Afghan women’s defiance and despair: ‘I never thought I’d have to wear a burqa. My identity will be lost’

Afghan women’s defiance and despair: ‘I never thought I’d have to wear a burqa. My identity will be lost’

The Guardian reports: In a market in Kabul, Aref is doing a booming trade. At first glance, the walls of his shop seem to be curtained in folds of blue fabric. On closer inspection, dozens and dozens of blue burqas hang like spectres from hooks on the wall. As the Taliban close in on Kabul, women inside the city are getting ready for what may be coming. “Before, most of our customers were from the provinces,” says Aref. “Now it…

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Al Qaeda won’t return to Afghanistan — it’s already there

Al Qaeda won’t return to Afghanistan — it’s already there

Jason Burke writes: As the Taliban prepare to rule Afghanistan after sweeping across the country in less than a week, an obvious question is what does this mean for the future of al-Qaida and other extremist Islamist groups committed to waging a global jihad. There is no doubt that the astonishing rapidity of the Taliban’s victory will deliver a tremendous boost to Islamist extremists everywhere – whether al-Qaida, Islamic State, fighters in Mozambique or Syria, or jihadi fanboys in bedsits…

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Biden administration prompts largest permanent increase in food stamps

Biden administration prompts largest permanent increase in food stamps

The New York Times reports: The Biden administration has revised the nutrition standards of the food stamp program and prompted the largest permanent increase to benefits in the program’s history, a move that will give poor people more power to fill their grocery carts but add billions of dollars to the cost of a program that feeds one in eight Americans. Under rules to be announced on Monday and put in place in October, average benefits will rise more than…

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What would it take to break up Big Oil?

What would it take to break up Big Oil?

The Guardian reports: Ayisha Siddiqa doesn’t want fossil fuel companies to determine her future anymore. The industry has promoted climate denial for longer than the 22-year-old has been alive. Rather than watch companies pad their profits as the world burns, Siddiqa has a radical solution in mind. “Abolish these oil companies, finish them, get rid of them, no more,” she said. The report found that 25 oil and gas industry organisations spent at least $9.5m to place more than 25,000…

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Do wild animals get PTSD? Scientists probe its evolutionary roots

Do wild animals get PTSD? Scientists probe its evolutionary roots

By Sharon Levy, Knowable Magazine Every few years, snowshoe hare numbers in the Canadian Yukon climb to a peak. As hare populations increase, so do those of their predators: lynx and coyotes. Then the hare population plummets and predators start to die off. The cycle is a famous phenomenon among ecologists and has been studied since the 1920s. In recent years, though, researchers have come to a startling conclusion: Hare numbers fall from their peak not just because predators eat…

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The return of the Taliban

The return of the Taliban

Jon Lee Anderson writes: Watching Afghanistan’s cities fall to the Taliban in rapid succession, as the United States completes a hasty withdrawal from the country, is a surreal experience, laced with a sense of déjà vu. Twenty years ago, I reported from Afghanistan as the Taliban’s enemies took these same cities from them, in the short but decisive U.S.-backed military offensive that followed the 9/11 attacks. The war on terror had just been declared, and the unfolding American military action…

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Afghan security forces face despair and feelings of abandonment

Afghan security forces face despair and feelings of abandonment

The New York Times reports: How the Afghan military came to disintegrate first became apparent not last week but months ago in an accumulation of losses that started even before President Biden’s announcement that the United States would withdraw by Sept. 11. It began with individual outposts in rural areas where starving and ammunition-depleted soldiers and police units were surrounded by Taliban fighters and promised safe passage if they surrendered and left behind their equipment, slowly giving the insurgents more…

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‘Why were we even there?’

‘Why were we even there?’

The Washington Post reports: Speaking from his home in Tucson, Army veteran John Whalen sighed as reports came in that Kandahar, the second-largest Afghan city, had fallen to the Taliban. “It’s just frustrating,” Whalen said over the phone. “We knew that this would happen. Now, all the people who went and served, are like, ‘Why did my friend die?’ ” “I ask that question, too,” Whalen said. Whalen said two of his friends were killed just a dozen miles from…

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Surge in the South places U.S. among nations with highest rate of new Covid-19 cases

Surge in the South places U.S. among nations with highest rate of new Covid-19 cases

CNN reports: The US remains among nations with the highest rate of new Covid-19 cases, driven mostly by a surge in the South, where many states are lagging in getting people vaccinated against the coronavirus. “This is starting to look really ominous in the South. … If you look at rates of transmission in Florida and Louisiana, they’re actually probably the highest in the world,” Dr. Peter Hotez, the dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College…

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Massive new analysis confirms just how many Covid cases are truly asymptomatic

Massive new analysis confirms just how many Covid cases are truly asymptomatic

Science Alert reports: Within months of SARS-CoV-2’s emergence as a global catastrophe it was becoming clear that many who spread the disease did so unwittingly, experiencing not so much as a tickle in their throat to alert them of the danger within. Distinguishing those who are truly asymptomatic from those who are simply yet to show signs of the virus has made it hard to calculate a precise figure on the risks of succumbing to the illness. Now an analysis…

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Iran’s health system ‘beyond disastrous’ from Covid surge

Iran’s health system ‘beyond disastrous’ from Covid surge

The New York Times reports: Hospital medics in Iran are triaging patients on the floors of emergency rooms and in cars parked on the roadside. Lines stretch for blocks outside pharmacies. Taxis double as hearses, transporting corpses from hospitals to cemeteries. In at least one city, laborers are digging mass graves. Iran is under assault from the most cataclysmic wave yet of the coronavirus, according to interviews with physicians and health workers, social media postings from angry citizens, and even…

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Xi’s dictatorship threatens the Chinese state

Xi’s dictatorship threatens the Chinese state

George Soros writes: Xi Jinping, the ruler of China, suffers from several internal inconsistencies which greatly reduce the cohesion and effectiveness of his leadership. There is a conflict between his beliefs and his actions and between his public declarations of wanting to make China a superpower and his behavior as a domestic ruler. These internal contradictions have revealed themselves in the context of the growing conflict between the U.S. and China. At the heart of this conflict is the reality…

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Delta has changed pandemic endgame

Delta has changed pandemic endgame

Ed Yong writes: In September 2020, just before COVID-19 began its wintry surge through the United States, I wrote that the country was trapped in a pandemic spiral, seemingly destined to repeat the same mistakes. But after vaccines arrived in midwinter, cases in the U.S. declined and, by summer’s edge, had reached their lowest levels since the pandemic’s start. Many Americans began to hope that the country had enough escape velocity to exit its cycle of missteps and sickness. And…

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Current public-health messaging on Covid breakthrough cases may understate the scale and risk

Current public-health messaging on Covid breakthrough cases may understate the scale and risk

David Wallace-Wells writes: The term itself, perhaps, is a problem. “Breakthrough” sounds bad — implying an immune-escape mutation, likely rare, and therefore alarming. The vaccines were never tested to prevent transmission, only symptomatic disease, and those who knew the science expected, from the outset, that we would see some number of such cases, and that they would be, overwhelmingly, mild. But Delta appears to have changed things. Not everything: The vaccines are working to suppress severe outcomes from COVID infection…

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