development only personally and getting to resist. i don't see how that strategy will be successful, very difficult time. time to sit down and talk with the stories that shaped the week. we marked 20 years since the u. s. and its allies invaded afghanistan, toppling the taliban regime and, and now in the wake of the pentagon, pull out many questions are still being asked with violence. they're continuing to rage 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 ramping gas prices drop in europe after russia pledges to boost supplies. but the move has not stopped us politicians from blaming moscow for the crisis. ah,

are broadcasting live direct from our studios in moscow? this is an art international. i'm sean. tom is certainly glad to have you with us as we recap to weeks top stories with our weekly program. 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 telephones offered to hand over osama. bin laden was rejected by the bush administration. 2 decades of war followed with countless lives lost. and at the end of it, all the militants back in charge are correspondent in cobble and asked, what has really been achieved the afghan born 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 a nation building before losing all lame and tylen 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, is that it was unanimously considered an abject failure. but 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 holds of congress in parliament, in europe, in, in the press in there on television internationally is, is who don't. 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 bolt, i administration drawdown. not a 19 month or 19 day neo, these scandal is nowhere near over the americans calling it been ghazi on steroids, the republicans as well as ordinary americans. the t, the end of the war is humiliating for america. they want someone held responsible, the biden, the miss administration, as well as 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 that. and that is ignoring the tremendous financial cost of the war.

sun 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 race 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, 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 town about her, of course jubilant. they have dismantled everything that the united states built here with 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 gustavo, 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, bob from a security perspective. yes,

al card that either gander stock may have been degraded but, but something worse has taken its place. and that is isis, which has bound to the challenge to afghanistan, dominance by the taliban. also this weekend, afghan scores of people were killed in an explosion at a she, a mosque in the northern city of condos. the blast happened to drink friday prayers and more than a 100 people are reported to have been injured. and i says k suicide bomber was behind the attack. it was the sunni terrorist groups, 2nd assault on a mask in a matter of days. and they have a long history of targeting shia muslims. in afghanistan, a local journalist visited the site of the incident and sent us this report. childhood. 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. assembly faith were targeting here on the era. there were targeting chia in syria, they were targeting chia 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 nicholas said that she or is there any, is there another good believer over there? so this is, this is the execute. but i mean, the major aim is who these that belies afghanistan to actually be stabilized that taliban rule and of denison. so this is mrs. the beginning and i wouldn't be surprised actually more of the bitterly at that slide miss will take place in that fuel we among sir, ahead. meanwhile, the u. s. delegation, i met with a senior tele representatives over the weekend and the guitar capital. the 1st such

talks since the american pull out the officials from both sides said ongoing negotiations center on the evacuation of foreign citizens and afghans and countering extremism. but the taliban that has rejected joint operations with washington to suppress the extremist group, isis 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 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 high 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 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. and

facebook. engineers blamed the problem on a 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 gotten locked out or something. sounds fishy sound 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 to have bigger problems than most tech companies with these issues. and, and i with whistleblowers as well. the academic impact. this has 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 could just wipe out revenue . whether the shut that was intentional or it was just the mistake. so for a brief period, at least we all have time to take a breath. were the outages of pleasure or pain for you on his ears, done on for took us through a world without freights. and what time 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 sista 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 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 you 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 by probably well, capitalizing on the whole situation. but in general, this whole thing, it underlines especially 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 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 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 facebook insisted 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 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 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 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's 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. boylen gas prices in europe have

been reduced to a summer after vladimir putin said russia is ready to stabilize the market. the president addressed the contents energy crisis on wednesday, adding that moscow would continue its gas transit commitment to ukraine. a spruce should i suggest 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 but 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 pon 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 contracts 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, a financial strain on many european household. ah 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 discuss how politics and energy security clash with a german european parliament and 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 them use house 3000 to reimburse prevented from being constructive in the summer 2014. and so, so now it seems as if all the i, all the criticism available, it isn't the directive against the most free man 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 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 countries, 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, then europe gets new opportunities and a new world or europe is not any longer, completely dependent to the united states. so d, america, europe, america, are playing politics to preserve their global leadership as the only superpower and

they don't care about consumer prices and energy security in europe, daycare on there. a martin. and since we have all of our american politicians fear of 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 room because the rushing behavior goes on ecology inches. but the reason behind this angie rushing rave is g in politics made a deep statement. washington the austrian chancellor has resigned him as a result of mounting fall out over 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 of on, on monday curse though denies any wrong doing. saying that the accusations are

solely based on old text messages recently published an austrian media. his decision to resign, come to after raids on his parties, office the chance laurie and also the finance ministry as part of the probe into the case as a head of the conservative block in parliament, he still has immunity from prosecution. he insists, though his decision to set down is to restore political stability. my landing movie 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 stale might fit that soon off to lose. 6 people have died in a massive explosion in yemen, support city of aiden 7, others have been injured. 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 governors convoy and

another senior official, both of whom survived the explosion damaged the surrounding area, buildings and vehicles, as well as the power good. no one has yet claimed responsibility. however, suspicion has fallen on islam. his militants who have carried out similar attacks in the past. yemen has been at war for 7 years with islam as rebels. i'm fighting for control of the middle eastern country. witnesses described the assault and the hot glenn let us then 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. a fe, alba. it was a bomb strapped 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 hits, affecting all the way to the city sense of an opening. elsewhere on the world powerful storms and mud slides have flooded. anthea island, north of the greek capital,

some 200 properties were severely damaged in an area still reeling from the summers . devastating wildfires meter, i'll just say that more rain is expected in the area throughout monday. check this dramatic video out of another natural disaster though this time it is a volcanic eruption in the canary islands, off north west africa lava. as high as 3 story slid down the mountain side on la palmer, wreaking 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 the villages. there were 21 seismic movements on sunday alone. and iraqis have been casting their balance and nationwide elections. it is the 1st such vote since major protest 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. that does it for me. in fact,

actually that does it for the weekly. but don't worry about 35 minutes time. my colleague, maury, sushi will be here with a full and fresh look at your news. this is our international. glad to have you with us. or with a 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 order that conflict with the 1st law show your identification. we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. at the point obviously is too great truck rather than fit like take on various jobs with artificial intelligence. real. somebody with

a robot must protect its own existence with when i see black america, i see and i was growing like a mirror, spoke to me when white australia did not. those who say black lives matter is a movement we are importing from america. no, nothing of who we are. i lived in a world where white lives mattered. and i was not white like ms. newman and i wasn't known from black america. i learned how to speak back to whitefish aboriginal people around lloyd re di. we're out wanted them now with the police

were out with 2 seats. i'm scared that more children are going to grow up in the country that think says no racism, but they're more likely to end up in the criminal justice system. then there are other fellow friends in daycare a i was showing wrong when i was just a shape out. disdain becomes the african and engagement equals the trail went so many find themselves worlds apart. we choose to look for common ground. oh is your media a reflection of reality?

in a world transformed what will make you feel safe? isolation, whole community? are you going the right way or are you being led somewhere? direct. what is true? what is faith? in the world corrupted, you need to descend have join us in the depths or remain in the shallows. ah ah

ah hello and welcome to cross stock where all things are considered i'm funeral about again the nobel peace prize misses the mark. the most deserving are again passed over. also the use war against 2 of its members, states hungry in poland. ideological had gemini, is demanded, descent not allowed. ah . to discuss these issues and bore, i'm joined by my guests, george and you, elleon, budapest. he's a podcast to read the goggles can be found on youtube and logos and here.