Nasir Ahmed Tawhedi, the Afghan refugee charged last week in Oklahoma with plotting an Election Day terror massacre was previously flagged by U.S. Customs Border and Protection this summer, weeks before his arrest, during a re-evaluation of his 2021 entry into the country, immigration records reviewed by Just the News show.
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An Afghan national let into the United States by the Biden administration immediately after the bungled withdrawal of American troops from his country was charged Tuesday in federal court with plotting an Election Day terror attack in support of the Islamic State (ISIS).
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The September 10th presidential debate went down as expected. Summed up, it was Sappy and the Blob pile on Grouchy.
The swarmy and evasive Kamala Harris preened, posed, and proffered empty platitudes.
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This week, we were reminded again of the 9/11 attacks. First, it was reported that U.S. government lawyers and defense counsel reached a plea deal giving life imprisonment to the high-level al Qaeda prisoners that plotted the attacks. While life imprisonment is undoubtedly a serious punishment, 9/11 was a mass murder that cries out for the death penalty. The lack of proportionality to the offense was striking.
Worse, the family members of 9/11 victims were not given any forewarning or a chance to provide input on this decision, even though the government had promised to do so. They instead received an antiseptic letter explaining what happened after the fact.
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Fresh off a poor first-debate performance, President Joe Biden and his campaign sought to paint GOP rival Donald Trump as a liar for his claims during the June debate. However, the president made several untrue claims of his own since the June 27 appearance.
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After two decades at war with the Taliban, the U.S. government is now sending millions of taxpayer dollars to the terrorist group.
The Taliban resumed power in Afghanistan immediately after the chaotic and deadly withdrawal of U.S. troops earlier in the Biden administration.
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New testimony from those who witnessed firsthand the confusion and chaos of the Afghanistan withdrawal further contradicts President Biden’s assertion that the hurried and violent end to the longest war in American history was an “extraordinary success.”
In a transcribed interview before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, former Foreign Service officer Samuel Aronson said the very opposite in living, harrowing color. “Let me be clear,” he told lawmakers behind closed doors, “I cannot call this evacuation a success.”
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As the world absorbs the horror of the ISIS-K slaughter inside a Russian concert hall, prominent members of Congress are warning the Afghan-based terror group could strike inside the United States.
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Mike McCaul said Sunday the threat of an attack was heightened by President Joe Biden‘s bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan, which gave ISIS-K a breeding ground to train and carry out attacks.
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The United States Army is reducing its size by about 5%, cutting roughly 24,000 jobs, as part of a restructuring plan that is ostensibly meant to better prepare for a possible war in the future.
As ABC News reports, the cuts will mostly affect posts that are already empty, such as counterinsurgency jobs that were previously needed in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan but no longer needed today, as well as about 3,000 jobs in the Army special operations forces.
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Writing in The Atlantic, David Frum, former speechwriter for President George W. Bush and cheerleader for endless wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Global War on Terror, warns us that if Donald Trump wins the 2024 presidential election NATO will be wrecked, our allies around the world will suffer “potential disaster,” and “above all” Ukraine will be left to the mercy of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Given Frum’s track record of advice about wars, one wonders why anyone would take his advice. Frum takes credit for Bush’s phrase the “axis of evil” to describe Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. Frum’s advice about war should be labeled the “axis of error.”
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A new watchdog report reveals that the country of Afghanistan has received a staggering $11 billion in foreign aid from the United States since the country’s collapse in August of 2021.
As Breitbart reports, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), John Sopko, issued his report on Monday. Sopko says that the U.S. and its allies have been sending “cash shipments” of about $80 million to Afghanistan “every 10-14 days” since the Taliban took over the country shortly before the withdrawal of all American forces.
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U.S. Rep. Cory Mills, R-Florida, made good on his promise earlier this year to file articles of impeachment against Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. On Friday, he filed one article of impeachment against Austin alleging high crimes and misdemeanors.
Mills appears to be the first to file an article of impeachment against a Defense secretary in U.S. history.
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Voters should remember that a President’s role is primarily foreign affairs, which includes trade and border security. In 2016, and today, President Trump is the only candidate that has consistently focused on what the actual job of the president is, rather than what those with outsized influence want it to be.
