#kabul blast news

[newscast1]

At least 10 killed, 8 injured in blast outside military airport in Kabul

At least 10 killed, 8 injured in blast outside military airport in Kabul

A blast outside a military airport in Afghanistan’s Kabul has reportedly killed at least 10 people. Many others have sustained injuries in the explosion. New Delhi,UPDATED: Jan 1, 2023 19:55 IST An investigation into the blast is underway. By India Today Web Desk: An explosion was reported outside a military airport in Afghanistan’s Kabul on Sunday. At least 10 people were killed in the deadly…

[jamilanaz]

She is a young girl. She is of Hazara ethnicity. And all she wanted was to go to school to learn but faced ethnic & gender-based terrorism.

This is the real face of Afghanistan. The worst country in the world to be a woman.

[dertaglichedan]

Trump Honors Afghanistan Troops as ABC, CBS, NBC Morning Shows Ignore Anniversary

President Donald Trump paid his respects to the 13 U.S. troops who were killed three years ago during President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan — while the morning shows on the major networks ignored the anniversary.

Monday, August 26, 2024, marked three years since the day a suicide bomber affiliated with the local branch of the so-called “Islamic State” (ISIS) killed 13 American service members and wounded dozens more at Kabul’s airport — while also murdering roughly 170 local civilians who were trying to flee the country.

Trump visited Arlington National Cemetery, laying a wreath alongside Marine Corporal Kelsee Lainhart, who was partially paralyzed by the blast.

NewsBusters.com noted that ABC, CBS, and NBC ignored the three-year anniversary on their Monday morning shows:

Monday marked three years since the deadly Islamic terror attack in Kabul, Afghanistan at Hamid Karzai International Airport that murdered 13 American soldiers, 170 Afghans, and left over 150 people wounded. Instead of even briefly acknowledging this painful day for American families in what became the symbol of the Biden-Harris’s administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, ABC, CBS, and NBC completely ignored it on their flagship morning news shows. To repeat: not a word from ABC’s Good Morning America, CBS Mornings, and NBC’s Today about the sacrifice of the brave Americans standing guard at Abbey Gate. The networks shamefully adopted the mold of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris in being radio silent (aside from paper statements released from their handlers). In contrast, cable news shows that aired during that same block — Fox Business Network’s Mornings with Maria, Fox News Channel’s Fox & Friends, Newsmax’s Wake Up America, NewsNation’s Morning in America, and even CNN News Central — all mentioned it multiple times.

Neither President Biden nor Vice President Kamala Harris visited Arlington, though both issued statements.

[dragoneyes618]

When Russia invaded Ukraine, Americans overwhelmingly supported Ukraine—as they did with Israel after October 7.

No wonder: Ukraine was surprise attacked by Russia, and Israel was by Hamas.

It seemed an easy binary of good versus evil: both the attacked Ukraine and Israel are pro-Western. Both their attackers, anti-Western Russia and Hamas, are not.

Now everything is bifurcating. And the politics of the wars in America reflect incoherence.

Both Ukraine and Israel are portrayed in the media as supposedly bogging down in their counteroffensives.

More pro-Israel Republicans are troubled by Ukraine’s strategy, or lack thereof, in an increasing Somme-like stalemate.

Yet more pro-Ukrainian Democrats are turning away from Israel as it dismantles Gaza in the messy, bloody slog against Hamas. The left claims either Israel cannot or should not defeat Hamas, or at least at the present cost.

So the left pushes Israel to a ceasefire with Hamas.

It blasts Israeli “disproportionate” responses.

It demands that Israel avoid collateral damage.

It pressures it to form a wartime bipartisan government.

It lobbies to cut it off from American resupply.

It is terrified that Israel will expand the war by responding to aggression from Hezbollah and Iran.

Yet on Ukraine, the left oddly pivots to the very opposite agenda.

It believes Ukraine should not be forced to make peace with Russian “fascists.” It must become disproportionate to “win” the war.

President Zelensky deserves a pass, despite cancelling elections while suspending political parties.

America must step up its resupply to Kyiv with more and far deadlier weapons.

Ukraine has a perfect right to hit targets inside Russia.

