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Anti-abortion lawyers are finally being honest about what they want from the Supreme Court

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The state of Mississippi begins its <a href="https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21014766/dobbs-v-jackson-womens-health-organization-brief-for-petitioners-final.pdf">brief in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization</a> with a bold claim: The case for overruling Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), two seminal Supreme Court decisions protecting the right to an abortion, is “overwhelming.”
Dobbs, which the Court will hear this fall, concerns a Mississippi law that prohibits nearly all abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. It’s the first major abortion case to receive a full briefing and oral argument since Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation gave the Court a 6-3 conservative majority. And abortion opponents have every reason to be optimistic that the Court’s new majority will <a href="https://www.vox.com/2021/5/17/22233440/supreme-court-abortion-roe-wade-dobbs-jackson-womens-health-amy-coney-barrett">use Dobbs to undo the right to an abortion</a>.
That probably explains why Mississippi’s brief, which argues that “the Constitution does not protect a right to abortion or limit States’ authority to restrict it,” breaks with the tactics anti-abortion lawyers have used to defend restrictions on reproductive freedom. Rather than explicitly asking the Court to overrule Roe, in the past, these lawyers tried to chip away at the abortion right until it is functionally impossible to obtain an abortion in many states.
Take, for example, <a href="https://casetext.com/case/whole-womans-health-v-hellerstedt?ref=Sb!OeQcZi">Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt</a>, the Court’s 2016 decision striking down two provisions of a Texas law that imposed expensive architectural requirements on abortion clinics, while also requiring abortion providers to obtain a difficult-to-acquire credential. The goal of this law wasn’t to explicitly ban abortion, it was to secure the Supreme Court’s permission to ban abortion indirectly — by layering so many legal burdens on top of abortion providers that they are eventually unable to comply with the law.
The law at issue in Dobbs doesn’t explicitly ban all abortions either. But Mississippi’s litigation strategy hopes to make such a ban permissible. If the Court overrules Roe and Casey, that’s the ballgame. State lawmakers will be free to ban abortion outright, and without having to dress their ban up as an attempt to <a href="https://www.vox.com/2019/5/30/18644611/missouri-last-abortion-clinic-2019-planned-parenthood">regulate the width of hallways in abortion clinics</a>.
Anti-abortion lawyers, in other words, are finally being honest about their ultimate goal. Rather than asking the Court to place some arcane and nonsensical limit on Roe and Casey, while simultaneously pretending that these two cases remain good law, Mississippi just asked the Court to eliminate the right to an abortion altogether.
Justice Anthony Kennedy, who retired from the Court in 2018, held the <a href="https://www.vox.com/22227912/supreme-court-anti-abortion-amy-coney-barrett-era-fda-american-college-sonia-sotomayor-john-roberts">pivotal vote on the Supreme Court in abortion cases</a> for many years.
Kennedy is quite conservative, and he tended to be skeptical of abortion rights. As David Cohen, a law professor at Drexel University, noted in 2013, Kennedy “has voted to <a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2013/11/justice-anthony-kennedy-abortion-swing-vote.html">strike down only one of the 21 abortion restrictions</a> that have come before the Supreme Court since he became a justice.”
Yet, while Kennedy was open to many laws making it harder to obtain an abortion, he refused to overrule Roe outright. Kennedy was one of three co-authors of the Court’s decision in Casey, which weakened Roe, while also <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/505/833">retaining “Roe’s essential holding”</a> affirming “the right of the woman to choose to have an abortion before [fetal] viability and to obtain it without undue interference from the State.”
Kennedy, in other words, would not have upheld an explicit ban on abortions. But he was willing to uphold many laws burdening abortion rights. So abortion opponents spent the years when Kennedy held the balance of power on the Court drafting more and more aggressive abortion restrictions that purported to be something other than an outright ban.
The culmination of this strategy was the two provisions of the Texas law struck down in Whole Woman’s Health. That law required physicians who perform abortions to <a href="https://www.vox.com/2019/10/4/20874618/roe-wade-supreme-court-louisiana-abortion-gee">obtain admitting privileges at a nearby hospital</a>, and it also required abortion clinics to comply with the same rules that apply to “<a href="https://www.vox.com/2015/11/13/9731550/supreme-court-abortion-texas">ambulatory surgical centers</a>,” facilities that are equipped to perform medical and surgical procedures that are far riskier and more complicated than an abortion.
Abortion-rights advocates often deride these kinds of laws as “targeted restrictions on abortion providers,” or <a href="https://www.plannedparenthoodaction.org/issues/abortion/trap-laws">“TRAP” laws</a>, because they masquerade as regulations intended to make abortion safer, when their real purpose is simply to increase the cost of operating an abortion clinic and drive many clinics out of business.
As the Court explained in <a href="https://casetext.com/case/whole-womans-health-v-hellerstedt?ref=Sb!OeQcZi">Whole Woman’s Health</a>, the burdens imposed by Texas’s law did little, if anything, to actually improve health outcomes. A major reason why it is difficult for abortion providers to obtain admitting privileges at hospitals, for example, is that hospitals often require doctors to actually admit a certain number of patients in order to maintain those privileges. But abortions are so safe that they rarely result in complications that could lead to hospitalization.
As Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in Whole Woman’s Health, one clinic in Texas performed more than 17,000 abortions over a decade, and “not a single one of those patients had to be transferred to a hospital for emergency treatment, much less admitted to the hospital.”
Similarly, the Texas law required all abortion clinics to house expensive surgical facilities. But many of Texas’s abortion clinics <a href="https://www.vox.com/2019/9/26/20873873/supreme-court-gut-roe-v-wade-next-week-abortion">do not even perform surgeries</a> — they exclusively offer medication abortions where abortion is induced by pills.
It should be obvious why, if the Supreme Court had upheld the law at issue in Whole Woman’s Health, that could have been the death knell for abortion rights. If states can enact regulations whose sole purpose is to drive up the cost of performing abortions, they eventually would be able to drive all abortion clinics out of business. Perhaps Texas might have required all abortion clinics to be built out of solid gold.
And yet, even in a world of 24-karat surgical centers, the Supreme Court could have claimed that Roe and Casey remain good law. States still would be forbidden from writing a law that states explicitly that “no one may perform an abortion.” But those states would still be free to ban abortion as long as they were sufficiently dishonest about what they were up to.
It’s worth noting, moreover, that while Whole Woman’s Health was one of the most closely watched cases involving an attempt to restrict abortions through deceptive means, it was hardly a unique case. Abortion opponents both on and off the Court have proposed a raft of limits on abortion rights — ranging from <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/2/26/21143844/supreme-court-june-medical-russo-abortion-roe-v-wade">limiting who is allowed to sue</a> in order to challenge an abortion restriction to requiring each individual person who wants an abortion to <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/1/8/21051739/abortion-june-medical-gee-third-party-standing-supreme-court-roe-wade">file their own lawsuit</a> in order to obtain one — that would nominally leave Roe and Casey in place while potentially rendering them unenforceable.
Yet, with Kennedy gone and Republican appointees controlling a supermajority of the seats on the Court, it’s far from clear that abortion opponents still need to engage in such subterfuge.
Although Mississippi’s lawyers are betting that they have five votes to explicitly overrule Roe and Casey, it’s possible that the Court will fall back on the strategy advanced by abortion opponents in cases like Whole Woman’s Health. Perhaps some members of the Court’s GOP-appointed majority will fear that a decision explicitly overruling Roe will inspire more Democrats to vote in future elections. Or maybe some members of the Court want to maintain the illusion of continuity within the law.
I don’t know what the Court will do in Dobbs and neither does anyone else. But it’s important to note that, even if the Court does not take Mississippi up on its invitation to openly and honestly abolish the right to an abortion, that doesn’t mean that abortion rights are safe — or even that any vestige of them will still exist.
Indeed, while Mississippi’s lawyers <a href="https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21014766/dobbs-v-jackson-womens-health-organization-brief-for-petitioners-final.pdf">devote the bulk of their brief</a> to their argument that Roe should be overruled, they do spend a few pages at the end creating a fallback argument — that the Court should “reject any rule barring a State from prohibiting elective abortions before viability.”
Ever since Roe, the Court has held that the state may impose stricter restrictions on abortions later in pregnancy than it can early in the fetus’s development. Roe <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/410/113">divided pregnancy up into trimesters</a>, permitting greater regulation of abortion in the latter two-thirds of the pregnancy. Casey abandoned this framework to focus on “viability,” giving the government broader authority over abortion once a fetus can survive outside of the womb.
If the Court permits states to impose the same kind of restrictions on pre-viability abortions that those states may currently impose on post-viability abortions, that would severely hobble abortion rights and allow states to forbid most abortions — even if the Court does not explicitly overrule Roe or Casey.
The point, in other words, is that abortion rights are still in very grave danger, even if the Court pretends to keep Roe or Casey alive.
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/22590262/supreme-court-anti-abortion-lawyers">https://www.vox.com/22590262/supreme-court-anti-abortion-lawyers</a>