President Trump is the first president to start no new wars since Jimmy Carter. Like Carter, he also affected a Middle East peace deal with Israel – not just one of them, but four. Arguably the first realist president since Richard Nixon, Trump’s combination of unpredictability enforced by blunt and brutal talk, credible military deterrence reinforced through a more robust military that was less used and overstretched, and a genuine and authentic desire to be a peace-maker created a moment in time for cooperation and peace through strength. Unfortunately, under Biden, the promise of peace has become a Shakespearean tragedy when considering our present dilemma in Europe and East Asia.
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Border Patrol has seen 1,000% increases in migrants coming from Afghanistan, China and other countries far from U.S. borders between fiscal year 2022 to fiscal year 2023.
The surges include migrants from Algeria, Djibouti, the Dominican Republic, Egypt, Ethiopia, Mauritania, Paraguay and Vietnam, outgoing Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz wrote on Twitter Friday. It has been challenging to deport such migrants, Ortiz said.
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An Afghan national on the federal Terrorist Screening Dataset (TSDS) was apprehended attempting to enter the U.S. illegally near the Otay Mesa Port of Entry in San Diego, California.
The TSDS is the federal government’s database that includes sensitive information about terrorist identities. It originated as a consolidated terrorist watch list “to house information on known or suspected terrorists (KSTs) but has evolved over the last decade to include additional individuals who represent a potential threat to the United States, including known affiliates of watch listed individuals,” CBP states.
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WEST DES MOINES, Iowa — Taking a different position than his old boss on a key foreign policy issue, former Vice President Mike Pence told a gathering of Iowans Saturday that the U.S. must continue to help provision Ukraine in its war against Russian aggression. While he repeatedly trumpeted “Trump-Pence” successes, the presumptive Republican presidential candidate definitely differs with potential top presidential race rivals, former President Donald Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, on U.S. involvement in the war-torn European country.
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Failed 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said Friday America is now comparable to the Taliban in Afghanistan and Sudan after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, returning abortion decisions to the states.
“It’s so shocking to think that in any way we’re related to poor Afghanistan and Sudan,” Clinton said, according to Fox News, regarding abortion rights during the Women’s Voices Summit at the Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock, Arkansas. “But as an advanced economy as we allegedly are, on this measure, we unfortunately are rightly put with them.”
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There’s lots not to like about the war in Ukraine, and people should be allowed to argue the case without being demonized by those who have a different opinion. But the more those who urge caution are demonized as pro-Putin by the pro-war people, the more they, and probably their audience, become suspicious, or should become suspicious, of the pro-war faction.
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Fort Hood, Texas, is named after John Bell Hood, a West Point graduate and Confederate general. The Army wants to rename the base after the late General Richard Cavazos, a hero of the Korean and Vietnam wars. This selection bypasses qualified candidates with a history on the base, such as Lieutenant Colonel Juanita Warman.
An expert in post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury, Warman received an Army Commendation Medal for service at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, the facility where soldiers injured in Afghanistan and Iraq received treatment before returning stateside. Warman loved her work and volunteered for flights to Iraq to care for soldiers.
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Two months ago, explosions and gunfire tore through a Sikh house of worship in Kabul, Afghanistan. Seven attackers, reportedly part of ISIS-K, the Afghanistan affiliate of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, tried to storm the temple on a Saturday morning, throwing grenades at security guards standing at the entrance. One gunman began firing on those worshipping inside; another attacker detonated a vehicle parked outside the temple.
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The frantic and deadly U.S. evacuation from Afghanistan was so disorganized that 1,450 children were evacuated without their parents, and senior leaders in Vice President Kamala Harris’ and first lady Jill Biden’s offices, as well as one of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, asked private veteran groups for assistance evacuating certain people from the country.
In the waning days of the evacuation, more than 1,000 women and girls waited more than 24 hours on dozens of buses, desperately circling the Kabul airport and trying to avoid Taliban checkpoints. Many of them were told multiple times they were not allowed to enter the airport. Now, nearly a year since the Taliban took control of the country, fewer than one-third of them have managed to flee the country.
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At a time of tectonic shifts in foreign policy alliances, with Russia and China forming a new pact and aggressively asserting themselves on the international stage, Washington’s national security community is splintered across the ideological spectrum on how best to counter the dual threats.
Yet, even before Russia invaded Ukraine, a group of national security practitioners, military veterans, and scholars began trying to move beyond their policy differences to help repair the damage inflicted by the last U.S. foreign policy failure – the chaotic U.S. evacuation from Afghanistan nearly seven months ago.
