The former Afghan president, who fled the country and deserted his people when the Taliban marched into Kabul, said he made a run for it to “keep the guns silent.”
Ashraf Ghani said he decided to leave at the urging of palace security officials who feared his presence could spark “horrific street-to-street fighting” like Kabul saw during the civil war in the 1990s.
“Leaving Kabul was the most difficult decision of my life, but I believed it was the only way to keep the guns silent and save Kabul and her 6 million citizens,” Ghani, who had been Afghanistan’s president since 2014, wrote on Twitter on Wednesday.
He fled to the United Arab Emirates on Aug. 15 as Taliban fighters toppled the government and took over the Presidential Palace — where they posed for photos, marking the extremist group’s lightning-fast takeover in the wake of President Biden’s hasty withdrawal of US troops.
Former President Ashraf Ghani claims leaving Afghanistan “was the only way to keep the guns silent and save Kabul.”Pete Marovich/The New York Times/Bloomberg via Getty Images
In the following days, chaos reigned on the streets of Kabul as thousands of desperate Afghans streamed to Hamid Karzai International Airport in a last-ditch attempt to escape the brutal Taliban rule.
The Biden administration was also forced to deploy additional forces to evacuate US citizens from the Kabul airport.
Amid the disorder, an ISIS-K terrorist detonated a suicide bomb, killing 13 American military members and scores of Afghans, including women and children.
Ghani apologized for leaving the Afghan people.
Taliban fighters posing for a photo after taking over over the Presidential Palace.Zabi Karimi/AP
”It is with a deep and profound regret that my own chapter ended in a similar tragedy to my predecessors — without ensuring stability and prosperity,” he said. “I apologize to the Afghan people that I could not make it end differently.”
In the tweet, written in English, Ghani said the time will come to parse his actions of that day.
“Now is not the moment for a long assessment of the events leading to my departure,” he said, adding, “I will address them in the near future.”
Taliban fighters in US military uniforms they took after American troops left them behind during the withdrawal.Balkis Press/Abaca/Sipa USA
Ghani, whose daughter Mariam lives in a million-dollar loft in Brooklyn, also addressed claims that when he fled Afghanistan, he did so with about $169 million in cash.
“These charges are completely and categorically false. Corruption is a plague that has crippled our country for decades and fighting corruption has been a central focus in my efforts as president,” he wrote.
Ghani, who has also faced allegations of corruption, said he would agree to an audit of his finances.
“I apologize to the Afghan people that I could not make it end differently,” former President Ashraf Ghani said.Marcus Yam/Los Angeles Times/Polaris
“I welcome an official audit or financial investigation under UN auspices or any other appropriate independent body to prove the veracity of my statements here,” Ghani wrote in the posting.
In several pictures released by the state-run Korean Central News Agency, Kim seemed markedly slimmer than he had on earlier dates. His suit appeared to fit him loosely.
With little independent information coming from the secretive country, its leader’s weight and health — and the health of the country — have long been sources of speculation, Insider’s Ryan Pickrell reported.
South Korea’s spy agency, the National Intelligence Service, said in November that Kim weighed about 300 pounds, which would make him severely obese .
Kim in Pyongyang in March 2019 in a photo provided by the state news agency.
Associated Press
But over time — and notably in the past year — North Korea watchers have noted a seemingly shrinking waistline. By July, the NIS said he had likely lost 22 to 44 pounds.
Kim on July 27.
Korean Central News Agency/Korea News Service via AP
Martyn Williams, who researches North Korea, said that at Thursday’s parade Kim again looked trimmer:
The apparent weight loss has fueled speculation about Kim’s health. During two military events in July, the leader was photographed with what appeared to be a strange greenish mark and a bandage on the back of his head.
A July 30 report on Korea Central Television appeared to show Kim with bandages on the back of his head.
KCTV/Insider
In April 2020, he was the subject of rumors of a health scare after he disappeared from public view for two weeks.
