KABUL: Hissing like a quiver of angry cobras, a group of young Afghan mixed martial arts (MMA) athletes shadow box in a Kabul club despite the uncertain future of the sport after a Taliban government ban on professional competitions.
Late last month, the Taliban authorities banned the sport in professional competition calling it too “violent” and “problematic with respect to sharia,” in the latest restriction based on their interpretation of Islamic law implemented since they swept to power in 2021.
“Initially, when a friend told me that MMA has been banned in Afghanistan, I didn’t believe but when I reached the club, all my friends were gutted, and obviously I was too,” 21-year-old Khalil Rahman said.
Rahman had ambitions to “raise Afghanistan’s flag high in the world,” through international MMA competitions, but now that professional bouts have been canceled, he and other trainees at the well-equipped private gym in eastern Kabul worry their days in the octagonal fighting cage are numbered.
For now, training and amateur competitions have continued with protective gear, leaving MMA enthusiasts in limbo, uncertain of the exact rules in the order from the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice.
The state sporting authority was not immediately available for comment, but a source from the organization confirmed to AFP that the order text “was vague about what actually has been banned and the general directorate of sports and physical education has requested clarity.”
But Rahman is already thinking of trying to leave the country to follow his pro MMA dreams abroad.
His fellow trainee Mohammad Waseem Qayumi is holding out hope he can keep up with the sport at an amateur level.
“Initially, it made me sad when MMA was banned,” he said, sweating after punching and kicking through the training session.
“Then I thought if free fighting (without safety gear) is banned, that’s OK, I will put on headgear and other safety equipment and will continue to freestyle with my fighting.”
Qayumi was inspired by the growth of the sport in the country in recent years, as he saw Afghan athletes taking part in international competitions on popular MMA platforms like the US Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC).
A number of non-Afghan Muslim fighters have won world titles and enormous purses on the international stage, including Russians Khabib Nurmagomedov and Islam Makhachev.
“The people of Afghanistan are fighters, and this sport is also a fight, where you can kick and punch freely, that’s why people like this sport,” Qayumi said.
The Taliban government has not been recognized by any other state, complicating sports teams’ participation in international arenas, but athletes from other countries have recently been welcomed to Afghanistan for competition.
The authorities have also effectively banned women from sports and male athletes have been ordered in a new morality law to cover their bodies from the navel to the knee.
Bilal Fazli, who trains in a club based in a dark basement in the southwest of the Afghan capital told AFP he was disappointed to see an immediate drop in the number of trainees coming to the club after the ban.
“All the boys were frightened... The government could have done a better job by working on other important things such as helping the poor than banning sport,” the 21-year-old said before punching his trainer’s gloves hard in frustration.
“I don’t know what to do, we don’t have jobs and if we can’t even have the sports of our liking, maybe we will leave this country.”
Afghan fighters pull no punches after Taliban ban on professional MMA
https://arab.news/gn5v3
Afghan fighters pull no punches after Taliban ban on professional MMA
- Taliban authorities banned the sport in professional competition calling it too ‘violent’ and ‘problematic with respect to sharia’
- A number of non-Afghan Muslim fighters have won world titles and enormous purses on the international stage
Musk vows to stay Trump’s ‘friend’ in bizarre black-eyed farewell
- “I look forward to continuing to be a friend and adviser to the president,” Musk said in a press conference
- Many people were more interested in the black bruise around Musk’s right eye, which he blamed on his son
WASHINGTON: Billionaire Elon Musk bade farewell to Donald Trump in an extraordinary Oval Office appearance Friday, sporting a black eye, brushing aside drug abuse claims and vowing to stay a “friend and adviser” to the US president.
As the world’s richest person bowed out of his role as Trump’s cost-cutter-in-chief, the Republican hailed Musk’s “incredible service” and handed him a golden key to the White House.
But Trump insisted that Musk was “really not leaving” after a turbulent four months in which his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cut tens of thousands of jobs, shuttered whole agencies and slashed foreign aid.
“He’s going to be back and forth,” said Trump, showering praise on the tech tycoon for what he called the “most sweeping and consequential government reform program in generations.”
South-African born Musk, wearing a black T-shirt with the word “Dogefather” in white lettering and a black DOGE baseball cap, said many of the $1 trillion savings he promised would take time to bear fruit.
“I look forward to continuing to be a friend and adviser to the president,” he said.
But many people were more interested in the livid black bruise around Musk’s right eye.
Speculation about the cause was further fueled by accusations in the New York Times Friday that Musk used so much of the drug ketamine on the 2024 campaign trail that he developed bladder problems.
‘Go ahead punch me in the face’
The SpaceX and Tesla magnate said that his son was to blame for the injury.
“I was just horsing around with lil’ X, and I said, ‘go ahead punch me in the face,’” 53-year-old Musk said. “And he did. Turns out even a five-year-old punching you in the face actually is...” he added, before tailing off.
Musk, however, dodged a question about the drug allegations.
The New York Times said Musk, the biggest donor to Trump’s 2024 election campaign, also took ecstasy and psychoactive mushrooms and traveled with a pill box last year.
Musk, who has long railed against the news media and championed his X social media platform as an alternative, took aim at the paper instead.
“Is that the same publication that got a Pulitzer Prize for false reporting on the Russiagate?” said Musk, referring to claims that Trump’s 2016 election campaign colluded with Moscow.
“Let’s move on. Okay. Next question.”
Later in the day, when a reporter asked Trump if he was “aware of Elon Musk’s regular drug use,” Trump simply responded: “I wasn’t.”
“I think Elon is a fantastic guy,” he added.
The White House had earlier played down the report.
“The drugs that we’re concerned about are the drugs running across the southern border” from Mexico, said Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, whose wife works for Musk.
Musk has previously admitted to taking ketamine, saying he was prescribed it to treat a “negative frame of mind” and suggesting his use of drugs benefited his work.
Leaving under a cloud
The latest in a series of made-for-TV Oval Office events was aimed at putting a positive spin on Musk’s departure.
Musk is leaving Trump’s administration under a cloud, after admitting disillusionment with his role and criticizing the Republican president’s spending plans.
It was a far cry from his first few weeks as Trump’s chainsaw-brandishing sidekick.
At one time Musk was almost inseparable from Trump, glued to his side on Air Force One, Marine One, in the White House and at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
The right-wing magnate’s DOGE led an ideologically-driven rampage through the federal government, with its young “tech bros” slashing tens of thousands of jobs.
But DOGE’s achievements fell far short of Musk’s original goal of saving $2 trillion dollars.
The White House says DOGE has made $170 billion in savings so far. The independent “Doge Tracker” site has counted just $12 billion while the Atlantic magazine put it far lower, at $2 billion.
Musk’s “move fast and break things” mantra was also at odds with some of his cabinet colleagues, and he said earlier this week that he was “disappointed” in Trump’s planned mega tax and spending bill as it undermined DOGE’s cuts.
Musk’s companies, meanwhile, have suffered.
Tesla shareholders called for him to return to work as sales slumped and protests targeted the electric vehicle maker, while SpaceX had a series of fiery rocket failures.
Trump says will double steel, aluminum tariffs to 50%
WEST MIFFLIN, US: US President Donald Trump said Friday that he would double steel and aluminum import tariffs to 50 percent from next week, the latest salvo in his trade wars aimed at protecting domestic industries.
“We’re going to bring it from 25 percent to 50 percent, the tariffs on steel into the United States of America,” he said while addressing workers at a US Steel plant in Pennsylvania.
“Nobody’s going to get around that,” he added in the speech before blue-collar workers in the battleground state that helped deliver his election victory last year.
Shortly after, Trump wrote in a Truth Social post that the elevated rate would also apply to aluminum, with the new tariffs “effective Wednesday, June 4th.”
Since returning to the presidency in January, Trump has imposed sweeping tariffs on allies and adversaries alike in moves that have rocked the world trade order and roiled financial markets.