When the Vandenberg Coalition, a group of primarily Republican experts representing diverse foreign policy views and approaches, began their Afghanistan assessment, its members couldn’t have known that international alarm over Russia’s bloody land grab would soon eclipse the U.S. evacuation of Afghanistan. Some national security experts believe that the two U.S. foreign policy nightmares are inextricably linked – that America’s ignominious retreat in Afghanistan emboldened Vladimir Putin to move on Ukraine.
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Every single one of senile president Joe Biden’s struggles was easily foreseeable.
It’s a bold statement, since many if not most of the issues that confront a new president can’t always be seen from a distance. If it can be said that elections are always about the future, it’s just as true to claim that the future would almost certainly be shaped by yet unseen events and circumstances that no politician could forthrightly discuss in the lead-up to his victory.
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The Biden administration failed to use all available screening data to vet Afghan refugees brought to the United States last year, allowing at least 50 individuals posing “potentially significant security concerns” to make it inside America’s borders, the Pentagon’s chief watchdog is warning.
To make matters worse, the Defense Department inspector general reported to Congress this week that 28 of 31 Afghan evacuees with known “derogatory information” can no longer be located.
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Thousands of Americans were left in Afghanistan after the Biden Administration’s botched withdrawal last summer, according to a stunning new report released by the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other Biden administration officials claimed that number of Americans left behind was only 100-150.
According to the report, published by Foreign Relations ranking member Jim Risch (R-Idaho), the Biden Administration “did not hold a senior-level interagency meeting to discuss an evacuation or formally task the State Department (State) to contact at risk populations, including Americans, until August 14, just hours before Kabul fell.”
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The Biden administration was still unsure on basic parts of evacuation from Afghanistan hours before the Taliban seized control of Kabul, according to a leaked memo obtained by Axios.
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On Wednesday, after a nearly two-month pause, another evacuation flight departed the country of Afghanistan en route for the United States.
According to CNN, the flight was a Qatar Airways flight that departed from Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, paid for by the United States government, with an unknown number of American citizens on board. It is the first such flight since November.
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Voters have swung in favor of Congressional Republicans’ handling of key issues by a significant margin as the midterm elections draw closer, newly released polling shows.
The Politico/Morning Consult poll released Wednesday reports that surveyed voters prefer Republicans work on the economy, jobs, immigration and national security. These figures, the latest in several polls showing poor numbers for Democrats, come alongside more than two dozen Congressional Democrats opting not to run for reelection.
The poll found voters prefer Republicans’ handling of the economy to Democrats 47% to 34%, Republicans’ work on jobs 45% to 35%, immigration 45% to 37% and national security 49% to 32%.
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President Joe Biden has stumbled, mumbled, and bumbled his way through his first year in office. While many of his gaffes leave us laughing, much of what comes out of his mouth isn’t just nonsense, it’s outright lies. Here’s a look at Biden’s Top 10 Lies of the past year.
Georgia election reforms
Biden claimed “Georgia’s new law ends voting hours early so working people can’t cast their vote.”
Even the Washington Post called Biden out for this lie (after the paper repeatedly repeated it for months!)
Biden repeatedly condemned a new Georgia election law that imposed new restrictions on voting, but one of his complaints was simply false: “It ends voting hours early so working people can’t cast their vote after their shift is over.” Many listeners might assume he was talking about voting on Election Day. But Election Day hours were not changed. The law did make some changes to early voting. But experts say the net effect of the new early-voting rules was to expand the opportunities to vote for most Georgians, not limit them.
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President Biden this past weekend suggested he would be willing to lose his presidency over his decisions on several key issues including his widely criticized withdrawal from Afghanistan.
In a CBS “Sunday Morning” interview in which he was asked whether he was discouraged by the criticism over his handling of the pandemic and other first-year challenges, Biden answered “No.”
“But look,” he continued. “One of the things we did decide, and I mean this, my word as a Biden, I know what I’m willing to lose over. If we walk away from the middle class, if we walk away from trying to unify people, if we start to engage in the same kind of politics that the last four years has done? I’m willing to lose over that.”
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The Taliban banned forced marriages in a Friday decree, saying that women are free persons and not property.
“Both (women and men) should be equal,” the decree said, according to ABC News. “No one can force women to marry by coercion or pressure.”
The Taliban ordered courts to allow widows to seek the inheritance of their families and to choose who they marry after their husbands die rather than being forced to marry an in-law, ABC News reported. The Taliban reportedly seeks an end to the practice of forcing women into marriage for money or to settle disputes.