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the country has claimed to have no cases and declared itself coronavirus-free.
That claim was shaken, however, by a reshuffling of Kim’s senior leadership in July that was prompted, Kim said, by a “grave crisis” relating to the pandemic. He did not offer details.
A new rule requiring vaccinations or regular tests would apply to companies with more than 100 employees.Credit…Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York Times
New federal safety regulations that call for businesses with more than 100 workers to require vaccinations against the coronavirus will affirm mandates already in place at many companies and give cover to employers that had yet to decide.
The proposed rules, which President Biden announced on Thursday, will require workers to be inoculated or face weekly testing and will mandate that the businesses offer employees paid time off to get vaccinated. They are the government’s biggest push yet to draw employers into a campaign to vaccinate the country.
Some 80 million workers will be affected. The requirements will be imposed by the Department of Labor and its Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which is drafting an emergency temporary standard to carry out the mandate, according to the White House.
“Some of the biggest companies are already requiring this — United Airlines, Disney, Tyson Foods and even Fox News,” Mr. Biden said during a speech Thursday.
The move, though, is sure to face political pushback and litigation. And it faces considerable challenges, like establishing a way to gather and store the vaccination information, as well as a process for exemptions. The president did not specify penalties for flouting the requirements.
Lawyers said Thursday that it was not immediately clear whether the rule would apply to all employees or only those who work in company offices or facilities.
The Biden administration also intends to require vaccination for federal workers and contractors, as well as for 17 million health care workers in hospitals and other institutions that receive Medicare and Medicaid funding.
Mr. Biden pleaded for more businesses to help the effort to increase vaccinations. “To those of you running large entertainment venues — from sports arenas, to concert venues, to movie theaters — please require folks to get vaccinated or show a negative test as a condition of entry,” he said.
OSHA oversees workplace safety, which the agency is likely to contend extends to vaccine mandates. The agency has issued other guidelines for pandemic precautions, such as a rule in June requiring health care employers to provide protective equipment, provide adequate ventilation and ensure social distancing, among other measures.
“I think that the Department of Labor probably is in good stead to be able to justify its mandate for health and safety reasons for the workers,” said Steve Bell, a partner at the law firm Dorsey & Whitney who specializes in labor and employment.
“They’ve got a broad pretty solid basis for saying: ‘We’re here to protect the workers, and this is part of our purview, and we think that this is something that will protect employees,’” he said.
OSHA has the authority to quickly issue a rule, known as an emergency temporary standard, if it can show that workers are exposed to a grave danger and that the rule is necessary to address that danger. The rule must also be feasible for employers to enforce.
The regulation is expected to be challenged in court by employers and perhaps even some states. But the legal basis for a state challenge is likely to be weakest in states that are directly within OSHA’s jurisdiction. Among them are some of the states that have been hardest hit by Covid-19 recently and where politicians have been resistant to mandates — such as Texas and Florida.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the business lobby, said in a statement that it “will work to ensure that employers have the resources, guidance and flexibility necessary to ensure the safety of their employees and customers and comply with public health requirements.” Another major business advocacy group, the Business Roundtable, said it “welcomes” the Biden administration actions, including the requirement that companies offer paid time off for workers to get vaccinated.
The Culinary Workers Union, which represents 57,000 workers in Nevada, said “stricter” vaccine mandates were “the only way we see a full recovery possible.”
But some unions have been wary of mandates, with members worrying about potential health side effects or bristling at the idea of an employer’s interfering in what they regard as a personal health decision.
On Aug. 23, the Food and Drug Administration paved the way for broader mandates when it gave full approval to the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
Employers as various as CVS Health, Goldman Sachs and Chevron have put in place some form of requirement. Companies have been eager to get their workers back into the office and return to a degree of normalcy. And others, like AstraZeneca and JPMorgan Chase, are already requiring vaccination or else weekly testing.
