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The Taliban are expected to announce a new government in Afghanistan within hours, as chaos in the country deepened and aid experts warned of imminent economic collapse.

More than two weeks after the Islamist militia seized control, sources told Agence-France Presse that the cabinet could be presented after morning prayers on Friday and Ahmadullah Muttaqi, a Taliban official, said on social media that a ceremony was being prepared at the presidential palace in Kabul.

The private broadcaster Tolo said an announcement was imminent. The movements supreme leader, Haibatullah Akhundzada, is expected to have ultimate power over a new governing council, with a president below him, Taliban officials have said.

The Islamist militants governed Afghanistan through an unelected leadership council, brutally enforcing a radical form of sharia law, from 1996 until 2001, when they were ousted by US-led forces. Since their return, they have promised a softer brand of rule.

However, the US, the EU and others have cast doubt on the groups assurances, saying formal recognition of the new government and any economic aid that would follow will depend on the Talibans actions in power.

Were not going to take them at their word, were going to take them at their deeds, the US undersecretary of state, Victoria Nuland, said. The EU has said the new rulers will not be recognised until they form an inclusive government, respect human rights and provide unfettered access for aid workers.

Haibatullah, a religious scholar from Kandahar whose son was a suicide bomber, is expected to play a theocratic role similar to that played by Irans supreme leader. Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a co-founder and deputy leader of the movement who was imprisoned in Pakistan, is likely to be appointed head of government.

Other Taliban officials expected to hold senior positions include Sirajuddin Haqqani, another deputy leader, and Mohammad Yaqoob, the son of the Talibans founder Mullah Muhammad Omar, who died in 2013.

The new government will face enormous challenges. The UN has warned of a looming humanitarian catastrophe across the country of 40 million people amid a severe drought, growing food insecurity and the upheavals of a 20-year war that forced thousands of families to flee their homes.

Mary-Ellen McGroarty, the World Food Programmes country director in Afghanistan, told Reuters: In the current context there are no national safety nets Since 15 August when the Taliban took over, we have seen the crisis accelerate and magnify with the imminent economic collapse that is coming this countrys way.

The situation that we have unfolding at the moment is absolutely horrendous and could morph into just a humanitarian catastrophe, she said, adding that since the Taliban takeover civil servants salaries were not being paid, the currency had depreciated, and banks have limited weekly withdrawals to $200.

Food stocks distributed by the UN are likely to run out for much of the country by the end of September, the organisations humanitarian coordinator for Afghanistan has said, with shortages of food and other necessities already widely reported.

Hours-long queues have formed outside banks and prices in Kabuls bazaars have soared. In one spot of brighter news, however, Western Union said on Thursday that it was restarting money transfer services to the country; many Afghans rely on remittances from relatives abroad to survive.

Afghanistan desperately needs money, but despite assurances from the new Taliban-appointed central bank head, the Taliban are unlikely to get swift access to roughly $10bn (7.25bn) in assets mostly held abroad by the Afghan central bank.

In a sign of where Afghanistan may now turn for international assistance, Zabiullah Mujahid, an official spokesman for the new regime, told the Italian newspaper la Repubblica that China was our main partner and represents a fundamental and extraordinary opportunity for us as the Chinese government is ready to invest and rebuild our country.

Mujahid said the Taliban care a lot about the one belt, one road project. We own rich copper mines, which, thanks to the Chinese, will be modernised. Finally, China represents our ticket to the markets around the world.

Asked about the Talibans relationship with Russia, he said relations with Moscow were mainly political and economic. Russia continues to mediate for us and with us to create the conditions for an international peace.

The Taliban have promised to allow safe passage out of the country for any foreigners or Afghans left behind by the massive airlift that ended with the withdrawal of the last US troops on Monday, but Kabul airport remained closed on Thursday.

Domestic flights from the airport, which will be vital for humanitarian operations, would resume on Friday, Al Jazeera reported, adding that while a Qatari technical team was assessing damage, the return of international air traffic that would allow further evacuations would take some time.

Meanwhile, Taliban forces and fighters loyal to the resistance leader Ahmad Massoud continued to fight the Panjshir valley north of Kabul, with each side claiming it had inflicted heavy casualties.

A Taliban spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, said Taliban fighters had entered Panjshir and taken control of some territory. The National Resistance Front of Afghanistan rebel grouping, however, said it had full control of all passes and entrances and had driven back all incursions.

With Reuters and AFP

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Afghanistan: Taliban expected to announce new government - The Guardian

The most urgent question in the world for the past 20 months has been: Whats the best way to stop the spread of the coronavirus? But its a frustrating question to answer definitively, since even the most logical solutions have been shrouded in what Ive called the fog of pandemic.

For example, covering your nose and mouth seems like a sensible way to block virus particles that come out of the mouth and go into the nose. But designing a perfect masking study is hard when state-by-state behavior differs from official masking policies, and when everybodys wearing a different material over their face. Limiting indoor dining seems like it would help contain a virus that spreads via indoor talking, but we dont have enough high-quality data to know for sure whether it makes a huge difference. Targeted shutdowns seem likely to prevent social mixing in the short term, but designing an experiment that proves their long-term effectiveness is devilishly difficult.

