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India: Veteran politician Ghulam Nabi Azad quits Congress
In a big jolt to India's main opposition Congress party, veteran leader Ghulam Nabi Azad quit the grand old political outfit on Friday.
In his five-page resignation letter addressed to interim Congress president Sonia Gandhi,
Azad made a scathing attack on her son -- Rahul -- for his "childish behaviour", "glaring immaturity" and for running the party via a "coterie of inexperienced sycophants".
Also read: Mamata re-elected Trinamool Congress chief
Blaming Rahul for the Congress' defeat in the 2014 general election, the 73-year-old claimed that"the party has now reached a point of no return".
The former federal Minister also came down heavily on a "remote control model" in which important decisions in the party are taken by "Rahul Gandhi or rather worse his security guards and personal assistants".
Azad's abrupt exit comes at a time when the Congress is gearing up for the party's presidential poll and facing an existential crisis in the wake of the departure of several leaders in the past three years.
Also read: Indian oppn leader Rahul Gandhi released from detention
Azad served as the Minister of Parliamentary Affairs in Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's government until 27 October 2005, when he was appointed as the Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir.
He was awarded the Padma Bhushan, India's third highest civilian award, in 2022 by Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government in the field of public affairs.
2 plead guilty in scheme to sell Biden's daughter's diary
Two Florida residents have pleaded guilty in a scheme to peddle a diary and other items stolen from President Joe Biden’s daughter to the conservative group Project Veritas for $40,000, prosecutors said Thursday.
Aimee Harris and Robert Kurlander “sought to profit from their theft of another person’s personal property,” Manhattan U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said in a statement.
Harris, a 40-year-old from Palm Beach, and Kurlander, 58, of nearby Jupiter, face the possibility of up to five years in prison. They pleaded guilty to conspiracy to transport stolen property across state lines.
Harris' lawyer, Sam Talkin, said she “has accepted responsibility for her conduct and looks forward to moving on with her life.” Kurlander’s lawyer, Florian Miedel, declined to comment.
Also read: One year after Afghan war, Biden struggles to find footing
While authorities didn’t identify anyone in the case except the defendants, the details of the investigation have been public for months.
Ashley Biden, the president's daughter, was moving out of a friend's Delray Beach, Florida, home in spring 2020 when she stored the diary and other belongings there, prosecutors said in a court filing.
They said Harris then moved into the same room, found the items and got in touch with Kurlander, who enthused in a text message that he would help her make a “ton of money” from selling it, adding an expletive before “ton.”
The two initially aimed to sell some of the purloined property to then-President Donald Trump's campaign, but a representative turned them down and told them to take the material to the FBI, according to the court papers.
The campaign “can't use this,” Kurlander explained to Harris in a September 2020 text message, adding: “It has to be done a different way.”
Also read: Biden tests positive for COVID-19, returns to isolation
Their next stop was Project Veritas, which paid for the two to bring some of the material — including the diary and a digital device with family photos — to a New York luxury hotel, prosecutors said.
Project Veritas staffers met with Kurlander and Harris in New York and agreed to pay an initial $10,000, saying more money could come if they retrieved more of Ashley Biden’s items from the home, partly in order to authenticate the diary, according to the court filing.
Back in Florida, Kurlander texted Harris a blunt assessment of what would come of the exchange, prosecutors said.
“They are in a sketchy business and here they are taking what’s literally a stolen diary and info ... and trying to make a story that will ruin” Ashley Biden's life and possibly affect the impending presidential election, he wrote, according to the court papers. He added that the two needed “to tread even more carefully” and get “anything worthwhile” out of the Delray Beach house, according to the court papers.
Prosecutors said Kurlander and Harris took Ashley Biden's stored tax documents, clothes and luggage as Kurlander pressed Project Veritas in a message to commit to a bigger payout: “We are taking huge risks. This isn't fair.”
A Project Veritas staffer soon flew to Florida, the employee shipped the items to New York and the group paid Harris and Kurlander $20,000 apiece, prosecutors said.
Project Veritas identifies itself as a news organization. It is best known for conducting hidden camera stings that have embarrassed news outlets, labor organizations and Democratic politicians.
“Project Veritas’s news gathering was ethical and legal" in the diary affair, the group said in a statement Thursday. The organization said earlier that it turned the journal over to law enforcement after receiving it from “tipsters” who maintained that it had been abandoned in a room.
"A journalist’s lawful receipt of material later alleged to be stolen is routine, commonplace and protected by the First Amendment,” Project Veritas added Thursday.
