created on what's called a blue ah, in the stories that shaped the week, we marked 20 years since the u. s. and allies invaded afghanistan and toppling the taliban regime. and now in the wake of the pentagon, pull out many questions are still being asked with violence. they're continuing to rage ramp and gas prices scale down in europe, off the russia pledges to boost supplies bought. the move hasn't stop us politicians from blaming moscow for the crisis. and the rapid rise of one of europe's youngest leaders comes to a dramatic holt as austrian leader, sebastian kurtz, quit amid allegations of embezzlement and bribery. ah

oh, what have you tuning in? hope you're having a good weekend. this is archie international from moscow with me calling bright welcome to the program. now this week we marked 20 years since the us led invasion of afghanistan, which overthrew the taliban. and now in the wake of the west and pull out, many issues have not been resolved. not least why the taliban offered a hand over osama. bin laden was rejected by the bush administration to get decades of war, followed with countless lives lost to add at the end of it all the militants back in charge. our senior correspond that is in cobbler and asked what's really been achieved the afghan war. and it's just shy of it's it's 20th anniversary, the, the war a vengeance that was launched by the united states as revenge for 911 and quickly morphed into something else. one of the most protracted conflicts in modern history,

an exercise, and, and nation building before losing all lame and tylenol towards the end. neither the united states nor any of its allies still knew what it is that they hoped to achieve. here. the end result is that it was unanimously considered an abject failure. metallic banners is back in control. and more absolutely than it was before the united states invaded afghanistan. and the question that we're hearing now in the holds of congress in parliament, in europe, in, in the press, in there on television internationally is, is who the we blame. we need to consider some uncomfortable truth that we did not fully comprehend the depth of corruption and poor leadership in her senior ranks. that we did not grass a damaging effect of frequent and unexplained rotations by president ghani of his commanders. and that we fail to fully grasp why there was only so much for which

and for home. many of the afghan forces would fight. this has been a 10 year balled by administration, drawdown. not a 19 month or 19 day neo, these scandal is no anywhere over the americans. calling it been ghazi on steroids . the republicans, as well as ordinary americans that see the end of the war as humiliating for america. they want someone held responsible, the biden, the miss administration, as was the pentagon, so far they have done their best to absolve themselves of all accountability for what many americans again see as the catastrophe. they argue that the fault is with many american administrations that, that preceded them. and that is ignoring the tremendous financial cost of the war. some that could have made the lives of americans and many of their allies at the

taxpayers so much better and so much easier. ah ah ah ah ah. you're the wealthiest country in the history of the world, and yet we have the highest trial, top rates of almost any country on earth from the perspective of a civilian. there is scott evidence here on the ground in afghanistan of any of

that money as making its way here. aside from par, finished clinics, him and broken roots, testament to record breaking levels of corruption that, that so brilliant siphoned off into the bank accounts of corrupt officials into the pockets of private contractors. though the evidence of these billions being here is in the hands of the taliban, the guns that they wield, stamped with made in america, the vehicles military vehicles left behind it, industrial quantities. the taliban are of course jubilant. they have dismantled everything that the united states built here, the human rights, the tolerance, the democratic institutions, and the matter of weeks. and they are jubilant. they have after 20 years of, and selection and rebellion, believe they won. ah,

by virtually any measure. this war was a failure in some respects, it even made things worse. from a humanitarian perspective or a 3rd of afghans near an offer on the verge of starvation, with no hope inside the drugs manufactured and export to that of, of gaston, kill countless youth world wide. from a geopolitical perspective, the taliban considered an international pariah since its inception. is now having to be negotiated with it. i counted with, even at the un, bob from a security perspective. yes, i'll car the eat of canister may have been degraded but, but something worse has taken its place and that is, i says,

which has bound to the challenge to afghanistan, dominance by the taliban. also this week in afghanistan, scores of people were killed in an explosion that a sheer mosque in the northern city of condos. the blast happened during friday. prayers of more than a 100 people are reported to have been injured on ice as case suicide bomber was behind the attack. and it was the sunny terrorist groups. second assault on a mosque, in a matter of days, they have a long history of targeting sheer muslims in afghanistan. local journalist visited the site of the incident and sent us this report. so the explosion was so powerful, according to some officials, the new taliban government had warned attacks like this one were possible. earlier taliban security personnel visited this place and they gave the opinion that it might be a suicide blast. after examining some evidence, we've seen such a blast in the past hitting mosques and killing worshippers. some faith we're

