AP News in Brief at 6:02 a.m. EDT

Rescue groups: US tally misses hundreds still left in Afghanistan

SAN DIEGO (AP) — Veteran-led rescue groups say the Biden administration’s estimate that no far more than 200 U.S. citizens were being left at the rear of in Afghanistan is way too lower and also overlooks hundreds of other folks they take into account to be similarly American: long term authorized citizens with green playing cards.

Some teams say they go on to be contacted by American citizens in Afghanistan who did not register with the U.S. Embassy just before it closed and by others not incorporated in former counts simply because they expressed misgivings about leaving liked kinds guiding.

As for inexperienced card holders, they have lived in the U.S. for decades, paid taxes, grow to be portion of their communities and usually have small children who are U.S. citizens. Still the administration says it does not have an estimate on the range of these long lasting inhabitants who are in Afghanistan and desperately attempting to escape Taliban rule.

“The worry is that no one is searching for them,” mentioned Howard Shen, spokesman for the Cajon Valley Union Faculty District in the San Diego area that is in contact with one particular these kinds of household who says they can’t get out.

“They are hundreds of miles away below an oppressive routine and we’re leaving them behind,” he said. “That’s not right.”

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9/11: As the many years pass, the act of remembering evolves

SHANKSVILLE, Pa. (AP) — Across the large field where by the aircraft fell out of the sky so lots of a long time ago, all is quiet.

The hills close to Shanksville feel to swallow sound. The plateau that Us residents by the millions ascend to stop by the Flight 93 Countrywide Memorial, to imagine of those people who died in this southwestern Pennsylvania expanse, sits just above a great deal of the landscape, developing a pocket of tranquil precisely where tranquil requires to be.

It is a position that encourages the act of remembering.

Twenty a long time have handed since United Flight 93 designed its last descent, chaos unfolding aboard as buildings burned 300 miles to the east. Virtually 1-fifth of the nation is much too youthful to bear in mind firsthand the working day that modified everything.

At the edge of the memorial’s ignore, a burly man in a leather Harley Davidson vest talks to two companions. He points towards the patch the place the aircraft hit. It is an intimate discussion, and it is tricky to hear what he’s saying.

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Do we need human beings for that task? Automation booms immediately after COVID

Request for a roast beef sandwich at an Arby’s drive-via east of Los Angeles and you may be chatting to Tori — an artificially smart voice assistant that will take your order and deliver it to the line cooks.

“It doesn’t contact ill,” states Amir Siddiqi, whose family members mounted the AI voice at its Arby’s franchise this yr in Ontario, California. “It doesn’t get corona. And the trustworthiness of it is wonderful.”

The pandemic did not just threaten Americans’ health and fitness when it slammed the U.S. in 2020 — it may also have posed a long-term danger to several of their work opportunities. Confronted with employee shortages and higher labor fees, organizations are starting to automate services sector work opportunities that economists as soon as deemed harmless, assuming that devices could not quickly provide the human contact they thought consumers would demand from customers.

Past encounter implies that this kind of automation waves ultimately produce much more jobs than they ruin, but that they also disproportionately wipe out less proficient employment that quite a few reduced-profits workers count on. Resulting developing pains for the U.S. economic system could be extreme.

If not for the pandemic, Siddiqi possibly would not have bothered investing in new technological innovation that could alienate current staff members and some consumers. But it is gone efficiently, he claims: “Basically, there is much less persons essential but individuals people are now performing in the kitchen and other areas.”

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Group guiding Hong Kong’s Tiananmen vigil denies international ties

HONG KONG (AP) — The group at the rear of the annual Tiananmen Sq. memorial vigil in Hong Kong stated Sunday it will not cooperate with police conducting a nationwide safety investigation into the group’s things to do, calling it an abuse of ability.

Police notified the Hong Kong Alliance in Assist of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China past thirty day period it was beneath investigation for performing for foreign pursuits, an accusation it denied.

“This is a seriously undesirable precedent of the countrywide security (police) abusing the electric power by arbitrarily labeling any civil business as a overseas agent,” Chow Han Tung, vice chairwoman of the alliance, claimed at a information meeting termed to handle the police investigation.

“The alliance strongly denies that we are any overseas agents,” Chow stated. “We are an organization that was launched through the 1989 democratic motion, it was founded by the Hong Kong persons.”

The investigation is portion of a broad crackdown on Hong Kong civil modern society pursuing mass pro-democracy protests in 2019. Authorities have tightened control above the town with a sweeping national protection legislation imposed by China’s ruling Communist Celebration that correctly criminalized opposition to the govt. The law and other improvements have forced various civil corporations to disband or found their leaders arrested.

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Outdoors of New Orleans, an even lengthier highway to Ida recovery

HOUMA, La. (AP) — The coronavirus pandemic claimed Kendall Duthu’s task as a cook at a jambalaya restaurant. Then Hurricane Ida claimed his house.

The 26-12 months-aged resident of Dulac, Louisiana, is now residing out of his vehicle with his girlfriend immediately after Ida roared ashore a week in the past Sunday, splintering houses in its path. Now he won’t know what’s next.

On Saturday, Duthu collected a container of pink beans and rice from volunteers in nearby Houma who handed out ice, drinking water and foods to shell-shocked storm survivors. He stopped to consume within his Infiniti, its windshield shattered.

“Next halt, I really do not really …” he explained, trailing off. “We’ve just been living day by working day.”

The two Dulac and Houma are in Terrebonne Parish, amid the hardest-hit spots of Louisiana battered to an unparalleled degree by Hurricane Ida. Nevertheless Louisiana’s largest electric utility, Entergy, estimates most residents in New Orleans will have ability by Wednesday, restoration attempts outside of the metropolis could be a significantly for a longer period slog.

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Over 24 hours in Kabul, brutality, trauma, moments of grace

Bone-weary like all people else in Kabul, Taliban fighters expended the final moments of the 20-yr Afghanistan war seeing the night time skies for the flares that would sign the United States was long gone. From afar, U.S. generals viewed video screens with the exact anticipation.

Relief washed around the war’s winners and the losers when the closing U.S. airplane took off.

For these in concerning and still left at the rear of — perhaps a the greater part of the allied Afghans who sought U.S. clearance to escape — concern spread about what arrives following, presented the Taliban’s record of ruthlessness and repression of gals. And for hundreds of U.S. officers and volunteers doing work close to the world to spot Afghan refugees, there is continue to no rest.

As witnessed by The Linked Push in Kabul and as informed by individuals The AP interviewed from all sides, the war finished with episodes of brutality, enduring trauma, a significant if fraught humanitarian effort and hard work and times of grace.

Enemies for two decades had been thrust into a strange collaboration, joined in a frequent intention — the Taliban and the United States ended up united in wanting the United States out. They required, too, to keep away from a different lethal terrorist assault. Both equally sides had a stake in creating the last 24 several hours do the job.

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Florida grapples with COVID-19’s deadliest stage yet

MIAMI (AP) — Funeral director Wayne Dazzling has observed grief piled on grief through the most recent COVID-19 surge.

A lady died of the virus, and as her family was scheduling the funeral, her mom was also struck down. An aunt took in excess of arrangements for the double funeral, only to die of COVID-19 herself two weeks afterward.

“That was just one of the most devastating factors ever,” claimed Bright, who also organized the funeral last 7 days of 1 of his closest good friends.

Florida is in the grip of its deadliest wave of COVID-19 given that the pandemic commenced, a disaster driven by the hugely contagious delta variant.

When Florida’s vaccination level is marginally higher than the national regular, the Sunshine Condition has an outsize population of elderly men and women, who are specifically vulnerable to the virus a lively bash scene and a Republican governor who has taken a hard line towards mask specifications, vaccine passports and business enterprise shutdowns.

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Taliban distinctive forces provide abrupt conclude to women’s protest

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Taliban specific forces in camouflage fired their weapons into the air Saturday, bringing an abrupt and horrifying conclusion to the latest protest march in the capital by Afghan ladies demanding equivalent rights from the new rulers.

Also on Saturday, the chief of Pakistan’s potent intelligence agency, which has an outsized affect on the Taliban, built a surprise pay a visit to to Kabul.

Taliban fighters quickly captured most of Afghanistan last thirty day period and celebrated the departure of the past U.S. forces right after 20 decades of war. The insurgent group will have to now govern a war-ravaged nation that is greatly reliant on worldwide help.

The women’s march — the 2nd in as several times in Kabul — began peacefully. Demonstrators laid a wreath outside Afghanistan’s Defense Ministry to honor Afghan soldiers who died combating the Taliban right before marching on to the presidential palace.

“We are below to gain human rights in Afghanistan,” mentioned 20-calendar year-outdated protester Maryam Naiby. “I appreciate my state. I will generally be below.”

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Organizations: $26B settlement of opioid lawsuits to move ahead

Four companies in the drug marketplace mentioned Saturday that adequate states had agreed to a settlement of lawsuits in excess of the opioid disaster for them to shift forward with the $26 billion offer.

An announcement from the three biggest U.S. drug distribution companies and a affirmation from drugmaker Johnson & Johnson, which experienced earlier declared that it would transfer ahead, came Saturday. That was the deadline for the corporations to determine whether there was sufficient acquire-in to continue on the settlement strategy.

The distribution providers — AmerisourceBergen, Cardinal Wellness and McKesson — explained that 42 states experienced agreed to be part of. Johnson & Johnson did not immediately say how quite a few states agreed to its portion of the settlement.

With each other, the settlements are probable to represent the biggest piece of a string of settlements among corporations in the drug industry and state and regional governments above the habit and overdose epidemic in the U.S. Prescription opioids this sort of as OxyContin and Vicodin and illicit types such as heroin and illegally created fentanyl have been joined to extra than 500,000 deaths in the U.S. considering that 2000.

Underneath the $26 billion settlement, which was in the beginning introduced in June, states have been offered a thirty day period to come to a decision irrespective of whether to sign up for. Then it would be up to the organizations to make a decision no matter whether it was plenty of to preserve heading.

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US: Afghan evacuees who fall short first screening Kosovo-bound

An ardent U.S. ally, Kosovo, has agreed to choose in Afghanistan evacuees who are unsuccessful to obvious first rounds of screening and host them for up to a 12 months, a U.S. formal mentioned Saturday, in an intended resolve to one of the protection challenges of the frantic U.S. evacuation from the Kabul airport.

The U.S. program is most likely to confront objections from refugee advocates, who presently complain of a lack of general public disclosure and unsure authorized jurisdiction in the Biden administration’s use of overseas screening websites. These promptly set-up overseas transit websites are continue to running close to or at comprehensive speed to verify eligibility and look for security issues among 1000’s of Afghans and more compact numbers of Individuals flown out of Taliban-held Afghanistan between Aug. 15 and Aug. 31.

The U.S. official spoke to the Related Press on ailment of anonymity to discuss the prepare. It was the initially disclosure of what the U.S. intends to do with Afghans or other evacuees who have unsuccessful to crystal clear preliminary rounds of screening or whose situations in any other case require more processing.

The U.S. Embassy in Kosovo in a assertion later Saturday pressured that the arrangement did not indicate Kosovo was getting evacuees who had been considered ineligible for admission to the United States. “Some applicants are nonetheless in the system of acquiring necessary documents and supplying all the facts essential to qualify underneath U.S legislation for quick entry,” the embassy assertion mentioned.

The Biden administration had resisted months of urging from some refugee companies and veterans teams to convey former Afghan allies or many others most vulnerable to concentrating on by the Taliban to American territory for safety screening and other processing.