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KABUL, Afghanistan In his first sit-down interview with a Western media outlet since the Taliban took full control of Afghanistan, one of the groups leaders on Wednesday offered a portrait of a group intent on rebuilding a country shattered by decades of war.

We want to build the future, and forget what happened in the past, the spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, said in an interview with The New York Times. He rejected widespread fears that the Taliban are already exacting vengeance on those who opposed them and want to reimpose the harsh controls on women that made them notorious when they ruled the country 20 years ago.

The interview came just a day after Mr. Mujahid warned the women of Afghanistan that it might be safest for them to remain home until more rank-and-file Taliban fighters have been trained in how not to mistreat them.

It was a notable acknowledgment of the many changes to Afghan society that greeted the Taliban when they re-entered a city they had not controlled for two decades.

Many of those changes involve women. Not only have they been free to leave home unaccompanied dressed as they see fit they have also returned to school and jobs, and their images can be seen on everything from billboards to TV screens.

On Wednesday, Mr. Mujahid suggested that longer-term, women would be free to resume their daily routines.

Concerns that the Taliban would once again force them to stay in their homes or cover their faces are baseless, he said. He added that the requirement they be accompanied by a male guardian, known as a mahram, was misunderstood. It applies only to journeys of three days or longer, he said.

If they go to school, the office, university, or the hospital, they dont need a mahram, said Mr. Mujahid, who also serves as the Talibans chief spokesman.

He also offered assurances to Afghans trying to leave the country, saying contrary to news reports based on his news conference on Tuesday, including in The Times that those with valid travel documents would not be prevented from entering the airport.

We said that people who dont have proper documents arent allowed to go, Mr. Mujahid said. They need passports and visas for the countries theyre going to, and then they can leave by air. If their documents are valid, then were not going to ask what they were doing before.

He also denied allegations that the Taliban have been searching for former interpreters and others who worked for the American military, and claimed that they would be safe in their own country. And he expressed frustration at the Western evacuation efforts.

They shouldnt interfere in our country and take out our human resources: doctors, professors and other people we need here, Mr. Mujahid said. In America, they might become dishwashers or cooks. Its inhuman.

For the past decade, Mr. Mujahid had been a key link between the militants and the news media, but remained faceless. On Wednesday, he granted the interview at the Ministry of Information and Culture as Taliban leaders and other Afghan power brokers were engaging in protracted discussions about the future shape of the country.

Who are the Taliban? The Taliban arose in 1994 amid the turmoil that came after the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan in 1989. They used brutal public punishments, including floggings, amputations and mass executions, to enforce their rules. Heres more on their origin story and their record as rulers.

Who are the Taliban leaders? These arethe top leaders of the Taliban, men who have spent years on the run, in hiding, in jail and dodging American drones. Little is known about them or how they plan to govern, including whether they will be as tolerant as they claim to be.

What happens to the women of Afghanistan? The last time the Taliban were in power, they barred women and girls from taking most jobs or going to school. Afghan women have made many gainssince the Taliban were toppled, but now they fear that ground may be lost. Taliban officials are trying to reassure women that things will be different, but there are signs that, at least in some areas, they have begun to reimpose the old order.

Mr. Mujahid is seen as likely to be the future minister of information and culture. Fluent in both Pashto and Dari, the countrys principal languages, Mr. Mujahid, 43, described himself as a native of Paktia Province and a graduate in Islamic jurisprudence from the well-known Darul Uloom Haqqania madrasa in Pakistan.

Despite the tense situation at the airport on Wednesday, where thousands of people were still crowded around most entrance gates, Mr. Mujahid expressed hope that the Taliban would build good relations with the international community, pointing out areas of cooperation around counterterrorism, opium eradication and the reduction of refugees to the West.

Although he sought to convey a much more tolerant image of the Taliban, Mr. Mujahid did confirm one report: Music will not be allowed in public.

Music is forbidden in Islam, he said, but were hoping that we can persuade people not to do such things, instead of pressuring them.

Excerpt from:
Taliban Spokesman, in Interview, Says, 'We Want to Build the Future' - The New York Times

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, gives an opening statement during a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing to discuss the on-going federal response to COVID-19, at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., May 11, 2021.

Greg Nash | Pool | Reuters

White House chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci said Monday night he hopes the U.S. will have some control over Covid-19 by the spring.