vox Anti-abortion lawyers are finally being honest about what they want from the Supreme Court

The state of Mississippi begins its brief in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization with a bold claim: The case for overruling Roe v...

Does Congress know what it would take to stop the next pandemic?

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In the US, pandemic preparedness has long been neglected among <a href="https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/report/the-neglected-dimension-of-global-security-a-framework-to-counter-infectious-disease-crises/">national security concerns</a>.
One would think that the harrowing experience of the past year would change that. But in light of recent reports that the $30 billion in pandemic preparedness funding proposed in the American Jobs Plan <a href="https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/563836-after-2020-pandemic-preparedness-budget-cuts-should-be-unthinkable?rl=1">might be cut to $5 billion in the bipartisan, negotiated compromise</a>, it’s not clear whether Covid-19 has been enough to teach the US its lesson.
For decades, public health policy experts have tried to convince the US government to take real steps to prepare for a respiratory pandemic.
“It is the prospect of another such pandemic [like the Spanish flu] — not a nuclear war, or a terrorist attack, or a natural disaster — that poses the greatest risk of a massive casualty event in the United States,” Ron Klain, now the White House chief of staff, <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2018/10/15/17948062/pandemic-flu-ebola-h1n1-outbreak-infectious-disease">argued in Vox in 2018</a>.
“All of this stuff was a no-brainer 30 years ago,” Amesh Adalja, at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told me. “We’ve been briefing Congress, we’ve been doing this since 1997. We were ignored. All those glossy reports telling people what to do? Those gathered dust in someone’s desk drawer.”
In 2020, the world paid the price. What the pandemic experts had warned of came. It killed millions worldwide, devastated the global economy, and disrupted billions of lives. And not only is Covid-19 still circulating, there’s every reason to believe a worldwide catastrophe like it can and will happen again.
But in <a href="https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/563836-after-2020-pandemic-preparedness-budget-cuts-should-be-unthinkable?rl=1">an op-ed published earlier this week</a>, Tom Frieden, former director of the CDC, and former US Sen. Tom Daschle reported the potential cuts to pandemic preparedness in the American Jobs Act, President Joe Biden’s signature infrastructure plan.
If true, it underscores a depressing fact: that our policymakers haven’t quite grasped the scale of what’s required to fight the next pandemic.
The original $30 billion Biden asked for is already too small as it is. By the time all is said and done, it is estimated Covid-19 will have cost the world between <a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/risk/our-insights/covid-19-implications-for-business#">$16 trillion and $35 trillion</a>. The next pandemic could be even more devastating.
Facing risks of that magnitude, $30 billion is a pittance. Some experts <a href="https://biodefensecommission.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Apollo_report_final_web3-2021.01.21-1.pdf">suggest</a> nothing less than an Apollo program for pandemic prevention, with $20 billion a year in spending for 10 years. If such a project made the next pandemic even moderately less bad, it would abundantly pay for itself. If it prevented it, it’d be one of the best investments in history.
Policy is often plagued by short-termism. It’s too easy to think ahead only to the next election cycle, and to think of anything whose benefits are long term and uncertain as “nonessential” and subject to budget cuts whenever convenient. But that short-termism is a betrayal of our future. If Covid-19 hasn’t taught us that, it’s not clear what will.
The shortsightedness on pandemic prevention is especially galling because pandemics are absolutely preventable.
“Outbreaks are inevitable, but pandemics are optional,” Larry Brilliant, who worked on global smallpox eradication, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVWoHmURDTQ">famously said</a>.
Given the human population worldwide, it’s inevitable that new diseases will emerge — jumping from animal hosts or evolving as particularly virulent strains of endemic diseases. But when that happens, if everything goes right, we can stop those diseases from becoming the next pandemic.
The first step is inventing potential vaccines and antiviral treatments, which we can do even before a virus hits us. “We know that there are certain families of virus that we know are more likely to produce a pandemic pathogen,” Adalja told me. Coronaviruses, for example, were on researchers’ radar even before SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes Covid-19) emerged because of SARS-1 and MERS, both of which have led to deadly outbreaks in Asia.
