ah ah ah, in the stories that shaped the week we march 20 years since the u. s. and its allies invaded afghanistan, toppling the taliban regime. and now in the wake of the pentagon, pull out many questions are still being asked with violence. that continuing to rage was lights out for facebook, whatsapp and instagram after the company experienced massive outages twice during the week, leaving the firm, nursing a $60000000.00 loss and ramp and gas prices scale down in europe, off the russia pledges to boost and supplies for the move hasn't stopped us politicians from blaming moscow for the crisis.

ah, hello, welcome to the weekly from aussie international where we'll update you on the weekends . big developments and also take you through some of the stories we've been covering here for the past 7 days. in fact, this week we marked 20 years since the us led invasion of afghanistan, which overthrew the taliban. and now in the wake of the western pull out many issues remain unresolved. not least why the top bands offer to hand over a sama. ben loudon was rejected by the bush administration, 2 decades of war, followed with countless lives lost to and at the end of it, old the militants back in charge. i'll senior correspondent is in cobble and asked what's really been achieved the afghan war and is just shy of its 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 a nation building before losing all lame and tylenol towards the n. either the united states, nor any of its allies, still knew what it is that they hoped to achieve. here the end result is, is that it was unanimously considered an abject failure. the taliban is, 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 halls of congress, in parliament, in europe, and the press in there on television internationally is, is who the we lame. we need to consider some uncomfortable truth that we did not fully comprehend. the depth of corruption and poor leadership and nursing arrange 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 malt, i, administration, drawdown. not a 19 month or 19 day neo, these scandal is no end year 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 some one 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 a catastrophe. they argue that the fault is with many american administrations that the preceded good. 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 ah, we are the wealthiest country in the history of the world, and yet we have the highest trial top right, almost any country on earth. from the perspective of the civilian,

there is scott evidence here on the ground in afghanistan of any of that money other making its way here. aside from half finished kleenexes 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, industrial quantities. the taliban are of course jubilant. they have dismantled everything that the united states built in the human rights, the tolerance, the democratic institutions in the matter of weeks. and they are jubilant. they have after 20 years of, and so wretched and rebellion,

believe they won. mm . 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 got to start killed countless youth worldwide. from a geopolitical perspective, the taliban considered an international pariah since its inception is now having to be negotiated with it, accounted with even at the un love from a security perspective. yes, i called the eve of canister may have been degraded but,

but something worse has taken its place in that is isis which has bound to the challenge to afghanistan, dominance by the taliban. also this week and 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 earn more than a 100 people are reported to have been injured. and isis case suicide bomber was behind the attack. it was the sunni group, terrorist groups, 2nd assault on the mosque in a matter of days. and they've got a long history of targeting sheer muslims in afghanistan. a 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, she are in syria. there were targeting here anywhere in the middle east. so i wouldn't be surprised that this is, as i said, this is actually the work of them the because the consider here is there. is there another good believer over there? so this is, this is the execute. but i mean, the major aim is who these that believes afghanistan to actually these, the belief that taliban rule and then is that. so this is the beginning and they wouldn't be surprised that me. more of the bitterly at that slackness will take place in their fuel. we sent them among sir ahead. meantime a u. s. delegation met with senior taliban representatives over the weekend in the guitar. a capitol. the 1st such talk since the american pullout officials from both sides said ongoing negotiations center on the evacuation of foreign citizens and

afghans as well as countering extremism. but the taliban rejected joint operations with washington to suppress the extremist group, ices k. and while the white house has made it clear, the talks don't signal the recognition of the taliban anti war activist brian becker 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 their 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. a facebook had a weak hit might rather forget with the tech giant experiencing serious outages, not once but twice. the 1st black out happens all monday way and uses of the platform along with walk sap and instagram. we're unable to get access to their accounts for 7 hours straight. the 2nd disruption, which happened on friday, continued for a couple of hours. both the said to have been caused by technical errors. facebook engineers blame the problem on a connection. failure between the tech companies data centers, the outage had a knock on effect for many uses and businesses all over the world. the platform

