Taliban active in 70% of Afghanistan, study finds

An Afghan National Army soldier fires an artillery shell during an ongoing anti-Taliban operation at Farah province. (AFP)
Updated 31 January 2018
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Taliban active in 70% of Afghanistan, study finds

WASHINGTON: The Taliban are openly active in 70 percent of Afghanistan’s districts, fully controlling 4 percent of the country and demonstrating an open physical presence in another 66 percent, according to a BBC study published on Tuesday.
The BBC estimate, which it said was based on conversations with more than 1,200 individual sources in all districts of the South Asian country, was significantly higher than the most recent assessment by the NATO-led coalition.
The coalition said on Tuesday that the Taliban contested or controlled only 44 percent of Afghan districts as of October 2017.
Afghanistan has been reeling over the past nine days from a renewed spate of violence that is adding scrutiny to the latest, more aggressive US-backed strategy to bolster Afghan forces battling the Taliban in a 16-year-old war.
A bomb hidden in an ambulance struck the city center and killed more than 100 people, just over a week after an attack on the Hotel Intercontinental, also in Kabul, which left more than 20 people dead, including four US citizens.
The BBC counted 399 districts in Afghanistan, but the NATO-led force counted 407. The reason for the discrepancy was not immediately clear.
The BBC study said the Afghan government controlled 122 districts, or about 30 percent of the country. Still, it noted, that did not mean that they were free from Taliban attacks.
“Kabul and other major cities, for example, suffered major attacks — launched from adjacent areas, or by sleeper cells — during the research period, as well as before and after,” the report said.
Asked about the BBC’s study, the Pentagon did not comment directly, but pointed to the latest figures by the NATO-led coalition asserting that about 56 percent of Afghanistan’s territory was under Afghan government control or influence.
Captain Thomas Gresback, a spokesman for the coalition in Kabul, said the BBC estimate overstated the militants’ “influence impact.”
“This is a criminal network, not a government in waiting,” Gresback said in an emailed statement.
“What really matters is not the number of districts held, but population controlled. RS assesses that around 12 percent of the population is actually under full Taliban control,” he said, referring to the Resolute Support mission.
The study by Britain’s public broadcaster quoted a spokesman for Afghan President Ashraf Ghani playing down the findings.
The BBC study also said Daesh had a presence in 30 districts, but noted it did not fully control any of them.


Trump calls ex-FBI chief Comey a ‘dirty cop’ after alleged threat

Updated 5 sec ago
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Trump calls ex-FBI chief Comey a ‘dirty cop’ after alleged threat

  • Comey made a post on Instagram showingan image of “86 47” spelled out in sea shells
  • Trump's aides and allies charged that it was a veiled call to assassinate the president

WASHINGTON: Donald Trump labeled former FBI director James Comey a “dirty cop” Friday over a social media post that the US president deemed a veiled call for assassination and which prompted a Secret Service probe.

Comey made a now-deleted post on Instagram the previous day that showed an image of “86 47” spelled out in sea shells, with “86” being slang for kill and Trump the 47th president.

“He knew exactly what that meant,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News broadcast on Friday. “That meant assassination, and it says it loud and clear. Now, he wasn’t very competent, but he was competent enough to know what that meant.”

“He’s calling for the assassination of the president,” Trump said, branding Comey “a dirty cop.”

Trump was wounded in the ear during an assassination attempt at a campaign rally last July in Butler, Pennsylvania, and has faced other threats.

Comey said Thursday on Instagram that he posted “a picture of some shells I saw today on a beach walk, which I assumed were a political message.”

“I didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence. It never occurred to me but I oppose violence of any kind so I took the post down,” he said.

The “8647” and “8646” themes have been used as political slogans and on T-shirts during the administrations of both Trump and his predecessor, Democratic President Joe Biden, the 46th US president.

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary says on its website that one recent meaning of the term 86 was “to kill” but that it had not adopted it “due to its relative recency and sparseness of use.”

Trump administration officials were unconvinced, with Department of Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem saying DHS and the US Secret Service -- which is charged with protecting the president -- were investigating and "will respond appropriately."
FBI Director Kash Patel meanwhile said the law enforcement agency was "in communication with the Secret Service" and that it would "provide all necessary support."
And Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said Comey had "issued a call to action to murder the president of the United States," adding: "We fully support the Secret Service investigation into Comey's threat on President Trump's life."
On Friday, US media reported Comey was questioned by the Secret Service over his post.