By contrast, the trials that proved the effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccines used the gold standard of scientific research, by randomly assigning people to treatment and control groups and then carefully measuring the effect of the medical intervention. If only we had something almost like this for, say, masking: a careful, randomized, real-world experiment on the effect of masks.

Well, now we have it. This week, a group of scientists from Yale, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and other institutions published the final results of a randomized study of community-wide masking behavior in Bangladesh. The study encompassed roughly 350,000 people in 600 villages. The researchers randomly selected certain villages for an intervention that included giving out free masks, paying villagers to remind people to cover their face, and having village leaders and religious figures such as imams emphasize the importance of masks. The researchers also paid villagers to count properly worn masks in public places, including markets and mosques. To gather data on coronavirus transmission, the team asked about symptoms and conducted blood tests to determine who came down with COVID-19 over the course of the study.

Read: Vaccines are great. Masks make them even better.

Their conclusion? Masks work, period. Surgical masks are particularly effective at preventing coronavirus transmission. And community-wide mask wearing is excellent at protecting older people, who are at much higher risk of severe illness from COVID-19.

To some, this conclusion might sound like the work of liberal conspiracists to permanently swaddle our faces in tyrannical cloth. To others, it might sound like very old news. After all, you might think, if people were masking successfully during the 1918 flu pandemic, why do we need a 2021 study to prove the benefits of the practice? But the Bangladesh study is still perhaps the most important research done during the pandemic outside of the vaccine clinical trials, because it gives us randomized-trial data to bolster the flimsier assumptions and conclusions of observational research. We finally have a sense of not just whether masks work but how much universal masking could reduce transmission. The answer is: quite a lot.

The randomly assigned pro-masking policy reduced the number of confirmed, symptomatic COVID-19 cases in the intervention group by nearly 10 percent, relative to the control group. That might not sound like a huge effect. But the intervention increased masking from 14 percent to only 43 percent; 100 percent masking would have likely had a much larger effect.

Even more impressively, the villages that implemented pro-masking policies saw a 34 percent decline in COVID-19 among seniors, for whom the disease is most deadly. This could be because older villagers are more likely to properly wear masks, or because they are more likely to have symptomatic infections if they come into contact with the coronavirus.

The study also found clear evidence that surgical masks are better at reducing the spread of symptomatic COVID-19 than cloth masks. In focus groups, Bangladeshi participants said they preferred cloth masks because they seemed to be more durable. But the researchers found that, on the one hand, surgical masks were more efficient, even after being washed 10 times with soap and water. On the other hand, we found only mixed evidence about cloth masks, Jason Abaluck, a co-author of the study and a professor at Yale, told me. People wearing cloth masks had fewer symptoms, such as coughs, than the control group, which suggests some effect. But cloth-mask wearers didnt have significantly fewer coronavirus antibodies as determined by blood tests. We cannot reject that [cloth masks] have zero or only a small impact on symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infections, Abaluck wrote along with Mushfiq Mobarak of Yale, Laura Kwong of UC Berkeley, Stephen Luby and Ashley Styczynski of Stanford, and other researchers.

Creating a social norm is hard work. The pro-masking intervention in this study was aggressive, extensive, and expensive. In all, the researchers distributed more than 1 million masks. Free distribution of masks was important. But of all the interventions, mask promotionthat is, paying individuals to remind people on the street to cover their faceseemed to have the biggest effect. Reminders from people in the village almost acted as booster shots for masking, Abaluck told me. The research team is currently working on scaling up its intervention in countries including Pakistan, India, and Nepal.

Read: Masks are back, maybe for the long term

Subtler efforts to change behavior failed to do much in the Bangladeshi study. Texting reminders made little difference. Talking about altruism and protecting the community made little difference. Offering cash rewards made little difference. Asking people to post pro-mask signs or to verbally commit to wearing masks in the future made little difference. The behavioral nudges failed to nudge behavior.

People with strong opinions about masks should be cautious about how they incorporate this study into their advocacy. On the debate over masking in primary schools, this study doesnt have much to directly offer, since the surveillance staff recorded mask-wearing behavior only among people who looked older than 18. On the debate about masking in specific places such as movie theaters and crowded arenas, this study also doesnt directly apply. Our study cant distinguish between outdoor and indoor transmission, Abaluck said. Given other research, its likely that masks are most effective in indoor, unventilated spaces. But our study doesnt tell us explicitly whether, say, parks or restaurants or schools are likely places for transmission.

So where does this leave us? In the past year and a half, masking in the United States has gone from being a point of confusion to a partisan flash point. Republicans who have discovered a special enemy in the specter of masking often point back to the morass of conflicting information from the beginning of the pandemic. Yes, Anthony Fauci infamously advised against masking. Yes, the World Health Organization refused to endorse it for months.

