ashraf Ghani fled the country, have insisted that the movement will not impose the same harsh restrictions and Islamic codes they enforced in the 1990s. So far, they have resisted restricting Afghans’ access to the internet and women are still able to go outside without being accompanied by male guardians.
But female activists believe they will soon see their political, educational and social rights, which enabled them to become MPs, drive cars and compete in sporting events, rolled back.
Some television programmes, including Turkish and Indian soap operas, have already been replaced by Islamic ones, while owners of businesses have taken down pictures of women from beauty salons, tailor shops and plastic surgery centres for fear of being punished by Taliban militants.
Ghouryan, a channel on Telegram that is close to the Taliban, quoted a member of the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan” as telling academics in Kabul that “our sisters can continue their administrative and educational activities....Don’t listen to baseless news.”
But Herat Times, an anti-Taliban news channel on Telegram, quoted a regional Taliban spokesman as saying that “the presence of women in government-owned offices is difficult”. It added that probably “women can only be present in the health and teaching sectors”.
Many women are already adjusting their lives in the expectation of what is to come.
Talking by phone, a university professor in Herat said that two days after the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan’s third largest city on Saturday, she chose to wear a dark-coloured chador, a conservative gown that covers the head and drops down to a woman’s feet, to work. The previous week, she wore a colourful manteau with a scarf loosely covering her head and a touch of make-up on her face, she recalled.
“While the Taliban were inside the university, the regular security guards at the entrance told me that ‘women cannot go in for now’,” she said. “I was also told that the Taliban’s message was they would not deduct my salary because of my absence, but would decide later about whether women could be present in the university.”
Female academics expect the burka to once again become obligatory dress and worry that gender segregation will be imposed at universities — if women will be allowed to continue their roles in education. They are also concerned that elements of schools’ curriculum will be curtailed or abolished, such as English, mathematics and physics, and replaced with more Islamic lessons.
Afghanistan has a literacy rate of 43 per cent, up from 31.4 in 2011 but still one of the world’s lowest rates. The gender gap remains substantial, with men’s literacy at 55 per cent and women’s at 30 per cent, according to the World Bank.
In Kabul, another university professor said she and her colleagues were “in a huge state of uncertainty with grave security concerns”. “We have no idea what’s going to happen to us,” she said.
Fearing for their lives if the Taliban deems their lifestyles to be sacrilegious, some women are considering fleeing their homeland. Maryam Durani, a journalist and rights activist in Kandahar, where she has helped promote education for girls, said she received threatening messages this month warning her that her life was at risk if she continued her activities. Just before the southern city fell to the Taliban, she escaped to Kabul.
“There’s no guarantee for our security,” she said. “We may have time to find a way out [of Afghanistan].”
All those who spoke to the FT doubted the Taliban of today would be different from the movement of two decades ago.
“What we have seen these days tells us that the Taliban’s ideology and policies have not changed, but they have learnt how to pretend and fool the world,” said a female surgeon in the western town of Herat.
She was two years old when her family house was destroyed by a rocket during the 1980s civil conflict. Her family fled to neighbouring Iran, but moved back after the 2001 US invasion brought promises of a better life in their home country. Now she blames the US and its allies for abandoning her nation.
“I’ve studied for 25 years only to be ruled now by people who have no education,” she said. “If I’m allowed to go to work, I am sure I will have to wear a burka, which I can no longer tolerate. The world and the US betrayed us.”
https://www.ft.com/content/acb69a3a-51ee-4484-8dad-e04b2c711f89
Investigations - Afghan security forces’ wholesale collapse was years in the making
By Craig Whitlock
Today at 7:00 a.m. EDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/afghan-security-forces-capabilities/2021/08/15/052a45e2-fdc7-11eb-a664-4f6de3e17ff0_story.html
In the summer of 2011, Army Lt. Gen. William Caldwell IV made a round of public appearances to boast that he had finally solved a problem that had kept U.S. troops bogged down in Afghanistan for a decade. Under his watch, he asserted, U.S. military advisers and trainers had transformed the ragtag Afghan army and police into a professional fighting force that could defend the country and keep the Taliban at bay.
“We’ve made tremendous strides, incredible progress,” Caldwell, the head of the U.S. and NATO’s training command in Afghanistan, told the Council on Foreign Relations in June 2011. “They’re probably the best trained, the best equipped and the best led of any forces we’ve developed yet inside of Afghanistan. They only continue to get better with time.”
Three months later, in a news briefing at the Pentagon, Caldwell said the Afghan soldiers and police previously had been in terrible shape: poorly led, uninspired and more than 90 percent of them illiterate. But he said the Obama administration’s decision to spend $6 billion a year to train and equip the Afghan security forces had produced a remarkable turnaround. He predicted that the Taliban-led insurgency would subside and that the Afghans would take over responsibility for securing their country by the end of 2014, enabling U.S. combat troops to leave.
“It really does give you a lot of hope for the future of what this country may have ahead of itself,” he said.
In fact, according to documents obtained for the forthcoming Washington Post book “The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War,” U.S. military officials privately harbored fundamental doubts for the duration of the war that the Afghan security forces could ever become competent or shed their dependency on U.S. money and firepower. “Thinking we could build the military that fast and that well was insane,” an unnamed former U.S. official told government interviewers in 2016.
Those fears, rarely expressed in public, were ultimately borne out by the sudden collapse this month of the Afghan security forces, whose wholesale and unconditional surrender to the Taliban will go down as perhaps the worst debacle in the history of proxy warfare.
The capitulation was sped up by a series of secret deals that the Taliban brokered with many Afghan government officials. In recent days and weeks, Taliban leaders used a combination of cash, threats and promises of leniency to persuade government forces to lay down their arms.
Although U.S. intelligence officials had recently forecast the possible demise of the Afghan government over the next three to six months, the Biden administration was caught unprepared by the velocity of the Taliban takeover. Afghan forces “proved incapable of defending the country. And that did happen more rapidly than we anticipated,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Sunday on the ABC News program “This Week.”
Over two decades, the U.S. government invested more than $85 billion to train and equip the Afghans and pay their salaries. Today, all that is left are arsenals of weapons, ammunition and supplies that have fallen into the hands of the enemy.
Senior U.S. officials said the Pentagon fell victim to the conceit that it could build from scratch an enormous Afghan army and police force with 350,000 personnel that was modeled on the centralized command structures and complex bureaucracy of the Defense Department. Though it was obvious from the beginning that the Afghans were struggling to make the U.S.-designed system work, the Pentagon kept throwing money at the problem and assigning new generals to find a solution.
