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Western leaders are panicking about a new surge in migration. But we can – and should – help those fleeing the TalibanTwo defining images of 2021 depict people fleeing. One is the sight of people desperately chasing after a US air force jet along the runway at Kabul airport, as the west’s 20-year occupation of Afghanistan came to an end. The other is of passengers, evacuated from a forest fire on the Greek island of Evia, watching from the deck of a ferry as the skyline is etched in apocalyptic red.In both cases they tell us about the speed at which people have to abandon everything when disaster strikes – there is rarely time for an orderly queue, for correct papers and possessions, when you are forced to flee – and about the power held by those who control the routes to safety. Continue reading...

Analysis: new regime may face enemy composed not of fighters loyal to former US-backed government but those who see new rulers as selloutsJoe Biden has said the US will maintain an “over the horizon” counter-terrorism capability to neutralise the threat posed by Islamist extremist groups in Afghanistan.With no troops on the ground, no intelligence-gathering operation in the country and no ally with shared borders, this kind of long-range effort to stop plots targeting the west will not be easy – and is made significantly harder by the range of the organisations based in territory now nominally under Taliban control. Continue reading...

Caldor fire explodes in size as Pacific Gas & Electric begins shutting off power to 51,000 customersCritically dangerous fire weather was forecast across northern California from Tuesday afternoon into Wednesday evening, threatening to intensify several large blazes and increasing the risk of new ones, as a small rural town in the Sierra Nevada was ravaged by a fire that grew with devastating speed.The Caldor fire, which erupted over the weekend, exploded in size on Tuesday and ran through the town of Grizzly Flats, destroying many buildings and forcing residents to leave. Two were injured. Officials estimated that the blaze had blown through 30,000 acres – up from 6,500 acres reported by the California department of forestry and fire protection (Cal Fire) earlier that day. Continue reading...

We have to sit with the Taliban now and accept this new reality. I wake up every morning, put on my bravest face and try to raise my voice for my peopleIt is mind-boggling how fast some world-defining moments happen to us. From entering a meeting to exiting it, my world had changed. There were people running in panic and the traffic was jammed. You could see armoured vehicles with their security protocols cutting through traffic. The city had fallen before the Taliban had entered it. There was no police, no armed forces and all government employees were asked to leave their offices.The first night was lawless. I had to hide everything of value in my house and abandon it. Continue reading...

White House press secretary Jen Psaki says the Biden administration does not have complete faith in the Taliban promise to offer a safe passage to Kabul's international airport after their takeover of the country. 'We're not trusting, we're not taking their word for it,' Psaki says. 'We are watching closely.' Asked what the consequences of breaking the promise could be, Psaki says: 'The consequences are the full weight and force of the United States military, and I think we've made that clear'

Greg Abbott, who was vaccinated in December, is at least the 11th governor to contract the virusTexas governor Greg Abbott tested positive for Covid-19 on Tuesday, after weeks spent banning local mask requirements and meeting maskless crowds.Related: Texas officials ask US government for mortuary trucks as Covid cases rise Continue reading...

Their sons never even saw the officers who shot them. In grief, two mothers formed a bond of support as they sought justice for what happenedNarene Stokes couldn’t help but notice the only white woman in the crowd. Sheila Albers had come to grieve. Like Narene, like all the mothers gathered for the meeting, her teenage son had been shot and killed by police.“On July 28, 2013,” Narene began, “in Kansas City, Missouri, my life changed forever.” Her voice was soft, a piece of silk ribboned on the wind. “A police officer shot my only son, Ryan Lee Stokes, in the back.” Continue reading...

US bankruptcy trustee, nine states and DC objecting to settlement plan because it would grant legal protection to SacklersMembers of the family that owns OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma will not contribute billions of dollars to a legal settlement unless they get off the hook for all current and future lawsuits over the company’s activities, David Sackler told a court on Tuesday in a rare public appearance.Related: ‘A cartel shouldn’t get away with this’: anger at opioid settlements that exclude admission of wrongdoing Continue reading...