Still, many mandates are not comprehensive. Companies like Walmart and Citigroup have requirements for their corporate employees but not for frontline workers in stores or at branches. Many companies are dealing with labor shortages and varying levels of vaccine hesitancy among workers.
“It levels the playing field,” said Ian Schaefer, a partner at the law firm Loeb & Loeb who specializes in labor issues and has been advising companies on their Covid policies. “Particularly in service industries or industries where they may have been represented by minority populations or lower-wage earners who are disproportionately likely not to be vaccinated — those employers were reluctant to push out a vaccine mandate because they thought they’d lose talent.”
“If they rolled out that mandate and people in their work stream weren’t getting vaccinated and walking across the street elsewhere, they’d be in a bind,” he said.
Mr. Biden had already raised the pressure on private employers to help with vaccination efforts. In August, the White House met with executives of companies that had mandated vaccination, including Scott Kirby of United Airlines, to discuss how they could encourage fellow business leaders to do the same.
Joseph Allen, an associate professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health who advises companies on Covid strategies, said the wide-ranging rule announced on Thursday was “a clear signal” from the federal government that it stood behind mandates.
“I suspect the dominoes will keep dropping,” he said. “It’s also necessary and needed. The voluntary approach has hit its limit.”
Katie Rogers and Noam Scheiber contributed reporting.
Attorney General Merrick Garland at the Justice Department in August. The department is seeking a permanent injunction against the Texas abortion law.
Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
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Attorney General Merrick Garland at the Justice Department in August. The department is seeking a permanent injunction against the Texas abortion law.
Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
The Department of Justice has sued the state of Texas over a new law that bans abortions after about six weeks, before most people realize they are pregnant, all but halting the procedure in the country’s second-largest state.
The lawsuit says the state enacted the law “in open defiance of the Constitution.”
“The act is clearly unconstitutional under long-standing Supreme Court precedent,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said during a news conference Thursday afternoon. “Those precedents hold, in the words of Planned Parenthood v. Casey, that ‘regardless of whether exceptions are made for particular circumstances, a state may not prohibit any woman from making the ultimate decision to terminate her pregnancy before viability.’ “
The Justice Department is seeking a permanent injunction from a federal court in the Western District of Texas. But it’s likely the Supreme Court will have the final word on the matter.
Garland noted the law deputizes private citizens “to serve as bounty hunters authorized to recover at least $10,000 per claim from individuals who facilitate a woman’s exercise of her constitutional rights.”
He pointed out the law has thus far had its intended effect.
“Because this statute makes it too risky for an abortion clinic to stay open, abortion providers have ceased providing services,” he said. “This leaves women in Texas unable to exercise their constitutional rights and unable to obtain judicial review at the very moment they need it.”
Experts said the Texas law is among the most strict in the nation, in part because it allows private citizens to sue anyone perceived to be helping patients obtain abortions and doesn’t make exceptions for cases involving rape or incest. Several other GOP-led states have announced they are considering adopting similar measures.
The Justice Department case may be designed to slow some of that momentum. The attorney general said if the federal government and the courts didn’t block the Texas law, other states could easily put other constitutional rights in jeopardy.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton tweeted that the administration “should focus on fixing the border crisis, Afghanistan, the economy and countless other disasters instead of meddling in state’s sovereign rights.”
The state’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, said he was confident Texas would prevail in court, according to a written statement.
The lawsuit follows heavy pressure from congressional Democrats, who have urged Garland to use the “full force” of the Justice Department.
“We urge you to take legal action up to and including the criminal prosecution of would-be vigilantes attempting to use the private right of action established by that blatantly unconstitutional law,” wrote House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-New York, and 22 other Democrats.
Last week, the Supreme Court allowed the Texas law to go into effect over dissent from Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor. President Biden called the court’s majority opinion “an unprecedented assault on a woman’s constitutional rights under Roe v. Wade, which has been the law of the land for almost 50 years.”