But that was a different time. Wisely navigating a pandemic requires that we marry a healthy skepticism with a willingness to change our minds when presented with high-quality evidence. Based on the results of this study and other observational research, we should go forward with a more confident thesis about face coverings: Community-wide usage of surgical masks clearly reduces the spread of the coronavirus, especially in the unventilated indoor environments where it seems to spread most efficiently.

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The Masks Were Working All Along - The Atlantic

September 19-25, 2021 is Child Passenger Safety (CPS) Week and National Seat Check Saturday is occurring September 25, 2021. The week is designed to bring awareness to the importance of properly restraining children in motor vehicles. The goal is to ensure children are secured properly in appropriate seats every trip, every time. Find a local seat check event by downloading the attachment on this page.

During Child Passenger Safety Week, local communities will have certified Child Passenger Safety Technicians on hand to provide free education on how to use car seats and help educate families about choosing the right car seat for their child, installing that seat correctly in their vehicle and using that seat correctly every time.

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA),

Findalistoflocalfittingstations

Below are some recommendations to keep in mind when choosing the safest car seat.

Resources

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Child Passenger Safety Week - Ohio Department of Health

DOHA, Sept 1 (Reuters) - Afghan television anchor Beheshta Arghand gathered her breath and adjusted her headscarf to look more like a traditional close-fitting hijab when a Taliban official showed up, uninvited, in her studio, asking to be interviewed.

It was only two days after the Islamist group took over Kabul. She looked down at her body to be sure that no other parts were showing and started firing her questions.

Her live interview made headlines around the world as she became the first Afghan female journalist to quiz a member of the hardline group.

"(Luckily) I always wear long clothes in the studio because we have different people with different minds," the 23-year-old told Reuters in Doha, where she has lived since fleeing Afghanistan on Aug. 24 with the help of Nobel Prize winner Malala Yousafzai.

"Women - Taliban they don't accept. When a group of people don't accept you as a human, they have some picture in their mind of you, it's very difficult," she said.

The interview, part of a broader Taliban media campaign, aimed to show a more moderate face as they promised they would respect women's rights and include other Afghan factions in a power-sharing deal.

Arghand had already been on set in the studio when the Taliban official arrived.

"I saw that they came (to the television station). I was shocked, I lost my control ... I said to myself that maybe they came to ask why did I come to the studio," she added.

It was about a week before her life turned into a nightmare, she said.

Afghan news anchor Beheshta Arghand speaks to her brother at a temporary residence compound in Doha, Qatar, September 1, 2021. REUTERS/Hamad I Mohammed

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She said the Taliban ordered her employer Tolo News to enforce that all women should wear a hijab - closely covering their heads but leaving the face uncovered - and subsequently suspended female anchors in other stations.

She said the Islamist group also asked local media to stop talking about their takeover and their rule.

"When you can't (even) ask easy questions, how can you be a journalist," Arghand said.

Many of her colleagues had already left the country by then despite Taliban assurances that the freedom of the media was improving every day and that women would have access to education and work.

She was soon to follow, along with her mother, sisters and brothers. They joined the tens of thousands of foreigners and Afghan nationals who took part in the chaotic U.S.-led evacuation.

"I called Malala and asked her if she can do something for me," she said. She said Yousafzai, who she had interviewed, helped to get her on Qatar's list of evacuees.

Yousafzai, who has spoken of her concern for the safety of women and girls in particular after the take-over, survived being shot by a Pakistani Taliban gunman in 2012, after she was targeted for her campaign against its efforts then to deny women education.

Looking back, Arghand said she realised how much she loved her country and a profession she chose over the objections of her family.

"When I sat in the airplane, I told myself that now you don't have anything," she said.

Writing by Aziz El Yaakoubi;Editing by Alison Williams

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Afghan news anchor made history, then had to leave it behind - Reuters

Russia's media watchdog has blocked six providers of virtual proxy networks (VPNs), which people can use to circumvent government restrictions on the Internet.

The move, announced on September 3, comes as Russian authorities tighten control of the Internet, blocking access to dozens of websites ahead of parliamentary elections this month.

The Russian watchdog, Roskomnadzor, justified the new restrictions by saying that allowing access to blocked content "created conditions for illegal activities, including those related to the distribution of drugs, child pornography, extremism, and suicidal tendencies."

The targeted VPN providers, including the widely used Nord VPN and Express VPN, are among Russia's most popular, but several other companies offer similar services.

The Russian government in recent years has ramped up control over the Internet under the guise of fighting extremism and protecting minors.

Critics have denounced official oversight of the web as censorship aimed at silencing dissent.

The authorities have also stepped up repression of opposition lawmakers and activists ahead of Russia's nationwide legislative elections, which are scheduled for September 17-19, with nearly all vocal Kremlin critics barred from running.

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Russia Blocks Access To Six VPN Providers Ahead Of Elections - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty