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Kabul, Afghanistan, August 5, 2021 The International Rescue Committee (IRC) expresses grave concern for the marked escalation in violence across large parts of Afghan territory over the last 48 hours.

This major increase in violence could cause devastation for civilians who are at risk of being caught up between warring parties. According to the latest UNAMA report, civilian casualties reached record levels in the first half of 2021 and without a significant de-escalation in violence, Afghanistan is set to witness the highest ever number in a single year. Afghanistan has already produced the second-largest displaced population in the world, after Syria, and with reports that 30,000 are fleeing Afghanistan per day, this number will rise exponentially.

Already, around 360,000 people have been displaced by conflict this year, but accurate and up-to-date figures are unavailable as most of the humanitarian staff operating amid the main areas of the fighting have also been displaced.

Vicki Aken, Afghanistan Director for the IRC, said,

In Afghanistan, women and children made up close to half of all civilian casualties in the first half of this year, and the latest violence should be cause for great alarm for members of the international community. Where fighting is most intense, humanitarian aid workers have also been forced to temporarily flee. If left to unravel further, we could see a major exodus of the population to neighbouring countries, with many people forced to turn to dangerous and illegal routes out of the country as external borders remain closed.

Meanwhile, the greatest need remains inside Afghanistan, and hundreds of thousands of people have already been internally displaced due to conflict as well as drought. Humanitarian organisations like the IRC are committed to remaining in Afghanistan and continuing to deliver support to its population; it is vital that world leaders do the same. The international community cannot afford to turn their backs but instead must double-down on commitments to ensure humanitarian access for the delivery of aid, advocate for an immediate ceasefire and support a peaceful settlement, and provide resettlement pathways for Afghan refugees.

The United States has begun relocating a group of Afghan Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) applicants to Virginia. The International Rescue Committee is providing services for these individuals, including reception, medical care, case management and resettlement by a sponsoring resettlement agency. However, this is not a solution to the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan even at the most optimistic this would only represent 0.02% of those in humanitarian need.

The overall humanitarian situation is worsening as the conflict intensifies; a situation that should be untenable for world leaders. Afghanistan needs sustained aid and diplomatic support from both Western and regional powers - without this, there is little chance that needs will be met and peace will be found.

With more than 18 million people in need of humanitarian aid, Afghanistan is facing an acute emergency, ranking second on the IRCs 2021 emergency Watchlist - a global list of humanitarian crises that are expected to deteriorate the most over the coming year. The IRC has been working in Afghanistan since 1988 providing aid to the most vulnerable. With more than 1,700 staff and volunteers, the IRC reaches more than a million Afghans each year with education, protection, water and sanitation, emergency response, and economic recovery programs.

About the IRC

The International Rescue Committee responds to the worlds worst humanitarian crises, helping to restore health, safety, education, economic wellbeing, and power to people devastated by conflict and disaster. Founded in 1933 at the call of Albert Einstein, the IRC is at work in over 40 countries and over 20 U.S. citieshelping people to survive, reclaim control of their future, and strengthen their communities.Learn more at http://www.rescue.org and follow the IRC on Twitter & Facebook.

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IRC warns that increased conflict could spell tragedy for Afghanistan, where 18 million people already live in dire need of humanitarian assistance -...

The Western armies lose no matter how big and well-equipped they are because the insurgents are fighting on home ground

I will never kneel before such a destructive force (as the Taliban), declared Ashraf Ghani, the soon-to-be ex-president of Afghanistan. We will either sit knee-to-knee for real negotiations at the table, or break their knees on the battlefield. Good luck with that, Ashraf.

General Sami Sadat, still commander of Helmand province as I write this (although perhaps not by the time you read it), was equally confident, but warned that the safety of the world is at stake: This will increase the hope for small extremist groups to mobilise in the cities of Europe and America, and will have a devastating effect on global security.

And how did it all come to this? Ashraf Ghani pointed out that it is obviously Americas fault. The reason for our current situation is that the (US decision to withdraw) was taken abruptly, he told parliament on Monday.

Well, fair enough. US forces have been in Afghanistan for a bare twenty years and the treacherous cowards are already quitting. Donald Trump signed a treaty with the Taliban eighteen months ago promising that all US troops would leave Afghanistan by the 1st of May this year. Short notice indeed.

Im tempted to go back into the archives and find similar brave declarations of imminent victory by South Vietnamese generals (followed by similar predictions of global disaster if they are abandoned) in the final weeks before the helicopters started plucking Americans from the US embassy roof in Saigon in 1975. But its a nice day and I cant be bothered.

President Ghani, General Sadat, and all their friends are reading from the same old script, just 46 years later, and once that final scene has played out in Kabul theyll go and live in the United States. (Dont worry. Theyve saved up enough money.) The only real surprise here is how thoroughly Western armed forces managed to forget their own history.