Russian threats to widen the war should be considered empty and thus ignored. America should hate Russia far more than Hamas.

By contrast, conservatives are less supportive of Ukraine’s offensives, if more than ever allied with Israel.

In their realist views, Ukraine is a smaller power, vastly outnumbered by a richer, better-armed Russia. Thus, it should negotiate while it can, rather than eventually losing everything.

Israel, however, is, in their view, defeating Hamas. If allowed to finish the job, it can soon win the war in Gaza and still handle Hezbollah and deter Iran.

Furthermore, the right is wary that Russia is a nuclear power. The Ukraine war is unfortunately creating a new, potent anti-American axis of Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea and drawing in former U.S. allies like Turkey and Qatar.

Yet, in Israel’s case, the U.S. is far more powerful than Hamas’s patron, Iran, and can easily deter it should Tehran intervene.

As of now, none of Hamas’s allies have nuclear weapons. Israel, however, does, unlike Ukraine.

Many conservatives further point out that Israel is a long-time U.S. democratic ally.

Ukraine’s elections are currently suspended while the country remains under martial law.

In realist terms, the old idea of Russian triangulation still makes some sense. Russia should be no friendlier to China than to the U.S., and China is no more aligned with Russia than with America.

Hamas, by contrast, is a terrorist clique, as are Hezbollah and all of Iran’s terrorist appendages. Their hatred of the U.S. is long-standing, immutable, and transcends the Gaza war.

How about the public’s views in general?

With over $35 trillion in debt, still smarting over the humiliating withdrawal from Kabul, and the military short 40,000 recruits, the public does not wish to get heavily involved in either war, even as polls still show radically differing left/right attitudes toward both.

Americans once overwhelmingly supported vast aid for Ukraine. Now they decidedly believe the U.S. is providing too much to Kyiv.

They still poll strong support for Israel over Hamas, but less so for Israel’s ongoing destruction of Hamas given the collateral damage that follows.

Given there are few Russian-Americans, there are almost no demonstrations on behalf of Moscow’s war. But there are plenty of protests for Hamas since there are lots of Middle-Eastern Americans and visitors within the U.S.

What are we to conclude about these contradictory wars and American attitudes toward them?

The more democratic and defensive the power, the more Americans support it—but only up to a point.

Even more, they demand quick victory—and lose interest when the wars stagnate, costs increase, and protests grow.

When Ukraine and Israel began costly counteroffensives, the former losing thousands and the latter killing thousands, the American public began to be less invested in either war.

Final lessons?

Israel should do all it can to destroy Hamas as quickly as possible and end the war.

Ukraine does not have the wherewithal to defeat Russia. It should cease costly offensives against Russia’s fortified lines and seek to negotiate.

Or, put another way, fickle Americans sympathize with those who are attacked. But their continuing support seems contingent on whether the victim can remain sympathetic—and win decisively to end the war rapidly.

[roboe1]

In The News Feed:Daily Update.3/8/2023.

US News, World News, Politics, Commentary. US News: Marine in Kabul airport blast says he was told not to shoot ISIS bomber Vargas-Andrews lost an arm and a leg in the explosion.AP Photo/Andrew Harnik WASHINGTON — A Marine who survived the deadly bombing at Kabul’s airport during the 2021 US withdrawal from Afghanistan told lawmakers Wednesday he was told not to kill a suspected ISIS…

[uniqueeval]

Blast kills at least six people in Afghan capital, 13 wounded | Taliban News

Explosion takes place in southern Kabul area of Qala-e-Bakhtiar, and no group has claimed responsibility so far. An explosion in Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, has killed at least six people, the police and Ministry of Interior Affairs say. “This afternoon, a person wearing explosives on his body detonated,” Kabul police spokesman Khalid Zadran posted on X on Monday. “Unfortunately six civilians,…

[bllsbailey]

Afghanistan: New Taliban Law Bans Women From Showing Their Faces And Speaking In Public

Taliban security personnel stand guard as an Afghan burqa-clad woman (R) walks along a street at a market in the Baharak district of Badakhshan province on February 26, 2024.