“We kept changing guys who were in charge of training the Afghan forces, and every time a new guy came in, he changed the way that they were being trained,” Robert Gates, who served as defense secretary during the Bush and Obama administrations, said in an oral-history interview with scholars at the University of Virginia. “The one thing they all had in common was they were all trying to train a Western army instead of figuring out the strengths of the Afghans as a fighting people and then building on that.”
Part 1 of The Afghanistan Papers: U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan
In the interviews, U.S. military trainers who worked directly with recruits said the Afghans suffered from other irreconcilable problems, including a lack of motivation and a corrupt chain of command that preyed upon its own soldiers and police.
Maj. Greg Escobar, a U.S. Army infantry officer, spent 2011 trying to straighten out a dysfunctional Afghan army unit in Paktika province near the border with Pakistan. The first Afghan battalion commander whom Escobar mentored lost his job after he was charged with raping one of his male soldiers. The commander’s replacement, in turn, was killed by his own men.
Escobar said he came to realize that the whole exercise was futile because the U.S. military was pushing too fast and the Afghans were not responding to what was, in the end, a foreign experiment. “Nothing we do is going to help,” he recalled in an Army oral-history interview. “Until the Afghan government can positively affect the people there, we’re wasting our time.”
Other Army officers who trained the Afghans recounted scenes of mayhem that bode poorly for how they would perform on the battlefield. Maj. Mark Glaspell, an Army engineer with the 101st Airborne Division who served as a mentor to Afghan forces from 2010 to 2011, said even simple exercises went haywire.
Glaspell recalled trying to teach an Afghan platoon in the eastern city of Gardez how to exit a CH-47 Chinook, a heavy-lift helicopter used to transport troops and supplies. They lacked an actual Chinook to practice on, so he lined up rows of folding chairs instead and instructed the Afghans how to safely disembark.
“We were working on that and it was going pretty good and all of a sudden this Afghan soldier walks up and he and one of the guys in the class started to get into an argument,” Glaspell said in an Army oral-history interview. A third Afghan soldier then picked up a folding chair and pounded the first guy over the head, he said.
“Well, then it was a brawl; it was on,” Glaspell added. He let the Afghans duke it out until they got tired. “My interpreter actually looked at me, shook his head and said, ‘This is why we’ll never be successful,’ and he walked away.”
Jack Kem, a retired Army officer who served as Gen. Caldwell’s deputy from 2009 to 2011, said the training command struggled to overcome a host of challenges. Recruiting was hard enough, but was compounded by startling rates of desertion and attrition. And trying to maintain an ethnic balance in the force among Afghanistan’s fractious tribes was another “enormous problem,” he said.
But perhaps the biggest hardship was having to teach virtually every recruit how to read. Kem estimated that only 2 to 5 percent of Afghan recruits could read at a third-grade level despite efforts by the United States to enroll millions of Afghan children in school over the previous decade.
“The literacy was just insurmountable,” he said in an Army oral-history interview. Some Afghans also had to learn their colors, or had to be taught how to count. “I mean, you’d ask an Afghan soldier how many brothers and sisters they had and they couldn’t tell you it was four. They could tell you their names, but they couldn’t go ‘one, two, three, four.’?”
Making everything harder was the Obama administration’s decision to rapidly expand the size of the Afghan security forces from 200,000 soldiers and police to 350,000. With recruits at a premium, Afghans were rushed through boot camp, even if they couldn’t shoot or perform other basic tasks.
In Washington, some skeptics warned Obama administration officials that they were sacrificing quality for quantity. But leaders at the Pentagon dismissed the concerns and insisted they could have both.
“There was a big debate that said, ‘Either you can have a small Afghan army and police that is trained to a high quality or you can have a lot of them but they won’t meet the quality standards. They’ll just be poorly equipped and poorly trained,’?” Brig. Gen. John Ferrari, who also served under Caldwell at the training command, said in an Army oral-history interview.
Caldwell, who retired from the Army in 2013, did not respond to a request to comment for this story.
As the years passed, it became apparent that the strategy was failing. Yet U.S. military commanders kept insisting in public that everything was going according to plan.
In November 2012, Marine Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr. Jr. told lawmakers that he had grown “optimistic” about the war because the Afghan army and police had improved so much. “When I look at the Afghan national security forces and where they were in 2008, when I first observed them, and where they are today in 2012, it’s a dramatic improvement.”
In September 2013, Mark A. Milley, then an Army lieutenant general and deputy commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, gave reporters another upbeat assessment. “I am much more optimistic about the outcome here, as long as the Afghan security forces continue to do what they’ve been doing,” he said.
If they continue to do that next year and the year after and so on, then I think things will turn out okay in Afghanistan,” he added. Today, Milley is“ chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and serves as the chief military adviser to President Biden.
The book, “The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War,” by Craig Whitlock is available here. The book is based on interviews with more than 1,000 people who played direct roles in the war as well as thousands of pages of documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. Whitlock will discuss the book during a Washington Post Live event on Aug. 31.
Follow @wpinvestigates on Twitter |
By Craig Whitlock
Craig Whitlock is an investigative reporter who specializes in national security issues. He has covered the Pentagon, served as the Berlin bureau chief and reported from more than 60 countries. He joined The Washington Post in 1998. Twitter
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/afghan-security-forces-capabilities/2021/08/15/052a45e2-fdc7-11eb-a664-4f6de3e17ff0_story.html
Health and environmental impacts of drinking water choices in Barcelona, Spain: A modelling study
Highlights
• Quantified health and environmental tradeoffs of drinking water choices
• Novel approach integrating health impact and life cycle assessment
• Environmental impact of bottled water 1400–3500 higher than tap water
• Local health burden of tap water consumption equivalent to 2 h of life lost
• Filtered water considerably reduced health and environmental impacts.
Abstract
Quantitative evidence of health and environmental tradeoffs between individuals' drinking water choices is needed to inform decision-making. We evaluated health and environmental impacts of drinking water choices using health impact and life cycle assessment (HIA, LCA) methodologies applied to data from Barcelona, Spain. We estimated the health and environmental impacts of four drinking water scenarios for the Barcelona population: 1) currently observed drinking water sources; a complete shift to 2) tap water; 3) bottled water; or 4) filtered tap water. We estimated the local bladder cancer incidence attributable to trihalomethane (THM) exposure, based on survey data on drinking water sources, THM levels, published exposure-response functions, and disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) from the Global Burden of Disease 2017. We estimated the environmental impacts (species lost/year, and resources use) from waste generation and disposal, use of electricity, chemicals, and plastic to produce tap or bottled drinking water using LCA. The scenario where the entire population consumed tap water yielded the lowest environmental impact on ecosystems and resources, while the scenario where the entire population drank bottled water yielded the highest impacts (1400 and 3500 times higher for species lost and resource use, respectively). Meeting drinking water needs using bottled or filtered tap water led to the lowest bladder cancer DALYs (respectively, 140 and 9 times lower than using tap water) in the Barcelona population. Our study provides the first attempt to integrate HIA and LCA to compare health and environmental impacts of individual water consumption choices. Our results suggest that the sustainability gain from consuming water from public supply relative to bottled water may exceed the reduced risk of bladder cancer due to THM exposure from consuming bottled water in Barcelona. Our analysis highlights several critical data gaps and methodological challenges in quantifying integrated health and environmental impacts of drinking water choices.
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https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969721039565#bb0120
‘Game over’: Westerners rush to leave Kabul, rescue Afghans
By ELLEN KNICKMEYER and COLLEEN BARRY
2 hours ago
https://apnews.com/article/business-kabul-3bf5dcb07bb97ab8851cadce9336574b
The chop of U.S. military helicopters whisking American diplomats to Kabul’s airport punctuated a frantic rush by thousands of other foreigners and Afghans to flee to safety as well, as a stunningly swift Taliban takeover entered the heart of Afghanistan’s capital.
The U.S. was pouring thousands of fresh troops into the country temporarily to safeguard what was gearing up to be a large-scale airlift. It announced late Sunday it was taking charge of air-traffic control at the airport, even as it lowered the flag at the U.S. Embassy.
Sporadic gunfire at Kabul international airport Sunday frightened Afghan families fearful of Taliban rule and desperate for flights out, in an ever-more chaotic and compressed evacuation. NATO allies that had pulled out their forces ahead of the Biden administration’s intended Aug. 31 withdrawal deadline were rushing troops back in as well this weekend, to airlift their citizens.
Some complained the U.S. was failing to move fast enough to bring to safety Afghans at risk of reprisal from the Taliban for past work with the Americans and other NATO forces.
“This is murder by incompetence,” said U.S. Air Force veteran Sam Lerman, struggling Sunday from his home in Woodbridge, Virginia, to find a way out for an Afghan contractor who had guarded Americans and other NATO forces at Afghanistan’s Bagram air base for a decade.
Massouma Tajik, a 22-year-old data analyst, was among hundreds of Afghans waiting anxiously in the Kabul airport to board an evacuation flight.
“I see people crying, they are not sure whether their flight will happen or not. Neither am I,” she said by phone, with panic in her voice.
Educated Afghan women have some of the most to lose under the fundamentalist Taliban, whose past government, overthrown by the U.S.-led invasion in 2001, sought to largely confine women to the home.
Taliban forces moved early Sunday into a capital beset by fear and declared they were awaiting a peaceful surrender, capping a stunning sweep of Afghanistan in just the past week.
That arrival of the first waves of Taliban insurgents into Kabul prompted the U.S. to evacuate the embassy building in full, leaving only acting ambassador Ross Wilson and a core of other diplomats operating at the airport. Even as CH-47 helicopters shuttled American diplomats to the airport, and facing criticism at home over the administration’s handling of the withdrawal, Secretary of State Antony Blinken rejected comparisons to the 1975 fall of Saigon.
“This is being done in a very deliberate way, it’s being done in an orderly way,” Blinken insisted on ABC’s “This Week.”
A joint statement from the U.S. State and Defense departments pledged late Sunday to fly thousands of Americans, local embassy staff and other “particularly vulnerable Afghan nationals” out of the country. It gave no details, but high-profile Afghan women, journalists, and Afghans who’ve worked with Western governments and nonprofits are among those who fear Taliban targeting for alleged Western ways or ties.
The statement promised to speed up visa processing for Afghans who used to work with American troops and officials in particular. Underscoring the difficulty the U.S. has had getting those Afghans out ahead of the Taliban, the statement could only assure “we will find” other countries to host some of those Afghans.
To many, however, the evacuations, and last-ditch rescue attempts by Americans and other foreigners trying to save Afghan allies, appeared far from orderly.
An Italian journalist, Francesca Mannocchi, posted a video of an Italian helicopter carrying her to the airport, an armed soldier standing guard at a window. Mannochi described watching columns of smoke rising from Kabul as she flew. Some were from fires that workers at the U.S. Embassy and others were using to keep sensitive material from falling in Taliban hands.
She said Afghans stoned an Italian convoy. She captioned her brief video: “Kabul airport. Evacuation. Game Over.”
Hundreds or more Afghans crowded in a part of the airport away from many of the evacuating Westerners. Some of them, including a man with a broken leg sitting on the ground, lined up for what was expected to be a last flight out by the country’s Ariana Airlines.
U.S. officials reported gunfire near the airport Sunday evening and urged civilians to stop coming. U.S. military officials later announced closing the airport to commercial flights, shutting one of the last avenues of escape for ordinary Afghans.
U.S. C-17 transport planes were due to bring thousands of fresh American troops to the airport, then fly out again with evacuating U.S. Embassy staffers. The Pentagon was now sending an additional 1,000 troops, bringing the total number to about 6,000, a U.S. defense official said Sunday, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss a deployment decision not yet announced by the Pentagon.
The Pentagon intends to have enough aircraft to fly out as many as 5,000 civilians a day, both Americans and the Afghan translators and others who worked with the U.S. during the war.
But tens of thousands of Afghans who have worked with U.S. and other NATO forces are seeking to flee with family members. And it was by no means clear how long Kabul’s deteriorating security would allow any evacuations to continue.
German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, whose government had been one of many expressing surprise at the speed of the U.S. withdrawal, told reporters in Berlin on Sunday that it was “difficult to endure” watching how quickly the Taliban took control of Afghanistan and how little government troops were able to do to stop them.
At a North Carolina-based adoption agency, Mary Beth Lee King sought a way to extricate two Afghan boys, ages 11 and 2, due for adoption by families in America.
“I am terrified and heartbroken. I can only imagine what they themselves are feeling,” King said of the children’s adoptive parents and Afghan families.