"If we can get through this winter and get the majority, the overwhelming majority of people who have not been vaccinated vaccinated, I hope we can start to get some good control in the spring of 2022," Fauci said during an interview on CNN's "Anderson Cooper 360."

Many scientists now predict that Covid will continue circulating around the world for the foreseeable future, requiring nations to reinstitute public health measures on an ad hoc basis.

U.S. health officials maintain that vaccinations are the nation's best hope to dramatically reduce the number of new cases and bring an end to the pandemic. As of Monday, more than 171 million Americans, or 51.5% of the total U.S. population, are fully vaccinated, according to data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"As we get into the spring, we could start getting back to a degree of normality, namely resuming the things that we were hoping we could do, restaurants, theaters, that kind of thing," Fauci told CNN.

That prediction comes with a big caveat, he said, noting that U.S. officials originally thought Covid would be fairly well contained by the Fourth of July before the delta variant emerged and derailed those projections.

"If we keep lingering without getting those people vaccinated that should be vaccinated, this thing could linger on, leading to the development of another variant which could complicate things," he said.

On Monday, the Food and Drug Administration granted full approval toPfizerandBioNTech's Covid-19 vaccine, the first in the U.S. to win the coveted designation.

U.S. officials and health experts hope full approval will persuade some unvaccinated Americans that the shots are safe. A survey fromthe Kaiser Family Foundationfound 3 in 10 unvaccinated adults said they would be more likely to get vaccinated if one of the vaccines receives full approval.

In a separate interview Tuesday on NBC's "TODAY," Fauci said there will also be much more "enthusiasm" about mandating the vaccine, spurring a rise in the rate of vaccinations.

Shortly after the FDA granted approval, New York City officials said they would require all 148,000 public school facultyand staffto get their Covid vaccine shots this fall. They had previously said employees could avoid the vaccines if they submitted to regular weekly Covid testing.

The Pentagon said that it will require service members to receive the Pfizer vaccine now that it has received full approval.

Under full approval, the drugmakers can now advertise the vaccine on TV and other media platforms, which may also encourage more vaccinations, Fauci said.

"There'll be a lot more advertisement out there, which you were not allowed to do unless you did get full approval," he said.

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Fauci says he hopes U.S. will have 'some good control' over Covid by spring 2022 - CNBC

Nearly 22 million people watched Britains first national lottery draw in 1994, an event broadcast across the country in a special primetime TV programme fronted by Noel Edmonds.

Schoolchildren would mimic its famous advertising campaign, featuring the finger of fate emerging from the heavens to choose a lucky winner, booming: It could be you.

After 27 years, the novelty and razzmatazz has dulled somewhat. About 60% of UK adults still play but increasingly do so in more quiet, solitary ways, engrossed in one of 21 instant-win games on their phones.

Spending caps allow users of the national lotterys app to splurge up to 350 a week 18,200 a year on captivating casino-style features that end, for the most part, with a different slogan: Better luck next time. The limit is 75 games a day.

This migration, from simple draw-based games to a dizzying array of scratchcards and rapid-fire apps, is at the heart of a growing controversy over the future of the lottery.

This week, interested parties will be finishing off their submissions to an inquiry into the lotterys future, launched by MPs on the digital, culture, media and sport (DCMS) select committee.

Their intervention is already proving controversial: it comes with the Gambling Commission in the midst of a twice-delayed competition process to decide who will run the next national lottery licence, a 10-year contract due to start in 2024.

Camelot, the company owned by the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan a giant Canadian investment fund has won all three licence competitions to date but appears to be at greater risk than ever before of losing the gig.

The incumbent faces stiff competition from three challengers: Czech-owned Sazka Group, media tycoon Richard Desmond and Italian lottery operator Sisal.

With a quartet of complex bids to analyse, the Gambling Commissions interim boss, Andrew Rhodes, wrote to the DCMS select committees chair, Julian Knight, advising him that the MPs had chosen an inopportune moment to launch their probe. The licence competition was governed by strict confidentiality rules, he pointed out, making it difficult for anyone involved to give evidence in public.

Knight responded in the strongest terms, warning that the commissions reluctance to face MPs set a dangerous precedent for democracy.