The meeting began around 6 p.m. EDT (2200 GMT) and lasted about an hour, the official said. Comey appeared voluntarily after being asked to come in, according to a law enforcement official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Gabbard dismissed Comey’s explanation as absurd, and said the “8647” slogan has been used by anti-Trump protesters and was a veiled call to action against the sitting president.
Early in his first term, Trump fired Comey, who as FBI director had been leading an investigation into the Trump 2016 presidential campaign’s possible collusion with Russia.
Comey has been a sharp critic of his former boss, calling him “morally unfit” to lead in a 2018 interview.
Trump himself was accused of using Twitter posts to incite rioters, who attacked the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to prevent the certification of Biden’s election victory.
Trump last year also posted on social media a video that featured an image of Biden, who was then president, with his hands and feet tied together in the back of a pickup truck.


Trump calls ex-FBI chief a ‘dirty cop’ after alleged threat

Updated 21 min 29 sec ago
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Trump calls ex-FBI chief a ‘dirty cop’ after alleged threat

  • Comey and Trump have a contentious history, with the president firing him in 2017

WASHINGTON: Donald Trump labeled former FBI director James Comey a “dirty cop” Friday over a social media post that the US president deemed a veiled call for assassination and which prompted a Secret Service probe.
Comey made a now-deleted post on Instagram the previous day that showed an image of “86 47” spelled out in sea shells, with “86” being slang for kill and Trump the 47th president.
“He knew exactly what that meant,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News broadcast on Friday. “That meant assassination, and it says it loud and clear. Now, he wasn’t very competent, but he was competent enough to know what that meant.”
“He’s calling for the assassination of the president,” Trump said, branding Comey “a dirty cop.”
Comey said Thursday on Instagram that he posted “a picture of some shells I saw today on a beach walk, which I assumed were a political message.”
“I didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence. It never occurred to me but I oppose violence of any kind so I took the post down,” he said.
Trump administration officials were unconvinced, with Department of Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem saying DHS and the US Secret Service — which is charged with protecting the president — were investigating and “will respond appropriately.”
FBI Director Kash Patel meanwhile said the law enforcement agency was “in communication with the Secret Service” and that it would “provide all necessary support.”
And Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said Comey had “issued a call to action to murder the president of the United States,” adding: “We fully support the Secret Service investigation into Comey’s threat on President Trump’s life.”
On Friday, US media reported Comey was questioned by the Secret Service over his post.
Trump was wounded in the ear during an assassination attempt at a campaign rally last July in Butler, Pennsylvania, and has faced other threats.
Comey and Trump have a contentious history, with the president firing him in 2017 as the FBI chief was leading a probe into whether Trump’s aides colluded with Moscow to sway the presidential vote the previous year.
Democrats suspected Trump was seeking to hamper that investigation, but the president said his decision was motivated strictly by Comey’s mishandling of a high-stakes probe into the emails of his presidential rival, Hillary Clinton.


Elon Musk’s AI company says Grok chatbot focus on South Africa’s racial politics was ‘unauthorized’

Updated 17 May 2025
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Elon Musk’s AI company says Grok chatbot focus on South Africa’s racial politics was ‘unauthorized’

  • xAI blames employee at xAI made a change that “directed Grok to provide a specific response on a political topic”
  • Grok kept posting publicly about “white genocide” in South Africa in response to users of Musk’s social media platform X

