we have committed suicide, but left behind, nor stay explicitly state that it was the constant intimidation and grueling by bank officers. that late them to i took the spy. obscene these people up, nor saw in the stories that shaped the week. we've marked 20 years since b 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. they're continuing to ridge whites out for facebook, what's up and instagram after the company experienced massive outages twice during the week, leaving the firm, nursing $860000000.00 loss and the ramp and gas prices drop in you're about to rush pledges to boost supplies, but the move has not stopped us and politicians from blaming moscow for the crisis

. ah, a broadcasting lab direct from our studios in moscow. this is our to international . and i'm john thomas. certainly glad to have you with us. 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 western pull out, many issues remain on resolved not least why the telephones offer to hand over osama. bin laden was rejected by the bush administration. 2 decades of war followed with countless lives lost at the end of it all the militants back in charge. our correspondent is in couple and asked, what's really been achieved the afghan war and is 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 do 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 n yet 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 and 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 the preceded 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, you're the wealthiest country in the history of the world, and yet we have the highest trial top rakes,

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 other making its way here. aside from half 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, 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 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 galveston, kill countless youth worldwide. 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 love from

a security perspective. yes, as card the eve of canister may have been degraded but, but something worse has taken its place. and that is isis, which is bound to the challenge to afghanistan, dominance by the taliban. also this week in afghanistan, scores of people were killed in an explosion. abby, sheer mosque in the northern city of condos. the blast happened during friday prayers. and more than a 100 people are reporting to have been injured and isis case suicide bomber was behind the attack. in was the sunni terrorist groups. second assault on a mosque in a matter of days. and they have a long history of targeting shia muslims in afghanistan. local journalist visited the site of the incident and sent us this report. oh, the explosion was so powerful. according to some officials, the new taliban government had warned a tax 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. systemic faith. we're targeting here and there are, there were targeting chia in syria. they were targeting here everywhere in the middle east. so that i wouldn't be surprised that this, this is, as i said, you know, this is actually the work of them expired because they can said that here is that it is there. another good believe are over there. so this is, this is the execute. but i mean, the major aim is who these fabulous up get them to actually be stabilized that taliban rule and of them is that so this is the beginning and i wouldn't be surprised actually more of the big li at that slide. this will take place in that fuel we among sir, ahead. meanwhile, u. s. a delegation met with senior taliban representatives over the weekend in the

could tarry capital. the 1st such talks that since the american pullout, officials from both sides said ongoing negotiations center on the evacuation of foreign citizens and afghans encountering extremism. but the taliban has rejected at joint operations with washington to suppress the extremist group. i says came and while the white house has made it clear the talks don't signal the recognition of the taliban. anti war activists. 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 u. r. constitutes a kind of defacto recognition that the taliban, in fact are the government. 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. facebook has been in the headlines this week with the tech giant experiencing serious outages, 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 their accounts for 7 hour straight. the 2nd disruption which happened on friday, continued for a couple of hours. both are said to have been caused by technical errors and

facebook engineers. blame the problem on connection failure between the tech companies data centers. the outage had a knock on effect for users and businesses all over the world. the platform itself took financial hit, losing up to $60000000.00 journalist and commentator. chad with more questioned 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 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, they've got one. so it's, it's very suspicious. and it's also suspicious that facebook seems to have bigger problems than most tech companies with these issues. and, and i would whistle blowers as well, acknowledging back this had to 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 ship that was intentional or it was just the mistake. so for a brief period, we all had time to take a breath where the outages a pleasure or pain for you, or to see which donna took us through a world without facebook and what's 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 engineers, when they tried to get in, they found out that they have 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 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 working. and that's the telegram messenger. they estimate 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 by probably, well, capitalizing on the whole situation. but in general, this whole thing and underlying, especially the fact that other businesses not, not well upon can linked which didn't appeared 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, so 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. facebook insisted the service outage didn't lead to any user data being compromised, but it is still another setback. weeks after a former product manager claimed the social network knowingly allows users to spread hate and misinformation. in the week, our guests gave us their views on where facebook, the brand currently stance and after 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. a facebook is not infallible, and what's app is definitely not infallible. what's apples that 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's a message to take away from this, i think it was 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. more of our headline news on the way russia steps

in to help take some of the heat out of europe. soaring gas prices with us politicians still scold moscow. it is our next story when the weekly returns, after 4 breaks, there was a join me every thursday on the alex simon, sure. i'll be speaking to guess in the world politics, sport, business. i'm show business. i'll see you then. oh is your media a reflection of reality? in a world transformed what will make you feel safer? high selection,

whole community. are you going the right way or are you being led somewhere? direct. what is true? what is great? in the world corrupted, you need to descend, have join us in the depths or remain in the shallows. ah, welcome back. this is our t international. now boiling gas prices in europe have been reduced to a similar after vladimir putin said. russia is ready to stabilize the market. the president addressed the continents energy crisis on wednesday, adding that moscow would continue its gas transit commitment to you crank a spruce should i should be. yes. 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 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 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 pond that in all respects to president putin earlier blamed europe's gas crisis on an overly hasty transition to green energy coupled with brussels decision to switch from long term gas contract, a volatile spot, trading the gas price had been steadily increasing since spring, but shot up in the past couple of weeks putting a huge, a financial strain on many european households.