Analysis: The scenes of mayhem in Kabul have erupted in the public consciousness, and may damage the president’s reputationIt had just started raining at the White House on Monday when a group of reporters, the Guardian included, were summoned and led past a Secret Service agent, along a red carpet in a windowless corridor, up a staircase and into the elegantly appointed East Room.Related: Afghanistan live news: Taliban say they seek no ‘revenge’ in press conference; vice-president says he is caretaker president Continue reading...

Officials requested trucks from Fema as a ‘precaution’ while coronavirus deaths in the state have tripled in the last two weeksHealth officials in Texas said they have asked the federal government for five mortuary trucks, as Covid cases, hospitalizations and deaths continue to rise in the state.Related: US experts expected to recommend Covid booster shots for all Continue reading...

He’s not an established artist – or critically acclaimed. Yet his works are apparently being sold for surprising amountsIt looks like the prodigal son is a painter now. Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s child, has apparently been dabbling with paints for years. Now his hobby has turned serious: starting soon, you can pick up one of his colourful creations from a gallery in New York’s SoHo. It will cost you, though: the pieces are reportedly priced between $75,000 and $500,000.Who parts with that much cash for the work of a new, not exactly critically acclaimed, painter? We may never know. Hunter’s new career raises obvious ethical issues for his father and, in an attempt to avoid accusations of influence peddling, the Biden administration has asked the gallerist to keep all information about the buyers and prices of Hunter’s work confidential. The gallery has also agreed to reject offers that seem suspiciously generous. Continue reading...

Airlines have encountered an unusual number of disorderly customers in recent months, occasionally leading to unorthodox methods of restraintUnited Airlines has asked its employees to not use duct tape to restrain unruly passengers.In a memo sent to employees last Friday, United flight attendants were urged to “please remember that there are designated items onboard that may be used in difficult situations, and alternative measures such as tape should never be used”. Continue reading...

This week’s victory by the Taliban in Afghanistan now stands as an inspiration to militants around the worldAlthough the anti-war mood deepened in the UK in 2002, as President George W Bush moved to terminate the regime in Iraq, there had already been some unease the previous October, before the Afghan war started. One policy paper, which I co-authored, even argued against it, pointing to an inevitable escalation and the risk of never-ending war. But for the most part the defence establishment offered support.In the event, the Taliban fell in a matter of weeks and Bush could announce, in his 2002 state of the union address, an expanded war against an “axis of evil”, with Iraq first in the sights. Even by mid-2002 the US, UK and others had moved on from Afghanistan, leaving a dangerous security vacuum, which was filled by a returning Taliban, across many rural districts, ultimately setting in motion the events that culminated in the past few days. Continue reading...

Across a sprawling internet community, an ideology of violent misogyny is spreading – with tragic, ‘real-world’ resultsThe term “involuntary celibate”, or incel for short, used to describe somebody who isn’t having sex but would like to be, was first coined by a young woman named Alana in the mid-1990s. The small, supportive, mixed-sex community she created online is a world apart from the extremist, hate-fuelled ideology it has transformed into in the many years since she left those online spaces behind. “It feels like being the scientist who figured out nuclear fission and then discovers it’s being used as a weapon for war,” she later told the Guardian.Today’s incels are not a clearly defined, organised group, but rather a sprawling, disparate community of men across a network of blogs, forums, websites, private members groups, chatrooms and social media channels. Several of the forums have memberships in the tens of thousands, with around a 25% increase in membership in the two years I have been researching them. And these figures don’t take into account the number of people visiting and being influenced by these sites without necessarily signing up. Continue reading...

The Los Angeles Dodgers said that they had properly vetted pitcher Trevor Bauer before signing him, but they either missed a prior assault allegation or didn’t careThe Los Angeles Dodgers wanted you to know that they had done their due diligence. In a press conference introducing starting pitcher Trevor Bauer, who the Dodgers had just signed to a three-year, $102m contract, the team’s president of baseball operations, Andrew Friedman, wanted to make that clear.Addressing Bauer’s well-established history of online harassment and feuds with teammates, Friedman wanted to emphasize the Dodgers weren’t worried about the pitcher’s reputation. “Hopefully over the last six-plus years,” Friedman said, “some trust and credibility has been built up in terms of the research we do on players and the vetting process that we go through ... we get as much information as we can on players.” Continue reading...