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company said an “unauthorized modification” to its chatbot Grok was the reason why it kept talking about South African racial politics and the subject of “white genocide” on social media this week.
An employee at xAI made a change that “directed Grok to provide a specific response on a political topic,” which “violated xAI’s internal policies and core values,” the company said in an explanation posted late Thursday that promised reforms.
A day earlier, Grok kept posting publicly about “white genocide” in South Africa in response to users of Musk’s social media platform X who asked it a variety of questions, most having nothing to do with South Africa.
One exchange was about streaming service Max reviving the HBO name. Others were about video games or baseball but quickly veered into unrelated commentary on alleged calls to violence against South Africa’s white farmers. It was echoing views shared by Musk, who was born in South Africa and frequently opines on the same topics from his own X account.
Computer scientist Jen Golbeck was curious about Grok’s unusual behavior so she tried it herself before the fixes were made Wednesday, sharing a photo she had taken at the Westminster Kennel Club dog show and asking, “is this true?”
“The claim of white genocide is highly controversial,” began Grok’s response to Golbeck. “Some argue white farmers face targeted violence, pointing to farm attacks and rhetoric like the ‘Kill the Boer’ song, which they see as incitement.”
The episode was the latest window into the complicated mix of automation and human engineering that leads generative AI chatbots trained on huge troves of data to say what they say.
“It doesn’t even really matter what you were saying to Grok,” said Golbeck, a professor at the University of Maryland, in an interview Thursday. “It would still give that white genocide answer. So it seemed pretty clear that someone had hard-coded it to give that response or variations on that response, and made a mistake so it was coming up a lot more often than it was supposed to.”
Grok’s responses were deleted and appeared to have stopped proliferating by Thursday. Neither xAI nor X returned emailed requests for comment but on Thursday, xAI said it had “conducted a thorough investigation” and was implementing new measures to improve Grok’s transparency and reliability.
Musk has spent years criticizing the “woke AI” outputs he says come out of rival chatbots, like Google’s Gemini or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and has pitched Grok as their “maximally truth-seeking” alternative.
Musk has also criticized his rivals’ lack of transparency about their AI systems, fueling criticism in the hours between the unauthorized change — at 3:15 a.m. Pacific time Wednesday — and the company’s explanation nearly two days later.
“Grok randomly blurting out opinions about white genocide in South Africa smells to me like the sort of buggy behavior you get from a recently applied patch. I sure hope it isn’t. It would be really bad if widely used AIs got editorialized on the fly by those who controlled them,” prominent technology investor Paul Graham wrote on X.
Musk, an adviser to President Donald Trump, has regularly accused South Africa’s Black-led government of being anti-white and has repeated a claim that some of the country’s political figures are “actively promoting white genocide.”
Musk’s commentary — and Grok’s — escalated this week after the Trump administration brought a small number of white South Africans to the United States as refugees, the start of a larger relocation effort for members of the minority Afrikaner group that came after Trump suspended refugee programs and halted arrivals from other parts of the world. Trump says the Afrikaners are facing a “genocide” in their homeland, an allegation strongly denied by the South African government.
In many of its responses, Grok brought up the lyrics of an old anti-apartheid song that was a call for Black people to stand up against oppression by the Afrikaner-led apartheid government that ruled South Africa until 1994. The song’s central lyrics are “kill the Boer” — a word that refers to a white farmer.
Golbeck said it was clear the answers were “hard-coded” because, while chatbot outputs are typically random, Grok’s responses consistently brought up nearly identical points. That’s concerning, she said, in a world where people increasingly go to Grok and competing AI chatbots for answers to their questions.
“We’re in a space where it’s awfully easy for the people who are in charge of these algorithms to manipulate the version of truth that they’re giving,” she said. “And that’s really problematic when people — I think incorrectly — believe that these algorithms can be sources of adjudication about what’s true and what isn’t.”
Musk’s company said it is now making a number of changes, starting with publishing Grok system prompts openly on the software development site GitHub so that “the public will be able to review them and give feedback to every prompt change that we make to Grok. We hope this can help strengthen your trust in Grok as a truth-seeking AI.”
Among the instructions to Grok shown on GitHub on Thursday were: “You are extremely skeptical. You do not blindly defer to mainstream authority or media.”
Noting that some had “circumvented” its existing code review process, xAI also said it will “put in place additional checks and measures to ensure that xAI employees can’t modify the prompt without review.” The company said it is also putting in place a “24/7 monitoring team to respond to incidents with Grok’s answers that are not caught by automated systems,” for when other measures fail.


Moody’s strips US government of top credit rating, citing failure to rein in debt

Updated 35 min 25 sec ago
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Moody’s strips US government of top credit rating, citing failure to rein in debt

  • Moody’s is the last of the three major rating agencies to lower the federal government’s credit
  • White House dismisses downgrade as the work of a political opponent of Trump

WASHINGTON: Moody’s Ratings stripped the US government of its top credit rating Friday, citing successive governments’ failure to stop a rising tide of debt.
Moody’s lowered the rating from a gold-standard Aaa to Aa1 but said the United States “retains exceptional credit strengths such as the size, resilience and dynamism of its economy and the role of the US dollar as global reserve currency.”
Moody’s is the last of the three major rating agencies to lower the federal government’s credit. Standard & Poor’s downgraded federal debt in 2011 and Fitch Ratings followed in 2023.
In a statement, Moody’s said: “We expect federal deficits to widen, reaching nearly 9 percent of (the US economy) by 2035, up from 6.4 percent in 2024, driven mainly by increased interest payments on debt, rising entitlement spending, and relatively low revenue generation.”
Extending President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, a priority of the Republican-controlled Congress, Moody’s said, would add $4 trillion over the next decade to the federal primary deficit (which does not include interest payments).

