oh, that was a it was stories that shaped the week we march 20 years since the us 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 raise lights out for facebook, what's up 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 drop in europe. after russia pledges to boost the supplies, the move has not stopped us politicians from blaming moscow for the crisis.

ah . who broadcast my direct from our studios in moscow? this is our to international. and john thomas. certainly glad to have you with us. now this week we marked 20 years since the us led invasion of afghanistan, which over through the taliban. and now in the wake of the western pull out many issues remain unresolved. not least why the taliban offered to hand over osama. bin laden was rejected by the bush administration. 2 decades of war followed with countless lies lost. and at the end of it, all the militants back in charge of correspondence is in couple and asked, what has really been in chief 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 in a 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 halls of congress, in parliament, in europe, it, in 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 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 n yet over the americans are 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 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. we are 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, other making its way here. aside from half finished clinics 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, 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 kind of thought 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 above, from a security perspective. yes,

al qaeda. either gander stock may have been degraded but, but something worse has taken its place and that is i fish, which is bound to the challenge to afghanistan, dominance by the taliban. also this weekend, afghanistan, scores of people were killed in an explosion. and a she, a 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 i, c k suicide bomber was behind the attack. it was the sunni terrorist groups. second assault on a mask 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. show 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. systemic state we're targeting here and there are, there were targeting here in syria. they were targeting chia anywhere in the middle east, so that i wouldn't be surprised that this, this is the, as i said, you know, this is actually the work of them expired because they consider here is that it, is there another good believer over them. so this is, this is the execute, but i mean, the major aim is who these fabulous up and then to actually be stabilized that taliban rule and then is that so this is mrs. the beginning and i wouldn't be surprised that me more of the big li at facts like this will take place and a few weeks a month ahead. meanwhile, us delegation met with senior taliban representatives over the weekend in the guitar cap. the 1st such talks 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 joint co operations with washington to suppress the extremist group, isis k. and while the white house has made it clear that talks don't signal the recognition of the tall among anti war activists, brian becker thinks that 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. a, 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 block out happened on monday when users on the platform along with whatsapp 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 are said to have been caused by technical errors. facebook

engineers blamed 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 a financial hit. losing up to $60000000.00, journalist and commentator chadwick 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 or 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 i would whistle blowers as well, 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 ship that was intentional or it was just the mistake. so for a brief period, at least we all have time to take a breath. where are the outages, a pleasure or pain for you to go to? jennifer took us through a world without facebook and what's out 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 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 tried to attract new users and did 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're 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, an underlying, especially with the fact that other businesses not, not well upon, can linked to 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 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 we're relying on. all right, now facebook insisted that the service outage did not 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 stands, after these recent events. but what's interesting about the lease documents that 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, but to any trust effort to break it up, coupled with now what these leak 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 they use their 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 app 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. boiling gas prices in europe have been

reduced to summer after vladimir putin said russia is ready to stabilize the market . president addressed to the continent energy crisis on wednesday, adding that moscow would continue. it's augusta transit commitment to ukraine. from yesterday she just 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. as 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 partner in all respects. of 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 to volatile spot trading. the gas price had been steadily increasing since spring, but shot up in the past couple of weeks putting a huge 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 billed them. is house 3000 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 or 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 all the think of all what, for instance, opechi arab countries use the in the 9th and seventies. we had at 7 instances non supply and non export of oil. this what we can call it in like an energy weapon . if you want to use that natasha, but in the current context of the many context, long term delivery, very complex that exist between the russian federation and there is new countries. and beyond that, it simply doesn't make sense to use it. if the western europe and russia are becoming 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, are playing politics to preserve their global leadership role as 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 of russia behavior or because of economic interest. but the reason behind this angie rushing rave is g in politics made by the deep state in washington dc. the austrian chancellor has resigned as a result of mounting fall out over corruption allegations made against both sebastian curts and his inner circle. now 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 the old text messages recently published in austrian media. his decision to resign, come after raids on his parties, office the chancellor re 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 insists his decision to step down is to restore political stability. men landis near the 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 opposite the throne. sick people have died in a massive explosion in yeoman's port city of eden 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. demons information ministry says the attack targeted the local, governor's convoy and another senior official,

both of whom survived explosion. damage to the surrounding area, buildings and vehicles, as well as the power grid. no one has yet claimed responsibility. however, suspicion has fallen on islam is militants who have carried out similar attacks in the past. yemen has been at war for 7 years with islam is rebels fighting for control of the middle eastern country. witnesses describe yourself now and nottingham and let us in. when we left school traffic was flown in the street and then we heard a sudden and powerful loud explosion. it shook houses and buildings. i say out of, uh huh. it was a bomb 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 in albany. elsewhere around the world, powerful storms and mud slides have flooded every island 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. check out this dramatic video of another natural disaster. this time of volcanic eruption in the canary islands off north west africa lava. as high as 3 stories slid down, the mountains on la paloma, 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 along and the rockies have been casting their balance in nationwide elections is the 1st such a vote since major protests broke out in 2019, which toppled a government facing accusations of corruption. thousands of candidates are competing for more than $300.00 seats in parliament. does it for your weekly this hour? i will be back and let's say 34 and a half minutes with another look. who's our international se with me

or steve? ah ah, but years ago the taliban were a different today or more violent than ever before. 20 years ago. the really kind of to stick with central place for so called today did not have non political at

all, except that they are using this crazy bulk in 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 limit. if you check your chicken one cabinet, one existing question and from, from inside just completely concentrated on what's called a bunch a kind of think the yeah. and then when you wanted to see what still with me a glove with agreeing with the talking proponents,

particularly identity progressions that i wasn't on the bridge. what i should say it also so much stacy bye. ah. one of my symbols. typical frank, in many of the national nuclear nauseous daughter near the back st. bezels cathedral is always the center of attention. but of course it's seen in a special wide by artists. it never looks the same with ever changing lighting and many different angles. so it offers endless creative opportunities, but it's not just the artist to a drawn to the cathedral, a from

politicians, to athlete and movie stars, to musicals. does it seems that every big name in the world has been here. i know, say, oh moscow. what am i live in it? what's good for that? i see enough on your thumb water the they helped me they had a noise. well figure there's a for the guy fios' girl. but being void, i would put a google sub. what? oh, checking concourse, or me silly and there is up on your sneaker, william the to the bill, thought somebody, so she got it out. we were like one elijah, asked, the lady was gap has always been flooded with pencils, cathedral, the russian capitals, most distinctive landmarks, and the most famous and recognizable russian architecture in the world. taking a filthy in front of some battles has been a must have for any traveller for quite

a while. now a fun time there is a morgan teacher picker, wagner for 4th grade. longer than that and you're good, you should use of water thought the grilled are years with marine. do you jump from your from from that that's my fault. i just don't know what i've been looking at before. so i know that somebody with leanne that you're on the left, if they come with that, as gladly, everyone must have seen the cathedral at least once in books, albums or on coins, perhaps on instagram or in almost any film about russia. but seeing it with your own eyes, that's something else. this is layla fenusse little bit of i'm dealing with.