He has also issued sector-specific levies that affect goods such as automobiles.
On Friday, he defended his trade policies, arguing that tariffs helped protect US industry.
He added that the steel facility he was speaking in would not exist if he had not also imposed duties on metals imports during his first administration.
On Friday, Trump touted a planned partnership between US Steel and Japan’s Nippon Steel, but offered few new details on a deal that earlier faced bipartisan opposition.
He stressed that despite a recently announced planned partnership between the American steelmaker and Nippon Steel, “US Steel will continue to be controlled by the USA.”
He added that there would be no layoffs or outsourcing of jobs by the company.
Last week, Trump said that US Steel would remain in America with its headquarters to stay in Pittsburgh, adding that the arrangement with Nippon would create at least 70,000 jobs and add $14 billion to the US economy.
On Friday, he said that as part of its commitment, Nippon would invest $2.2 billion to boost steel production in the Mon Valley Works-Irvin plant where he was speaking.
Another $7 billion would go toward modernizing steel mills, expanding ore mining and building facilities in places including Indiana and Minnesota.
A proposed $14.9 billion sale of US Steel to Nippon Steel had previously drawn political opposition from both sides of the aisle. Former president Joe Biden blocked the deal on national security grounds shortly before leaving office.
There remain lingering concerns over the new partnership.
The United Steelworkers union which represents thousands of hourly workers at US Steel facilities said after Trump’s speech that it had not participated in discussions involving Nippon Steel and the Trump administration, “nor were we consulted.”
“We cannot speculate about the meaning of the ‘planned partnership,’” said USW International President David McCall in a statement.
“Whatever the deal structure, our primary concern remains with the impact that this merger of US Steel into a foreign competitor will have on national security, our members and the communities where we live and work,” McCall said.
“The devil is always in the details,” he added.
Trump had opposed Nippon Steel’s takeover plan while on the election campaign trail. But since returning to the presidency, he signaled that he would be open to some form of investment after all.
Trump vowed to remake aid. Is Gaza the future?
WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump has slashed US aid and vowed a major rethink on helping the world. A controversial effort to bring food to Gaza may offer clues on what’s to come.
Administered by contracted US security with Israeli troops at the perimeter, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is distributing food through several hubs in the war-ravaged Gaza Strip.
An officially private effort with opaque funding, the GHF began operations on May 26 after Israel completely cut off supplies into Gaza for over two months, sparking warnings of mass famine.
The organization said it had distributed 2.1 million meals as of Friday.
The initiative excludes the UN, which has long coordinated aid distribution in the war-ravaged territory and has infrastructure and systems in place to deliver assistance on a large scale.
The UN and other major aid groups have refused to cooperate with GHF, saying it violates basic humanitarian principles, and appears crafted to cater to Israeli military objectives.
“What we have seen is chaotic, it’s tragic and it’s resulted in hundreds of thousands of people scrambling in an incredibly undignified and unsafe way to access a tiny trickle of aid,” said Ciaran Donnelly, senior vice president of international programs at the International Rescue Committee .
Jan Egeland, head of the Norwegian Refugee Council, said his aid group stopped work in Gaza in 2015 when Hamas militants invaded its office and that it refused to cooperate in Syria when former strongman Bashar Assad was pressuring opposition-held areas by withholding food.
“Why on earth would we be willing to let the Israeli military decide how, where and to whom we give our aid as part of their military strategy to herd people around Gaza?” said Egeland.
“It’s a violation of everything we stand for. It is the biggest and reddest line there is that we cannot cross.”
The UN said that 47 people were injured Tuesday when hungry and desperate crowds rushed a GHF site — most of them by Israeli gunfire — while a Palestinian medical source said at least one person had died.
The Israeli military denied its soldiers fired on civilians and the GHF denied any injuries or deaths.
Israel has relentlessly attacked Gaza since Hamas’s unprecedented attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Israel has vowed to sideline the UN agency for Palestinian refugees UNRWA, accusing it of bias and of harboring Hamas militants.