The Taliban on Monday rejected criticisms announced by the United Nations over new laws that ban women in Afghanistan from baring their faces and speaking in public places. 

Roza Otunbayeva, who heads the U.N. mission in the country, “UNAMA,” said on Sunday that the laws provided a “distressing vision” for Afghanistan’s future. She also said that the laws extend the “already intolerable restrictions” on rights of women and girls. 

“After decades of war and in the midst of a terrible humanitarian crisis, the Afghan people deserve much better than being threatened or jailed if they happen to be late for prayers, glance at a member of the opposite sex who is not a family member, or possess a photo of a loved one,” Otunbayeva said.

This comes after the terrorist organization published the new laws last week, approved by their supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada. It declares that women must completely cover their bodies, including their faces, in thick clothing at all times in public in order to avoid “leading men” into temptation and adultery.

“Adultery or extramarital sex is considered as the infringement of matrimonial bond and is regarded as one of the foremost crimes condemned by Allah,” according to advocatekhoj.com. “Under Islamic laws in an Islamic state, it is not lawful to shed the blood of a Muslim except for one of the three sins: a married person committing fornication, and in just retribution for premeditated murder, and [for sin of treason involving] a person renouncing Islam, and thus leaving the community [to join the enemy camp in order to wage war against the faithful.”

Zabihullah Mujahid, the main spokesman for the Taliban’s government, issued a statement warning against “arrogance” for those who he said may not be familiar with Islamic law, specifically non-Muslims who might express reservations or objections.

“We urge a thorough understanding of these laws and a respectful acknowledgment of Islamic values. To reject these laws without such understanding is, in our view, an expression of arrogance,” he said.

Mujahid also responded to the UNAMA statement, saying, “We must stress that the concerns raised by various parties will not sway the Islamic Emirate from its commitment to upholding and enforcing Islamic law.”

The Japanese Embassy in Kabul expressed its deep concern about the continuing restrictions on women and girls as announced in the laws. 

Additionally, the embassy said on X (Twitter) on Monday, that it would keep pleading to authorities to “listen to the voice of Afghan women and girls for education, employment, and freedom of movement” for the future of the country.

Stay informed! Receive breaking news blasts directly to your inbox for free. Subscribe here. https://www.oann.com/alerts

[mightyflamethrower]

The entire 2019-20 Biden candidacy and subsequent presidency were predicated on a rotten Faustian bargain. A hale Joe Biden would feign his aw-shucks, Joe from Scranton schtick. And an ossified working-class Joe’s camouflage would get the hard left elected—especially thanks to the changes in balloting laws that often saw only 30 percent of the electorate voting on Election Day in key states.

In exchange, the two narcissistic Bidens would bask in the power and attention of the presidency. From the start, Jill and the media would orchestrate deep cover for Joe’s escalating dementia as well as the true intentions of the now-in-power radical Democratic Party with its neo-socialist agenda. The former Obama acolytes would get their long-dreamed-of third presidential term. And this time they would enact a truly radical agenda while their string puppet mumbled to everyone that he was just old, familiar Joe working for the middle class.

The problem, inter alia, with the ruse was that it was based on a complete lie to the American people. Joe Biden was nowhere near cognitively competent. He could not campaign “normally” in 2020. And it would be impossible for his dementia to go undetected even in the ceremonial duties of the presidency for four, perhaps even eight, more years.

And there were plenty of other problems that transcended even Biden’s mental confusion.

First, the new Obama agenda—hyperinflation, open borders, woke crime theories, destroying deterrence abroad, green extremist mandates—was further to the left of the American people than in 2016.

And worse, it was nihilist and destructive. By the August 2021 Kabul withdrawal humiliation, Biden would never again win 50 percent approval from an increasingly exasperated public who felt they had been had by the mannequin Scranton Joe and his false 2020 calls for “unity” and “healing America.”

Second, Joe Biden, senator, vice president, quid-pro-quo sudden multimillionaire, was never a “nice guy.”

His (brief) 1984, 1988, and 2020 presidential runs were characterized by assorted gaffes, plagiarism, and racism (the first “clean” and “articulate” black presidential candidate, “junkie,” “you ain’t’ black,” and the corn-pop sagas).