Despite the potential for a new coronavirus to emerge, the US did not make the massive investments in developing antivirals and vaccines against coronaviruses that would, in hindsight, have been useful to have. But even the smaller investments which the country did make into SARS-1 and MERS research paid dividends.
“The fact that we had vaccines within a year is testament to the work on SARS and MERS,” Adalja said. “The SARS and MERS work did produce information, such as the spike protein is important for immunity — so they knew right away, we need a vaccine against the spike protein. Even though we didn’t have any SARS vaccines or any MERS vaccines ready to go, that early work was useful.”
The government could fund such research into every class of virus that is considered likely to produce a potentially pandemic pathogen.
And the breakthroughs that would no doubt come from that research wouldn’t only protect humanity against pandemics. They might also lead to a vaccine for the common cold or for the flu, or to new antivirals that reduce the death toll of viral illnesses.
The next step is disease surveillance — observation of the spread of respiratory illnesses around the world — so that when a new disease emerges, we get an accurate picture of its spread right away.
By late December 2019, hospitals in China were already seeing an upswing in severe respiratory illness cases. Countries with effective disease surveillance, like Taiwan, <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/3/10/21171722/taiwan-coronavirus-china-social-distancing-quarantine">jumped into action then</a>, with public health officials getting on airplanes from Wuhan to screen passengers — weeks before China officially acknowledged that an outbreak was underway.
One promising part of that is what’s called pathogen-agnostic screening. When a person goes into the doctor’s office with a respiratory illness, they will get tested for Covid-19. If they don’t have Covid-19, they might get tested for the flu — or they might not. Many people are assumed to have the flu without screening.
The technology exists to change that. “The technology is now to the point where you don’t just go test for Covid, yes or no, test for flu, yes or no. We can test for hundreds of pathogens that cause respiratory diseases,” Andy Weber, the former US Assistant Secretary of Defense for nuclear, chemical, and biological defense programs, who now works on biosecurity for the Council on Strategic Risks, told me.
That means we have the ability to develop a system where if someone comes in sick, they’ll get tested automatically. And if they’re sick with something unprecedented, their doctors will know right away.
“If the Chinese had had this in place, it would’ve been nipped in the bud,” Weber said.
That tactic needs to be combined with improved state and local public health infrastructure. During Covid-19, state and local contact tracing was quickly overwhelmed. States didn’t have testing or quarantine capacity.
“States could not hire contact tracers,” Adalja said. “They were using very primitive kinds of pen-and-paper contact tracing. They have poor communications with hospitals and health care facilities. They’re constrained with hiring people.”
As a result, the US ended up fighting the pandemic in the dark.
If the funding proposals now under consideration had passed two years ago, the US “would have had public health departments that are able to really rapidly respond, we would have had tests that are available earlier,” Frieden told me.
“We would have known a month earlier that Covid was spreading in New York City. We also would have been able to do much better contact tracing, so we would have understood more and earlier where Covid was spreading and how to reduce that,” he added. “We would have had better infection control, so doctors who are dead today wouldn’t be dead.”
Critical to changing all of that is more funding.
In 2001, shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, someone mailed anthrax — a deadly bacterium — to the offices of several US senators and several media outlets. Five people died, and interest in biosecurity soared. For a few years, Congress spent lots more money on preparing America for identifying and combating infectious diseases. Biodefense funding <a href="https://www.omicsonline.org/open-access/changes-in-us-biosecurity-following-the-2001-anthrax-attacks-2157-2526-1000163-103533.html#:~:text=In%20the%20weeks%20following%20the,million%20spent%20the%20year%20before.">spiked to $8 billion from $600 million</a>.
But then health security saw year after year of cuts, and it <a href="https://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/our-work/pubs_archive/pubs-pdfs/2017/hs.2017.0047.pdf">was back down to about $1.5 billion by 2018</a>.
That dynamic <a href="https://pandemicactionnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Break-the-Cycle-of-Panic-and-Neglect-Preventing-the-Next-Pandemic.pdf">has been dubbed</a> by experts the “cycle of panic and neglect.” When bioterrorism or a potential pandemic hits the headlines, readiness gets funded. When a few years have gone by, it stops.
And right now, if reports of the funding cuts are to be believed, we’re doing even worse than that: racing straight to “neglect” before the pandemic has even ended.
Ending the threat of pandemics in the United States means a change in approach. Weber’s proposal is a <a href="https://councilonstrategicrisks.org/2021/04/01/10-10-over-10-a-funding-vision-for-the-u-s-fight-against-biological-threats/">“10 + 10 Over 10” plan</a> — that’s $10 billion to the Department of Defense for biological threat preparedness and $10 billion to the Department of Health and Human Services to <a href="https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2021-01/features/pandemic-shows-need-biological-readiness">prevent biological threats in the future</a>, over 10 years. That would allow for building mRNA vaccine factories that <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22397914/vaccine-mrna-adenovirus-manufacturing-process-investment">crank out vaccines year-round</a>; upgrading public health infrastructure, testing, and reporting systems; and researching the biggest threats ahead so America can be prepared for them.
That might sound like a lot of money. But it pales in comparison to the human and economic cost of normal infectious diseases, let alone Covid-19, let alone the diseases much worse than Covid-19 that have the potential to be around the corner. According to one study, the annual economic burden of <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29801998/#:~:text=Results%3A%20The%20estimated%20average%20annual,(%244.8-%2413.6%20billion).">influenza alone in the US is estimated at $11.2 billion</a>. Covid-19’s toll worldwide has been estimated at perhaps <a href="https://www.dw.com/en/coronavirus-global-gdp-to-sink-by-22-trillion-over-covid-says-imf/a-56349323">$22 trillion</a>. And future pandemics could be worse: As Frieden points out, “Covid kills one out of 200 people,” and has killed millions to date. “There are diseases that kill one out of two people,” he told me.
“We have to do everything we can to make sure that this is the last pandemic we have to deal with,” Weber argued. With that goal even potentially in reach, it seems unwise to try to scrimp on the science and health work that is needed to reach it.
What’s presently under discussion in Congress is considerably less ambitious than Weber’s proposal. The American Jobs Plan, at least in its original form, includes $30 billion in pandemic preparedness spending — but it’s a one-off allocation, not a permanent new commitment to fighting pandemics.
Still, there’s no disputing that it would make a huge difference. It would allow for foundational research like what led to mRNA vaccines — and it’d be a step toward meeting the administration’s goal to have the capacity to make enough vaccines for the whole population in a matter of weeks. It would revamp the systems that every American has witnessed failing to protect them during the pandemic.
“Every American has been touched by this, and it was completely and entirely a failure of government,” Adalja told me. “This would have been preventable with the correct government actions.”
And that $30 billion could, ideally, be a down payment on further commitments. A dozen senators have cosponsored the Public Health Infrastructure Saves Lives Act, which would <a href="https://www.help.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Public%20Health%20Infrastructure%20Saves%20Lives%20Act%20Summary.pdf">commit $4.5 billion a year</a> to pandemic prevention. With such commitments, Covid-19 could genuinely be a turning point for how we fight disease.
That’s why it’s so depressing to learn that the way negotiations are currently trending, a one-time boost of $30 billion — already inadequate — might be whittled down further.
It’s impossible to see that as anything but an utter failure of vision — an inability to believe that doing better than the country’s disastrous Covid-19 response is even possible. There should be broad, bipartisan agreement that what the nation has gone through over the last year must never happen again — and there should be broad awareness that, in many ways, the world got lucky with Covid-19: The next pandemic could be far deadlier or particularly dangerous to children or harder to vaccinate against.
A government focused not just on the present but on the risks its citizens face 10, 20, or 30 years down the line should be willing to make a down payment on a better future. But it’s also entirely possible that the country needs an even more expensive lesson before it learns anything.
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/22589042/covid-pandemic-preparedness-vaccines-treatments-funding">https://www.vox.com/22589042/covid-pandemic-preparedness-vaccines-treatments-funding</a>

vox Does Congress know what it would take to stop the next pandemic?

In the US, pandemic preparedness has long been neglected among national security concerns . One would think that the harrowing experience ...

Amid Taliban Offensive, India's Word Of Caution For Citizens

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<div class="ins_instory_dv_cont"><img alt="Amid Taliban Offensive, India's Word Of Caution For Citizens" src="https://c.ndtvimg.com/2021-07/q3hkgnqg_afghanistanafp_625x300_24_July_21.jpg" title="Amid Taliban Offensive, India's Word Of Caution For Citizens" /></div>
Afghanistan has witnessed widespread violence after US began withdrawal of troops.
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New Delhi:
Terror groups in Afghanistan have escalated violent activities, including targeting of civilians, the Indian Embassy in Kabul has warned in its latest advisory, urging "utmost caution". The statement comes nearly a week after Reuters journalist and <a href="https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/pulitzer-winning-photojournalist-danish-siddiqui-killed-in-afghanistan-taliban-clashes-2487952" target="_self">Pulitzer prize winner Danish Siddiqui was killed</a> while covering a clash between Afghan security forces and Taliban fighters.
All Indians - visiting, staying and working in Afghanistan - are "advised to exercise utmost vigilance and caution with regard to security at workplace, place of residence and also during the movement to their place of work," the advisory reads, stressing the "security situation in Afghanistan remains dangerous in several provinces"
"It is recommended that all types of non-essential movements be avoided. Movements especially during peak commuting hours should also be avoided. While traveling on roads, maintain distance from possible targets like military convoys, vehicles of government ministries or offices, high ranking officials, law enforcement agencies, and avoid visiting crowded markets, shopping complexes, mandis, restaurants, and other public places," it said.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Security Advisory for Indian Nationals in Afghanistan<a href="https://twitter.com/MEAIndia?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@MEAIndia</a><a href="https://t.co/snwaajCrq1">pic.twitter.com/snwaajCrq1</a>
— India in Afghanistan (@IndianEmbKabul) <a href="https://twitter.com/IndianEmbKabul/status/1418854059306532871?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">July 24, 2021</a></blockquote>
Indian firms operating in the country have been told to make special arrangements for their employees.
"As recent tragic events showed, it is essential that all Indian press-persons covering events on the ground establish contact with the Public Affairs and Security Wing of this Embassy for a personalised briefing, including specific advice for the locale they are traveling to," the statement further read.
From <a href="https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/un-chief-grieved-at-the-killing-of-indian-photojournalist-danish-siddiqui-in-afghanistan-2488393" target="_self">UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres</a> to Joe Biden administration, the death of Danish Siddiqui had led to worldwide outpouring of tributes. 
Amid widespread Taliban offensive, Afghanistan on Saturday imposed a night-time curfew across 31 of the country's 34 provinces to curb surging violence, news agency AFP reported. 
"To curb violence and limit the Taliban movements a night curfew has been imposed in 31 provinces across the country," except in Kabul, Panjshir and Nangarhar, the interior ministry said in a statement.
Afghanistan has witnessed widespread violence after the US and NATO forces began withdrawing in early May, nearly 20 years after the arrival in the war-torn country.
Earlier this month, <a href="https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/50-indian-diplomats-officials-evacuated-from-afghanistans-kandahar-consulate-as-taliban-advances-sources-2483945" target="_self">India evacuated about 50 Indian diplomats and other staff members</a> at the consulate in Afghanistan's Kandahar. The personnel at the consulate were flown to Delhi by special Air Force planes which avoided Pakistan air space, sources said.
(With inputs from AFP, Reuters)  
 
 
 
source <a href="https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/amid-taliban-offensive-indias-word-of-caution-for-citizens-2493806">https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/amid-taliban-offensive-indias-word-of-caution-for-citizens-2493806</a>

news world Amid Taliban Offensive, India's Word Of Caution For Citizens

Afghanistan has witnessed widespread violence after US began withdrawal of troops. New Delhi: Terror groups in Afghanistan have escalat...