At an event Thursday, Vice President Harris said the administration and the Congress should work to codify Roe.
“We are heartened to see the Biden administration stepping in to take action to vindicate Texans’ rights,” said Helene Krasnoff, vice president, public policy litigation and law, for Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
Mindy’s not alone. Larry, a Category 2 hurricane, is sideswiping Bermuda, bringing tropical storm conditions as heavy rain squalls and gusty winds lash the island. As rip current danger remains high along much of the U.S. East Coast, the hurricane’s impacts are being realized nearly a thousand miles away. A hurricane watch is even up in parts of the Canadian Maritimes, where Larry is headed.
Students participating in in-person extracurricular activities need both shots sooner, by the end of October. The resolution mentions “qualified and approved exemptions” but does not offer details.
Initial data on infections at Los Angeles schools this academic year has been reassuring. According to a Los Angeles Times tracker based on district data, 1,385 active Covid-19 cases had been identified at schools as of Tuesday; four were linked to on-campus transmissions, and a single school had a campus outbreak.
Like many districts, Los Angeles Unified has been operating vaccine clinics in schools. It has the nation’s broadest school testing program, screening all students and staff members for infection weekly. Masks are required for every individual on campus, indoors and outdoors, and staff members must be vaccinated, with limited exceptions for serious medical conditions and sincerely held religious beliefs.
The four-month timeline before proof of vaccination is required on Jan. 10 would allow the district to partner with community organizations, clinics and doctors’ offices to reach approximately 80,000 students who are eligible for vaccination but have not been inoculated, Mr. Melvoin said. The district might knock on doors, in an effort similar to the one encouraging families to fill out the U.S. census.
The task will be logistically complicated in a large, sprawling district like Los Angeles. And while not every eligible student will be fully vaccinated by Christmas, the timing of the required first and second shots should allow students to gain at least some protection against the virus before the holiday season, when cases surged last year.
“We did not want to set the district up for failure by setting a deadline that had to be pushed back,” Mr. Melvoin said.
A key constituency supporting a student vaccine mandate is the city’s teachers’ union, United Teachers Los Angeles. The group has pushed for stringent safety measures throughout the pandemic and, during the previous academic year, a longer period of remote learning. The union continues to ask for more aggressive quarantines for those exposed to the virus.
Captain Meaghan Mobbs (Ret.) says that she will not resign from the military academy board because it should remain a non-partisan role.
Retired Army Capt. Meaghan Mobbs is fighting back against the Biden administration, refusing the request to step down from her position on the military academy advisory board after President Biden asked multiple Trump-appointed members to resign.
Biden is now facing backlash from multiple members of the board, including Kellyanne Conway and Sean Spicer.
“It’s imperative that we fight for this,” Mobbs said on “Fox & Friends.”
“One of the last places where we should be politicizing anything is at our United States military academies. … There has been a long tradition of being nonpartisan to ensure that we are offering the best possible advice and instruction to our West Point cadets.”
Kellyanne Conway, former adviser to President Trump and a member of the Board of Visitors to the U.S. Air Force Academy, fired back at Biden on Twitter saying, “I’m not resigning, but you should.”
White House press secretary Jen Psaki defended the decision to oust Trump-appointed board members, saying Biden wants qualified individuals who align with his administration’s values to serve.
“Kellyanne Conway is absolutely qualified to be on this board,” Mobbs said. “People like her are the exact kind of people we should have making sure we have the strongest teams possible and advising our military because she’s one, a civilian; two, brings real-world expertise and the ability to win in a tough fight. That’s who we should have advising these boards.”
Mobbs told Brian Kilmeade that the purpose of the advisory boards is to provide outside perspectives and expertise.
Many board members serve across administrations, which Mobbs said is in the spirit of the military academy.
“I served alongside Obama appointees and they were extraordinarily respectful and embraced all of us that were appointed during that period,” Mobbs said.
