Scores of Westerners, including Americans, fly out of Kabul

 KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Some 200 foreigners, including Americans, left Afghanistan on a commercial flight out of Kabul on Thursday, the first such large-scale departure since U.S. and other forces completed their frantic withdrawal over a week ago.

The Qatar Airways flight to Doha marked a breakthrough in the bumpy coordination between the U.S. and Afghanistan’s new Taliban rulers. A dayslong standoff over charter planes at another airport has left dozens of passengers stranded.

A senior U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to talk to the media, provided the number of Westerners on the Qatar flight and said two senior Taliban officials helped facilitate the departure — the new foreign minister and deputy prime minister.

Americans, U.S. green card holders and other nationalities, including Germans, Hungarians and Canadians, were aboard, the official said.

Qatari envoy Mutlaq bin Majed al-Qahtani said another 200 passengers will leave Afghanistan on Friday. A diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity, also because he was not authorized to speak to the media, said foreigners, including Americans, will depart in the next couple of days.

It was not immediately clear how many Americans were on board Thursday and how many were still in Afghanistan. White House press secretary Jen Psaki said before the flight that the U.S. believed roughly 100 American citizens remained in the country.

Many thousands of Afghans remain desperate to get out, afraid of what Taliban rule might hold. The Taliban have repeatedly said foreigners and Afghans with proper travel documents could leave. But their assurances have been meet with skepticism, even with the departure of the Qatar flight.

U.S. lawmakers, veterans groups and others are pressing the Biden administration to ensure that former Afghan military interpreters and others who could be in danger of Taliban reprisals for working with the Americans are allowed to leave.

As Taliban authorities patrolled the tarmac on Thursday, passengers presented their documents for inspection and dogs sniffed luggage laid out on the ground. Some veteran airport employees had returned to their jobs after fleeing during the harrowing chaos of the U.S.-led airlift.

Irfan Popalzai, 12, boarded the flight with his mother and five brothers and sisters. He said his family lives in Maryland.

“I am an Afghan, but you know I am from America and I am so excited” to leave, he said.

Before the flight took off, Qatari officials gathered on the tarmac to announce the airport was ready for the resumption of international commercial flights after days of repairs.

Extensive damage in the frenzied final days of the U.S. airlift that evacuated over 100,000 people had raised questions about how soon regular commercial service could resume. Experts from Qatar and Turkey have been racing to restore operations.

“I can clearly say that this is a historic day in the history of Afghanistan as Kabul airport is now operational,” al-Qahtani said.

“Call it what you want, a charter or a commercial flight, everyone has tickets and boarding passes,” he added. “Hopefully, life is becoming normal in Afghanistan.”

The flight was the first to take off from the Kabul airport since American forces left the country at the end of August. The accompanying scenes of chaos, including Afghans plunging to their deaths from the sides of military aircraft on takeoff and a suicide bombing that killed 169 Afghans and 13 U.S. service members, came to define the end of America’s two-decade war.

Al-Qahtani said the airport’s radar is now active and covering some 70 miles (112 kilometers) after U.S. forces left it inoperable. Authorities coordinated with Pakistan as they tried to fix control over the airspace, he added. Flights are restricted to daytime hours.

The airport is also no longer the Hamid Karzai International Airport, but rather simply Kabul International Airport, with the name of the country’s former president removed. Several Taliban white flags flew from the terminal, which was emblazoned “The Islamic Emirate seeks peaceful and positive relations with the world.”

Hundreds of other Afghans who say they are at risk for helping the Americans have gathered for more than a week in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif, waiting for permission to board chartered evacuation flights. Many of them are believed not to have the necessary travel documents.

Despite skepticism around the world, the Taliban have promised that Afghans who worked for the Americans will not be targeted.

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US group writes to PM over Troubles legacy plan

 A group of prominent Irish Americans have said they will not support the UK government’s Troubles legacy proposals.

In July, the government unveiled plans which would see an end to Troubles-related prosecutions.

Boris Johnson said it would allow Northern Ireland to “draw a line under the Troubles”.

The Ad Hoc Committee to Protect the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) said it believed the proposal would not get the approval of the Biden administration.

The US group said it had studied the government proposals with “great care” and said they could become an “issue of contention” between the US and UK governments.

“We have strong reason to believe this proposal will not be met with approval in Washington by either Congress or the Biden administration,” they said.

“It will be a further source of disagreement with US political leaders who have already raised serious concerns about your government’s recent approach to implementation of the Northern Ireland Protocol.”

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Northern Ireland’s executive parties, victims’ groups and the Irish government have all expressed opposition to the proposals, with some labelling them as a “de-facto amnesty”.

The proposals, announced by Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis, included provisions for a statute of limitations, a legal mechanism which would bar future prosecutions.

This would apply to former members of the security forces and to former paramilitaries.

The Ad Hoc Committee to Protect the GFA was formed more than two years ago by leading political leaders and diplomats who have a history of supporting the peace process in Northern Ireland.

The group includes five former US ambassadors, several former US special envoys to Northern Ireland as well as leaders of Irish American organisations.