Im not talking about the old history, when three invasions of Afghanistan at the height of British imperial power (1839-42; 1878-80; 1919) all failed to achieve their objectives.

Im not even talking about the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in 1979-89 when the United States helped the Taliban and similar Islamist groups to do to the Russians exactly what the Taliban have now done to the Americans themselves.

The problem there was that Americans did not see Russians as Western, although viewed from a low orbit they are virtually identical. US generals, therefore, believed that some essential difference between the two armies protected American troops from the fate of the Russians.

Never mind all that. The really unpardonable mistake was forgetting all the lessons Western armies had learned from a dozen lost guerilla wars in former colonies between 1954 and 1975.

France in Algeria and Indochina, Britain in Kenya, Cyprus and Aden, Portugal in Angola and Mozambique, the proxy wars in Rhodesia and South-West Africa (as they were then known), and the United States again in Indochina. All the wars were lost, and yet the defeated imperial powers didn't lose anything except face.

Western armies really did learn the lessons of those defeats. As a young man in the 1970s I taught military history and strategy in the Canadian Forces Staff College and then at Britains Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. The doctrine I taught was a) Western armies always lose guerilla wars in the Third World, and b) it never really matters.

The Western armies lose no matter how big and well-equipped they are because the insurgents are fighting on home ground. They cant quit and go home because they already are home. Your side can always quit and go home, and sooner or later your own public will demand that they do. So, you are bound to lose eventually, even if you win all the battles.

But losing doesnt matter, because the insurgents are always first and foremost nationalists. They may have picked up bits of some grand ideology to make them feel that history is on their side - Marxism or Islamism or whatever - but all they want is for you to go home so they can run their own show. They wont actually follow you home.

By 1975 this hard-earned wisdom was the official doctrine in almost every army in the Western world, but military generations are short. A typical military career is only 25 years, so by 2001 nobody remembered it. Their successors had to start learning it again the hard way. Maybe by now, they have.

(Gwynne Dyer's new book is 'The Shortest History of War'. The views expressed are personal.)

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Afghanistan: How Did They Think It Would End? - Daily Pioneer

British Islamist preacher Anjem Choudary has been blocked from joining employment networking site LinkedIn, the latest decision among major social media platforms to ban him.

A LinkedIn spokesperson said the account belonging to Choudary, who was convicted on terrorism charges in 2016 and once praised the Sept. 11 hijackers as Muslims "carrying out their Islamic responsibility and duty" with the attack, was taken down because the platform doesn't "allow any terrorist organizations or violent extremist groups on our platform."

"And we dont allow any individuals who affiliate with such organizations or groups to promote their activities," the company said in a statement. "We enforce those rules to help keep LinkedIn safe, trusted and professional. These rules apply to everyone on LinkedIn and if they are violated, we take action."

BIDEN ADMINISTRATION TRANSFERS FIRST DETAINEE OUT OF GUANTANAMO BAY

Choudary had already been blocked from Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, with a spokesperson for the latter two saying his accounts violated its Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policies.

"Under these rules, we ban organizations or individuals that proclaim a violent mission or engage in organized hate or violence," the spokesperson said in a statement.

"That was quick, a record, just five days after I set up my account," Choudary told Sky News on July 29 of his ban from Twitter.

Choudary asserted he was "quite moderate" in his Twitter posts and that the company did not provide a reason for blocking him. The companies did not immediately disclose whether a particular post led to their actions. He had been posting about his interpretation of the Quran and Sharia before his accounts were deactivated.

The Washington Examiner contacted Twitter for comment but did not immediately receive a response.

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In July 2016, Choudary was found guilty of providing support to ISIS and was sentenced to five and a half years in prison. He was released in October 2018 and served the rest of his sentence under supervision.

Choudary had been subject to public speaking restrictions as part of his sentence, most of which expired in the last two weeks.

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British Islamist preacher banned from multiple social media platforms - Washington Examiner

In a Facebook earnings call last week, Mark Zuckerberg outlined the future of his company. The vision he put forth wasnt based on advertising, which provides the bulk of Facebooks current profits, or on an increase in the over-all size of the social network, which already has nearly three billion monthly active users. Instead, Zuckerberg said that his goal is for Facebook to help build the metaverse, a Silicon Valley buzzword that has become an obsession for anyone trying to predict, and thus profit from, the next decade of technology. I expect people will transition from seeing us primarily as a social-media company to seeing us as a metaverse company, Zuckerberg said. It was a remarkable pivot in messaging for the social-media giant, especially given the fact that the exact meaning of the metaverse, and what it portends for digital life, is far from clear. In the earnings call, Zuckerberg offered his own definition. The metaverse is a virtual environment where you can be present with people in digital spaces, he said. Its an embodied Internet that youre inside of rather than just looking at. We believe that this is going to be the successor to the mobile Internet.