UNRWA said that nine out of thousands of staff may have been involved in the October 7 attack and dismissed them, but accuses Israel of trying to throw a distraction.
John Hannah, a former senior US policymaker who led a study last year that gave birth to the concepts behind the GHF, said the UN seemed to be “completely lacking in self-reflection” on the need for a new approach to aid after Hamas built a “terror kingdom.”
“I fear that people could be on the brink of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good instead of figuring out how do we take part in this effort, improve it, make it better, scale it up,” said Hannah, who is not involved in implementing the GHF.
Hannah, a senior fellow at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, defended the use of private contractors, saying that many had extensive Middle East experience from the US-led “war on terror.”
“We would have been happy if there were volunteers from capable and trusted national forces... but the fact is, nobody’s volunteering,” he said.
He said he would rather that aid workers coordinate with Israel than Hamas.
“Inevitably, any humanitarian effort in a war zone has to make some compromises with a ruling authority that carries the guns,” he said.
Hannah’s study had discouraged a major Israeli role in humanitarian work in Gaza, urging instead involvement by Arab states to bring greater legitimacy.
Arab states have balked at supporting US efforts as Israel pounds Gaza and after Trump mused about forcibly displacing the whole Gaza population and constructing luxury hotels.
Israel and Hamas are negotiating a new Gaza ceasefire that could see a resumption of UN-backed efforts.
Aid groups say they have vast amounts of aid ready for Gaza that remain blocked.
Donnelly said the IRC had 27 tons of supplies waiting to enter Gaza, faulting the GHF for distributing items like pasta and tinned fish that require cooking supplies — not therapeutic food and treatment for malnourished children.
He called for distributing relief in communities where people need it, instead of through militarized hubs.
“If anyone really cares about distributing aid in a transparent, accountable, effective way, the way to do that is to use the expertise and infrastructure of aid organizations that have been doing this for decades,” Donnelly said.
Hegseth says US will stand by Indo-Pacific allies against ‘imminent’ threat of China
- Hegseth also called out China for its ambitions in Latin America, particularly its efforts to increase its influence over the Panama Canal
SINGAPORE: US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reassured allies in the Indo-Pacific on Saturday that they will not be left alone to face increasing military and economic pressures from China.
He said Washington will bolster its defenses overseas to counter what the Pentagon sees as rapidly developing threats by Beijing, particularly in its aggressive stance toward Taiwan. China has conducted numerous exercises to test what a blockade would look like of the self-governing island, which Beijing claims as its own and the US has pledged to defend.
China’s army “is rehearsing for the real deal,” Hegseth said in a keynote speech at a security conference in Singapore. “We are not going to sugarcoat it — the threat China poses is real. And it could be imminent.”
China has a stated goal of having its military be able to take Taiwan by force if necessary by 2027, a deadline that is seen by experts as more of an aspirational goal than a hard war deadline.
But China also has developed sophisticated man-made islands in the South China Sea to support new military outposts and built up highly advanced hypersonic and space capabilities, which are driving the US to create its own space-based “Golden Dome” missile defenses.
Speaking at the Shangri-La Dialogue, a global security conference hosted by the International Institute for Security Studies, Hegseth said China is no longer just building up its military forces to take Taiwan, it’s “actively training for it, every day.”
Hegseth also called out China for its ambitions in Latin America, particularly its efforts to increase its influence over the Panama Canal.
He repeated a pledge made by previous administrations to bolster US military capabilities in the region to provide a more robust deterrent. While both the Obama and Biden administrations had also committed to pivoting to the Pacific — and even established new military agreements throughout the region — a full shift has never been realized.
Instead, US military resources from the Indo-Pacific have been regularly pulled to support military needs in the Middle East and Europe, especially since the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. In the first few months of President Donald Trump’s second term, that’s also been the case.
The Indo-Pacific nations caught in between have tried to balance relations with both the US and China over the years. Beijing is the primary trading partner for many, but is also feared as a regional bully, in part due to its increasingly aggressive claims on natural resources such as critical fisheries.