Analysis: US president’s TV address blamed others for the Taliban takeover and tried to distance himself from past administrationsIn a televised speech on Monday, Joe Biden defended his decision to withdraw US forces from Afghanistan and his handling of a crisis that has seen the Taliban capture the country in a lightning offensive. Blaming Afghan politicians and the country’s security forces for the calamitous collapse, he also sought to distance himself from previous administrations. But how much of it was fair or even accurate?Biden: We went to Afghanistan almost 20 years ago with clear goals: get those who attacked us on September 11, 2001, and make sure al-Qaida could not use Afghanistan as a base from which to attack us again. We did that. We severely degraded al-Qaida in Afghanistan. We never gave up the hunt for Osama bin Laden and we got him. Continue reading...

Amid alarm among federal officials about the spread of the Delta variant, authorities are set to recommend a third dose

The USWNT star spent most of her playing days trying to prove herself against perceived adversaries. The results speak for themselvesAt 39 Carli Lloyd was, by some distance, the oldest player on the US women’s soccer team in the Tokyo Olympics. She wasn’t the same player who established an unrivaled propensity for decisive goals from the 2008 Olympics to the 2015 World Cup.So why does her imminent retirement seem so surprising? Continue reading...

Officials have declared a dire water shortage at Lake Mead, the US’s largest reservoir, triggering significant water cuts in Arizona and other western states.The US Bureau of Reclamation’s first ever declaration of a 'tier 1' shortage represents an acknowledgment that after a 20-year drought, the reservoir that impounds the Colorado River at Hoover Dam has receded to its lowest levels since it was created in the 1930s

Rather than address stagnant wages for hourly workers and yawning inequality, corporations are blaming a ‘labor shortage’Last week, the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan thinktank, released a report on the increasing pay gap between chief executives and workers. This research tells a familiar story with updated figures. When taking into account stocks, which now make up more than 80% of the average CEO’s compensation package, the report found that chief-executive pay has risen by an astounding 1,322% since 1978. That’s more than six times more than the top 0.1% of wage earners and more than 73 times higher than the growth of the typical worker’s pay, which grew by only 18% in the same time period. Most remarkable, however, is the 18.9% increase in CEO compensation between 2019 and 2020 alone.Related: Bob Woodward’s third book in Trump trilogy to cover handling of pandemic Continue reading...

President says US mission in Afghanistan was never about nation building. Plus: how to navigate Delta when you’re vaccinated

Twenty years after 9/11, it’s time to set America’s priorities based on reason instead of fear – and talk about the true cost of ‘national security’The 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks is a natural time to assess our nation’s response over the last two decades and chart a course for the future. Our single-minded focus on defeating terrorist groups claiming to act in the name of Islam over all other priorities, international or domestic, has allowed vulnerabilities to fester.Related: FBI offer to release some Saudi files not enough, 9/11 families say Continue reading...

A specialist team documents damage, gathering data that could help aid the firefight in years to comeThe floor of what was once the Greenville library is littered with heaps of charred pages, scattered between a few remaining walls, shelves and filing cabinets. In the downtown park, blackened benches sit empty underneath spiny trees stretching into a smoke-filled sky.Two weeks ago, the Dixie fire raged through this quaint northern California mountain town, leveling many of the brightly colored buildings, some of which had stood here through the last century. Continue reading...

The once-a-decade redistricting process is set to unfold over the next few months, but Republicans will draw district lines in most placesThe data the Census Bureau released last week offered a remarkably clear picture of how the United States is becoming more diverse. For the first time ever, America’s white population declined, while people of color accounted for almost all of the population growth over the last decade in the country. Continue reading...