targeting here and there are, there were targeting chia in syria. there were targeting t r everywhere in the middle east, so that i wouldn't be surprised that this, this is, as i said, this is actually the work of them expired because they're considered as, yeah. is there any, is there another good believer over there? so this is, this is the executor, but i mean, the major aim is to these fabulous afghanistan to actually these, the belief that taliban rule and of that is that, so this is, this is the beginning and they wouldn't be surprised actually, more of the bitterly, at that slide this will take place in that few weeks a month sir. ahead. what another development senior representative from the u. s. and the taliban met this weekend in the katara capital. in the 1st such talk since the u. s. pull out from afghanistan. officials from both sides said the ongoing negotiations are centered on the evacuation of foreign citizens and afghans from

the country and also to counter extremism. but the taliban projected joint operations with washington to suppress the extreme, his group ices k in afghanistan. and while the white house made it clear that the talks don't signal the recognition of the taliban, anti war activists prime becca thinks they clearly do. the afghanistan government is insisting is that the united states not have the right or not to believe that it has the right to continually intervene into the air space. or territory of afghanistan talks between the taliban lead government in afghanistan and the united states. and other talks with the e, u. r, constitutes a kind of defacto recognition that the taliban, in fact are the government, the both the european countries and the united states have to make a choice. if they refuse to recognize the taliban government officially, if they continue to hold the seized assets of the afghan government,

making it impossible for that government to meet basic needs of the people in afghanistan. i think it's very likely that the african government will seek to find new partners the united states does not legally have the right to take control of or sees the assets of afghanistan, simply because the u. s. occupied the country for 20 years. and because some news from this sunday that and 6 people who reportedly been killed and a massive explosion in yelman's pulled city of aidan neutral boat, se carbone targeted the local governor and us another senior official, both of whom survived the attack. yelman's been at war for 7 years with visible rebels fighting for control of the middle eastern countries. oh, so this sunday, a plane crash and central russia has killed 16 people, including the pilot and co pilot 6 others survive, but they're in a critical condition. the plane, which was a lead l $410.00, had 20 members of a local parachute club on board. the twin engineer croft came down soon after

takeoff from the town of mens zalinski, which is around a 1000 kilometers east of moscow. and jim failed. the suspected course and negation is underway. the plane which belong to the club had been in service since 1987. but if suspended, all flights of all aircraft of that time pending the results of the inquiry is boiling gas prices in europe have been reduced to more of a similar after vladimir putin said that russia is ready to stabilize the market. the president addressed the countenance energy crisis on wednesday, adding that moscow would continue in its commitment to ukraine in regards to gas transit. especially as soon as he gets prom believes that it would be more profitable for it to pay a fine to ukraine and increase the gas volume pumping through the new systems. but there's no need for that. there's more pressure in the pipe, less c o 2 emissions into the atmosphere. everything turns out cheaper. and at $3000000000.00 a year, it is necessary to fully comply with the contractual obligations for the transit of

gas through ukraine. although it is more profitable to sell it on the exchange, but there is no need to buy anyone in a difficult position including ukraine despite the difficulties in relations. second, as no need to undermine gas prompts confidence is an absolute reliable partner in all respects. president booted earlier blamed europe's gas crisis on an overly hasty transition to green energy coupled with brussels decision to switch from long term gas contracts to volatile spot trading. a gas price has been steadily increasing since the spring, but it shot up in the past couple of weeks putting a huge financial strain on many european household ah, in with

a, despite the pledge to help reduce prices in europe, moscow still being accused of manipulating the market us congressman michael mccomb called the sanctions against the old stream to gas pipeline. we discussed earlier in the week how politics clash with energy security with the german european parliament and pay as well as with a former austrian foreign minister. about 7 years ago. that could be more supply to do your market wire pipeline. that was never billed them. use house 3000 stream free. went it from being constructed in the summer 2014. and so now it seems as if all the i and all the criticism

available. it isn't the direct against thermal stream, and it simply doesn't make sense of a real mistake in terms of making a guess as much as well as the contracts allow when we speak of anna to weapon a lot of people, even though those who have been born here then 73 will all the think of all what, for instance, opechi arab countries to stay in the 1970s. we had at 7 instances non supply and non export of oil. this what we can call it in like an, an, a 2 weapon. if you want to use that natasha in the current context of the many context, long term delivery castillo complex that exist between the russian federation and various view conference. and beyond that, it simply doesn't make sense to use it. if the western europe and russia become