“Even if the U.S. won’t admit them to the U.S., get them somewhere, so that ... we know that they are alive and safe,” she said of the two Afghan children.
In Virginia, Lerman, the Air Force veteran, stayed up overnight Saturday to Sunday to finish an application for a special U.S. visa program meant to rescue Afghans who had worked with Americans.
When Lerman hit “send,” he got a message saying the State Department email box for the rescue program was full, he said, sharing screenshots.
The Afghan security contractor he was working to get out was sitting frightened inside his home with the blinds drawn and Taliban fighters outside, he said.
The State Department said late Sunday afternoon it believed it had fixed the problem.
“Never in my life have I been ashamed to be an American before,” Lerman said. “And I am, deeply.”
—-
Knickmeyer reported from Oklahoma City and Barry from Rome. Samya Kullab in Baghdad, Krista Larson in Dakar, Frank Jordans in Berlin and Robert Burns and Matthew Lee in Washington contributed.
https://apnews.com/article/business-kabul-3bf5dcb07bb97ab8851cadce9336574b
Biden team surprised by rapid Taliban gains in Afghanistan
By ZEKE MILLER, JONATHAN LEMIRE and JOSH BOAK
an hour ago
https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-afghanistan-taliban-5abab9d1a552dc93b10a76973a8b3d25
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden and other top U.S. officials were stunned on Sunday by the pace of the Taliban’s nearly complete takeover of Afghanistan, as the planned withdrawal of American forces urgently became a mission to ensure a safe evacuation.
The speed of the Afghan government’s collapse and the ensuing chaos posed the most serious test of Biden as commander in chief, and he was the subject of withering criticism from Republicans who said that he had failed.
Biden campaigned as a seasoned expert in international relations and has spent months downplaying the prospect of an ascendant Taliban while arguing that Americans of all political persuasions have tired of a 20-year war, a conflict that demonstrated the limits of money and military might to force a Western-style democracy on a society not ready or willing to embrace it.
By Sunday, though, leading figures in the administration acknowledged they were caught off guard with the utter speed of the collapse of Afghan security forces. The challenge of that effort became clear after reports of sporadic gunfire at the Kabul airport prompted Americans to shelter as they awaited flights to safety after the U.S. Embassy was completely evacuated.
“We’ve seen that that force has been unable to defend the country, and that has happened more quickly than we anticipated,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken told CNN, referring to the Afghan military.
The turmoil in Afghanistan resets the focus in an unwelcome way for a president who has largely focused on a domestic agenda that includes emerging from the pandemic, winning congressional approval for trillions of dollars in infrastructure spending and protecting voting rights.
Biden remained at Camp David on Sunday, receiving regular briefings on Afghanistan and holding secure video conference calls with members of his national security team, according to senior White House officials. His administration released a single photo of the president alone in a conference room meeting virtually with military, diplomatic and intelligence experts. The next several days would be critical in determining whether the U.S. is able to regain some level of control over the situation.
The Pentagon and State Department said in a joint statement Sunday that “we are completing a series of steps to secure the Hamid Karzai International Airport to enable the safe departure of U.S. and allied personnel from Afghanistan via civilian and military flights.” Biden ordered another 1,000 troops into Kabul to secure the evacuation.
Discussions were underway for Biden to speak publicly, according to two senior administration officials who requested anonymity to discuss internal conversations. Biden, who is scheduled to remain at the presidential retreat through Wednesday, is expected to return to the White House if he decides to deliver an address.
Biden is the fourth U.S. president to confront challenges in Afghanistan and has insisted he wouldn’t hand America’s longest war to his successor. But the president will likely have to explain how security in Afghanistan unraveled so quickly, especially since he and others in the administration have insisted it wouldn’t happen.
“The jury is still out, but the likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely,” Biden said on July 8.
As recently as last week, Biden publicly expressed hope that Afghan forces could develop the will to defend their country. But privately, administration officials warned that the military was crumbling, prompting Biden on Thursday to order thousands of American troops into the region to speed up evacuation plans.
One official said Biden was more sanguine on projections for the Afghan fighters to hold off the Taliban in part to prevent a further erosion in morale among their force. It was ultimately for naught.
Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump also yearned to leave Afghanistan, but ultimately stood down in the face of resistance from military leaders and other political concerns. Biden, on the other hand, has been steadfast in his refusal to change the Aug. 31 deadline, in part because of his belief that the American public is on his side.
A late July ABC News/Ipsos poll, for instance, showed 55% of Americans approving of Biden’s handling of the troop withdrawal.
Most Republicans have not pushed Biden to keep troops in Afghanistan over the long term and they also supported Trump’s own push to exit the country. Still, some in the GOP are stepping up their critique of Biden’s withdrawal strategy and said images from Sunday of American helicopters circling the U.S. Embassy in Kabul evoked the humiliating departure of U.S. personnel from Vietnam.
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell deemed the scenes of withdrawal as “the embarrassment of a superpower laid low.”
Meanwhile, U.S. officials are increasingly concerned about the potential for the rise in terrorist threats against the U.S. as the situation in Afghanistan devolves, according to a person familiar with the matter who requested anonymity to discuss a sensitive security matter.
Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told senators on a briefing call Sunday that U.S. officials are expected to alter their earlier assessments about the pace of terrorist groups reconstituting in Afghanistan, the person said. Based on the evolving situation, officials believe terror groups like al-Qaida may be able to grow much faster than expected.
The officials on the call told senators that the U.S. intelligence community is currently working on forming a new timeline based on the evolving threats.
Still, there were no additional steps planned beyond the troop deployment Biden ordered to assist in the evacuations. Senior administration officials believe the U.S. will be able to maintain security at the Kabul airport long enough to extricate Americans and their allies, but the fate of those unable to get to the airport was far from certain.
Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who has backed the Biden administration’s strategy, said in an interview that “the speed is a surprise” but would not characterize the situation as an intelligence failure. He said it has long been known that Afghanistan would fall to the Taliban if the United States pulled out.
“Given how much we have invested in the Afghan army, it’s not ridiculous for analysts to believe that they’d be able to put up a fight for more than a few days,” Murphy said. “You want to believe that trillions of dollars and 20 years of investment adds up to something, even if it doesn’t add up for the ability to defend the country in the long run.”
In the upper ranks of Biden’s staff, the rapid collapse in Afghanistan only confirmed the decision to leave: If the meltdown of the Afghan forces would come so quickly after nearly two decades of American presence, another six months or a year or two or more would not have changed anything.
Biden has argued for more than a decade that Afghanistan was a kind of purgatory for the United States. He found it to be corrupt, addicted to America’s largesse and an unreliable partner that should be made to fend for itself. His goal was to protect Americans from terrorist attacks, not building a country.
As vice president, he argued privately against Obama’s surge of 30,000 troops into Afghanistan in a bid to stabilize the country so that the United States and its allies could then pull back their forces.
As president, Biden said in July that he made the decision to withdraw with “clear eyes” after receiving daily battlefield updates. His judgment was that Afghanistan would be divided in a peace agreement with the Taliban, rather than falling all at once.
While Biden has prided himself on delivering plain truths to the American public, his bullish assessment of the situation just a month ago could come back to haunt him.
“There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of a embassy in the — of the United States from Afghanistan,” he said in July. “The likelihood there’s going to be one unified government in Afghanistan controlling the whole country is highly unlikely.”
___
Associated Press writers Michael Balsamo and Mary Clare Jalonick contributed to this report.
https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-afghanistan-taliban-5abab9d1a552dc93b10a76973a8b3d25
If These US Navy Patents are Made Then We Are in a Star Trek Technology World
February 22, 2019 by Brian Wang
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2019/02/if-these-us-navy-patents-are-made-then-we-are-in-a-star-trek-technology-world.html
Salvatore Cezar Pais is a US Navy researcher. Salvatore has three amazing patents that would be incredible breakthroughs in physics if they are true. The least extreme is a patent for Piezoelectricity-Induced Room Temperature Superconductor. The other two patents are gravity wave generator and inertial mass reduction.
If these could be realized as technologies then we are talking Star Trek level spaceships. The gravitational wave generator could be used for propellentless propulsion to near the speed of light. Being able to reduce inertia would also mean capabilities which currently seem beyond known physics.
The more likely situation is that these will not lead anywhere and are incorrect.
1. Piezoelectricity-Induced Room Temperature Superconductor (2019)
Patent US 20190058105A1
2. High-Frequency Gravitational Wave Generator (2017)
Patent US20180229864A1
3. Craft using an inertial mass reduction device (2016)
Patent US10144532B2
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2019/02/if-these-us-navy-patents-are-made-then-we-are-in-a-star-trek-technology-world.html
'Please pray for me’: female reporter being hunted by the Taliban tells her story
Tue 10 Aug 2021 14.22 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/aug/10/please-pray-for-me-female-reporter-being-hunted-by-the-taliban-tells-her-story
A young female journalist describes the panic and fear of being forced into hiding as cities across Afghanistan fall
By Anonymous
Two days ago I had to flee my home and life in the north of Afghanistan after the Taliban took my city. I am still on the run and there is no safe place for me to go.
Last week I was a news journalist. Today I can’t write under my own name or say where I am from or where I am. My whole life has been obliterated in just a few days.
I am so scared and I don’t know what will happen to me. Will I ever go home? Will I see my parents again? Where will I go? The highway is blocked in both directions. How will I survive?
My decision to leave my home and life was not planned. It happened very suddenly. In the past days my whole province has fallen to the Taliban. The only places that the government still controls are the airport and a few police district offices. I’m not safe because I’m a 22-year-old woman and I know that the Taliban are forcing families to give their daughters as wives for their fighters. I’m also not safe because I’m a news journalist and I know the Taliban will come looking for me and all of my colleagues.
The Taliban are already seeking out people they want to target. At the weekend my manager called me and asked me not to answer any unknown number. He said that we, especially the women, should hide, and escape the city if we could.
As I was packing I could hear bullets and rockets. Planes and helicopters were flying low over our heads. There was fighting on the streets right outside the house. My uncle offered to help get me to a safe place, so I grabbed my phone and a chadari (the full Afghan burqa) and left. My parents would not leave even though our house was now on the frontline of the battle for the city. As the rocket fire intensified they pleaded for me to leave because they knew the routes out of the city would soon be shut. So I left them behind and fled with my uncle. I haven’t spoken to them since as the phones are not working in the city any more.
Outside the house it was chaos. I was one of the last young women left in my neighbourhood to try to flee. I could see Taliban fighters right outside our house, on the street. They were everywhere. Thank God, I had my chadari, but even then I was afraid they would stop me or would recognise me. I was trembling as I was walking, but trying not to look scared.
Just after we’d left a rocket landed right next to us. I remember screaming and crying, women and children around me were running in every direction. It felt like we were all stuck in a boat and there was a big storm around us.
We managed to get to my uncle’s car and started driving towards his house, which is 30 minutes outside the city. On the way we were stopped at a Taliban checkpoint. It was the most terrifying moment of my life. I was inside my chadari and they ignored me but interrogated my uncle, asking him where we were going. He said we had been visiting a health centre in the city and were on our way home. Even as they were questioning him, rockets were being fired and landing close to the checkpoint. Finally, they let us go.
Even when we got to my uncle’s village, it wasn’t safe. His village is under Taliban control and many families are Taliban sympathisers. A few hours after we arrived, we were told some of the neighbours had discovered he was hiding me there and that we had to leave – they said the Taliban knew I’d been taken out the city and if they came to the village and found me there, they’d kill everyone.
We found somewhere else for me to hide, a home of a distant relative. We had to walk for hours, with me still in my chadari, staying away from all the main roads where the Taliban might be. This is where I am now. A rural area where there is nothing. There is no running water or electricity. There is barely any phone signal and I am cut off from the world.
Most of the women and girls I know have also fled the city and are trying to find somewhere safe. I cannot stop thinking and worrying about my friends, my neighbours, my classmates, all the women in Afghanistan.
All my female colleagues in the media are terrified. Most have managed to flee the city and are trying to find a way out of the province, but we are completely surrounded. All of us have spoken out against the Taliban and angered them through our journalism.
Right now, everything is tense. All I can do is keep running and hope that a route out of the province opens up soon. Please pray for me.