Analysis: Trump thought he’d use the midterm primaries to punish his enemies and tighten his grip on the party. It’s not working out quite how he’d hopedAs the Republican party first began to prepare for the 2022 midterm elections it seemed like Donald Trump had it all figured out.The former US president had an axe to grind with certain Republicans who had bucked him in the past and the upcoming party primaries were a place he could assert his still powerful influence and exact revenge on his perceived foes. Continue reading...

The vast majority of those hospitalized are unvaccinated, but health experts say everyone should exercise cautionThe Covid-19 vaccine was supposed to bring life back to normal. Then came the Delta variant.Real-world data collection continues, but it’s clear that the vaccines do offer significant protection against becoming infected by Delta. They offer even greater protection against severe illness: Among states that are reporting breakthrough cases of Covid-19, fully vaccinated people made up no more than 5% of overall hospitalizations. Continue reading...

Thousands of workers who make clothes for top fashion brands earn below minimum wage for 60-hour week in unsafe conditionsThousands of garment workers in Los Angeles who make pants, shirts, blouses and other clothing for a variety of well-known fashion labels are paid less than minimum wage through a piece-rate payment system that compensates workers just a few cents per article of clothing.Related: Protesters against Line 3 tar sands pipeline face arrests and rubber bullets Continue reading...

I was one of many who thought, in the wake of 9/11, that “something must be done”. We have learned a bitter lessonHere ends the west’s grotesque delusion that it could use its military might to turn Afghanistan into a stable democracy, a shining path of moderate Islam. In the shadow of New York’s burning twin towers, I was one swept along on that “something must be done” tide, that drumbeat for a war to stop terror and liberate oppressed people. We have learned a bitter lesson.How deceptively easy was the 2001 victory, as Taliban fighters fled to melt back into their own population famously murmuring, “You have watches, we have time.” They have just turned back the clock on 20 wasted years. Continue reading...

A look back at the official photographs of Obama’s presidency shows his skill at conjuring a sense of pride and possibility – but today his victories seem narrow indeedFrom the beginning, Obama’s team was invested in constructing a certain image of what would be deemed a “historic” presidency. During Obama’s campaign, the artist Shepard Fairey, who designed the famous “Hope” poster, was widely acknowledged as his key iconographer. But, in retrospect, who Obama was and what he represented endures in the public imagination thanks to the work of the White House photographer Pete Souza, a longtime photojournalist who first had the assignment under Ronald Reagan. Over time, Souza helped create a new image of race in the US. This was an image of a postracial nation, where postracial didn’t mean liberation – it meant a US where race was solely affect and gesture, rather than the old brew of capital, land and premature death. Progress would deposit us in a place where black would be pure style – a style that the ruling class could finally wear out.In the thick of the 2008 primary, in an essay titled Native Son, George Packer argued that after a half century when “rightwing populism has been the most successful political force in America”, there was finally hope for an alternative. “Obama is a black candidate,” he wrote, “who can tell Americans of all races to move beyond race.” The ensuing years bore out the impossibility of that widely held belief, but it was already evident in the language. How could a single person be black and capable of moving everybody beyond race? Continue reading...

President acknowledges his decision would be criticized by many but says he would not ‘shrink from my share of responsibility’

President shifts blame to his predecessor, Donald Trump, and the unwillingness of Afghan forces to fight the Taliban

Joe Biden defended his decision to withdraw all US troops from Afghanistan even after Taliban forces took Kabul, saying: 'I stand squarely behind my decision.' Striking a defiant tone, the US president admitted the situation in the country had deteriorated faster than anticipated, but said it showed there would never be a good time to withdraw US forces. 'American troops cannot and should not be dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves,' Biden said. 'We gave them every chance to determine their own future; we could not provide them with the will to fight for that future.'