Hegseth cautioned that playing both sides, seeking US military support and Chinese economic support, carries risk.
“Beware the leverage the CCP seeks with that entanglement,” Hegseth said.
China usually sends its own defense minister to this conference — but in a snub this year to the US and the erratic tariff war Trump has ignited with Beijing, its minister Dong Jun did not attend, something the US delegation said it intended to capitalize on.
“We are here this morning. And somebody else isn’t,” Hegseth said.
He urged countries in the region to increase defense spending to levels similar to the 5 percent of their gross domestic product European nations are now pressed to contribute.
“We must all do our part,” Hegseth said.
It’s not clear if the US can or wants to supplant China as the region’s primary economic driver. But Hegseth’s push follows Trump’s visit to the Middle East, which resulted in billions of dollars in new defense agreements.
Hegseth said committing US support for Indo-Pacific nations would not be based on any conditions on local governments aligning their cultural or climate issues with the West.
Homeland Security chief said an immigrant threatened to kill Trump. The story quickly fell apart
- Law enforcement officials believe the man, Ramon Morales Reyes, never wrote a letter that Noem and her department shared on social media
- Probers found that the hand-writing in the letter was different from the man's handwriting sample, and that he did not know how to speak English
A claim by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem that an immigrant threatened the life of President Donald Trump has begun to unravel.
Noem announced an arrest of a 54-year-old man who was living in the US illegally, saying he had written a letter threatening to kill Trump and would then return to Mexico. The story received a flood of media attention and was highlighted by the White House and Trump’s allies.
But investigators actually believe the man may have been framed so that he would get arrested and be deported from the US before he got a chance to testify in a trial as a victim of assault, a person familiar with the matter told The Associated Press. The person could not publicly discuss details of the investigation and spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity.
Law enforcement officials believe the man, Ramon Morales Reyes, never wrote a letter that Noem and her department shared with a message written in light blue ink expressing anger over Trump’s deportations and threatening to shoot him in the head with a rifle at a rally. Noem also shared the letter on X along with a photo of Morales Reyes, and the White House also shared it on its social media accounts. The letter was mailed to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office along with the FBI and other agencies, the person said.
As part of the investigation, officials had contacted Morales Reyes and asked for a handwriting sample and concluded his handwriting and the threatening letter didn’t match and that the threat was not credible, the person said. It’s not clear why Homeland Security officials still decided to send a release making that claim.
In an emailed statement asking for information about the letter and the new information about Morales Reyes, the Department of Homeland Security said “the investigation into the threat is ongoing. Over the course of the investigation, this individual was determined to be in the country illegally and that he had a criminal record. He will remain in custody.”
His attorneys said he was not facing current charges and they did not have any information about convictions in his record.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s records show Morales Reyes is being held at a county jail in Juneau, Wisconsin, northwest of Milwaukee. The Milwaukee-based immigrant rights group Voces de la Frontera, which is advocating for his release, said he was arrested May 21. Attorney Cain Oulahan, who was hired to fight against his deportation, said he has a hearing in a Chicago immigration court next week and is hoping he is released on bond.
Morales Reyes had been a victim in a case of another man who is awaiting trial on assault charges in Wisconsin, the person familiar with the matter said. The trial is scheduled for July.
Morales Reyes works as a dishwasher in Milwaukee, where he lives with his wife and three children. He had recently applied for a U visa, which is carved out for people in the country illegally who become victims of serious crimes, said attorney Kime Abduli, who filed that application.
The Milwaukee Police Department said it is investigating an identity theft and victim intimidation incident related to this matter and the county district attorney’s office said the investigation was ongoing. Milwaukee police said no one has been criminally charged at this time.
Abduli, Morales Reyes’ attorney, says he could not have written the letter, saying he did not receive formal education and can’t write in Spanish and doesn’t know how to speak English. She said it was not clear whether he was arrested because of the letters.
“There is really no way that it could be even remotely true,” Abduli said. “We’re asking for a clarification and a correction from DHS to clear Ramon’s name of anything having to do with this.”