He always displayed a short-fuse, mean streak (cf. his 1988 angry and falsified defense of his law school and stump speech plagiarism) and bullying (his 2020 slurs of “fat,” “lying dog-faced pony soldier,” etc.).

Biden’s scowls and outbursts grew as he seemed to come alive only when slurring and slandering half the country as “semi-fascists” and “ultra-MAGA” deplorables. So, in the recent debate, Biden at least admitted that he had written off half the nation that voted for Trump.

Third, if Trump was an exaggerator, Biden was a long-time mythologist, fabricating his bio, family history, and Trump’s record (from the yarn about cannibals eating his uncle to inheriting a completely unvaccinated country and 9 percent hyperinflation in 2021).

Fourth, there was a creepy side to Joe Biden—from stories of swimming nude in front of female Secret Service agents and the Tara Reade days to his 2020 apologies for sexual buffoonery and his fixations with pre-teen young girls, expressed by embarrassing crowd call-outs or blowing and touching “inappropriately” their hair, shoulders, and necks. Most Washington women knew in advance to avoid Joe’s too-long hugs and bizarre air blasts on their hair and ears.

In short, there were plenty of reasons why Joe Biden never got far as a presidential candidate, given he was a blowhard, cruel to people, a fabricator, of questionable ethics, and eerily interested in young girls—a far cry from ol’ Joe from Scranton, who, in a debilitated state, was supposed to offer the moderate veneer to a Jacobin agenda.

And now? Biden’s dementia has become so overt and so impossible to hide that the entire “crooked deal” has blown up. As a result, in the eleventh hour, there are very few pathways to salvation—as there never are when everything is birthed on a lie and its media-assisted cover-up.

Bidengate is far worse than Watergate. The media this time around was not exposing the wrongdoing of a conservative president but instead serving as a force multiplier in deceiving the very American people it was supposed to inform. “Democracy Dies in Deceit” is now the Washington Post’s de facto motto.

Remember, the left is worried only that Biden is so challenged that he cannot win an election. But they are not bothered that he has no business continuing in his dementia as commander-in-chief and putting the country in real danger each day he occupies the oval office—a bitter paradox that is beginning to infuriate the American people.

So, can Joe Biden just press ahead, sleep more, and fulfill his Faustian obligations? Or is he not in a doom loop? The more he rests, sleeps, and avoids the media, the more the public considers him an inadequate, one-quarter president. Yet the more he might welcome more exposure, interviews, press conferences, debates and town halls, the more his ensuing dementia becomes apparent to the public. So, his handlers haggle over the choice between an ensconced virtual president versus an all-too-real, obviously senile one.

Some House liberal presidential historians cite a failing FDR in 1944 who was visibly ill during the campaign and from a variety of serious ailments. They chirp in that Roosevelt nevertheless mocked his critics, got reelected, and entered his fourth term on January 20, 1945. But they forget; the end of the story negates their very point. FDR dropped dead in office, as his critics feared, just 11 weeks later, and as historians seem to pass over.

What if Biden does an FDR, ignores critics and runs—and likewise somehow wins?

Unlike a failing Biden, had FDR not given into intense pressure from the Democratic donor class, the big-city machine bosses, the Southern segregationists, and the liberal print media, and thus had he not removed then-current Vice President Henry Wallace as his running mate, then the wartime commander-in-chief overseeing the Okinawa campaign, the Potsdam Conference, the decision to drop the atomic bomb, and dealing with an ascendant Joseph Stalin and the postwar Soviet Union monster would have been socialist/communist President Henry Wallace.

But unlike FDR, Biden still has no plans to remove Vice President Kamala Harris. Most certainly, then, soon the next president of the United States in 2025-6 will be an unelected and more incompetent successor: President Kamala Harris. And that thought terrifies seasoned Democrat donors, insiders and politicos as much as it did in 1944.

More realistically, Biden is far more cognitively challenged than FDR was in 1944. The chances that he will stay cogent for the next five months and win the election are quickly vanishing. Even the Biden-inspired, now discredited lawfare campaign against Trump has not just failed but boomeranged by increasing Trump’s popularity.

