Category: International

In the last week, the Taliban have gained control of large sections of Afghanistan faster than most people expected. The Pentagon is dispatching troops to assist in evacuating staff from the American embassy in Kabul, where refugee camps are growing more crowded. The U.N. says the country may be on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe.

State Department spokesperson Ned Price told Audie Cornish the 300,000-member Afghan military needs “the willpower” to stand up to the Taliban.

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In the next few weeks, millions of children will head back to school. Many of them are too young to be vaccinated. At the same time, children are being hospitalized with COVID-19 in small but growing numbers — and approaching rates higher than the winter surge.

Dr. Marcos Mestre with Niklaus Children’s Foundation Hospital in Miami told NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday many of the children his hospital is treating come from families with unvaccinated parents or caretakers.

Unlike last year, many schools will have no remote learning option this fall. While some may have mask mandates, a handful of Republican governors — including Florida’s Ron DeSantis — have issued executive orders banning those mandates. NPR’s Pien Huang surveyed experts about how to keep children safe during the delta surge. Read more coverage from the NPR science desk here.

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The Tigray region in northern Ethiopia is at the center of a civil war that broke out last November, after rebels there attacked a military base. Since then, the political fight has become an ethnic one, with troops no longer distinguishing civilians from rebel fighters.

NPR’s Eyder Peralta visited the war-torn region in May and spoke with the people at the center of the conflict.

The United Nations says more than 400,000 people are now living in famine conditions in Ethiopia, putting them at risk of starvation if the country’s civil war doesn’t let up.

The United States is the country’s largest foreign aid donor. And the person who controls that funding currently is Samantha Power, administrator for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). She spoke with Ari Shapiro about she learned from her recent trip the area.

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Episode four of On Our Watch from NPR and KQED investigates the case of a plainclothes Stockton police officer who grabbed a Black 16-year-old, took him to the ground and punched him, knocking the teen’s two front teeth onto a convenience store floor.

A landmark new report from the United Nations warns that the world is running out of time to avoid the catastrophic effects of global warming.

Those effects are already becoming clear as extreme weather, drought, and fire become more common. One of the latest examples: wildfires are raging amid a record heat wave in Turkey, Lebanon, Italy and Greece. Durrie Bouscaren reports for NPR from Istanbul.

And, as NPR’s Jeff Brady reports, climate change is also changing lives in subtler ways.

Other reporting heard in this episode came from NPR’s Rebecca Hersher, who’s been covering the new U.N. report on climate change.

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After months of bipartisan negotiation, the Senate may finally vote this weekend on a 2,700 page infrastructure bill that includes $1 trillion in spending on things like roads, bridges, public transit, and broadband.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is refusing to resign after this week’s explosive report from the state’s attorney general. It detailed multiple allegations of sexual harassment and assault against Cuomo.

Cuomo has categorically denied harassment and groping allegations. And he said that people have “sought to unfairly characterize and weaponize everyday interactions.”

Multiple high profile politicians have called for Cuomo to step down, including President Biden. Meanwhile, NPR’s Brian Mann discusses how Democratic leaders in New York state legislature plan to move forward with impeachment proceedings.

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It’s been exactly one year since a massive explosion in Beirut’s port killed over 200 people, injured thousands and caused billions of dollars in damage.

At the stroke of midnight last Saturday, a federal moratorium that had been in place for nearly eleven months expired.

After the Supreme Court ruled that the CDC could not extend that moratorium, the Biden administration asked Congress to take action. But Congress failed to maintain protections for renters before the House went into August recess.

Now, many renters fear eviction could coming knocking at their doors.

Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., told NPR that she is urging local governments to institute any protections possible to prevent a wave of mass evictions across the country.

The Virginia Poverty Law Center’s Christine Marra explains where the national situation leaves renters in her state and across the country.

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In episode three of On Our Watch, we examine the records that were unsealed by this transparency law to piece together what exactly happened on September 14, 2014 when Pedie Perez was shot and killed outside a liquor store by a police officer, Wallace Jensen.