Republican-turned-independent Assemblymember Chad Mayes said his phone has been lighting up with “texts saying ‘don’t let them steal it.’”
“It’s this constant messaging that somehow if Republicans lose elections, it’s because of voter fraud. It is wrong, it is dangerous, and it needs to stop,” Mayes said.
Republican frontrunner and talk show host Larry Elder, who has denied that President Joe Biden fairly won the 2020 election, is among those fomenting the idea of a tainted recall election. He has urged his followers to report “suspicious” recall activity, while saying he was preemptively prepared to file a lawsuit.
Conservative commentator Tomi Lahren assured viewers this week that only malfeasance could deliver Newsom a win.
“The only thing that will save Gavin Newsom is voter fraud,” Lahren said on Fox.
As prominent Republicans and pundits fan the flames, social media has circulated a story about Torrance police arresting a man with drugs, a gun and hundreds of sealed mail-in ballots (police are still investigating) and a debunked claim that California ballots are designed to reveal how people voted.
All of it resembles the contentious aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, which has been marked by Trump’s ongoing election fraud lie.
“There has been this relentless false narrative about election fraud we’ve been hearing for almost a year now” that “peaked with the insurrection on Jan. 6, and it’s been continuing,” said Kim Alexander, president of the nonpartisan California Voter Foundation. “Just because something doesn’t make sense to you doesn’t mean someone’s trying to steal your vote,” she added, but as conspiracies circulate online, “the more outrageous it is, the quicker people hit the ‘share’ button.”
Warnings about pervasive fraud have helped erode Republican distrust in elections. And no one has played a more pivotal role in undermining trust than Trump. As far back as 2016, after Trump lost California by more than 4 million votes, he claimed he was the victim of “massive voter fraud.”
Two years later, he returned to the subject. “In many places, like California, the same person votes many times — you’ve probably heard about that,” Trump said, without offering any proof. “They always like to say ‘oh, that’s a conspiracy theory’ — not a conspiracy theory, folks. Millions and millions of people.”
California Republicans once reliably voted early by mail while Democrats waited until the last moment. But that dynamic has flipped in recent years as Trump and other conservatives relentlessly hammered mail voting as vulnerable to fraud. In 2020, California shifted to a model in which elections officials mail every voter a ballot — and in a repeat of the voting dynamics of 2020, Democrats are now far outpacing Republicans in returning recall ballots.
“You’ve got the fear factor where all the Republicans are holding onto their ballots because Donald Trump made the statement prior to Georgia, ‘hold on to your ballots, don’t vote in person’,” said pro-recall consultant Anne Dunsmore. “I got all of these crazy responses of, ‘it’s a wasted vote.’”
The California Republican Party is both encouraging voters to trust the process and creating avenues to report wrongdoing. The party has put out videos featuring Rep. Michelle Steel and other figures urging voters to participate, including by mail or by handing ballots off to collectors — a process conservatives once decried as “ballot harvesting” and now pursue. Its website also features options to volunteer or contribute money to “election integrity” efforts that could include legal action.
“I think making sure every voter is educated on the way they can vote and putting these security measures into place, being preventative, being proactive will help people gain confidence in the way they are voting,” party chair Jessica Millan Patterson said in an interview. “This is what we’re doing at the California Republican Party. It doesn’t really matter to me what else is going on outside of that — I want people to vote. I want people to have confidence in their vote.”
Polling shows a stark divergence in how voters in the two major parties view elections. Most California Democrats express confidence in California elections. But a plurality of Republicans espouses little faith, and most California Republicans say they are concerned that non-eligible people might vote. A majority of state Republicans still believe the 2020 election was “stolen” from Trump, according to a recent YouGov/Hoover poll.
At the same time, Republicans are confident that Newsom will be recalled even as polls consistently give Newsom a double-digit advantage. That disconnect all but ensures that a tight Newsom victory would spur a new wave of voter fraud accusations.