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Jerome Boateng: German football star on trial over assault charge

 German footballer Jerome Boateng has appeared in court in Munich over allegations he assaulted his ex-girlfriend in 2018.

The defender is accused of injuring the mother of his twin daughters, named as Sherin S, during a dispute on holiday.

Prosecutors have accused the former Bayern Munich defender and 2014 World Cup winner of wilful bodily harm.

Mr Boateng, 33, has denied the allegations. If convicted, he could be fined or jailed for up to five years.

Wearing a dark blue suit, Mr Boateng was escorted by bodyguards as arrived in court with his lawyer Kai Walden on Thursday morning.

The court will hear testimony from four witnesses, German TV channel RTL reported. A verdict could be delivered on Thursday, the only scheduled day of proceedings.

The hearing was due to take place in December but was postponed because a witness was unable to appear.

A prominent name in the world of football and on social media, Boateng has had a decorated career for club and country.

image captionBoateng moved to Lyon on a tree transfer after 10 years at Bayern

He won 22 trophies at Bayern, including the Champions League twice and the Bundesliga nine times and moved to French Ligue 1 team Lyon on a free transfer in the summer after his contract at Bayern expired.

In February Mr Boateng’s ex-girlfriend, 25-year-old model Kasia Lenhardt, was found dead after taking her own life at a flat in Berlin.

Berlin police found her body in February while Mr Boateng was away playing for Bayern at the Club World Cup in Qatar. Reports in Germany said he had recently ended their relationship.

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Elizabeth Holmes drawn as villain, underdog as trial begins

 SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) — Prosecutors and defense attorneys sketched dueling portraits of fallen Silicon Valley star Elizabeth Holmes as her trial got underway Wednesday, alternatively describing her as a greedy villain who faked her way to the top and as a passionate underdog whose spent years trying to shake up the health care industry.

The two sides are now expected to spend the next three months trying to sway a 12-person jury impaneled to hearing the evidence in a case airing allegations that Holmes used her startup, Theranos, as a scheme to realize her dreams of becoming rich and as famous as one of her role models, late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.

Once hailed as a billionaire on paper, Holmes is now facing a sentence of up to 20 years if convicted of the felony charges.

Holmes’ rise and fall has already been the subject of documentaries, books and podcasts, feeding the fervor that has built up around a trial that has been delayed twice since she was indicted nearly three years ago. With roughly only 75 spots available for the media and general public to observe the proceedings, people began to line up outside the San Jose, California, courthouse before 5 a.m. Wednesday.

After the jury was seated and U.S. District Judge Edward Davila gave his preliminary instructions, federal prosecutor Robert Leach wasted little time vilifying Holmes.

He cast Holmes in a dark light, depicting her as a conniving entrepreneur who duped investors, customers and patients for years, even though she knew her startup, Theranos, was nearly bankrupt and its much-hyped blood-testing technology was a flop.

“This case is about fraud, about lying and cheating to get money,” Leach said during his roughly 45-minute opening statement.

He said the evidence would show that Theranos was already in deep trouble as far back as 2009, about six years after Holmes founded the Palo Alto, California, company. At that point, Leach said, Holmes resorted to a pattern of lying and hyperbole in an effort to fool major media outlets, wealthy investors such as media mogul Rupert Murdoch, well-connected Theranos board members such as former U.S. Secretaries of State George Shultz and Henry Kissinger, and customers such as Walgreens.

Some of the most damning evidence may be presented by a former top finance officer at Theranos who will testify that the company only had $650,000 in revenue from 2011 through 2014, according to Leach. Yet Holmes was telling investors and other people that Theranos would generate $140 million in revenue in 2014, Leach said.

Holmes, 37, is also accused of promising that Theranos would be able to quickly test small vials of blood in a small company-designed machine named after the famed inventor Thomas Edison. Leach said the samples were actually sent out to outside parties for testing using standard-issue machines he described as “big” and “clunky.”

Theranos eventually failed in 2018, a few years after a series of explosive stories in The Wall Street Journal exposed serious flaws in its technology and spurred regulatory investigations that shut down the testing.

The fraud committed by Holmes “is a fraud on Main Street and it’s a fraud in Silicon Valley,” Leach told the jury.

Holmes’ defense team countered with a more heroic narrative describing her as a tireless worker who poured more than 15 years of her life in pursuit of a faster, cheaper and less invasive way to test blood samples and screen for disease.

Defense attorney Lance Wade, argued that Holmes was simply trying to wrest control of the blood-testing technology market from two dominant laboratories, Quest Diagnostics and Labcorp. “She did her best day in and day out to make Theranos successful,” Wade said of Holmes as he began a roughly 90-minute presentation.

Although she didn’t succeed, Wade insisted that Holmes never stopped believing she was on the verge of a breakthrough that would realize her ambitions. Many investors thought she would too, one of the reasons that Theranos once was valued at $9 billion —- with half that amount belonging to Holmes.

“Failure is not a crime,” Wade said. “Trying your hardest is not a crime. A failed business does not make a CEO a criminal.”

