Category: World

WASHINGTON: Roughly 650 US troops are expected to remain in Afghanistan to provide security for diplomats after the main American military force completes its withdrawal, which is set to be largely done in the next two weeks, US officials told The Associated Press.

Moreover, several hundred additional American forces will remain at the Kabul airport, potentially until September. They’ll assist Turkish troops providing security, a temporary move until a more formal Turkey-led security operation is in place, the officials said Thursday.

Overall, officials said the US expects to have American and coalition military command, its leadership, and most troops out by July Fourth, or shortly after that, meeting an aspirational deadline that commanders developed months ago.

The departure of the bulk of the more than 4,000 troops that have been in the country in recent months is unfolding well before President Joe Biden’s Sept. 11 deadline for withdrawal. And it comes amid accelerating Taliban battlefield gains, fueling fears that the Afghan government and its military could collapse in a matter of months.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken, speaking Friday in Paris, noted the increased violence and cited “a real danger” that if the Taliban tries to take the country by force, “we’ll see a renewal of a war or possibly worse.”

But, Blinken said, the Biden administration came to the conclusion that not removing US troops, as the Trump administration had promised the Taliban in February 2020, would have been a bad choice. The administration believes the Taliban would have resumed attacks on US forces, prompting an escalation of the war.

“Had we not announced that we were leaving, then that restraint, in terms of attacking our forces and attacking the capitals, would have ended,” Blinken said.

He said a continued US presence “certainly would have helped significantly” the Kabul government. “But what is almost certain is that our military would have come to us and said, well, the situation has changed, we need more forces. And we would have repeated the cycle that we’ve been in for 20 years. And at some point, you have to say this has to stop.”

Biden faces strong criticism from some Republicans for pulling out of Afghanistan, even though President Donald Trump made the 2020 deal with the Taliban to withdrawing all US forces by May 2021.

SURFSIDE, United States: The number of people unaccounted for following the collapse of a Florida apartment block has risen to 159, the county”s mayor said Friday. “We do have 120 people now accounted for, which is very, very good news. But our unaccounted for number has gone up to 159,” Miami-Dade County mayor Daniella Levine Cava told a news conference. Authorities have stressed it is still unclear how many people were inside the building when it pancaked in the early hours of Thursday, killing at least four people.

PARIS: Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Friday said the status quo was not an option for the US in Afghanistan, as it prepares to withdraw troops by September despite a rise in attacks. “We are seeing elevated attacks on the Afghan security forces in certain parts of the country compared to a year ago,” Blinken said on a visit to Paris, acknowledging the US had to look “very hard” to see if the Taliban was serious about peace. But he added: “Had we not begun the process of drawing down. . . the status quo would not have helped. . . The status quo was not an option.

ANKARA: Japan”s population declined by 0.7% during the past five years, dropping out for the first time since 1950 from the world”s top 10 countries in terms of population. The latest census data of 2020, released by the Internal Affairs Ministry on Friday, showed that the country”s population stood at 126,226,568 as of Oct. 1, 2020, reported Tokyo-based Kyodo News. Japan, comprising 1.6% of the global population, dropped one place from 10th to 11th in the world ranking of the most populated countries, it said, citing the latest UN report. According to the report, Japan is the only nation among the top 20 populated countries of the world, while its population dropped by around 868,000 from 2015 to 2020.But the number of households increased by 4.2 % to 55.7 million. The average number of members per household fell to 2.27 from 2.38 in the 2015 survey, the lowest since comparable data became available in 1970 as more elderly people lived alone, according to the report.

JERUSALEM: Bones belonging to a “new type of early human” previously unknown to science have been found in Israel, researchers said Thursday, claiming to have shed new light on human evolution.

Excavations in the quarry of a cement plant near the central city of Ramla uncovered prehistoric remains that could not be matched to any known species from the Homo genus. Researchers from Tel Aviv University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem dubbed the “extraordinary discovery” the “Nesher Ramla Homo type” after the site, in a study published in the journal Science.

The fossils date to between 140,000 and 120,000 years ago, and the team believes the Nesher Ramla type would have overlapped with Homo sapiens, the lineage of modern humans. “We had never imagined that alongside Homo sapiens, archaic Homo roamed the area so late in human history,” lead archaeologist Yossi Zaidner said.

“The morphology of the Nesher Ramla humans shares features with both Neanderthals. . . and archaic Homo,” the researchers said in a statement. “At the same time, this type of Homo is very unlike modern humans — displaying a completely different skull structure, no chin and very large teeth.

” Along with the human remains, the dig uncovered large quantities of animal bones as well as stone tools. “The archaeological finds associated with human fossils show that ”Nesher Ramla Homo” possessed advanced stone-tool production technologies and most likely interacted with the local Homo sapiens,” Zaidner said.

The researchers suggested that some fossils previously discovered in Israel dating back as far as 400,000 years could belong to the same prehistoric human type.

An indigenous nation in Canada says it has found 751 unmarked graves at the site of a former residential school in Saskatchewan.  The Cowessess First Nation said the discovery was “the most significantly substantial to date in Canada”.

It comes weeks after the remains of 215 children were found at a similar residential school in British Columbia.  “This is not a mass grave site. These are unmarked graves,” said Cowessess Chief Cadmus Delorme.  The Marieval Indian Residential School was operated by the Roman Catholic Church from 1899 to 1997 in the area where Cowessess is now located in southeastern Saskatchewan. It is not yet clear if all of the remains are linked to the school. It was one of more than 130 compulsory boarding schools funded by the Canadian government and run by religious authorities during the 19th and 20th Centuries with the aim of assimilating indigenous youth.

An estimated 6,000 children died while attending these schools, due in large part to the squalid health conditions inside. Students were often housed in poorly built, poorly heated, and unsanitary facilities.