Editing and translation by Ruchi Kumar
Now more than ever, Afghan women need a platform to speak for themselves. As the Taliban’s return haunts Afghanistan, the survival of Rukhshana Media depends on ?readers’ help. To continue reporting over the next crucial year, it is trying to raise $20,000. If you can help, go to this crowdfunding page.
https://chuffed.org/project/reporting-on-issues-that-affect-afghan-women-is-expensive-rukhshana-media-needs-your-help
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/aug/10/please-pray-for-me-female-reporter-being-hunted-by-the-taliban-tells-her-story
Mark Hertling @MarkHertling ·24m While we all ponder what may happen next in Afghanistan, @jaketapper provided a deeply moving distinction between the war & the warriors. Those who have friends who fought or died in that country are grieving; we are also distressed by what may happen to Afghan allies. 1/5
THREAD
We’re all especially concerned about the women & girls who made such progress in the last 20 years. That is especially haunting. 2/5
— Mark Hertling (@MarkHertling) August 15, 2021
Afghan president leaves the country as Taliban move on Kabul
By AHMAD SEIR, RAHIM FAIEZ, TAMEEM AKHGAR and JON GAMBRELL
14 minutes ago
https://apnews.com/article/afghanistan-taliban-kabul-bagram-e1ed33fe0c665ee67ba132c51b8e32a5
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Afghanistan’s embattled President Ashraf Ghani fled the country Sunday as the Taliban moved further into Kabul, officials said. His countrymen and foreigners alike raced for the exit, signaling the end of a 20-year Western experiment aimed at remaking Afghanistan.
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Afghanistan’s embattled President Ashraf Ghani fled the country Sunday as the Taliban moved further into Kabul, officials said. His countrymen and foreigners alike raced for the exit, signaling the end of a 20-year Western experiment aimed at remaking Afghanistan.
Ghani flew out of the country, two officials told The Associated Press, speaking on condition of anonymity as they weren’t authorized to brief journalists. Abdullah Abdullah, the head of the Afghan National Reconciliation Council, later confirmed Ghani had left in an online video.
“He left Afghanistan in a hard time, God hold him accountable,” Abdullah said.
Civilians fearing that the Taliban could reimpose the kind of brutal rule that all but eliminated women’s rights rushed to leave the country, lining up at cash machines to withdraw their life savings.
Helicopters buzzed overhead to evacuate personnel from the U.S. Embassy, while smoke rose near the compound as staff destroyed important documents. Several other Western missions also prepared to pull their people out.
In a stunning rout, the Taliban seized nearly all of Afghanistan in just over a week, despite the billions of dollars spent by the U.S. and NATO over nearly two decades to build up Afghan security forces. Just days earlier, an American military assessment estimated it would be a month before the capital would come under insurgent pressure.
...
MUCH MORE
https://apnews.com/article/afghanistan-taliban-kabul-bagram-e1ed33fe0c665ee67ba132c51b8e32a5
Afghan president leaves the country as Taliban move on Kabul
By AHMAD SEIR, RAHIM FAIEZ, TAMEEM AKHGAR and JON GAMBRELL
14 minutes ago
https://apnews.com/article/afghanistan-taliban-kabul-bagram-e1ed33fe0c665ee67ba132c51b8e32a5
Biden orders 1,000 more troops to aid Afghanistan departure
By ROBERT BURNS and JOSH BOAK
today
https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-afghanistan-4a2015be84d49c71cfe8f227a8896eae
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden authorized an additional 1,000 U.S. troops for deployment to Afghanistan, raising to roughly 5,000 the number of U.S. troops to ensure what Biden called an “orderly and safe drawdown” of American and allied personnel.
U.S. troops will also help in the evacuation of Afghans who worked with the military during the nearly two-decade war.
The last-minute decision to re-insert thousands of U.S. troops into Afghanistan reflected the dire state of security as the Taliban seized control of multiple Afghan cities in a few short days. The militant and fundamentalist movement gained control of key parts of the country it governed until being ousted by U.S. and coalition forces after the Sept. 11 attacks. Biden had set an Aug. 31 deadline for fully withdraw combat forces before the 20th anniversary of the attacks.
Biden attributed much of the chaos unfolding in Afghanistan to former President Donald Trump’s efforts to end the war, which Biden said created a blueprint that put U.S. forces in a difficult spot with an emboldened Taliban challenging the Afghan government.
“When I came to office, I inherited a deal cut by my predecessor — which he invited the Taliban to discuss at Camp David on the eve of 9/11 of 2019 — that left the Taliban in the strongest position militarily since 2001,” Biden said in a statement Saturday. “I was the fourth president to preside over an American troop presence in Afghanistan — two Republicans, two Democrats. I would not, and will not, pass this war onto a fifth.”
In his statement Biden didn’t explain the numerical breakdown of the 5,000 troops he said had been deployed. But a defense official said in a media statement that the president had approved Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s recommendation that the lead battalion of the 82nd Airborne Brigade Combat Team assist in the State Department’s drawdown.
Initially 1,000 troops were in place to aid with the withdrawal, and administration officials quickly judged that total to be insufficient. An additional contingent of Marines arrived in Kabul as part of a 3,000-troop force intended to secure an airlift of U.S. Embassy personnel and Afghan allies as Taliban insurgents approached the outskirts of the capital. The additional 1,000 troops approved Saturday appeared to bring the total to 5,000.
Officials have stressed that the newly arriving troops’ mission was limited to assisting the airlift of embassy personnel and Afghan allies, and they expected to complete it by month’s end. But they might have to stay longer if the embassy is threatened by a Taliban takeover of Kabul by then.
In a sign of fears that the Taliban could soon capture Kabul, U.S. Embassy personnel were urgently destroying sensitive documents, according to two U.S. military officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the actions.
As the situation in Afghanistan rapidly worsened, Biden, who was spending the weekend at Camp David, and Vice President Kamala Harris held a secure video conference on Saturday morning with national security officials before Biden announced the additional troops.
On Saturday, the Taliban captured Mazar-e-Sharif, a large heavily defended city in northern Afghanistan, and closed in on Kabul by taking the Logar province just to the south. The Taliban have made major advances in recent days, including capturing Herat and Kandahar, the country’s second- and third-largest cities.
“Clearly from their actions, it appears as if they are trying to get Kabul isolated,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said, referring to the Taliban’s speedy and efficient takedown of major provincial capitals this past week.
Biden had given the Pentagon until Aug. 31 to complete the withdrawal of the 2,500 to 3,000 troops that were in Afghanistan when he announced in April that he would end U.S. involvement in the war. That number has dropped to just under 1,000, and all but about 650 were scheduled to be gone by the end of the month; the 650 were to remain to help protect the U.S. diplomatic presence, including with aircraft and defensive weapons at the Kabul airport.
But the decision in recent days to dispatch 4,000 fresh troops suggested that American forces and their allies were at risk. There was no discussion of rejoining the war, but the number of troops needed for security will depend on decisions about keeping the embassy open and the extent of a Taliban threat to the capital in coming days.
Having the Aug. 31 deadline pass with thousands of U.S. troops in the country could be problematic for Biden, who said he had no regrets about stopping the U.S. war by that date. Republicans criticized the withdrawal as a mistake and ill-planned, though there was little political appetite by either party to send fresh troops to fight the Taliban.
The president said Satuday his administration had conveyed to Taliban representatives in Qatar that any actions in Afghanistan that harm U.S. personnel will be met by a “swift and strong” military response. Biden also directed Secretary of State Antony Blinken to support Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and engage with regional leaders in the pursuit of a political settlement with the Taliban.
Ghani delivered a televised speech Saturday, his first public appearance since the recent Taliban gains, and pledged not to give up the “achievements” of the 20 years since the U.S. toppled the Taliban.
Despite the Taliban’s gains, the Biden administration has said that Afghan security forces’ air force and superior numbers could give them an edge against the insurgents. The statement served to highlight the lack of morale by Afghan forces to fight in a situation where the Taliban seemed to be speeding forward.
The State Department said the embassy in Kabul would remain partially staffed and functioning, but Thursday’s decision to evacuate a significant number of staff suggested concerns about protecting American and Afghan lives as the Taliban progressed through the country. The Biden administration has not publicly ruled out a full embassy evacuation or possibly relocating embassy operations to the Kabul airport.
https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-afghanistan-4a2015be84d49c71cfe8f227a8896eae
Taliban enter Kabul, await ‘peaceful transfer’ of power
By AHMAD SEIR, RAHIM FAIEZ, TAMEEM AKHGAR and JON GAMBRELL
11 minutes ago
https://apnews.com/article/taliban-e1ed33fe0c665ee67ba132c51b8e32a5
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Taliban fighters entered Kabul on Sunday and sought the unconditional surrender of the central government, officials said, as Afghans and foreigners alike raced for the exit, signaling the end of a 20-year Western experiment aimed at remaking Afghanistan.
The beleaguered central government, meanwhile, hope for an interim administration, but increasingly had few cards to play. Civilians fearing that the Taliban could reimpose the kind of brutal rule that all but eliminated women’s rights rushed to leave the country, lining up at cash machines to withdraw their life savings. Helicopters buzzed overhead, some apparently evacuating personnel at the U.S. Embassy. Several other Western missions were also preparing to get staff out.
In a stunning rout, the Taliban seized nearly all of Afghanistan in just over a week, despite the hundreds of billions of dollars spent by the U.S. and NATO over nearly two decades to build up Afghan security forces. Just days earlier, an American military assessment estimated it would be a month before the capital would come under insurgent pressure.
Instead, the Taliban swiftly defeated, co-opted or sent Afghan security forces fleeing from wide swaths of the country, even though they had some air support from the U.S. military.
On Sunday, the insurgents entered the outskirts of Kabul but apparently remained outside of the city’s downtown. Sporadic gunfire echoed at times though the streets were largely quiet.
Workers fled government offices, and smoke rose over the city as embassy staff burned important documents.
Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen told Qatar’s Al-Jazeera English satellite news channel that the insurgents are “awaiting a peaceful transfer of Kabul city.” He declined to offer specifics on any possible negotiations between his forces and the government.
But when pressed on what kind of agreement the Taliban wanted, Shaheen acknowledged that they were seeking an unconditional surrender by the central government.
Taliban negotiators headed to the presidential palace Sunday to discuss the transfer, said an Afghan official who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals. It remained unclear when that transfer would take place.
The negotiators on the government side included former President Hamid Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah, the head of the Afghan National Reconciliation Council, an official said. Abdullah long has been a vocal critic of President Ashraf Ghani, who long refused giving up power to get a deal with the Taliban.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss details of the closed-doors negotiations, described them as “tense.”
Acting Defense Minister Bismillah Khan sought to reassure the public that Kabul would remain “secure.” The insurgents also tried to calm residents of the capital, insisting their fighters wouldn’t enter people’s homes or interfere with businesses. They also said they’d offer an “amnesty” to those who worked with the Afghan government or foreign forces.
“No one’s life, property and dignity will be harmed and the lives of the citizens of Kabul will not be at risk,” the insurgents said in a statement. But they also warned no one to enter the area around the capital.
Despite the pledges, panic set in as many rushed to leave the country through the Kabul airport, the last route out of the country as the Taliban now hold every border crossing. Rapid shuttle flights of Boeing CH-47 Chinook helicopters near the U.S. Embassy began a few hours later after the militants seized the nearby city of Jalalabad — which had been the last major city besides the capital not in Taliban hands. Diplomatic armored SUVs could be seen leaving the area around the post.
The U.S. State Department did not immediately respond to questions about the movements. However, wisps of smoke could be seen near the embassy’s roof as diplomats urgently destroyed sensitive documents, according to two American military officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the situation. The smoke grew heavier over time in the area, home to other nation’s embassies as well.
Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, which typically carry armed troops, later landed near the U.S. Embassy. The U.S. decided a few days ago to send in thousands of troops to help evacuate some personnel from its embassy.
At Kabul International Airport, Afghan forces abandoned the field to Western militaries, said a pilot who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss security matters.
Ghani, who spoke to the nation Saturday for the first time since the offensive began, appeared increasingly isolated. Warlords he negotiated with just days earlier have surrendered to the Taliban or fled, leaving Ghani without a military option. Ongoing negotiations in Qatar, the site of a Taliban office, also have failed to stop the insurgents’ advance.
Earlier in the day, militants posted photos online showing them in the governor’s office in Jalalabad, the capital of Nangarhar province.
Abrarullah Murad, a lawmaker from the province told The Associated Press that the insurgents seized the city after elders negotiated the fall of the government there. Murad said there was no fighting as the city surrendered.
The militants also took Maidan Shar, the capital of Maidan Wardak, on Sunday, Afghan lawmaker Hamida Akbari and the Taliban said. Another provincial capital in Khost also fell to the insurgents, said a provincial council member who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals. Afghan officials said the capitals of Kapisa and Parwan provinces also fell.
The militants also took the land border at Torkham, the last not in their control, on Sunday. Pakistan’s Interior Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed told local broadcaster Geo TV that Pakistan halted cross-border traffic there after the militants seized it.