itself also took a financial hit losing up to $60000000.00, which had lifted 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 or gotten locked out or something. sounds fishy sounds really strange. the fact that this and facebook always of privacy problems and they always have problems there and they always go offline, it went down to one. so it's, it's very suspicious. and it's also suspicious that facebook seems that bigger problems and most tech companies with these issues. and,

and i would whistleblowers as well acknowledge, in fact 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 our they are monopolies and look at how they could just wipe out revenue. whether the shut that was intentional or it was just the mistake. so for a brief period, we'll have time to take a breath, but with the outage is a pleasure or pain for you. he go. stone of took us through a world without facebook and waltz up 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 engine is when they tried to get in, they found out that their electronic cards, their passes simply did not work. so they had to literally forced 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, a messenger 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 says to 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 join 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 may have 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 underlines, especially the fact that other businesses not, not well. a pankey 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, say, spoke in order to, to connect to other apps. it sends a huge warning across the bile because here we have a major social network off 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 sa 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 we're relying on a facebook insisted that the service outage didn't lead to any use of data being compromised. but it's still another setback is weeks after a form. a product manager claim that the social network knowingly allows uses to spread hate and misinformation. in the week our guests give us that he's aware facebook. the brand currently stands off to these recent events. but what's interesting about the leak 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 preteens 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 the 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's a message to take away from this, i think it is absolutely that we should be very skeptical the claims that facebook, what's that 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 on line. one of our headline news on the way russia steps in to help take some of the heat out of europe soaring gas prices. but us politicians still scold moscow will tell you why whether we keep returns after this

ah ah, with what we've got to do is identify the threats that we have. it's crazy even

foundation, let it be an arms race is on offense. very dramatic development only personally and getting to resist are those 3 how that strategy will be successful, very critical time time to sit down and talk ah, hello again. europe's boiling gas price is reduced to more of a sima in the wake after vladimir putin said, rushes ready to stabilize the market. the president addressed the countenance energy crisis on wednesday. i think that moscow will continue its gas transit commitment to ukraine. as should i suggest from 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 40 comply with the contractual obligations for the transitive gas through ukraine. although it is more profitable to sell it on the exchange, but there is no need to bought anyone in a difficult position including ukraine despite the difficulties in relations. second has no need to undermine gas prompts confidence is an absolute reliable partner. in all respects, state president burton 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. the gas price has been steadily increasing since spring, but it shot up in the past couple of weeks putting a huge financial strain on many european households. ah

ah. despite the pledge to help reduce prices in europe, moscow is still being accused of manipulating the market. while you, as congressman michael mccaul, called for sanctions against the old stream to gas pipeline, we discussed how politics and energy security clash with a german european parliament unpaid and a former austrian foreign minister. about 7 years ago that could have been more supply to do your market wire pipeline that was never built them use house 3 south stream was prevented from being constructed in the summer 2014. and so, so now it seems as if all the i,

all the criticism available is simply directed against the most stream. and it simply doesn't make sense of a real matches taken in terms of making gas as much as way level as the contracts allow, when we speak of energy weapon, a lot of people, even though those who have been born here, then 73 will always think of all what, for instance, opechi arab countries use the in the 9th and seventies. we had several instances non supply and non export of oil. this what we can call it something like an an a to weapon if you want to use that matter. but in the current context of the many context, long term delivery, very complex, it's exist between the russian federation and various new conference. and beyond that, it simply doesn't make sense to use it. if you western europe and russia become

into a partnership over economic change over energy supply than europe gets new opportunities and a new world. europe is not any longer, completely dependent to the united states. so d, america, europe, america, playing politics to preserve their global leadership route, healy superpower, and they don't care about consumer prices of energy security in europe, daycare on there are. and since the whole others, pro american politicians fear of a whole industry trio thing turns, this is very powerful. so what we have there is no rational reason there is no, there is no rational reason because russia b no because on economic interest. but the reason behind is angie rushing rave is g in politics made a deep statement. washington the austrian chancellor has resigned as