A rapprochement has since taken place, say sources on both sides of the row, with the commission stressing that it is not refusing to appear, but merely highlighting the difficulty of facing a public grilling about a confidential process.

Nonetheless, the spat underscores the extent to which concern about its direction has brought the national lottery to a crossroads.

At the heart of questions over its future lie hard numbers. Camelot has faced criticism, including from a parliamentary public accounts committee (PAC) report in 2018, that charitable donations have not always risen as fast as profits.

In the first year of the current lottery licence, Camelot booked an after-tax profit of 31.5m after selling 5.45bn of tickets, raising more than 1.5bn for good causes. In the year that so exercised the PAC, 2016-17, Camelots profit was more than twice as high at 70m but it raised only a little more for good causes, about 1.6bn.

Since then, Camelot has rebalanced things somewhat. Profits for the year to March 2021 are expected to reach close to 80m but that comes on the back of record sales of 8.37bn, with good-cause money also hitting an all-time high, of 1.85bn.

What matters most, says Camelot, is that the annual sum raised has increased in absolute terms by 350m, while the cumulative total is already more than 43bn.

Yet theres no denying that the companys profit as a proportion of ticket sales has crept up, from 0.6% to about 1%. This is partly as a result of the appetite for those compulsive instant-win games and scratchcards. Growth in sales of traditional tickets has been weak since 2010, up from 4.1bn to 4.7bn, despite a bump in the price from 1 to 2. Meanwhile, combined sales of scratchcards and online instant-win games have surged from 1.3bn to 3.36bn.

The percentage of the punters stake that goes to good causes is between 28% and 34% for the draws, but just 12% for instant-win and 9% for scratchcards.

The operator says that difference is because a higher proportion of each stake on a scratchcard or instant-win game has to go towards prize money. Unlike a weekly draw, which might make you a millionaire, instant-win products are only attractive to customers if they pay out regularly, even in small sums. More attractive games mean higher sales, and therefore more overall cash for good causes, the company says.

There are other areas of concern about shifting trends in lottery play, however. Instant-win games alone reached sales of 1bn during the pandemic, a source told a national newspaper earlier this year.

This trend has fuelled misgivings about the addiction risk posed by quickfire products, which have more in common with frequently criticised online casino games than they do with a lottery draw.

This is a particular hot topic, coming as it does in the midst of a government review of gambling regulation borne on a wave of public disquiet about addictive products.

The Labour MP Carolyn Harris, who leads a cross-party parliamentary group examining gambling harms, takes a dim view of Camelots fondness for instant-win games.

Theyre one of the worst for enticing young people into gambling, using the premise that its for charity, said Harris.

She points out that, while the minimum age for playing the national lottery was raised to 18 in April this year, before that Camelot allowed 16-year-olds to open an account to play instant-win games, even as online casino firms imposed age gates to block under-18s. This, she said, had sullied the brand of the lottery.

I hope whoever gets it next has more moral integrity than Camelot, she said.

When it comes to encouraging young people to play, theyre no better than any other gambling organisation.

Camelot points out that age limits are set by government and that it applied the 18+ rating earlier than it was required to. A spokesperson said that the inherent risk of problem play associated with national lottery products is very low a fact that is backed up by Gambling Commission and [gamblers charity] GamCare data.

Given the air of secrecy around the licence competition, its difficult to pin down what Camelots challengers would do differently.

In theory, the contenders arent allowed to talk about their plans one reason why the Gambling Commission is wary of public select committee hearings. In practice, theyre not averse to offering a glimpse behind the curtain.

Some have latched on to concern about instant-win games, professing eagerness to move back towards draw-based play, albeit marketed to a broader base of people in more locations, on more occasions.

One figure involved in the bid process asked: Why cant Amazon and Deliveroo sell lottery tickets? Why cant you pick up a lottery ticket in a Costa or a Starbucks? Youre sitting having a coffee, why wouldnt you be able to play the lottery then?

Its about changing the emphasis away from instant-win to make it less like slot machines and more like fun, such as gifting at Christmas.

Others say that Camelot has not invested sufficiently in technology, despite the 250m of capital expenditure it has made during the current licence period.

One bidder has a deal with a technology company that would involve replacing the countertop scratchcard cases and lottery ticket booths that you find in supermarkets and convenience stores.

Instead, shops would have electronic terminals that could recognise a lottery players phone, pinging them when they got within a certain distance of the terminal with a reminder to play.