Neither Project Veritas nor any staffers have been charged with a crime.
The FBI searched the group's New York offices and the homes of some of its employees as part of the investigation. A court in New York appointed a former federal judge to review material that was seized in those searches, so as to ensure that investigators couldn’t look at material protected by journalistic or attorney-client privileges.
Generally, media organizations aren’t culpable for receiving material that might have been stolen, if they weren’t involved in the theft. But there can be criminal liability for orchestrating theft and then knowingly paying for stolen material.
“There is no First Amendment protection for the theft and interstate transport of stolen property,” the U.S. attorney’s office wrote in a court filing last year.
O’Keefe has said that Project Veritas ultimately could not confirm that the diary belonged to Ashley Biden. The group did not publish information from it.
He added that there was “no doubt Project Veritas acted appropriately at each and every step.”
Ashley Biden, a 41-year-old social worker, is the daughter of the president and of first lady Jill Biden. His eldest daughter and his first wife were killed in a 1972 car accident.
Brazil’s Lula vows to renegotiate household debts if elected
Former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva pledged Thursday night to renegotiate household debts of Brazilians if he wins October’s election, making another promise seeking to lure support from tens of millions experiencing hardship.
The announcement came a day after U.S. President Joe Biden announced that some Americans will receive up to $10,000 in federal student loan debt forgiveness. Many Brazilians are eager for relief at a time when inflation is running at nearly 10% and the poor are struggling to make ends meet.
“We have almost 70% of Brazilian families in debt and the vast majority are women,” da Silva said in a prime-time interview on the television network Globo. “You can be sure that we will negotiate with the private sector and the financial system.”
The same program interviewed the incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro, on Aug 22.
Da Silva has already hinted that if voters return him to the job he held in 2003-2010, he likely would keep in place the sharp boost to social welfare payments approved recently. Those increases, scheduled to expire at year’s end, are part of Bolsonaro’s efforts to bolster his reelection bid. Whoever wins the October vote will assume office in January.
Read: Brazilians rally for democracy, seek to rein in Bolsonaro
The leftist da Silva, who is leading the far-right Bolsonaro in opinion polls, also criticized the incumbent for seeking political support by allowing huge chunks of public funds to be used by lawmakers at their discretion as part of what is known as the “secret budget.”
“Bolsonaro doesn’t command anything, Congress is holding him hostage. He doesn’t even control the budget,” da Silva said.
“Arthur Lira is in charge. Ministers call him, not Boslonaro,” he added, referring to the speaker of the Chamber of Deputies.
Da Silva also acknowledged for the first time that errors were made and corruption occurred during his own administration and that of his successor, Dilma Rousseff. Both are members of the leftist Workers’ Party.
“You can’t say there was no corruption if people confessed,” da Silva said when asked about massive corruption scandals under Workers’ Party governments. But he attributed such transgressions to individuals rather than an orchestrated scheme of his party.
Da Silva himself was found guilty of corruption and money laundering and spent over a year in jail, though the Supreme Court later annulled the convictions, paving the way for his presidential run this year. He has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.
In the 2018 presidential race, Bolsonaro placed the fight against corruption, then symbolized by the Workers’ Party and an imprisoned da Silva, at the heart of his campaign.
Putin orders troop replenishment in face of Ukraine losses
Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a major buildup of his country’s military forces Thursday in an apparent effort to replenish troops that have suffered heavy losses in six months of bloody warfare and prepare for a long, grinding fight ahead in Ukraine.
The move to increase the number of troops by 137,000, or 13%, to 1.15 million by the end of the year came amid chilling developments on the ground in Ukraine:
— Fueling fears of a nuclear catastrophe, the Zaporizhzhia power plant in the middle of the fighting in southern Ukraine was briefly knocked out of commission by fire damage to a transmission line, authorities said. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the plant’s emergency backup diesel generators had to be activated to provide power needed to operate the plant.
“Russia has put Ukraine and all Europeans one step away from a radiation disaster,” Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address.
— The death toll from a Russian rocket attack on a train station and the surrounding area climbed to 25, Ukrainian authorities said. Russia said it targeted a military train and claimed to have killed more than 200 Ukrainian reservists in the attack, which took place Wednesday on Ukraine’s Independence Day.
Putin’s decree did not specify whether the expansion would be accomplished by widening the draft, recruiting more volunteers, or both. But some Russian military analysts predicted heavier reliance on volunteers because of the Kremlin’s concerns about a potential domestic backlash from an expanded draft.
The move will boost Russia’s armed forces overall to 2.04 million, including the 1.15 million troops.
Western estimates of Russian dead in the Ukraine war have ranged from more than 15,000 to over 20,000 — more than the Soviet Union lost during its 10-year war in Afghanistan. The Pentagon said last week that as many as 80,000 Russian troops have been killed or wounded, eroding Moscow’s ability to conduct big offensives.
The Kremlin has said that only volunteer contract soldiers take part in the Ukraine war. But it may be difficult to find more willing soldiers, and military analysts said the planned troop levels may still be insufficient to sustain operations.
Read: Ukrainian fears run high over fighting near nuclear plant
Retired Russian Col. Retired Viktor Murakhovsky said in comments carried by the Moscow-based RBC online news outlet that the Kremlin will probably try to keep relying on volunteers, and he predicted that will account for the bulk of the increase.
Another Russian military expert, Alexei Leonkov, noted that training on complex modern weapons normally takes three years. And draftees serve only one year.
“A draft won’t help that, so there will be no increase in the number of draftees,” the state RIA Novosti news agency quoted Leonkov as saying.
Fears of a Chernobyl-like disaster have been mounting in Ukraine because of fighting around the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia plant. Ukraine and Russia have accused each other of shelling the site.
In the incident on Thursday, the plant was cut off from the electrical grid, causing a blackout across the region, according to authorities. The complex was later reconnected to the grid, a local Russian-installed official said.
It was not immediately clear from Ukrainian energy authorities whether the damaged line carried outgoing electricity or incoming power to operate the plant. But Zelenskyy’s mention of the emergency generators implied that incoming power was affected. Incoming electricity is needed to run the reactors’ vital cooling systems.
Zelenskyy said Ukraine would have faced a radiation accident if the diesel generators had failed to turn on.
He blamed the fire that damaged the transmission line on Russian shelling. But Zaporizhzhia’s Russian-installed regional governor, Yevgeny Balitsky, blamed a Ukrainian attack.
While the incident apparently didn’t affect the reactors’ cooling systems — whose loss could lead to a meltdown — it stoked fears of disaster.
“The situation is extremely dangerous,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said. “I’m receiving reports that there are fires in the forest near the power plant. We still have to examine this issue more.”
Elsewhere on the battle front, the deadly strike on the train station in Chaplyne, a town of about 3,500 in the central Dnipropetrovsk region, came as Ukraine was bracing for attacks tied to the national holiday and the war’s six-month mark, both of which fell on Wednesday.
The deputy head of the Ukrainian presidential office, Kyrylo Tymoshenko, did not say whether all of the 25 people killed were civilians. If they were, it would amount to one of the deadliest attacks on civilians in weeks. Thirty-one people were reported wounded.
Witnesses said some of the victims, including at least one child, burned to death in train cars or passing automobiles.
“Everything sank into dust,” said Olena Budnyk, a 65-year-old Chaplyne resident. “There was a dust storm. We couldn’t see anything. We didn’t know where to run.”
The dead included an 11-year-old boy found under the rubble of a house and a 6-year-old killed in a car fire near the train station, authorities said.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said its forces used an Iskander missile to strike a military train carrying Ukrainian troops and equipment to the front line in eastern Ukraine. The ministry claimed more than 200 reservists “were destroyed on their way to the combat zone.”
The attack served as a painful reminder of Russia’s continued ability to inflict large-scale suffering. Wednesday’s national holiday celebrated Ukraine’s 1991 declaration of independence from the Soviet Union.
Tetyana Kvitnytska, deputy head of the Dnipropetrovsk regional health department, said those hurt in the train station attack suffered head injuries, broken limbs, burns and shrapnel wounds.
Following attacks in which civilians have died, the Russian government has repeatedly claimed that its forces aim only at legitimate military targets. Hours before the bloodshed at the train station, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu insisted the military was doing its best to spare civilians, even at the cost of slowing down its offensive in Ukraine.
In April, a Russian missile attack on a train station in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk killed more than 50 people as crowds of mostly women and children sought to flee the fighting. The attack was denounced as a war crime.
In Moscow on Thursday, Dmitry Medvedev, the secretary of Russia’s Security Council, said Western hopes for a Ukrainian victory are futile and emphasized that the Kremlin will press home what it calls the “special military operation,” leaving just two possible outcomes.
“One is reaching all goals of the special military operation and Kyiv’s recognition of this outcome,” Medvedev said on his messaging app channel. “The second is a military coup in Ukraine followed by the recognition of results of the special operation.”
Japan police chief to resign over Abe shooting death
Japan's national police chief said Thursday he will resign to take responsibility over shortfalls in security that an investigation by his own agency showed did not adequately safeguard former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe from a fatal shooting of at a campaign speech last month.
National Police Agency Chief Itaru Nakamura's announcement came as his agency released a report blaming flaws in police protection — from planning to guarding at the scene — that led to Abe’s assassination July 8 in Nara in western Japan.
Nakamura said he took the former prime minister's death seriously and that he submitted his resignation to the National Public Safety Commission earlier Thursday.
“In order to fundamentally reexamine guarding and never to let this happen, we need to have a new system,” Nakamura told a news conference as he announced his intention to step down.
Nakamura did not say when his resignation would be official. Japanese media reported that his resignation is expected to be approved at Friday's Cabinet meeting.
Also read: Japanese say final goodbye to former leader Abe at funeral
The alleged gunman, Tetsuya Yamagami, was arrested at the scene and is currently under mental evaluation until late November. Yamagami told police that he targeted Abe because of the former leader's link to the Unification Church, which he hated.
Abe sent a video message last year to a group affiliated with the church, which experts say may have infuriated the shooting suspect.
In a 54-page investigative report released Thursday, the National Police Agency concluded that the protection plan for Abe neglected potential danger coming from behind him and merely focused on risks during his movement from the site of his speech to his vehicle.
Inadequacies in the command system, communication among several key police officials, as well as their attention in areas behind Abe at the campaign site led to their lack of attention on the suspect's movement until it was too late.
Also read: Japan's ex-leader Shinzo Abe assassinated during a speech
None of the officers assigned to immediate protection of Abe caught the suspect until he was already 7 meters (yards) behind him where he took out his homemade double-barrel gun, which resembled a camera with a long lens, to blast his first shot that narrowly missed Abe. Up to that moment, none of the officers was aware of the suspect's presence, or recognized the blast as a gun shot, the report said.
In just over two seconds, the suspect was only 5.3 meters (yards) behind Abe to fatally fire the second shot.
The report called for significant strengthening in both training and staffing of Japan’s dignitary protection, as well as revising police protection guidelines for the first time in about 30 years. It said the prefectural police's Abe protection plan lacked a thorough safety evaluation and largely copied an earlier visit by another top party lawmaker.
The national police called for doubling dignitary protection staff in Tokyo, a greater supervisory role for the national police over prefectural staff, and use of digital technology and drones to bolster surveillance from above ground. The police agency also proposed bullet-proof shields that are not yet used in Japan, a country known for strict gun control.
Abe’s family paid tribute to him in a private Buddhist ritual Thursday marking the 49th day since his assassination. His younger brother and former Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi, and other senior party officials and ministers reportedly attended.
About 1,000 people, including Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, attended an earlier private funeral at a Tokyo temple days after his death.
Kishida's government plans to hold a state funeral Sept. 27, a plan that has split public opinion amid growing criticisms over the governing party members' cozy ties with the controversial Korean church. Kishida's Cabinet is reportedly announcing a 250 million yen ($1.8 million) budget to invite 6,400 guests from in and outside Japan for the upcoming funeral.
The Unification Church, which was founded in South Korea in 1954 and came to Japan a decade later, has built close ties with a host of conservative lawmakers, many of them members of Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party on their shared interests of anti-communism.
Since the 1980s, the church has faced accusations of problematic recruiting and religious sales in Japan, and the governing party’s church ties have sent support ratings of Kishida’s Cabinet into a nosedive even after its recent shuffle.
In Nara on Thursday, prefectural police chief Tomoaki Onizuka also expressed his intention to step down over Abe's assassination.
“I have been almost crushed by the seriousness of my responsibility" in the former leader's death, teary Onizuka said. “We will grit our teeth and endeavor in order to regain the public trust and be helpful to the people in the prefecture and across Japan."
WHO: Monkeypox cases drop 21%, reversing month-long increase
The number of monkeypox cases reported globally dropped by 21% in the last week, reversing a month-long trend of rising infections and a possible signal the outbreak in Europe may be starting to decline, according to a World Health Organization report issued Thursday.
The U.N. health agency reported 5,907 new weekly cases and said two countries, Iran and Indonesia, reported their first cases. To date, more than 45,000 cases have been reported in 98 countries since late April.
Cases in the Americas accounted for 60% of cases in the past month, WHO said, while cases in Europe comprised about 38%. It said infections in the Americas showed “a continuing steep rise.”
The Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday the continent had 219 new cases reported in the past week, a jump of 54%. Most were in Nigeria and Congo, the agency said.
Also read: Public health emergency declared over monkeypox in WA county
In early July, just weeks before the agency declared the international spread of the disease to be a global emergency, WHO’s Europe director said countries in the region were responsible for 90% of all laboratory confirmed cases of monkeypox.
British health authorities said last week after seeing a decline in the number of new cases getting reported daily that there were “early signs” the country’s monkeypox outbreak was slowing.
The U.K.’s Health Security Agency downgraded the country’s monkeypox outbreak last month, saying there was no evidence the once rare disease was spreading beyond men who were gay, bisexual or had sex with other men.
Since monkeypox outbreaks in Europe and North America were identified in May, WHO and other health agencies have noted that its spread was almost exclusively in men who have sex with men.
Also read: Monkeypox cases cross 35,000: WHO
Monkeypox has been endemic in parts of Africa for decades and experts suspect the outbreaks in Europe and North America were triggered after the disease started spreading via sex at two raves in Spain and Belgium.
WHO’s latest report said 98% of cases are in men and of those who reported sexual orientation, 96% are in men who have sex with men.
“Of all reported types of transmission, a sexual encounter was reported most commonly,” WHO said. “The majority of cases were likely exposed in a party with sexual contacts,” the agency said.
Among the monkeypox cases in which the HIV status of patients was known, 45% were infected with HIV.
WHO has recommended that men at high risk of the disease temporarily consider reducing their number of sex partners or refrain from group or anonymous sex.
Monkeypox typically requires skin-to-skin or skin-to-mouth contact with an infected patient’s lesions to spread. People can also become infected through contact with the clothing or bedsheets of someone who has monkeypox lesions.
With globally limited vaccine supplies, authorities in the U.S., Europe and the U.K. have all begun rationing doses to stretch supplies by up to five times.
WHO has advised countries that have vaccines to prioritize immunization for those at high risk of the disease, including gay and bisexual men with multiple sex partners, and for health workers, laboratory staff and outbreak responders.
While Africa has reported the most suspected deaths from monkeypox, the continent has no vaccine supplies apart from a very small stock being tested in a research study in Congo.
“As we know, the situation with monkeypox vaccine access is very topical, but there are not enough doses of vaccines," Nigeria Center for Disease Control Director-General Ifedayo Adetifa said this week. Potentially, a lot more more doses will become available, but because of challenges with manufacturing factories and unexpected uptick in monkeypox cases, the vaccine may actually not be available until 2023.”
UNHCR raises concerns over Afghan refugees forced returns from Tajikistan
UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, has raised “grave concerns” over the continued detention and deportations of Afghan refugees in Tajikistan, warning once again that forcing people fleeing persecution back to their country against their will is illegal and puts lives at risk.
In a latest incident, some five Afghans, including a family comprising of three children and their mother, were returned to Afghanistan on Tuesday (August 23) through the Panji Poyon border checkpoint in north-eastern Tajikistan despite UNHCR’s interventions to halt the deportations, said the UN agency on Thursday.
"Tajikistan must stop detaining and deporting refugees, an action that clearly puts lives at risk," said Elizabeth Tan, UNHCR’s Director of International Protection. "Forced return of refugees is against the law and runs contrary to the principle of non-refoulement, a cornerstone of international refugee law."
Read: UNHCR seeks more support from international community for Rohingyas
Since 2021, UNHCR has recorded multiple incidents of refugee detentions, forced returns and non-admission to territory for individuals in need of international protection.
A UNHCR global non-return advisory for Afghanistan issued in August 2021 and renewed in February 2022, calls for a bar on forced returns of all Afghan nationals.
Afghans seeking safety must have access to protection and a fair and efficient asylum process in Tajikistan. Forced returns will place asylum-seekers at risk of persecution upon return and accordingly, constitute a serious breach of international law.
"We have continuously urged the authorities in Tajikistan to allow access to territory for those fleeing conflict and persecution in Afghanistan and halt any further deportations," UNHCR's Elizabeth Tan added.
UNHCR remains concerned about the risk of human rights violations against civilians in Afghanistan, including in respect of women and girls.
One year on, Afghans at risk await evacuation, relocation
More than a year after the Taliban takeover that saw thousands of Afghans rushing to Kabul’s international airport amid the chaotic U.S. withdrawal, Afghans at risk who failed to get on evacuation flights say they are still struggling to find safe and legal ways out of the country.