a result of mounting fall out of a corruption allegations leveled against both sebastian curts and his inner circle . the claims against him include a breach of trust, bribery, and making false statements to a parliamentary committee. for a minister, alexander schellenberg will be sworn in as the new leader on monday. cuts denies any wrong doing, saying that the accusations are solely based on old text messages that were recently published in the austria media. his decision to resign comes after raids on his parties, office, the chancery, and also the finance ministry. as part of the proven to the case. i was head of the conservative block in the austrian parliament. he still has immunity from prosecution. and he insists that his decision to step down is to restore political stability. my landing nearby 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. seat 6 people have died and

a massive explosion in yemen. port city of aiden with 7 others injured out. this video shows the immediate aftermath of the blast. as thick black smoke rose from the and shoeing blaze. yelman's information ministry says the attack targeted the local governors convoy and also another senior official, both of whom survived the explosion. damage the surrounding area, buildings and vehicles, as well as the power grid. no one's yet claim responsibility. however, the authorities are investigating his limits. militants have carried out similar attacks in the past. yelman's been a war for 7 years with islamist rebels fighting for control of the middle east and country. witnesses have been describing the assault. i'm at home and now we're having them in the event, when we left school traffic was flown on the street and then we heard a sudden and powerful loud explosion. it shook houses and buildings. vialva. it was a bomb stripped co that targeted aiden's government, which led to casualties among his team and some civilians. it'll solitude damaged houses and civilian cars. electricity was also hit,

affecting all the way to the city sense of albany elsewhere. powerful storms, mudslides flooded a heavier island north of the greek capital. some 200 prophetess was severely damaged in an area still reeling from this summers devastating wildfires. meteorologists say that more rain is expected in the area throughout monday. to magic video of another natural disaster, this time, the volcanic eruption in the canary islands off north west africa lava. as high as 3 story slid down the mountain side on la palmer, reeking more havoc in the area in the past 3 weeks more than a 1000 buildings have been badly damaged or destroyed. as the molten rock forced its way through villages. there were 21 seismic movements on sunday alone, and the rockies have been casting that ballots. and nationwide election sits the 1st such votes and made to protest, broke out in 2019, which toppled the government, which was facing accusations of corruption. thousands of candidates competing for

more than $300.00 seats in parliament. and that's it for me. and this addition to the weekly, thanks for watching from the team here in moscow. have a great week. mm. mm. mm mm, mm mm. and i make no certainly no borders and just like to tease and you farish. as a merge, we don't have a terribly, we don't to the vaccine. whole world needs to take action to be ready. people are judgment, common crisis with we can do better. we should be doing better. everyone is contributing each in their own way. but we also know that this

crisis will not go on forever. the challenge is great. the response has been massive. so many good people are helping us. it makes us feel very proud that we are in it together in ah, it's open, open for the most basic with doug, believe go, he did. who bought? i bought a dial tomorrow. a couple of reviews on your report by that. i know from politicians to athletes and movies. does the musicals does it seems every big need in the world has been here. let's see, are copa bazooka. this goes to school. and when you get the course, but i need to finish with glover. you spoke

with said thousands makes dreams. come true. the every one who falls in love with people like what? mm. a ah mm hm. mm. mm.

and welcome to wells at barclays for day care gander spent has been everybody's business and no one's responsibility. other powers, big and small pursuit that for the agenda there with little regard for the countries or aspirations of the calibre has abandoned familiar status. walk washin. oh, i've got a since trajectory and wanted for tans, but the region as a whole is more grass. an effort to dispose of them now joined by us monthly and was soon brother of the late resistance. later my shots, my son, and form afghan essence and bastard to the united kingdom ambassador miss it. it's great to talk to you. thank you very much for finding the time. you're welcome. thank you. i'm thinking now a few days after the taliban claimed it took full control off afghanistan. you called for international support and i assume and agreeing to this interview, you are also seeking to mobilize the international public opinion. and i know that you are clearly miss.