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President Joe Biden’s approval rating has dropped to its lowest level since taking office.
A new Washington Post-ABC News poll found that Biden’s approval rating has plummeted in recent months among steadily rising inflation, a difficult withdrawal from Afghanistan, and other economic issues.
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This is one of the greatest votes of no confidence in the 21st Century.
Against the destructive policies of President Joe Biden, a torrent of spending that has brought back memories of the 1970s — surging inflation as the middle class are taxed their savings at the grocery store and then scenes of American defeat overseas in Afghanistan that stranded hundreds of Americans and thousands of American allies, who now suffer under the tyranny of the Taliban.
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The U.S. announced it will provide an additional $144 million in aid to Afghanistan as part of efforts to help citizens in the country in a statement by Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Thursday.
The assistance brings the total amount of aid to Afghanistan to $474 million in 2021, making the U.S. the top aid donor to the country out of any nation, the statement wrote.
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The U.S. State Department joined an initiative to welcome Afghan refugees into the country that is sponsored by organizations supporting groups with possible ties to Palestinian terrorist organizations, a Daily Caller News Foundation review found.
Welcome.US is part of the Office of American Possibilities initiative, a project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, according to its website. The initiative’s main co-chairs include former President Barack Obama, former First Lady Michelle Obama, former President George W. Bush, former First Lady Laura Bush, former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
The initiative also formed a coalition composed of nonprofit leaders and organizations, former government officials, corporate leaders and public figures. Businesses, including Starbucks, Uber, Facebook, Microsoft, Walmart and Airbnb, also support the effort.
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U.S. intelligence agencies failed to predict how quickly Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, would fall to the Taliban, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.
Four agencies tracked the Taliban’s gains around Afghanistan starting in the spring of 2020 up until Taliban insurgents overthrew the U.S.-supported government in the capital city of Kabul, according to classified materials reviewed by the WSJ.
Around two dozen of the reports the WSJ reviewed predicted the Afghan government would collapse after U.S. forces withdrew, though none of them thought the government would fall as quickly as it did or with American troops still deployed in the region.
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Secretary of State Antony Blinken confirmed Wednesday the State Department is conducting an internal review into the evacuation of Afghanistan.
“It’s absolutely critical that we capture and benefit from lessons learned,” Blinken said in a speech at the Foreign Service Institute in Arlington, Virginia, attended by lawmakers, diplomats and others.
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After three weeks in Europe and extensive discussions with dozens of well-informed and highly placed individuals from most of the principal Western European countries, including leading members of the British government, I have the unpleasant duty of reporting complete incomprehension and incredulity at what Joe Biden and his collaborators encapsulate in the peppy but misleading phrase, “We’re back.”
As one eminent elected British government official put it, “They are not back in any conventional sense of that word. We have worked closely with the Americans for many decades and we have never seen such a shambles of incompetent administration, diplomatic incoherence, and complete military ineptitude as we have seen in these nine months. We were startled by Trump, but he clearly knew what he was doing, whatever we or anyone else thought about it. This is just a disintegration of the authority of a great nation for no apparent reason.”
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Nearly 450 American citizens are estimated to remain in Afghanistan almost two months after U.S. troops withdrew from the country, according to the Pentagon.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken originally said the Biden administration believed there to be “under 200, and likely closer to 100, who remain in Afghanistan and want to leave,” on Aug. 30, the day before the last Anerican troops left Afghanistan.
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Attorney General Merrick Garland on Wednesday faced a litany of hard-edged Senate questions about agreeing to allow federal law enforcement to investigate alleged incidents of outspoken parents at school board meetings.
Garland, in a memo, agreed to responded to a Sept. 29 letter from the National School Board Association to President Biden asking that the FBI, Justice Department and other federal agencies to investigate potential acts of domestic terrorism at the meetings. Parents across the nation have been voicing their concerns about the curricula being taught to their children, in addition to instances like the one currently playing out in northern Virginia, in which there was an apparent coverup of the sexual assault of a female student in a bathroom.
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On Feb. 29, 2020, the U.S. and the Taliban signed the Doha Agreement, which set conditions for an American military withdrawal from Afghanistan. A few days later, then-President Donald Trump picked up the phone to call Taliban leader Abdul Ghani Baradar. On that call, Trump explained to Baradar in no uncertain terms that, if he and his men didn’t fulfill the agreement, which included a pledge not to attack U.S. forces, the Taliban would suffer dearly. Not a single U.S. soldier was killed in combat in Afghanistan for the rest of Trump’s presidency.
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Before the 2018 midterm elections, Trump’s political advisors were thinking about the president’s re-election bid and noticed a curious commonality among incumbent presidents who didn’t get re-elected: they all faced challengers from within their own party.
Five U.S. presidents since 1900 have lost their bids for a second term. William Taft lost to Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover lost to Franklin Roosevelt, Gerald Ford lost to Jimmy Carter, Jimmy Carter lost to Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush lost to Bill Clinton. While each election is determined by unique factors, all five of these failed incumbents dealt with internal party fights or serious primary challenges.
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A series of economic struggles that have grown increasingly worse this year will likely have a significant impact on the holiday season, many economic experts predict.
After President Joe Biden gave remarks from the White House this week, one reporter called out, “Will Christmas presents arrive on time, sir?” The president did not respond to that question or the flurry of others as he walked away from the podium.
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State Department evacuation flights out of Afghanistan will resume by the end of the year, a senior State Department official told The Wall Street Journal.
The operation to retrieve U.S. citizens and Afghan allies left behind will require coordination with the Taliban and other governments, the official told The Wall Street Journal. Kabul’s international airport remains closed to regular passenger travel since the U.S. ended its first evacuation attempt on Aug. 31.
U.S. citizens, U.S. legal permanent residents and immediate family members will receive priority treatment in securing seats on evacuation flights, the official said. The State Department is hoping to eventually have several aircraft leave the country each week.
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When 13 U.S. service members were killed by suicide bombers as American citizens were abandoned in Afghanistan last August—in perhaps the most ill planned military operation since our efforts in Somalia which resulted in naked U.S. servicemen being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu—it should have given us a clue about the Biden Administration’s priorities. Much as the Somalian disaster led to a massive influx of Somali immigrants, which is changing the makeup of the Midwest, we can soon expect a surge in Afghan immigration.
In retaliation for the Kabul airport bombings, the United States conducted a drone strike on what the world was told were ISIS-K members. When confronted about the irregularities of the operation, General Mark Milley described the air attack as a “righteous strike.” We later learned this “righteous strike” killed an innocent aid worker and nine members of his family. No one has been held accountable for this tragic political slaughter.
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What was the purpose for the insane opposition of the Left between 2017 and 2021? To usher in a planned nihilism, an incompetent chaos, a honed anarchy to wreck the country in less than a year?
No sooner had Donald Trump entered office than scores of House Democrats filed motions for impeachment, apparently for thought crimes that he might, some day, in theory, could possibly commit.
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The U.S. will provide humanitarian aid to Afghanistan but won’t recognize the Taliban as the country’s leaders, the Associated Press reported on Sunday.
U.S. and Taliban officials met for the first time since American forces left the county in August in Doha, Qatar, according to the Associated Press. U.S. officials said they would provide aid to Afghanistan, which faces an economic disaster, at the meeting’s conclusion.
U.S. officials said the leaders “discussed the United States’ provision of robust humanitarian assistance, directly to the Afghan people,” the AP reported. The aid was promised after officials agreed it didn’t mean the U.S. would officially recognize the Taliban as Afghanistan’s government.
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An Afghan father and ally to American military operations in the country sued the U.S. in an effort to reunite with his two sons who are in hiding in Afghanistan, the Associated Press reported on Thursday.
Mohammad decided to request asylum in the U.S. after the Taliban sent a death threat to his home in Afghanistan where his wife and two sons were in 2019, according to the AP. He petitioned for visas for his wife and children before she died of a heart attack in 2020, forcing his sons to go into hiding with their grandmother and uncle.
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Almost two months after the Taliban seized control of the nation of Afghanistan, dozens of American students and their relatives remain stuck in the nation that is now controlled by enemy forces, and with no more American military forces remaining, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The majority of the students are from the Sacramento area of California. The Times’ Justin Ray says that his investigations have led him to believe that there are still “dozens” of families still trapped in Afghanistan, with 38 students among them. The students are all from the San Juan Unified School District.
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Former President Donald Trump says he’s not concerned by the prospect of his former advisers testifying before the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riots.
Lawmakers, Trump argued, should instead investigate the “insurrection” that changed last year’s election rules and committee chairman Bennie Thompson’s ties to a black separatist group whose members killed cops decades ago.
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