into a partnership over economic change over energy supply than europe gets new, opportunity is ended, you worlds or europe is love any longer, completely dependent to the united states. so d, america, europe, america, playing d, a politics to preserve their global leadership rule as the only superpower and they don't care about consumer prices and energy security in europe, they care on their part. and since the whole others, pro american politicians fear of a whole industry of turns, this is very powerful. so what behalf there is no rational reason there is no, there is no rational reason because of rushing behavior or because of economic interest. but the reason behind this angie, rushing rave is gee, in politics made body deep studying and washington still to come on the weekly billions of facebook used as unable to use the site for hours earlier this week

with technical problems blame for the outage. that struck not once but twice will have more and more course the blackout after the break. ah ah ah, what we've got to do is identify the threats that we have. it's crazy confrontation, let it be an arms race is on offensive, bearing dramatic development only personally and getting to resist. i don't see how that strategy will be successfully, very difficult time. time to sit down and talk ah

with oh, hello again. austrian chancellor, sebastian curts, has resigned. it follows mounting fall out over corruption allegations made against both the politician and his inner circle. the claims against him include breach of trust, bribery, and making false statements to a parliamentary committee. for a minister, alexandra schellenberg will be sworn in as the new leader on monday. they could

deny is any wrong doing, saying that the accusations are solely based on old text messages. recently published in the austria media and his decision to quit comes after raids on his parties, office the chancery, and also the finance ministry. as a part of the probe into the case as head of the conservative block in parliament, he still has immunity from prosecution. he insist that his decision to step down is to restore political stability. men landis new v sticker. my country is more important to me than myself. what is needed now is stable conditions. i would therefore like to make room in order to resolve the stalemate. facebook to put in the headlines this week with the tech giant experiencing serious averages not once but twice. the 1st black out happened on monday when users of the platform along with whatsapp and instagram, we're unable to get access to that pages for 7 hours straight. the 2nd disruption which happened on friday evening continued for a couple of hours,

but both the said to have been called by technical errors and an official statement . facebook's engineers said the problem was due to a connection failure between the tech companies data centers. the outage had a knock on effect on individuals and businesses all around the world. the platform itself was hit out financially over it to losing up to $60000000.00 journalist and commentator chadwick more question. how such a vast company could have been so vulnerable to a technical failure. facebook. oh is a one trillion dollar company and i like these outages happen a lot. it happened in april in june of just this year. you don't see google outages or any other big tech companies. apple. busy happening quite so frequently, so it's a bit bizarre that facebook has a problem with this. it seems to be that all of their, these properties oculus, instagram, whatsapp, and facebook all run through some sort of similar server. facebook is now sort of saying they were making upgrades and, and, and program has gotten locked out or something. sounds fishy sound really strange.

the fact that this and facebook always the privacy problems and they always have problems there and they always go offline. it went down to one, so it's very suspicious, and it's also suspicious that facebook seems to have bigger problems than most tech companies with these issues. and i would whistleblowers as well, could be acknowledging back. this has a look at the dangers of these monopolies. if they can blink out of existence so quickly, hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue was lost in 6 hours today till these companies have it so much control, so much power. they are monopolies and look at how they can just wipe out revenue. whether the shut off was intentional or it was just the mistake. so for short time, then we'll had a little bit of time to take a breath now where the outage is parrot, i saw a paint for you. english donna took us through a world without facebook, a multiple was quite an experience and in fact, it was one of the longest outages that facebook has experienced in its history. so

yet it was long and there were long, tense hours because nobody seemed to know what caused the outage, how long it will last and well, we'll, what we should all do with it. when facebook service went down, they took along with themselves the so the infrastructure inside the, the, the facebook headquarters or wherever their services are located. so engineers, when they tried to get in, they found out that their electronic cards, their passes simply did not work. so they had to literally force their way into the server room to manually reboot them. so, and it took mark zuckerberg also hours to come forward and explain what was going on. facebook, instagram, whatsapp and messenger are coming back online now. sorry for the disruption today. i know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about. you might think that it was just facebook, instagram and you know, facebook sister companies essentially, but no. a lot of other companies, a lot of other businesses that do not necessarily rely on facebook as

a social platform, but rely rather on their technical physical infrastructure like service. they all went down to, from well tended to netflix to zoom, to literally websites of airline companies and world bank apps as well. so a lot of a lot of sites, a lot of services that were used to using they, well they went offline. but one app seem to take advantage of it and mainly to take advantage of what's that not work. and that's the telegram messenger. they eserman their social media team even had their fun on twitter before twitter went down as well. and well, they try to attract new users. and well, they successfully did so because it is estimated some 50000000 new users joined telegram and it almost went down as well, but not because of the facebook thing, but because it had pro says so many new accounts being registered. so yeah, and there were a few funny reactions on line to this whole mayhem unfolding. have