Among those left behind is a 49-year-old interpreter who worked for a NATO contractor in 2010 accompanying convoys in Kandahar. Only six days after the Taliban reached the capital last August, they came looking for him.
“They come to my house and they threatened my son and my wife (when) I was not at home. They (then) destroy my office,” he told AP via WhatsApp referring to the place where he taught English. He asked that his name not be revealed for security reasons.
This month, he was interrogated by the Taliban again for more than two hours.
During the chaotic days of the U.S. pullout, he had tried several times to reach Kabul Airport but, like many, failed to get through massive crowds made even more dangerous by attacks around the airport that killed dozens. He then tried to leave Afghanistan by crossing the land border with Pakistan but was stopped by the Taliban who demanded $700 per person to cross — money he did not have. To make matters worse, his passport is no longer valid.
Like millions of Afghans, he’s also been impacted by the country’s economic freefall, caused in part by international sanctions and vanishing foreign aid.
“We eat once a day,” the interpreter said. Still, he continues hoping he and his family will leave Afghanistan at some point.
“I never give up because of my future and my children future,” he said.
Since their return to rule, the Taliban have been trying to transition from insurgency and war to governing, with the hard-liners increasingly at odds with the pragmatists on how to run a country in the midst of a humanitarian and economic crisis. But a year on they have so far failed to gain international recognition. Initial promises to allow girls to return to school and women to continue working have been broken.
Those who have failed to evacuate include interpreters and drivers but also women journalists, activists and athletes who say they cannot live freely under a Taliban-led government.
The U.S., together with other Western nations, hastily evacuated more than 120,000 people, both foreign nationals and Afghan citizens, in August last year.
Some 46,000 Afghans who remained in the country after Aug. 31 have since applied for U.S. humanitarian parole, according to the Migration Policy Institute. But only 297 have been approved so far.
Because there is no longer a U.S. consulate in Afghanistan, asylum-seekers must make their way to other countries with consular services for in-person interviews.
The list of obstacles to getting out of Afghanistan is extensive, starting with the difficulty in obtaining passports as offices repeatedly close due to technical problems.
“Today, the vast majority of Afghans don’t have access to legal identity, meaning if they need tomorrow to be able to get to safety legally, they can’t,” said Nassim Majidi, co-founder and executive director of Samuel Hall, an independent think tank that conducts research on migration and displacement. Majidi was speaking at a seminar organized by the Migration Policy Institute looking at the situation of Afghans in Afghanistan and abroad a year after the withdrawal.
Read: Taliban: 2 civilians killed in a bomb blast in Afghanistan
Around 2,000 Afghans and their families who worked with NATO, its agencies, and member countries were among those evacuated from Kabul according to the military alliance. But the evacuations were organized by individual member countries. NATO, as an organization, had no repatriation plan.
Evacuations from third countries are still happening, although sporadically. Earlier this month a plane carrying nearly 300 Afghans who had collaborated with the Spanish government landed in Madrid. Germany and France also have continued to work on evacuation cases, Majidi said.
But thousands of Afghans are still living in limbo in third countries including Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kosovo and Albania while they wait for their applications to be processed for resettlement to the United States and Canada.
Though life-saving for many, the evacuations also fractured families. Among them is that of an Afghan journalist who asked to remain anonymous, fearing for the safety of her relatives in Kabul.
“It was really difficult to leave everything behind in an hour,” she told the Associated Press in a phone interview from her new home in Nijmegen, in the Netherlands, which she moved into after months of living in a temporary refugee shelter.
The government of the Netherlands had called her on Aug. 26 offering a single spot on an evacuation flight. Her relatives told her she needed to save herself first if she wanted to help them.
A year later, three of her family members have recently managed to get evacuated to France, she said. But despite repeated family reunification requests to the Netherlands and other European countries, the majority of her siblings remain in Kabul, living across the street from a police station now in Taliban hands.
On June 17 one of her older brothers was allegedly beaten to death by Taliban forces on the street after he was found carrying a photo of Ahmad Shah Massoud, the leader of the Northern Alliance that fought the Taliban, she said.
Days later, she said, the men showed up at the family’s home and forced them to sign a death certificate that stated he had died of “natural causes.” The AP was unable to independently verify her claims.
With most of her family still in Afghanistan and many bureaucratic hurdles to face in the Netherlands, it has been difficult to start a new life, she said.
“Until now it is just darkness.”