New book Peril follows Fear and Rage, and is based on hundreds of interviews as well as diaries, secret orders and phone transcripts

Tennis star, who is of Haitian and Japanese descent, will play in the Western and Southern Open, which has a $255,220 prizeThe tennis star Naomi Osaka has announced that she will donate prize earnings from her next tournament to support relief efforts in Haiti, where a 7.2 magnitude earthquake killed at least 1,297 people over the weekend and injured more than 5,700.Osaka, who is of Haitian and Japanese descent, made the announcement on Twitter on Sunday. Continue reading...

Brilliant German footballer admired for his prolific goal-scoring and his role in the 1974 World CupGerd Müller, who has died aged 75, was one of Germany’s greatest footballers and a star of the 1974 World Cup final, in which he scored the winning goal against the Netherlands.He also scored twice in West Germany’s 1972 European Championship final win over the Soviet Union and across more than 62 appearances for his country racked up a scarcely believable total of 68 goals, at a rate of more than one a game. Continue reading...

Western involvement in the country was a post-imperial fantasy that has led to the current ghastly situationThe fall of Kabul was inevitable. It marks the end of a post-imperial western fantasy. Yet the west’s reaction beggars belief. Call it a catastrophe, a humiliation, a calamitous mistake, if it sounds good. All retreats from empire are messy. This one took 20 years, but the end was at least swift.The US had no need to invade Afghanistan. The country was never a “terrorist state” like Libya or Iran. It was not at war with the US; indeed the US had aided its rise to power against the Russians in 1996. The Taliban had hosted Osama bin Laden in his mountain lair through his friendship with the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar. At an immediate post-9/11 “loya jirga” in the southern city of Kandahar, younger leaders pressed the mullah to expel Bin Laden. Pakistan would probably have forced his surrender sooner or later. After the 2001 invasion the US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld demanded that George Bush “punish and get out”. Continue reading...

I’d like to blame lockdown for my failing eyesight. But my friends keep mentioning my ageSome time over the past 18 months, I went from having perfect vision – the kind of vision that means, “Here, let me have a look” is your catchphrase, and that makes you mock your friends for the font size on their mobiles – to being unable to even read a menu. You have no idea how much I wanted to add a sweary prefix before “menu”.I always thought people were attention-seeking when they went through that performance of getting their glasses out at the table. Come on, it’s going to be garlic bread, soup and chicken liver pate. Surely you could have guessed that? I didn’t realise how it would feel when the text was swimming about indistinguishably or how rare it is these days that the first sentence is “garlic bread”. Now I realise it’s just as likely to be bread with a medjool date whipped butter, or garlic bread with a cheesy crust. In my pride, I have spent ages ordering things that weren’t there. Continue reading...

• State supreme court temporarily backs governor’s order• Local hearings in Dallas and San Antonio aim to protect childrenThe Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, will temporarily be allowed to enforce an order banning mask mandates, the state supreme court ruled on Sunday.Related: Texas anti-vaxxers’ calls for personal freedom dismiss my nearly fatal bout with Covid Continue reading...

Since my hospitalization, and as Hidalgo county sees a surge in cases, protests against the vaccine are triggeringI was stunned by the comment as I walked into a recent press conference to warn our south Texas community that, after all we’ve been through for the past 18 months, we need to remain vigilant as new variants of Covid-19 are causing a surge in hospitalizations.“You were pretty sick last year,” said a doctor at the press conference, a friend who had treated me when I was hospitalized for 10 days with Covid-19 last July. “I didn’t think you were going to make it. You almost died.” Continue reading...

FTSE 100 down about 1% as markets react to weak data from world’s second biggest economy

The group’s hardline beliefs are unchanged, but coalition partners and regional powers may be moderating influencesThe Taliban agreed on Saturday not to enter Kabul city for now and to wait for the evacuation of western diplomats and troops, but the Afghan president Ashraf Ghani’s sudden departure on Sunday, without informing anyone, has led to the collapse of the remnants of police and army and created a vacuum that the group decided to fill immediately. The Taliban are now expected to officially take over in the coming days, with a kind of transfer of power being arranged by a delegation of political leaders from Kabul. Although the Taliban may well adopt the “emirate” label for Afghanistan again, it seems that their plan is to incorporate new features in their government.The Taliban started discussions about an interim government with the Americans in 2018-19, indicating that their ambitions in terms of power-sharing could be quantified in about a third of all positions of power. The interim government plan did not take off; instead the Ghani administration in Kabul opted for military confrontation, hoping to demonstrate to the Taliban that the Islamic Republic had staying power. Continue reading...