a look. we're working to get things back to normal. telegram you single, come over, the servers are up and my parents aren't home. so yeah, being a little tongue in cheek, the s m m team there, but probably well capitalizing on the whole situation. but in general, this whole thing and underlying, especially with the fact that other businesses not, not well upon, can linked which didn't appear to billing to facebook. that they experienced troubles. it really points out how much people and in general, massive massive companies rely on the infrastructure of one particular tech giant. millions of businesses rely on facebook now and many other many others use facebook in order to, to connect to other apps. it sends a huge warning across the bile because here we have a major social network site. but you know, this shows us the extent to which we rely on digital technology across the board.

and cyber attacks of sorts can bring down whole systems. and facebook is just one. it's a social networking platform, but a lot of businesses as we've said, relying on it. but imagine a much more intrinsic infrastructural saw attack. i'm not saying this was a a cyber attack. in fact, i have a theory about what happened. but ah, this shows you the fragility of the entire digital infrastructure that were relying on a facebook insisted that the service outage didn't lead to any use a data being compromised. but it's still another setback. weeks after a form. a product manager claim that the social network knowingly allows uses to spread hate this information in the wake our guests get as their views on where facebook the brand currently stands after these recent events. what's interesting about the lease documents of the wall street journal published is that they show quite clearly that facebook is in decline and knows it's in decline. and so you see

all these desperate measures of attempting to attract pre teens and children. i mean even children. so there is a kind of convergence of several bad instances. i mean, not just to shut down by any trust effort to break it up, coupled with now what these lead documents show is and understanding by facebook officials, that crest of the wave is now headed downwards. that facebook is not infallible, and what's up is definitely not infallible. what's that also came under scrutiny because there were reports that even though they claim that user messages were encrypted, that they were actually sending some user data to authorities in order to help with different types of prosecution. so if there is a message to take away from this, i think it is absolutely that we should be very skeptical. the claims that facebook whatsapp, if you all the subsidiaries are making about their ability to keep your, your data private. because clearly it seems like they can't, at least for the moment, i keep their sites even online. i will definitely online all the time. so look us

up as you wrap up your weekend, we're going to wrap up this edition of the weekly for now i'll be back in just a half an hour with the next edition. leave it with ah, it's open open, so most basic with douglas go. he did, who bought? i bought off the dial tomato, a couple of these on your quote, but i know from politicians to athletes and movies. does the musicals does it seems every big, maybe the world has been here this year. copa bismark office goes to school. ah a get the go for i need to remove people does not give me a glove with new sport,

but she said basil makes dreams. come true that every one who falls in love with people threatening luc wide. mm hm. driven by dreamers shaped by center. some of those with dares sinks. we dare to ask with these people, learn from their own experience,

how vulnerable of business is to the bank. so he pushes my business over, the age, pushes me right to the bankruptcy. now i realize we will go this isn't just the back that may be involved in this is the concept. see is, is the lawyers, these people have got on their stories and it was kinda whistleblower. tell people's marriages have broken up. they've lost their family homes. it is spectacularly devastating for people's lives. we have committed suicide, but left behind north, the explicitly steep that it was the constant intimidation and grueling by bank officers that led them to i talked to spy obscene these people up, nor sold

with when the sa crossing for this area. and that this earth is, is where the muslim thing pathology happened. and it's different reasons they hit or they called like it's very cold at nights and it's very hot, but the day nobody can carry enough water to. so by that it's made to me, it's so easy to connect because i'm coming from there, but it's also so hard to see like to see that people don't understand here. and it's, it's hard every day is the struggle because the it's not easy. these people are dying in justin. justin. nobody should died that way. nobody

should lose their life trying to get a better life or trying to help their family. they are coming for come from countries are in conflict, then they damage so poor people though they don't have any chances to survive. they basically abandoned by their government. so, and the violence is to me, many of these cases that i see every day they are that they are going to die. die there any way they know the risks, and they still do it because there is something really bad happening there. i don't think, i mean, thought they love your lens, general intially. i love it as photo nickel. he, those sticker, the emitter, the up, what matters you in the bottom of the law. and as soon as the leaders, if he was sick, i mean, a lot of you must, more of a more he does as you know, one.