Foes of Newsom argue the governor has also undermined confidence in the vote. They point to rhetoric from the governor and his allies casting the election as an illegitimate power grab, a “coup” and an extension of the “Stop the Steal” protests of the 2020 election that culminated in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Republicans hammered the Democrat-controlled legislature for seeking to protect the governor by moving up the election date at Newsom’s urging.
“They have tried every step of the way to delegitimize the recall,” Republican Assemblymember and recall candidate Kevin Kiley said during a debate, adding that “the scales have been tilted in favor of the incumbent here, and I think that’s why a lot of people distrust our election process.”
But Mayes, the assemblymember, argued the drumbeat of accusations was undermining the larger project of reviving the beleaguered California GOP, which has not controlled a statewide office in years and represents just a quarter of state lawmakers.
“It’s their excuse for losing elections when, in reality, Republicans need to change if they want to win again in California,” Mayes said, “and when they blame voting fraud it gives them an excuse not to change.”
Businesses that ignore the policy, once it’s in place, could trigger penalties of up to $14,000 per violation, according to a senior Biden administration official, who briefed reporters on the plan ahead of the president’s speech under the condition that his name would not be used.
The Biden administration on Thursday sued Texas over the state’s extreme abortion law, which amounts to a near total ban on abortion, calling the law “clearly unconstitutional”.
US attorney general Merrick Garland said the law that went into effect last week after the supreme court refused to block it and bans almost all abortions in the state was one “all Americans should fear”.
Senate Bill 8, pushed through by Texas’s Republican-dominated legislature, bans abortion once embryonic cardiac activity is detected, which is around six weeks. Most women are not aware they are pregnant as early as that time.
The justice department decided to argue that the law, which offers no exceptions for rape or incest, “illegally interferes with federal interests”, the Wall Street Journal first reported.
On Monday Garland said the justice department would “protect those seeking to obtain or provide reproductive health services”, under a federal law known as the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances.
Garland said that law would be enforced “in order to protect the constitutional rights of women and other persons, including access to an abortion”.
The Texas law incentivizes any private citizen to sue an abortion provider or anyone deemed to have helped a women get an abortion contravening the law. It came into effect on 1 September, and survived an emergency appeal to the supreme court, which voted 5-4 to allow the law to remain in force.
On Thursday, when announcing the lawsuit, Garland said: “The act is clearly unconstitutional” and said that it failed to give women seeking an abortion their constitutional right “at the very moment they need it”.
And he added that the “kind of scheme” that Texas has devised and other states want to follow, where the public enforces the law as a way to avoid legal challenge, and allows individuals to sue abortion providers or those helping a woman obtain the service, was designed to “nullify the constitution”.
Joe Biden condemned the new law and reaffirmed the White House’s support for abortion rights. “This extreme Texas law blatantly violates the constitutional right established under Roe v Wade and upheld as a precedent for nearly half a century,” Biden said in a statement.
The Biden administration has since been under pressure to act, with Democrats on the House judiciary committee writing to Garland on Tuesday, although many experts believe that winning the lawsuit will be a challenge for the federal government.
“The Department of Justice cannot permit private individuals seeking to deprive women of the constitutional right to choose an abortion to escape scrutiny under existing federal law simply because they attempt to do so under the color of state law,” wrote the Democratic members of Congress, who include Pramila Jayapal, representative for Washington, and Val Demings, from Florida.
The Texas law is the strictest legislation enacted against abortion rights in the United States since the supreme court’s landmark Roe v Wade decision in 1973. At least 12 other states have enacted bans early in pregnancy, but all have been blocked from going into effect.
Abortion providers have said the law will probably force many abortion clinics in Texas to ultimately close. Women’s rights advocates fear the conservative-dominated supreme court’s lack of action over the law could signal the start of the unravelling of Roe v Wade.
The secretary of state provides a county-by-county breakdown of where ballots have been submitted, visualized in the map below. Included are each county’s turnout figures to this point, as well as the margins of the 2020 presidential election and 2018 gubernatorial election for reference.