Its unclear how the Gambling Commission, already under pressure over addiction, will view the appeal of phones that nudge you to gamble, or lottery tickets sold alongside cups of tea and coffee.

Final bids must be in by mid-October, with the winner due to be announced in February next year. The finger of fate awaits.

Continued here:
High rollers ready to gamble on winning control of the UKs lottery - The Guardian

Content recommendation engine Taboola has announced a brand safety partnership with DoubleVerify to better control the media partners are being placed in.

As a result of the launch, Taboolas advertiser partners, including performance marketers, brands and media agencies, will receive access to DoubleVerifys standard brand safety and suitability targeting technology, allowing for control over the quality of where their ads are placed.

Many of todays advertisers require a nuanced approach to brand safety and our reach, coupled with DoubleVerifys ability to offer different tiers of safety and suitability within different categories, is uniquely valuable, said Adam Singolda, chief executive officer and founder, Taboola.

With shifts in how consumers view ads online and the growth of ad spend after last year, advertisers deserve peace of mind that their ads are running alongside the content they prefer. DoubleVerify is an innovator in the realm of advertiser trust, and as we bolster our suite of brand safety offerings, partnering with them was a natural fit.

Settings can be customized by advertisers based on DoubleVerifys ontological expertise and brand safety and suitability controls.

This approach to content classification is touted to allow advertisers to carefully balance brand reputation, protection and scale while achieving their marketing objectives across their Taboola campaigns.

DoubleVerifys pre-bid brand safety and suitability segments are now available directly within the Taboola Ads console for use when planning and executing campaigns.

Advertisers can make use of DoubleVerifys safety and suitability segments while taking advantage of the variety of outcome-based buying options, including CPC and vCPM, available in the Taboola Ads console.

Taboola's fighting perceptions around the quality of its inventory and offering assurances to partners.

Excerpt from:
Taboola and DoubleVerify partner for 'peace of mind' on brand safety and suitability - The Drum

A woman from Retford has revealed how a cybercriminal tried to blackmail her after hacking her Facebook account and sending messages to her husband claiming she was cheating on him.

Donna Potter said the hacker also sent messages to her friends after taking over her account.

The hacker then demanded she send Amazon gift card vouchers in return for having her access restored.

Read more: Plans for a lorry park and service station to be rejected due to noise and smell concerns

It really upset me, said Mrs Potter. The hacker started sending messages to my friends pretending to be me. The messages were quite rude but fortunately they asked my husband if that was me sending them, which of course it wasnt.

My husband then contacted the hacker by messaging my account and the hacker replied to say I was having sex with another man. It did cause us problems.

Mrs Potter said the fraudulent messages made her feel anxious and so she called the police.

Nottinghamshire Polices cyber crime unit helped the 34-year-old set up a new Facebook account and gave her advice on keeping her online information safe from criminals.

Mrs Potter said she wanted others to learn from her experience, as the hacker was able to access her account because of a weak password.

She is now urging others to review their passwords on all online accounts, especially social media and email by having strong, separate passwords using three random words and to enable two-factor authentication to help protect themselves.

She said: If you use a childs name or a pets name, the chances are a hacker will be able to hack your password and by having no additional security enabled, any online account you have is left vulnerable.

"Ive had to set up a new account and Ive now got a much stronger password that contains 40 characters.

Kirsty Jackson, one of the forces specialist cyber protect officers, recommended people use at least 20 characters for their passwords. She added it was important for users to take the right steps to keep themselves and their personal information safe.

She said: We know people like to use social media everyday so its vitally important you keep your accounts and data safe from cybercriminals.

In most cases, cybercriminals were able to gain access using old or weak passwords. The best way to avoid an attack is to activate Two-Factor-Authentication (2FA) on your account and ensure any recovery contact details are up-to-date in case you need to reset your passwords or recover an account.

"To create a strong and memorable password, use three random words. You can also include numbers and symbols to increase the security of the password further. For example, !ReadPlantsTreasure4!"

If you believe any of your online accounts have been compromised, or you are the victim of any other type of fraud or cybercrime, report it to Action Fraud online at https://www.actionfraud.police.uk/ or by calling 0300 123 2040.

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Hackers tried to blackmail woman after taking control of her social media account - Lincolnshire Live