The Republican senator told the president his attacks on his son Hunter were the ‘bare minimum’ to satisfy Trump supportersThe South Carolina Republican senator Lindsey Graham called Joe Biden after his victory over Donald Trump to tell the president he only joined attacks on his son, Hunter Biden, as a “bare minimum” to satisfy Trump supporters.Related: Lindsey Graham, reverse ferret: how John McCain's spaniel became Trump's poodle Continue reading...

By not choosing Burton, the show deprived the world of a host that represents everything that it so sorely needs right nowJeopardy! may have made the world’s worst hosting choice since OJ Simpson was given his own prank show in 2006. Even before the death of the legendary host Alex Trebek, the public, including Trebek himself, was in deep debate over his potential heir. Following Trebek’s passing, the show moved through a number of other temporary guest hosts. Only three people of color were brought on as hosts, including the former Reading Rainbow host and Star Trek actor LeVar Burton, and in the end they decided to go with not one but two white hosts, one with questionable skill and both with questionable histories. The show not only failed by depriving itself of a wonderful host, but deprived the world of a host that represents everything that it so sorely needs right now.Jeopardy! was born in the midst of a series of scandals that plagued quiz shows in the 1950s. Previous quiz shows were accused of being rigged, and many of these accusations had some truth to them. Jeopardy’s creator, Merv Griffin, added the Jeopardy! trademark of answers being asked as questions as a layer of complexity that made it clearer that the contestants were developing their own answers instead of being fed answers by producers. The show was cancelled twice before being reborn with a new host, Alex Trebek, in 1983. The Canadian American host would go on to receive eight Emmys, including a posthumous one earlier this year. Continue reading...

The swift rise of the Chinese video-sharing app could have ramifications for all of us and how we live, both online and offAgainst the backdrop of a global pandemic that has kept millions of people inside with nothing but their phones for company, the short-form video-sharing app TikTok has quietly ascended to the top ranks of tech. TikTok was the world’s most downloaded app last year, and according to App Annie, a mobile analytics company, in March 2020 alone, users spent as much time on it as there has been since the stone age: 2.8bn hours, or nearly 320,000 years. Last month, TikTok became the first app not owned by Facebook to cross the 3bn download mark. For context, there are 5.3bn mobile phone users worldwide.By now, you’ll almost certainly know the name TikTok, even if you’ve never used it, perhaps through word of mouth from nagging children or grandchildren, or the sheer bombardment of TV adverts over the past year. Parent company ByteDance turned over $34bn in revenue in 2020, and clearly isn’t shy about spending it to acquire new users: at the Euros this summer, for instance, TikTok’s logo was emblazoned on every advertising hoarding in sight. Continue reading...

Desperate crowds converge on airport in Afghanistan’s capital, plus how the 1996 Olympics inspired a generation of female athletesGood morning.The final collapse of the 20-year western mission to Afghanistan took only a single day as Taliban gunmen entered the capital, Kabul, on Sunday, President Ashraf Ghani fled the country, and the US and other coalition countries abandoned their embassies in panic. Continue reading...

With mere weeks to go, Gavin Newsom and his opponents appeal to voters across America’s most populous stateCalifornia voters will decide on 14 September whether the governor, Gavin Newsom, gets to keep his job. With mere weeks to go, the governor has started making his way around the state to argue his case, as Republican challengers including talkshow host Larry Elder, reality star Caitlyn Jenner and former San Diego mayor Kevin Faulconer attempt to channel pandemic upheaval and deep political partisanship into an unlikely upset.Here’s what you need to know about California’s gubernatorial recall: Continue reading...