Later, Afghan forces at Bagram air base, home to a prison housing 5,000 inmates, surrendered to the Taliban, according to Bagram district chief Darwaish Raufi. The prison at the former U.S. base held both Taliban and Islamic State group fighters.
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Akhgar and Faiez reported from Istanbul and Gambrell from Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Associated Press writers Kathy Gannon in Guelph, Canada, Joseph Krauss in Jerusalem and ?James LaPorta in Washington contributed to this report.
https://apnews.com/article/taliban-e1ed33fe0c665ee67ba132c51b8e32a5
Japan marks 76th anniversary of WWII defeat; no Suga apology
By MARI YAMAGUCHI
an hour ago
https://apnews.com/article/health-japan-coronavirus-pandemic-8a30499ff03ce1cf1e9f89f168247284
TOKYO (AP) — Japan marked the 76th anniversary of its World War II surrender on Sunday with a somber ceremony in which Prime Minister Yosihide Suga pledged for the tragedy of war to never be repeated but avoided apologizing for his country’s aggression.
Suga said Japan never forgets that the peace the country enjoys today is built on the sacrifices of those who died in the war.
“We will commit to our pledge to never repeat the tragedy of the war,” he said in his first speech at the event since becoming prime minister.
Suga did not offer an apology to the Asian victims of Japanese aggression across the region in the first half of the 20th century — a precedent set by the country’s previous leader, Shinzo Abe, who was frequently accused of trying to whitewash Japan’s brutal past.
In a largely domestic-focused speech, Suga listed damage inflicted on Japan and its people, including the U.S. atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the firebombing of Tokyo and other cities and the fierce battle of Okinawa, and mourned for them.
Emperor Naruhito, in contrast, expressed “deep remorse” over his country’s wartime actions in a carefully nuanced speech that followed the footsteps of his father, who devoted his 30-year career to making amends for a war fought in the name of Hirohito, the current emperor’s grandfather. Naruhito also said he hoped that people can put their hearts together to overcome the difficulty of the pandemic while seeking happiness and peace for all.
Amid Tokyo’s surging coronavirus infections, about 200 participants, reduced from about 6,000 before the pandemic, mourned for the dead with a minute of silence. Masks were required, and there was no singing of the national anthem.
Suga vowed to cooperate with the international community in tackling global issues under “proactive pacifism,” a vision that Abe promoted to allow Japan to play a greater military role in international conflicts.
Beginning 2013, Abe stopped acknowledging Japan’s wartime hostilities or apologize in his Aug. 15 speeches, scrapping a nearly 20-year tradition that began with the 1995 apology of Socialist leader Tomiichi Murayama.
On Sunday, before attending the ceremony at Tokyo’s Budokan hall, Suga laid flowers at a nearby national cemetery for unknown soldiers. While Suga stayed away from controversial Yasukuni shrine, he did send a religious offering to the shrine, Japanese media reported.
Victims of Japanese actions during the first half of the 20th century, especially the Koreas and China, see the shrine as a symbol of Japanese militarism because it honors convicted war criminals among about 2.5 million war dead.
Abe, who stepped down as prime minister last year, prayed at the shrine Sunday, and so did three other members of Suga’s Cabinet. Two other ministers visited the shrine Friday.
The visits sparked criticism from China and South Korea.
On Sunday, South Korea’s Foreign Ministry in a statement urged Japanese officials to show “sincere remorse through action” so that the countries could develop “future-oriented ties.”
China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs also said they had lodged “stern representations” with the Japanese side in Tokyo and in Beijing over the visits to the Yasukuni shrine, noting Suga’s religious offering. Spokeswoman Hua Chunying called on Japan to take actions that would “win the trust” of its neighbors.
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Associated Press writer Kim Tong-hyung in Seoul, South Korea, and Huizhong Wu in Taipei, Taiwan, contributed to this report.
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Follow Mari Yamaguchi on Twitter at https://www.twitter.com/mariyamaguchi. Kim Tong-hyung at https://www.twitter.com/kimtonghyung
https://apnews.com/article/health-japan-coronavirus-pandemic-8a30499ff03ce1cf1e9f89f168247284
Live Afghanistan: Taliban fighters instructed to wait outside Kabul as they prepare to take power
By: Maighna Nanu
15 AUGUST 2021 • 11:09AM
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2021/08/15/afghanistan-taliban-enter-kabul-seizing-control-major-cities/
* UK in rush to evacuate envoy from Afghanistan
* Dispatch: Panic as Taliban now within miles of Kabul
* Ben Wallace: We have not betrayed Afghanistan
* Con Coughlin: Taliban's foreign allies have put it on brink of victory
Taliban fighters entered the outskirts of the Afghan capital on Sunday, further tightening their grip on the country as panicked workers fled government offices and helicopters landed at the US Embassy.
Three Afghan officials said that the Taliban were in the districts of Kalakan, Qarabagh and Paghman in the capital. The militants later pledged not to take Kabul "by force" as sporadic gunfire could be heard in the capital. "No one's life, property and dignity will be harmed and the lives of the citizens of Kabul will not be at risk," the Taliban said. In a nationwide offensive that has taken just over a week, the Taliban has defeated, co-opted or sent Afghan security forces fleeing from wide swaths of the country, even though they had some air support from the US military.
Britain's ambassador Sir Laurie Bristow was due to be airlifted from Afghanistan by Monday evening, as the number of UK diplomats and government officials in the country has already dropped from 500 to the "low tens".
The lightning speed of the Taliban offensive has shocked many and raised questions about why Afghan forces crumbled despite years of training and billions of dollars spent.
Just days ago, an American military assessment estimated it would be a month before the capital would come under insurgent pressure.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2021/08/15/afghanistan-taliban-enter-kabul-seizing-control-major-cities/
BREAKING: Afghan president Ashraf Ghani will resign within hours and relinquish power to The Taliban.
Middle East Eye is reporting that an interim government has been formed by The Taliban
https://telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2021/08/15/afghanistan-taliban-enter-kabul-seizing-control-major-cities/
10:54 AM · Aug 15, 2021·Twitter Web App
THREAD
🔴BREAKING: Afghan president Ashraf Ghani will resign within hours and relinquish power to The Taliban.
— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) August 15, 2021
Middle East Eye is reporting that an interim government has been formed by The Talibanhttps://t.co/ss18P2BDR3 pic.twitter.com/La5xZKrFZo