Sierra County, which has favored Republican candidates by more than 20 percentage points in the last two statewide elections, has the highest turnout so far with 47.9% of ballots returned. The county with the lowest turnout is Imperial County (10.5% of ballots returned), a typically blue county where over 80% of residents are Latino.
Low Latino turnout has been one of the major storylines in the recall election so far, and in all three California counties where Latinos make up more than 56% of the population — San Benito, Tulare and Imperial — voter turnout is below the statewide figure of 28.3%.
Every county in the highly Democratic San Francisco Bay Area exceeds the statewide 28.3% figure with the exception of Solano County, which has a returned ballot rate so far of 27.8%.
In the COVID-19 era, Democrats have been more likely to vote by mail while Republicans are likelier to vote in person on Election Day, and this pattern seems to be borne out a bit by the Bay Area’s high returned ballot rate contrasted with the Central Valley’s low rate. Kern County, which was the most highly populated California county to vote for Trump in 2020, has a paltry 21.1% return to this point. That’s suggestive of an upcoming large election day turnout from pro-recall voters.
The exact size of that Election Day turnout and the question of whether Democrats can engage more voters in the campaign’s final days will determine Newsom’s fate.
Red flag warnings for high fire danger are in effect for portions of Northern California, central Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and the western Plains. A fire weather watch has been hoisted for portions of the San Francisco Bay area east through Sacramento on Thursday night into Friday morning, when thunderstorms may produce lightning with little to no rain.
Wednesday afternoon, once Lee was hauled away before a cheering crowd in a heavy thunderstorm, workers had spent about an hour cutting the mortar around the 2,500-pound capstone on that side, said Chris Hilgert, owner of Summit Masonry and Building Restoration, a Connecticut company hired to do the stone work. They lifted the capstone early Thursday morning.
More than three weeks after fleeing Kabul by helicopter as the Taliban swept through the capital, former Afghan President Ashraf Ghani issued a statement late Wednesday in apology to his fellow countrymen.
“I owe the Afghan people an explanation for leaving Kabul abruptly on August 15 after Taliban unexpectedly entered the city,” Ghani began, in a letter posted to his Twitter account that was written only in English.
Three days after his speedy departure and amid apocalyptic scenes of panic at Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport as desperate Afghans tried to flee the country, Ghani resurfaced in the United Arab Emirates, whose government confirmed it had welcomed him and his family on humanitarian grounds.
“I left at the urging of the palace security who advised me that to remain risked setting off the same horrific street to street fighting the city had suffered during the Civil War of the 1990s. Leaving Kabul was the most difficult decision of my life, but I believed it was the only way to keep the guns silent and save Kabul and her 6 million citizens,” the former academic and World Bank official, who had been Afghanistan’s president since 2014, wrote.
In what some are seeing as an attempt to avoid accountability, Ghani said, “Now is not the moment for a long assessment of the events leading to my departure,” adding that “I will address them in the near future.”
Taliban forces had made a series of stunning advances across the country of 39 million in the wake of the Biden administration and NATO announcing a full departure of U.S. and coalition forces by the end of August.
Amid the exodus of foreign troops, the Taliban were able to declare near complete control of the country within 10 days of seizing their first provincial capital. This was despite being vastly outnumbered by the Afghan military, which has been assisted by U.S. and coalition forces for the last 20 years.
Denying taking millions in cash with him
Ghani has been accused of engaging in and profiting from rampant corruption. Rumors abounded among Afghans and analysts that the 72-year-old took millions of dollars in cash with him when he left, and Russian state media reported the same. Ghani in his letter denied the accusations.
“I must now address baseless allegations that as I left Kabul I took with me millions of dollars belonging to the Afghan people. These charges are completely and categorically false. Corruption is a plague that has crippled our country for decades and fighting corruption has been a central focus in my efforts as president.”