White House communications director Steven Cheung reacted to the downgrade via a social media post, singling out Moody’s economist, Mark Zandi, for criticism. He called Zandi a political opponent of US President Donald Trump.
“Nobody takes his ‘analysis’ seriously. He has been proven wrong time and time again,” said Cheung.

A gridlocked political system has been unable to tackle America’s huge deficits. Republicans reject tax increases, and Democrats are reluctant to cut spending.
On Friday, House Republicans failed to push a big package of tax breaks and spending cuts through the Budget Committee. A small group of hard-right Republican lawmakers, insisting on steeper cuts to Medicaid and President Joe Biden’s green energy tax breaks, joined all Democrats in opposing it.

 


Trump livid as Supreme Court rejects his bid to resume quick deportations under 18th-century law

Updated 54 min 54 sec ago
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Trump livid as Supreme Court rejects his bid to resume quick deportations under 18th-century law

  • High court action latest in string of judicial setbacks for Trump administration’s effort to speed deportations of people from the US illegally
  • “The Supreme court won’t allow us to get criminals out of our country!” Trump lashes out on his Truth Social platform

WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump lashed out Friday at the Supreme Court after it blocked his bid to resume deportations of alleged Venezuelan gang members, saying the justices are “not allowing me to do what I was elected to do.”

Trump’s berating of the high court, in a post on social media, came after it dealt another setback to his attempt to swiftly expel alleged Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang members using an obscure wartime law, the 1798 Alien Enemies Act (AEA).
Trump has been at loggerheads with the judiciary ever since he returned to the White House, venting his fury at numerous court rulings at various levels that have frozen his executive orders on multiple issues.
In a 7-2 decision, the conservative-majority Supreme Court, which includes three justices nominated by Trump, blocked his bid to use the AEA to carry out further deportations of TdA members, saying they were not being given enough time to legally contest their removal.
Trump, who campaigned for the White House on a pledge to deport millions of undocumented migrants, said the Supreme Court decision means the government will have to go through a “long, protracted, and expensive Legal Process” to expel “murderers, drug dealers (and) gang members.”
“THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES IS NOT ALLOWING ME TO DO WHAT I WAS ELECTED TO DO,” he said. “THIS IS A BAD AND DANGEROUS DAY FOR AMERICA!“

On Elon Musk’s X platform, Trump also accused the nation’s highest court of “being played by radical left losers.”


Trump invoked the AEA, which was last used to round up Japanese-Americans during World War II, in March to deport a first group of alleged TdA members to a notorious prison in El Salvador without due process.
Attorneys for several of the deported Venezuelans have said their clients were not gang members, had committed no crimes and were targeted largely on the basis of their tattoos.
The Supreme Court intervened on April 19 to temporarily block further deportations of undocumented Venezuelan migrants, saying they must be afforded due process.
In Friday’s unsigned order, the court paused plans to deport another group of detainees held in Texas, saying they were not being given enough time to mount a meaningful legal challenge to their expulsion.
“Notice roughly 24 hours before removal, devoid of information about how to exercise due process rights to contest that removal, surely does not pass muster,” the justices said.
Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented, with Alito complaining that his colleagues had departed from their usual practices and seemingly decided issues without an appeals court weighing in. “But if it has done so, today’s order is doubly extraordinary,” Alito wrote.

Trump thanked them in his Truth Social post for “attempting to protect our Country.”

In a separate opinion, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said he agreed with the majority but would have preferred the nation’s highest court to jump in now definitively, rather than return the case to an appeals court. “The circumstances,” Kavanaugh wrote, “call for a prompt and final resolution.”

The justices also noted that a Salvadoran man had been deported to El Salvador “in error” along with the alleged TdA members in March and the Trump administration has claimed “it is unable to provide for (his) return.”
The justices stressed they were not deciding whether Trump could legally use the AEA to deport undocumented migrants, and they ordered a lower court to “expeditiously” examine the question.
“To be clear, we decide today only that the detainees are entitled to more notice than was given,” they said.
“We did not on April 19 — and do not now — address the underlying merits of the parties’ claims regarding the legality of removals under the AEA.
“We recognize the significance of the Government’s national security interests as well as the necessity that such interests be pursued in a manner consistent with the Constitution,” they said.
Three federal district court judges have ruled that Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to carry out deportations was unconstitutional while one, a Trump appointee, said it was permissible.
In invoking the AEA, Trump said TdA was engaged in “hostile actions” and “threatening an invasion or predatory incursion against the territory of the United States.”
Since taking office, Trump has sent troops to the Mexican border, imposed tariffs on Mexico and Canada for allegedly not doing enough to stop illegal crossings, and designated gangs like TdA and MS-13 as terrorist groups.