ah . despite the pledge to help reduce prices in europe, moscow is still being accused of manipulating the market. meanwhile, us congressman michael mccaul, called for sanctions against the north stream to gas pipeline. we discussed how politics and energy security clash with a german european parliament m. p. 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 news house 3 south stream was prevented from being constructive in the summer 2014. and so, so now it seems as if all the i and all the criticism available is simply directed against the most free men for it simply doesn't make sense of a real match is taken in terms of making gas as much as well 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 all the think of all what, for instance opechi arab countries to stay in the 9th and seventies. we had at 7 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 from

a tougher. but in the current context of the many context, long term delivery gas to really complex, it's exist between the russian federation and various new countries. 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 band, 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 rule. that's the only 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 here a whole industry of turns, this is very powerful. so what we have there is no rational reason there is no,

there is no rational reason because russia be a no because on the card inches. but the reason behind is angie rushing rave is g in politics made by the state of washington. the austrian chancellor has resigned as a result of mounting fall out of her corruption allegations made 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. foreign minister, alexander schellenberg will be sworn in as the new leader on monday. kurtz denies any wrong doing, saying that the accusations are solely based on old text messages. recently published in austria media, his decision to resign comes after raids on his party office. the chance laurie and also the finance ministry. as part of the probe into the case. as the head of the conservative block in parliament, he still has immunity from prosecution. he insists his decision to step down is to

restore political stability. may lancoste mujica. my country is more important to me than myself. what is needed now a stable conditions. i would therefore like to make room in order to resolve the stalemate. 56 people have died and a massive explosion in yemen. support the city of adding is 7 others have been injured as well. now this video shows the immediate aftermath of the blast. as thick black smoke rose from the ensuing blaze. yemen information ministry says that the attack targeted the local governor's convoy and another senior official, both of whom survived. the explosion damaged the surrounding area buildings and vehicles, as well as the power grid. no one has it yet claimed responsibility. however, suspicion has fallen on islam. his militants have carried out similar attacks in the past. yemen has been at war for 7 years with illness rebels. fighting in control of the middle easterners for them at witnesses described the salt as such

and nottingham in london. then 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. i say ha, it was a boom. stripped co, the 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 law, but elsewhere around the globe, powerful storms and mudslides have flooded elvia island and north of the greek capital. some $200.00 properties were severely damaged in an area still reeling from the summers. devastating wildfires meteorologist say more rain is expected in the area throughout monday. look at this dramatic video of another natural disaster. this time a volcanic eruption in the canary islands off north west africa lava. as high as 3 stories 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 their balance in nationwide elections is the 1st such vote since major protests broke out in 2019 which toppled the government facing accusations of corruption. thousands of candidates are competing for more than $300.00 seats in parliament. that does it for your weekly, this our i will be back in just under 33 minutes with another full and fresh look. stay with us. this is our to international. mm. mm hm. look forward to talking to you all that technology should work for people. a

robot must obey the orders given by human beings, except where such orders at conflict with the 1st law show your identification. we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. at that point obviously is too great trust, rather than fear i would like to take on various jobs with artificial intelligence . real summoning with a robot must protect its own existence. with awe. is a glow to follow up on were a different today or more violent than ever before. 20 years ago, they really turned out to stick with central press for so parked to they did not have non principle at all except that they are using this principle claim has their

own interest. but years ago, there was some sort of kind of dialogue with the others to see what they can do today. they are so kind of restrict your limits. if you check your chicken one cabinet, one existing question and from from inside question do just completely concentrated on west golf club with the way of life of reindeer herders leading a traditionally nomadic lifestyle in the tundra is similar to a parallel reality which sharply contrast with the usual realities of megacity. while the men drive the hoods, women carry the weight of the household work on their shoulders,

but no one would ever put housewife on this cd. it's not considered a profession or an occupation that you'd get a salary or a pension for however, in the vast expanse of russia, there is a spot where a housewife could secure a regular employment status. it's in the far north that there's just one tricky bit unlike any other housewife. such a woman would have to live in a cham attend, covered with reindeer hides that moves location several times a week. ah yeah. like girls i, when you can, you start up with phillip chemistry, lambert sherman. i'm in usually retreat. little good. oh, why do a good a.