U.S. and former Afghan officials, including those who worked closely with Ghani, allege numerous instances of corruption and bribery within Ghani’s office and family, and independent investigations have concluded that Ghani gave lucrative contracts to immediate family members. Ghani has denied the accusations.
“I welcome an official audit or financial investigation under UN auspices or any other appropriate independent body to prove the veracity of my statements here,” Ghani wrote in his Sept. 8 statement.
Analysts and many U.S. veterans of the war in Afghanistan note that the corruption in the Afghan government and in its military’s leadership often meant that money meant for soldiers’ salaries instead went to lining the pockets of senior officials. They told CNBC that the Afghan military’s rapid surrenders to the Taliban stemmed in part from a total lack of confidence that Ghani and the government in Kabul would support them.
“I offer my profound appreciate and respect for the sacrifice of all Afghans, especially our Afghan soldiers and their families, through the last forty years,” Ghani wrote in his letter’s closing paragraph.
“It is with deep and profound regret that my own chapter ended in similar tragedy to my predecessors — without ensuring stability and prosperity. I apologize to the Afghan people that I could not make it end differently. My commitment to the Afghan people has never wavered and will guide me for the rest of my life.”
Fox News correspondent Claudia Cowan reports from the Bay Area just days ahead of the election that could remove California Governor Gavin Newsom from office.
Vice President Kamala Harris was on mostly friendly ground in her native California on Wednesday as she campaigned for embattled Gov. Gavin Newsom, who faces a recall election next week.
But that didn’t mean Harris fully escaped any criticism of her time in office.
About 100 yards from the Newsom rally stage in San Leandro, a city of about 90,000 residents located south of Oakland, some protesters chanted and waved the flag of Afghanistan during Harris’ appearance, Fox 40 of Sacramento reported.
Social media posts by Sacramento-based reporter Ashley Zavala, a contributor to FOX 40 and other stations, showed some of the demonstrators.
“Free, free Afghanistan!” the group chants in one video.
In another post, demonstrator Willy Moosayar identifies himself as an Afghan-American whose parents fled the Taliban and came to the U.S. He criticizes Harris for not speaking out about what he describes as a humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan.
He said many Afghan refugees now in the U.S. feel guilt about being safe here while other Afghans who remained behind face the Taliban’s rule.
“We have to fight for them, we have to be their voices,” Moosayar says.
He said the group was protesting Afghan women’s loss of rights under the Taliban as well as reports of Taliban opponents facing retribution from the militant group, he said.
Vice President Kamala Harris stands onstage with California Gov. Gavin Newsom in San Leandro, California, Wednesday, Sept. 8, 2021. (Associated Press)
The Republican National Committee also targeted Harris for campaigning in California amid the Afghanistan crisis. One ad posted on a mobile billboard said, “Californians are stranded in Afghanistan. Where’s Kamala? Campaigning in California.”
Harris had originally been scheduled to campaign for Newsom in late August, on the way back to Washington from her trip to Singapore and Vietnam, but that event was postponed after the Aug. 26 terror attack in Kabul that left 13 U.S. service members and dozens of Afghans dead.
The vice president did stop at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii to meet with some U.S. troops during her return trip but that event was closed to the press.
Both President Biden and Harris have faced bipartisan criticism for what many critics have described as a “botched” job of removing U.S. troops from Afghanistan after a 20-year U.S. military presence following the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The Biden administration has also faced criticism for its handling of evacuations of American citizens and others from Afghanistan since its fall to the Taliban last month.
On Wednesday, White House press secretary defended the administration’s decision to not allow chartered flights from Afghanistan to land at U.S. military bases, claiming concerns about a lack of proper vetting of the people aboard the flights.
Harris on Wednesday became the latest high-profile Democrat to campaign for Newsom. Others have included U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.
Republican talk show host Larry Elder is viewed as the greatest threat to replace Newsom if voters decide to oust the Democrat at the polls next Tuesday.
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