And if a stubborn Biden stays on the ticket and more likely loses, he will destroy what is left of the vestigial Democratic Party of the once triangulating Clintons. He will forever discredit the old-boy hierarchy and final obstacle to the full and overt manifestation of a Democrat, woke European-socialist party of Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, the Squad, and the DEI caucuses.

Note Biden has already taken down with him most of the Washington-New York media, who only now confess they participated in suppressing real evidence of Biden dementia—and this from the same “journalists” who used to insidiously shout “25th Amendment”  during the Donald Trump years.

Biden and the apparat that presses on with the current farce might well lose more than the presidency—by losing both houses of Congress and ensuring Trump an unobstructed legislative trajectory to implement a complete reversal of the Obama-Biden years.

Yet, if Biden should step down voluntarily, pundits have run through the endless ensuing problematics. They are considerable: will his successor be on the ballot in all 50 states? What will the Party’s leftist base do if the identity-politics-selected Harris is pushed aside (and what will it do if she is not and steps up to the presidency?).

And how would a successor to Biden emerge in a free-delegate luche libre at a Chicago carnival convention, with chaos both inside the convention hall and a more violent “Death to America!’ bedlam on the streets outside?

So given all these nihilist alternatives, the two Bidens’ choice for now is to bark at the public. They will insult their own toadish media and deny the obvious. They will put the country’s interest dead last and connive that Joe can scowl, scold, lie, and yell at his critics—with not a care that our enemies abroad will conclude this is a golden Biden moment to do something stupid that may not come again.

[fairfieldthinkspace]

What Do I Owe the Dead of My Generation’s Mismanaged Wars?

The New York Times Opinion Guest Essay, published May 26, 2024

By Phil Klay

Fairfield University MFA Professor

Mr. Klay is a novelist and a Marine Corps veteran of the Iraq War. His most recent book is the essay collection “Uncertain Ground: Citizenship in an Age of Endless, Invisible War.”

About 10 years ago, as the war in Afghanistan was slowly, painfully winding down, I walked through Arlington National Cemetery with a fellow Marine veteran and a relative of mine visiting from Ireland. We passed row after row of pristine white tombs, the dead of all the just wars and unjust wars that made and remade this country, and my relative told us he found it quite moving; he hadn’t been expecting that. Perhaps he thought it’d be more bombastic, or obviously militaristic, and he was taken by the beauty and serenity and quiet dignity of the place.

So we brought him to Section 60 to see some of the newest graves, of kids born in the ’90s, and I told him the sight filled me with rage, these young lives thrown into a mismanaged war, where even their deaths, at that late stage, were mostly ignored. Just the background hum of a global superpower.

A couple of years later, in 2021, the Afghan war finally ended, taking with it a few American children of the 2000s, and, in a moral failure laid on top of the military failure, leaving tens of thousands of Afghans who worked with us at risk in the now completely Taliban-controlled country. The last Marines to fall died in a suicide bombing at a gate to Kabul’s airport, a blast that killed 11 Marines, one Navy medic, one soldier and about 170 Afghan civilians. The Marines were trying to manage the chaos of the poorly planned evacuation of Afghans from Kabul — a humanitarian mission at heart, trying to help those we were abandoning. A week before she died, one of the Marines, Sgt. Nicole Gee, posted a photo of her cradling a baby in Kabul and captioned it, “I love my job.”

America responded to those deaths with a drone strike against a Kabul vehicle the military claimed was transporting ISIS members who were about to carry out another attack, but that, in a twist that felt grotesquely emblematic of so many of our failures, turned out to carry an Afghan aid worker. The blast killed the aid worker and his relatives, seven of whom were children. The sort of people those Marines died trying to help.

How do you memorialize the dead of a failed war? At Arlington, it’s easy to let your heart swell with pride as you pass certain graves. Here are the heroes that ended slavery. Here are the patriots who defeated fascism. We think of them as inextricably bound up with the cause they gave their life to. The same can’t be said for more morally troubling wars, from the Philippines to Vietnam. And for the dead of my generation’s wars, for the dead I knew, the reasons they died sit awkwardly alongside the honor I owe them.

I watched a lot of Marines go off to Afghanistan, a war that I could have gone to but that I chose to avoid. Mostly, they were young. That’s the thing Hollywood most often gets wrong about war when they cast grown men to portray America’s finest killers. Look at a Marine infantry platoon, so many of whose members joined at 17 or 18, and you see boys. Boys who haven’t grown into cynicism yet. Some find it in the middle of their tours. Some keep that idealistic flame burning through multiple deployments. And some die before it can be extinguished.

For so many of the kids I saw, their mission mattered to them, and so their mission should matter to all of us when we remember their deaths. And the mission was a catastrophe. Memorial Day should come with sorrow and patriotic pride, yes, but also with a sense of shame. And, though it has faded for me over the years, with anger.

A few months after Kabul fell I went to the Bronx to see a war photographer I admire, Peter van Agtmael, taking a group of adult learners through a display of his photography from 9/11 to the present at the Bronx Documentary Center, photographs now collected in the book “Look at the U.S.A.”

“I just got back from Afghanistan, and it’s controversial to say, but it’s beautiful,” he told the group. “It’s beautiful to see Afghanistan at peace.”

Beautiful. I thought of a Marine in 2009, just back from Afghanistan, hollow-eyed, telling us in a monotone about his best friend taking a bullet to the head in these beautiful regions of the country, now at peace. What would he make of such a claim? Around me on the walls I saw a burned soldier in a combat hospital, the arm of a Trump supporter climbing over a wall by the Capitol on Jan. 6, the dust cloud of an improvised bomb detonation in Iraq.

Toward the end of the gallery, there was a huge print hung high up. You craned your neck and saw a homeless encampment in Las Vegas, and then, craning further, you saw an F-16 fighter jet, an aircraft that costs tens of millions of dollars, flying above. Amid our national forgetting of the wars, there was something powerful about seeing this accounting of America in the South Bronx, in a community whose struggles have so often been subject to forgetting, effacing, indifference. And, God, it was painful.

In the past when I’ve thought about the recent dead, I’ve told myself that service to country, service unto the point of death, is a momentous enough sacrifice to overshadow all other questions. The cause doesn’t matter so much if the fallen I knew served courageously, looked after their fellow Marines and kept their honor clean. But I’ve come to feel that airbrushing out the complexities of their wars is, ultimately, disrespectful to the dead. We owe it to the dead to remember what mattered to them, the ideals they held, as well as how those ideals were betrayed or failed to match reality.

This Memorial Day, as I get ready to take my sons to march in our local Memorial Day parade, our country is in the midst of the most divisive antiwar protests since the early days of the Iraq war, protests my friends characterize as either “objectively pro-Hamas” or as “opposing undeniable genocide.” Questions long dormant, about how we use our might and whom we help kill, feel like live political questions once again (even if we’re not talking much about actual American military deployments, or the troops who have most recently died at the hands of Iranian proxies). The debate is raw and angry.

Good. What a good, uncomfortable, painful national mood for remembering the dead. This year, when I remember them, I will not just remember who they were, the shreds of memory dredged up from past decades. I will remember why they died. All the reasons they died. Because they believed in America. Because America forgot about them. Because they were trying to force-feed a different way of life to people from a different country and culture. Because they wanted to look after their Marines. Because the mission was always hopeless. Because America could be a force for good in the world. Because Presidents Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden didn’t have much of a plan. Because it’s a dangerous world, and somebody’s got to do the killing. Because of college money. Because the Marine Corps is cool as hell. Because they saw “Full Metal Jacket” and wanted to be Joker. Or Animal Mother. Because the war might offer a new hope for Iraq, for Afghanistan. Because we earned others’ hatred, with our cruelty and indifference and carelessness and hubris. Because America was still worth dying for.

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 11.12 (after 1960)

1961 – Terry Jo Duperrault is the sole survivor of a series of brutal murders aboard the ketch Bluebelle. 1969 – Vietnam War: Independent investigative journalist Seymour Hersh breaks the story of the My Lai Massacre. 1970 – The Oregon Highway Division attempts to destroy a rotting beached sperm whale with explosives, leading to the now infamous "exploding whale" incident. 1970 – The 1970 Bhola cyclone makes landfall on the coast of East Pakistan, becoming the deadliest tropical cyclone in history. 1971 – Vietnam War: As part of Vietnamization, U.S. President Richard Nixon sets February 1, 1972 as the deadline for the removal of another 45,000 American troops from Vietnam. 1975 – The Comoros joins the United Nations. 1977 – France conducts the Oreste nuclear test as 14th in the group of 29, 1975–78 French nuclear tests series. 1979 – Iran hostage crisis: In response to the hostage situation in Tehran, U.S. President Jimmy Carter orders a halt to all petroleum imports into the United States from Iran. 1980 – The NASA space probe Voyager I makes its closest approach to Saturn and takes the first images of its rings. 1981 – Space Shuttle program: Mission STS-2, utilizing the Space Shuttle Columbia, marks the first time a crewed spacecraft is launched into space twice. 1982 – USSR: Yuri Andropov becomes the General Secretary of the Communist Party's Central Committee, succeeding Leonid I. Brezhnev. 1990 – Crown Prince Akihito is formally installed as Emperor Akihito of Japan, becoming the 125th Japanese monarch. 1990 – Tim Berners-Lee publishes a formal proposal for the World Wide Web. 1991 – Santa Cruz massacre: The Indonesian Army open fire on a crowd of student protesters in Dili, East Timor. 1995 – Erdut Agreement regarding the peaceful resolution to the Croatian War of Independence is reached. 1996 – A Saudi Arabian Airlines Boeing 747 and a Kazakh Ilyushin Il-76 cargo plane collide in mid-air near New Delhi, killing 349 in the deadliest mid-air collision to date. 1997 – Ramzi Yousef is found guilty of masterminding the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. 1999 – The 7.2 Mw  Düzce earthquake shakes northwestern Turkey with a maximum Mercalli intensity of IX (Violent). At least 845 people are killed and almost 5,000 are injured. 2001 – In New York City, American Airlines Flight 587, an Airbus A300 en route to the Dominican Republic, crashes minutes after takeoff from John F. Kennedy International Airport, killing all 260 on board and five on the ground. 2001 – War in Afghanistan: Taliban forces abandon Kabul, ahead of advancing Afghan Northern Alliance troops. 2003 – Iraq War: In Nasiriyah, Iraq, at least 23 people, among them the first Italian casualties of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, are killed in a suicide bomb attack on an Italian police base. 2003 – Shanghai Transrapid sets a new world speed record of 501 kilometres per hour (311 mph) for commercial railway systems, which remains the fastest for unmodified commercial rail vehicles. 2011 – Silvio Berlusconi tenders his resignation as Prime Minister of Italy, effective November 16, due in large part to the European sovereign debt crisis. 2011 – A blast in Iran's Shahid Modarres missile base leads to the death of 17 of the Revolutionary Guards members, including Hassan Tehrani Moghaddam, a key figure in Iran's missile program. 2014 – The Philae lander, deployed from the European Space Agency's Rosetta probe, reaches the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko. 2015 – Two suicide bombers detonate explosives in Bourj el-Barajneh, Beirut, killing 43 people and injuring over 200 others. 2017 – The 7.3 Mw  Kermanshah earthquake shakes the northern Iran–Iraq border with a maximum Mercalli intensity of VIII (Severe). At least 410 people are killed and over 7,000 are injured. 2021 – The Los Angeles Superior Court formally ends the 14-year conservatorship to pop singer Britney Spears.

[fanofsports]

ISIL claims Kabul bus attack targeting Shia Muslims | ISIL/ISIS News

The attack is the second in weeks against Afghanistan’s historically oppressed Shia Hazara community. The ISIL (ISIS) group has claimed responsibility for a deadly bus attack targeting the Shia Hazara community in Afghanistan’s capital Kabul. The blast in the Dasht-e-Barchi district, a Hazara stronghold, killed seven people and wounded 20, police said on Tuesday. The attack was the second…

[dertaglichedan]

EXCLUSIVE: Biden's TWO missed chances to prevent Kabul Airport suicide attack that killed 13 troops during chaotic Afghan withdrawal

A new book describes how the US relied on the Taliban for security during exit 

Commanders had intelligence about a suicide attack planned on Kabul airport

But they vetoed a drone strike because of the Taliban's 'negative response'

The Taliban also never acted on request to raid a hotel used by ISIS-K terrorists

In the days before a suicide bomber killed 13 service personnel at Kabul airport in 2021, U.S. military commanders were aware of the threat and twice missed chances to take out the deadly terrorist network behind the plot, according to a new book.

The Taliban, who had seized control of Afghanistan, refused a request to raid a hotel that was a known staging post for ISIS-K, who carried out the atrocity. 

And at around the same time, superior officers vetoed a plan for a drone strike elsewhere because of the 'negative response' of the Taliban to such a raid.

Taken together, the shocking conclusion is that the bloodiest moment in President Joe Biden's presidency might have been avoided if American troops had not been reliant on their enemy for protection in the final days of the evacuation. 

A total of 183 people were killed in the blast, including the bomber. 

The details are set out in 'Kabul: The Untold Story of Biden's Fiasco and the American Warriors Who Fought to the End,' which is published by Center Street on Tuesday — the two-year anniversary of the Taliban takeover.

[globalaffairs]

"Those On Duty Didn't Check Because...": On Pak Blast, Cops Admit To Lapse

Pakistan mosque blast: Those on duty didn't check the suicide bomber because he was in a police uniform, said police.

Peshawar: The suicide bomber who killed 101 people inside a mosque at a police headquarters in Pakistan was wearing a police uniform and helmet when he staged the attack, a police chief said Thursday.

"Those on duty didn't check him because he was in a police uniform... It was a security lapse," Moazzam Jah Ansari, the head of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province police force, told a news conference.

Police have a "fair idea" about who the bomber was after matching his head found at the scene with CCTV images.

"There's an entire network behind him," Mr Ansari said, explaining that the bomber had not planned Monday's assault in northwest Peshawar alone.

Hundreds of police were attending afternoon prayers in the police headquarters' mosque when the blast erupted, causing a wall to collapse and crush officers.

Authorities are investigating how a major security breach could happen in one of the most tightly controlled areas of the city, housing intelligence and counter-terrorism bureaus, and next door to the regional secretariat.

It is Pakistan's deadliest assault in several years and the worst since violence began to surge again in the region after the Afghan Taliban's takeover in Kabul in 2021.

[moazdijkot]

Afghanistan: Deadly suicide bombing outside foreign ministry - BBC

Afghanistan: Deadly suicide bombing outside foreign ministry – BBC

Afghanistan: Deadly suicide bombing outside foreign ministry  BBC Islamic State claims responsibility for Kabul suicide blast | International News | Top News | WION  WION Deadly ‘suicide’ blast outside Afghan foreign ministry in Kabul  Al Jazeera English Kabul: Narrow escape for Chinese officials as suicide bomber targets Taliban ministry  Hindustan Times Suicide blast and gun fire rock Taliban…

[mubashirnews]

‘Suicide’ blast outside Afghan foreign ministry in Kabul | News

‘Suicide’ blast outside Afghan foreign ministry in Kabul | News

DEVELOPING STORYDEVELOPING STORY, Police spokesman Khalid Zadran said that the blast in the Afghan capital resulted in casualties. A suspected suicide bomber has detonated himself outside the foreign ministry in Afghanistan’s capital Kabul, with a senior police official saying the blast caused casualties. The blast hit about 4pm local time (11:30 GMT) on Wednesday, police spokesman Khalid Zadran…

[thunderrabby-blog]

Several feared dead in blast outside Kabul military airport | News

Several feared dead in blast outside Kabul military airport | News

DEVELOPING STORYDEVELOPING STORY, Explosion outside the airport causes multiple casualties, a spokesman for the Taliban-run interior ministry says. An explosion outside the military airport in Kabul has caused multiple casualties, a spokesman for the Taliban-run interior ministry said. “Today morning an explosion took place outside Kabul military airport, due to which a number of our citizens…