Ukrainian fears run high over fighting near nuclear plant
Ukrainians are once again anxious and alarmed about the fate of a nuclear power plant in a land that was home to the world’s worst atomic accident in 1986 at Chernobyl.
The Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, Europe’s largest, has been occupied by Russian forces since the early days of the war, and continued fighting near the facility has heightened fears of a catastrophe that could affect nearby towns in southern Ukraine — or potentially an even wider region.
The government in Kyiv alleges Russia is essentially holding the Soviet-era nuclear plant hostage, storing weapons there and launching attacks from around it, while Moscow accuses Ukraine of recklessly firing on the facility, which is located in the city of Enerhodar.
“Anybody who understands nuclear safety issues has been trembling for the last six months,” said Mycle Schneider, an independent policy consultant and coordinator of the World Nuclear Industry Status Report.
Ukraine cannot simply shut down its nuclear plants during the war because it is heavily reliant on them, and its 15 reactors at four stations provide about half of its electricity. Still, an ongoing conflict near a working atomic plant is troubling for many experts who fear that a damaged facility could lead to a disaster.
That fear is palpable just across the Dnieper River in Nikopol, where residents have been under nearly constant Russian shelling since July 12, with eight people killed, 850 buildings damaged and over the half the population of 100,000 fleeing the city.
Liudmyla Shyshkina, a 74-year-old widow who lived within sight of the Zaporizhzhia plant before her apartment was bombarded and her husband killed, said she believes the Russians are capable of intentionally causing a nuclear disaster.
Fighting in early March caused a brief fire at the plant’s training complex, which officials said did not result in the release of any radiation. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says Russia’s military actions there amount to “nuclear blackmail.”
No civilian nuclear plant is designed for a wartime situation, although the buildings housing Zaporizhzhia’s six reactors are protected by reinforced concrete that could withstand an errant shell, experts say.
The more immediate concern is that a disruption of electricity supply to the plant could knock out cooling systems that are essential for the safe operation of the reactors, and emergency diesel generators are sometimes unreliable. The pools where spent fuel rods are kept to be cooled also are vulnerable to shelling, which could cause the release of radioactive material.
Kyiv told the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog, that shelling earlier this week damaged transformers at a nearby conventional power plant, disrupting electricity supplies to the Zaporizhzhia plant for several hours.
“These incidents show why the IAEA must be able to send a mission to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant very soon,” said the agency’s head, Rafael Mariano Grossi, adding that he expected that to happen “within the next few days, if ongoing negotiations succeed.”
At a U.N. Security Council meeting Tuesday, U.N. political chief Rosemary DiCarlo urged the withdrawal of all military personnel and equipment from the plant and an agreement on a demilitarized zone around it.
Currently only one of the plant’s four power lines connecting it to the grid is operational, the agency said. External power is essential not just to cool the two reactors still in operation but also the spent radioactive fuel stored in special facilities onsite.
Read: 22 reported killed in Independence Day attack in Ukraine
“If we lose the last one, we are at the total mercy of emergency power generators,” said Najmedin Meshkati, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Southern California.
He and Schneider expressed concern that the occupation of the plant by Russian forces is also hampering safety inspections and the replacement of critical parts, and is putting severe strain on hundreds of Ukrainian staff who operate the facility.
“Human error probability will be increased manifold by fatigue,” said Meshkati, who was part of a committee appointed by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences to identify lessons from the 2011 nuclear disaster at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant. “Fatigue and stress are unfortunately two big safety factors.”
If an incident at the Zaporizhzhia plant were to release significant amounts of radiation, the scale and location of the contamination would be determined largely by the weather, said Paul Dorfman, a nuclear safety expert at the University of Sussex who has advised the British and Irish governments.
The massive earthquake and tsunami that hit the Fukushima plant destroyed cooling systems which triggered meltdowns in three of its reactors. Much of the contaminated material was blown out to sea, limiting the damage.
The April 26, 1986, explosion and fire at one of four reactors at the Chernobyl nuclear plant north of Kyiv sent a cloud of radioactive material across a wide swath of Europe and beyond. In addition to fueling anti-nuclear sentiment in many countries, the disaster left deep psychological scars on Ukrainians.
Zaporizhzhia’s reactors are of a different model than those at Chernobyl, but unfavorable winds could still spread radioactive contamination in any direction, Dorfman said.
“If something really went wrong, then we have a full-scale radiological catastrophe that could reach Europe, go as far as the Middle East, and certainly could reach Russia, but the most significant contamination would be in the immediate area,” he said.
That’s why Nikopol’s emergency services department takes radiation measurements every hour since the Russian invasion began. Before that, it was every four hours.
Uvalde school board fires police chief after mass shooting
The Uvalde school district fired police chief Pete Arredondo on Wednesday under mounting pressure in the grieving Texas town to punish officers over letting a gunman at Robb Elementary School remain in a fourth-grade classroom for more than an hour with an AR-15 style rifle as 19 children and two teachers were killed.
In a unanimous vote, the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District’s board of trustees fired Arredondo in an auditorium of parents and survivors of the May 24 massacre. Arredondo, who did not attend the meeting, becomes the first officer to lose his job following one of the deadliest classroom shootings in U.S. history.
His ouster came three months to the day after the tragedy, and less than two weeks before students return to school in Uvalde, where some children remain too scared or scarred to go back inside a classroom.
Cheers from the crowd followed the vote, and some parents walked out of an auditorium in tears. Outside, several Uvalde residents called for other officers to be held accountable.
“Coward!” some in the audience yelled as the meeting got underway.
Arredondo, who has been on leave from the district since June 22, has come under the most intense scrutiny of the nearly 400 officers who rushed to school but waited more than 70 minutes to confront the 18-year-old gunman in a fourth-grade classroom.
Most notably, Arredondo was criticized for not ordering officers to act sooner. Col. Steve McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, has said Arredondo was in charge of the law enforcement response to the attack.
Minutes before the meeting of the Uvalde school board got underway, Arredondo’s attorney released a scathing 4,500-word letter that amounted to the police chief’s fullest defense to date of his actions. Over 17 defiant pages, Arredondo is not a fumbling school police chief who a damning state investigation blamed for not taking command and wasted time by looking for keys to a likely unlocked door, but a brave officer whose level-headed decisions saved the lives of other students.
It alleges that Arredondo warned the district about a variety of security issues in the schools a year before the shooting and asserted he wasn’t in charge of the scene. The letter also accused Uvalde school officials of putting his safety at risk by not letting him carry a weapon to the school board meeting if he were to attend, citing “legitimate risks of harm to the public and to Chief Arredondo.”
“Chief Arredondo is a leader and a courageous officer who with all of the other law enforcement officers who responded to the scene, should be celebrated for the lives saved, instead of vilified for those they couldn’t reach in time,” George Hyde wrote.
Following the vote, Hyde’s office did not immediately return a request for comment.
Uvalde school officials have been under mounting pressure from victims’ families and members of the community, many of whom have called for Arredondo’s termination. Superintendent Hal Harrell had first moved to fire Arredondo in July but postponed the decision at the request of the police chief’s attorney.
Read: Uvalde school police chief on leave after mass shooting
Among those at the meeting was Ruben Torres, father of Chloe Torres, who survived the shooting in room 112 of the school. He said that as a former Marine, he took an oath that he faithfully executed willingly, and did not understand why officers did not take action when leadership failed.
“Right now, being young, she is having a hard time handling this horrific event,” Torres said.
Shirley Zamora, the mother of a student at Robb Elementary, said accountability shouldn’t end with Arredondo’s dismissal.
“This is just going to be the beginning. It’s a long process,” she said.
Only one other officer — Uvalde Police Department Lt. Mariano Pargas, who was the city’s acting police chief on the day of massacre — is known to have been placed on leave for their actions during the shooting.
The Texas Department of Public Safety, which had more than 90 state troopers at the scene, has also launched an internal investigation into the response by state police. State Sen. Roland Gutierrez, a Democrat who represents Uvalde, said McCraw, the state police chief, also deserves scrutiny.
“You fail at something so badly that people are getting hurt, then certainly we have to have some greater accountability,” he said. “And accountability means losing your job, so be it.”
School officials have said the campus at Robb Elementary will no longer be used when students return Sept 6. Instead, campuses elsewhere in Uvalde will serve as temporary classrooms for elementary school students, not all of whom are willing to return to school in-person following the shooting.
School officials say a virtual academy will be offered for students. The district has not said how many students will attend virtually, but a new state law passed last year in Texas following the pandemic limits the number of eligible students receiving remote instruction to “10% of all enrolled students within a given school system.”
Schools can seek a waiver to exceed the limit but Uvalde has not done so, according to the Texas Education Agency.
New measures to improve school safety in Uvalde include “8-foot, non-scalable perimeter fencing” at elementary, middle and high school campuses, according to the school district. Officials say they have also installed additional security cameras, upgraded locks, enhanced training for district staff and improving communication.