The drone strike that the Pentagon claimed killed an ISIS-K suicide bomber in Kabul actually targeted an aid worker who had filled his car with water jugs, rather than explosives, according to a shocking new report.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Wednesday during a briefing that President Biden‘s administration is “not going to allow” charter flights with unvetted passengers from Afghanistan to land on American military bases, due to safety concerns.

According to Psaki, the Biden administration continues to “press the Taliban” over the issue of evacuation flights, many of which contain Americans, not being allowed to leave Afghanistan.

“We don’t have a role in preventing flights from taking off,” Psaki told reporters. “We are not on the ground, so that is not something that the U.S. government is doing. At the same time, some of these planes and some of the issues [include] where are they going to land.”

Americans engaged in the rescue of U.S. citizens, SIVs and green card holders left behind by President Biden in Afghanistan are horrified by what they describe as inexplicable delays from the State Department that are preventing evacuation flights from leaving the country. 

Sirajuddin Haqqani, the head of the terror group known as the Haqqani network who is wanted by the FBI, has been named the Taliban’s interim interior minister, which was seen by some as a slap in the face to the U.S. and Western countries. 

Taliban spokesperson Zabiullah Mujahid on Monday expressed that the group “desires” to join the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).

CPEC is a part of China’s most ambitious project ‘Belt and Road Initiative’, aimed at renewing the country’s historic trade routes in the coastal countries of south-east Asia.

In 2015, China announced the ‘China Pakistan Economic Corridor’ (CPEC) project which is worth USD 46 billion.

With CPEC, Beijing aims to expand its influence in Pakistan and across Central and South Asia in order to counter the influence of the United States and India.

The CPEC would link Pakistan’s southern Gwadar port (626 kilometers west of Karachi) in Balochistan on the Arabian Sea to China’s western Xinjiang region. It also includes plans to create road, rail, and oil pipeline links to improve connectivity between China and the Middle East.

The State Department refused to grant official approval for private evacuation flights from Afghanistan to land in third countries, even though the department conceded that official authorization would likely be needed for planes to land in those nations, according to leaked email.

Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Friday that an all-out war with neighbouring Russia is very much an ‘unfortunate’ possibility, but to prevent that he would first like to have a substantive meeting with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. “I think there can be,” Zelenskiy said when asked at the Yalta European Strategy (YES) summit if there could really be an all-out war with Russia. “It’s the worst thing that could happen, but unfortunately there is that possibility.”

The conflict between Russia and Ukraine, which has been referred to as an “undeclared war” in the past, has rolled on for seven years and has already cost thousands of lives. It started when Russia seized the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine in 2014, a move yet to be recognised by several Western powers. The conflict later extended to Ukraine’s east, where Moscow backs pro-Russian separatists at the Donbas region, with more troops (an additional 10,000, according to reports) amassing near the border. Kyiv says the conflict in eastern Ukraine has killed 14,000 people since 2014.

Chancellor candidate for the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and North Rhine-Westphalia premier Armin Laschet held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris on Wednesday. The visit comes just weeks before critical elections, with Laschet vying to become Germany’s n

China will provide almost $31 million worth of food, winter weather supplies, vaccines, and medicine to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, China’s Foreign Ministry said Wednesday.Hua Chunyin, spokesperson for the Foreign Ministry, said the decision was announced during the first meeting of the foreign ministers of Afghanistan’s neighboring countries and would be “for emergency use to the Afghan people.”Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi also announced that China will donate 3 million vaccine doses to Afghanistan in the first batch, according to the Chinese state news agency Xinhua. It is not clear when the vaccines are scheduled to be delivered.

Iran has emphasised its calls for the formation of an “inclusive” government in neighbouring Afghanistan, shortly after the Taliban formed what it said was an interim cabinet.

On Wednesday, a day after the Taliban announced the formation of the new Afghan government, which was dominated by its old guard and included no representation for women or members of the Shia community, the foreign ministers of Afghanistan’s neighbouring countries – including Iran, China, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Pakistan – held a virtual meeting.

According to a foreign ministry statement on Thursday, Iranian top diplomat Hossein Amirabdollahian told his peers Iran was following up on the formation of “an inclusive government with the participation of all people” and hoped the Taliban would abide by its promises for such an administration.