China Braces For Typhoon In-Fa As It Cleans Up Flood Damage

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<div class="ins_instory_dv_cont"><img alt="China Braces For Typhoon In-Fa As It Cleans Up Flood Damage" src="https://c.ndtvimg.com/2021-07/038u7k8_china-floods_625x300_24_July_21.jpg" title="China Braces For Typhoon In-Fa As It Cleans Up Flood Damage" /></div>
China Floods: At least 58 people were killed this week in central China's Henan province.
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Beijing:
China shut down ports and railways on Saturday as it braced for Typhoon In-Fa as parts of the country struggled to recover from devastating floods earlier this week.
In-Fa is forecast to make landfall late Sunday in the eastern coastal province of Zhejiang near Shanghai, according to the official Xinhua news agency.
Chinese authorities have issued a level III alert -- the third-highest -- for the storm, while more than 100 trains travelling through the region have been cancelled, according to China Railway.
Shanghai authorities closed some public parks and museums and warned residents on Saturday to "stop large-scale outdoor gatherings" and to stay indoors.
Meanwhile, all container ship docks were shut down from Yangshan Port south of Shanghai and 150 vessels including passenger ships and cargo vessels were evacuated from the area.
In central China's Henan province, where historic floods this week have now killed at least 58 people, authorities are gradually clearing and reopening roads blocked with vehicles and debris.
Millions have been affected by the floods, with some trapped without fresh food or water for days and others lifted to safety in excavator buckets.
More than 495,000 people have been evacuated, according to the Henan government, with the flooding causing billions of dollars in losses.
Henan emergency response official Li Changxun warned on Saturday that the province would need to undertake large-scale cleaning and disinfecting to "ensure the disaster is not followed by an epidemic."
Photos published by state media and government social media accounts Saturday showed rescue workers continuing to shovel mud and remove uprooted trees across the province.
Torrential downpours dumped a year's rain in just three days this week on the hardest-hit city of Zhengzhou, where at least a dozen people died inside a subway train during Tuesday's rush hour after floodwaters trapped passengers in their carriages.
State media warned that In-Fa could bring more torrential downpours to parts of the province in the coming days.
China has suffered an annual flood season for millennia, but the record rainfall in Henan has prompted questions about how China's cities could be better prepared for freak weather events, which experts say are happening with increased frequency and intensity due to climate change.
Henan province is striated by rivers, dams and reservoirs, many constructed decades ago to manage the flow of floodwater and irrigate the agricultural region, but rapid urban sprawl has strained existing drainage systems.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
 
 
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news world China Braces For Typhoon In-Fa As It Cleans Up Flood Damage

China Floods: At least 58 people were killed this week in central China's Henan province. Beijing: China shut down ports and railwa...

Afghanistan Government Imposes Night Curfew Across Almost Entire Country: Official

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<div class="ins_instory_dv_cont"><img alt="Afghanistan Government Imposes Night Curfew Across Almost Entire Country: Official" src="https://c.ndtvimg.com/2021-07/q3hkgnqg_afghanistanafp_625x300_24_July_21.jpg" title="Afghanistan Government Imposes Night Curfew Across Almost Entire Country: Official" /></div>
Night curfew has been imposed in 31 provinces except in Kabul, Panjshir and Nangarhar (File)
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Kabul:
Afghan authorities on Saturday imposed a night-time curfew across 31 of the country's 34 provinces to curb surging violence unleashed by a sweeping Taliban offensive in recent months, the interior ministry said.
The widespread Taliban offensive has seen the insurgents capture key border crossings, dozens of districts and encircle several provincial capitals since early May.
"To curb violence and limit the Taliban movements a night curfew has been imposed in 31 provinces across the country," except in Kabul, Panjshir and Nangarhar, the interior ministry said in a statement.
The curfew will be effective between 10:00 pm and 4:00 am local time, Ahmad Zia Zia, deputy interior ministry spokesman said in a separate audio statement to reporters.
With the withdrawal of American-led foreign forces all but complete, the resurgent Taliban now controls about half of Afghanistan's roughly 400 districts.
After a brief lull in violence during this week's Muslim holidays of Eid al-Adha, fighting continued again with the authorities claiming to have killed more than 260 Taliban fighters in the past 24 hours across several provinces.
Both the authorities and the Taliban exaggerate their claims which cannot be independently verified.
As the fighting raged in recent weeks, the US military was forced to carry out air strikes "to support" Afghan troops to repel Taliban offensives even as its overall withdrawal continues, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said on Thursday.
Experts say a lack of regular US air support since May to Afghan forces on the ground is a key factor in government troops losing lot of territory to the Taliban.
Late on Friday, the Taliban warned the US military against carrying out air strikes.
"It is a clear violation of the signed agreement that will have consequences," the Taliban said in a statement, referring to a landmark deal between Washington and the insurgents last year that paved the way for the withdrawal of foreign forces.
The Taliban also warned the Afghan government against launching any offensive, saying the group will "strongly defend their territories and not remain in a defensive posture if the enemy insists upon war".
The Taliban had said earlier this week that its fighters were in a "defensive" posture to mark the Eid al-Adha holidays that ended on Thursday.
Earlier this week, the chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff General Mark Milley said the Taliban appear to have "strategic momentum" on the battlefield.
With the militants putting pressure on around half of the country's provincial capitals, Afghan troops are in the process of "consolidating their forces" to protect those major urban centres, Milley added.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
 
 
source <a href="https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/afghanistan-government-imposes-night-curfew-across-almost-entire-country-official-2493787">https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/afghanistan-government-imposes-night-curfew-across-almost-entire-country-official-2493787</a>

news world Afghanistan Government Imposes Night Curfew Across Almost Entire Country: Official

Night curfew has been imposed in 31 provinces except in Kabul, Panjshir and Nangarhar (File) Kabul: Afghan authorities on Saturday impo...

Philippines Evacuates Thousands As Monsoon Rains Flood Capital Manila

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<div class="ins_instory_dv_cont"><img alt="Philippines Evacuates Thousands As Monsoon Rains Flood Capital Manila" src="https://c.ndtvimg.com/2021-07/68uc1doo_philippines-rain_625x300_24_July_21.jpg" title="Philippines Evacuates Thousands As Monsoon Rains Flood Capital Manila" /></div>
Philippines Rain: A man on a bicycle wades through a flooded street in Manila, Philippines.
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Manila:
Philippine authorities moved thousands of residents in the capital, Manila, out of low-lying communities on Saturday as heavy monsoon rains, compounded by a tropical storm, flooded the city and nearby provinces.
The national disaster agency said about 15,000 people, most of them from a flood-prone Manila suburb, had moved into evacuation centres.
"We decided to evacuate early," said Luzviminda Tayson, 61.
"We don't want the waters to rise and be caught," said Tayson, one of about 2,900 evacuees who were reminded to practice physical distancing as they took refuge in a primary school in Marikina city.
Harsh weather has hit nearly all corners of the globe in recent weeks, bringing floods to China, India and Western Europe and heat waves to North America, heightening fears about the impact of climate change.
The Philippines, a Southeast Asian archipelago of more than 7,600 islands, is hit by about 20 tropical storms a year but a warmer Pacific Ocean will make storms more powerful and bring heavier rain, meteorologists say.
In some parts of the Philippine capital region, an urban sprawl of more than 13 million people, flood waters waters rose waist-high in places and cut off roads to light vehicles.
The Philippines is also grappling with one of the worst outbreaks of COVID-19 in Asia and has tightened curbs to prevent the spread of the more infectious Delta variant.
With more than 1.54 million cases and 27,131 deaths, the Philippines has the second highest number of COVID-19 infections and fatalities in Southeast Asia, after Indonesia.
The public works ministry was busy on Saturday clearing debris and landslides from roads in the provinces, presidential spokesperson Harry Roque said in a statement.
"Some houses were flooded up to the roof," Humerlito Dolor, governor of Oriental Mindoro province south of the capital, told DZMM radio station.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
 
 
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news world Philippines Evacuates Thousands As Monsoon Rains Flood Capital Manila

Philippines Rain: A man on a bicycle wades through a flooded street in Manila, Philippines. Manila: Philippine authorities moved thousa...