In court documents unsealed just before the trial started, Holmes’ lawyers also disclosed that she may take the witness stand to assert some of her statements and actions while running Theranos were the result of “intimate partner abuse” inflicted by the company’s chief operating officer and her secret lover, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani.

Without going into specifics, Wade told the jury that she believed she was bringing in “the best businessman she knew” when she hired Balwani but now realizes it was one of her biggest mistakes.

“You will learn that Mr. Balwani did not take well to people who disagreed with him,” Wade said while asserting Balwani’s tempestuous behavior caused many Theranos employees to leave the company.

Balwani also was responsible for overseeing the Theranos lab that the government alleges provided misleading results of blood tests that endangered some people’s lives, Wade noted.

“If what government is trying to show is that Theranos’ clinical lab was not well run from 2013 to 2016, we will likely agree with what they have to say,” Wade said. “Poor operations in the lab was one of Theranos’ biggest failures, but it wasn’t fraud.”

Balwani faces multiple fraud charges in a separate trial scheduled to begin next year. His attorney has denied Holmes’ allegations.

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Afghanistan: Protesters defy Taliban intimidation

 Protesters have again taken to the streets in several parts of Afghanistan, defying Taliban pressure to stay at home.

Dozens of demonstrators gathered near the Pakistan embassy in Kabul and Taliban gunmen opened fire to disperse them, protesters said.

More demonstrations were reported in Parwan and Nimruz provinces.

Photos have also emerged showing injuries inflicted on two journalists who covered protests on Wednesday.

They are reported to have been badly beaten after being arrested by the Taliban in Kabul.

image captionThe two journalists say they were badly beaten in Taliban custody

Photographer Nematullah Naqdi spoke to the AFP news agency.

“One of the Taliban put his foot on my head, crushed my face against the concrete. They kicked me in the head… I thought they were going to kill me.”

Naqdi was covering a protest by women in front of a police station with his colleague at the local Etilaat Roz newspaper, Taqi Darybai.

The Taliban have banned protests unless authorised by the justice ministry.

In the latest demonstration, protesters chanting “we want freedom” were dispersed outside the Pakistan embassy.

Taliban gunfire also rang out at a protest in Parwan, Aamaj news reports. Marchers shouted: “No-one can silence our voice by force of arms, death to Pakistan and the United States.”

Another protest by women took place in Kapisa province, north-east of Kabul, local reports say. Sources told Aamaj news that several women were arrested.

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Dozens of women in Kabul and the north-eastern province of Badakhshan protested on Wednesday against the formation of an all-male interim Taliban government.

Some women, calling for the inclusion of female ministers in the government, were reportedly beaten before the demonstrations were broken up.

On Tuesday, three people were killed during a demonstration in the western city of Herat. The Taliban have denied that they were behind the violence.

Separately, there are reports that the internet has been taken down in parts of Kabul.

Afghanistan journalist Bilal Sawary tweeted that several sources in the telecom sector had confirmed to him that the Taliban had ordered mobile phone internet coverage to be turned off temporarily in several districts.

Separately, social media footage has emerged from the Panjshir valley said to show the desecration of the mausoleum of the well-known anti-Taliban alliance leader, Ahmed Shah Massoud.

The Taliban claimed on Tuesday to have taken the valley – the last region of Afghanistan holding out against their rule – from the Afghanistan National Resistance Front. NRF, led by Ahmed Shah Massoud’s son, said they would continue to fight.

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Covid-19 vaccines in South Africa: Free football tickets for fans with jabs

 South African football fans who are vaccinated can get free entry to watch the national team play Ethiopia in a World Cup qualifier next month, the country’s football association says.

Its head Danny Jordaan said the deal would apply to half the tickets.

It is subject to an agreement with the government and depends on how many fans show up, according to the News24 site.

The government is concerned about growing anti-vaccine sentiment in the country.

Only 10 million people have been inoculated against Covid-19, and the government says this needs to reach 40 million for population immunity.

After a slow start to its vaccine roll-out, South Africa does now have enough doses for any adult who wants a jab.

More than 80,000 people have died with Covid-19 in South Africa, more than any other country on the continent.

Local media quotes Mr Jordaan alluding to the mass crowds pictured at the Euro 2020 matches in June and July.

“When you look at what happens in Europe, why is it that Euro finals can have over 60,000 people in the stadium, can have fans celebrating before, during and after the match?”

Mr Jordan had a clear message for fans who don’t want the vaccine, according to News24.

“It’s very clear that, if you’re unvaccinated, you can’t come to the stadium.”

“We want you to come to the stadium. We don’t want you to go to the hospital.”

The country’s Deputy President David Mabuza said the sports and arts industry needed audiences to function properly and “contribute meaningfully to the economy”.

He said the goal of the campaign was to encourage more people to get jabbed so they can attend large-scale events.

It is not yet clear which other events will be included in the initiative.

Anti-vaccine rumours and conspiracies have been spreading in South Africa, including false theories that the Covid-19 vaccine is a Western plot to reduce Africa’s population size.

The country’s top judge Chief Justice Mogoeng was criticised after a video surfaced showing him linking vaccines to a “satanic agenda”

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