Like the term cyberspace, a coinage of the fiction writer William Gibson, the term metaverse has literary origins. In Neal Stephensons novel Snow Crash, from 1992, the protagonist, Hiro, a sometime programmer and pizza-delivery driver in a dystopian Los Angeles, immerses himself in the metaverse, a computer-generated universe that his computer is drawing onto his goggles and pumping into his earphones. Its an established part of the books fictional world, a familiar aspect of the characters lives, which move fluidly between physical and virtual realms. On a black ground, below a black sky, like eternal night in Las Vegas, Stephensons metaverse is made up of the Street, a sprawling avenue where the buildings and signs represent different pieces of software that have been engineered by major corporations. The corporations all pay an entity called the Global Multimedia Protocol Group for their slice of digital real estate. Users also pay for access; those who can only afford cheaper public terminals appear in the metaverse in grainy black-and-white.

Stephensons fictional metaverse may not be that far off from what todays tech companies are now developing. Imagine, like Hiro, donning goggles (perhaps those produced by Oculus, which Facebook owns), controlling a three-dimensional virtual avatar, and browsing a series of virtual storefronts, the metaverse equivalents of different platforms like Instagram (which Facebook also owns), Netflix, or the video game Minecraft. You might gather with friends in the virtual landscape and all watch a movie in the same virtual theatre. Youre basically going to be able to do everything that you can on the Internet today as well as some things that dont make sense on the Internet today, like dancing, Zuckerberg said. In the future we might walk through Facebook, wear clothes on Facebook, host virtual parties on Facebook, or own property in the digital territory of Facebook. Each activity in what we once thought of as the real world will develop a metaverse equivalent, with attendant opportunities to spend money doing that activity online. Digital goods and creators are just going to be huge, Zuckerberg said.

This shift is already beginning to take place, though not yet under Facebooks domain. The video game Second Life, which was released in 2003 by Linden Lab, created a virtual world where users could wander, building their own structures; land can be bought there for either U.S. dollars or the in-game currency, Linden Dollars. Roblox, a childrens video game launched in 2006, has lately evolved into an immersive world in which players can design and sell their own creations, from avatar costumes to their own interactive experiences. Rather than a single game, Roblox became a platform for games. Fortnite, released in 2017, evolved from an online multiplayer free-for-all shoot-em-up into a more diffuse space in which players can collaboratively build structures or attend concerts and other live in-game events. (Ariana Grande just announced an upcoming virtual show there.) Players of Fortnite buy customized avatar skins and motions or gestures that the avatars can performperhaps thats where Zuckerberg got his reference to dancing. If any company is primed to profit from the metaverse its the maker of Fortnite, Epic Games, which owns a game marketplace and also sells Unreal Engine, the three-dimensional design software that is used in every corner of the gaming industry and in streaming blockbusters such as the Star Wars TV series The Mandalorian. In April, the company announced a billion-dollar funding round to support its vision for the metaverse.

No single company is meant to own or run the metaverse, however; it requires coperation to create consistency. Assets that one acquires in the metaverse will hypothetically be portable, moving even between platforms owned by different corporations. This synchronization might be enabled by blockchain technology like cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens, which are defined by their immutable record keeping. If you bought an N.F.T. avatar from the online society Bored Ape Yacht Club, Fortnite could theoretically verify your ownership on the blockchain and then allow you to use the avatar within its game world. The same avatar might show up on Roblox, too. The various realms are supposed to maintain interoperability, as Zuckerberg said in the earnings call, linking together to form the wider hypothetical metaverse, the way every Web site exists non-hierarchically on the open protocol of the Internet.

The metaverse represents a techno-optimist vision for a future in which culture can exist in all forms at once. Intellectual propertya phrase increasingly applied to creative output of any kindcan move seamlessly among movies, video games, and virtual-reality environments. Its a tantalizing possibility for the corporate producers of culture, who will profit from their I.P. wherever it goes. Disneys Marvel pantheon of superhero narratives already amounts to a cinematic universe; why not unleash it into every possible platform simultaneously? In Fortnite, as the pro-metaverse investor Matthew Ball wrote in an influential essay last year, You can literally wear a Marvel characters costume inside Gotham City, while interacting with those wearing legally licensed N.F.L. uniforms. (How appealing you find this may depend on how addicted you are to logos.) In the future, users own creations may attain the same kind of portability and profitability, letting fan concepts compete with Marvel just as self-published blogs once disrupted newspapers.

Judging from Facebooks growth strategy over the past decade, though, Zuckerberg wont be satisfied with making his company one component of a multiplatform metaverse. Just as the company bought, absorbed, and outcompeted smaller social-media platforms until it resembled a monopoly, it may try to control the entire space in which users dwell so that it will be able to charge us rents. Facebook may, indeed, create virtual real estate that online small businesses will have to rent in order to sell their wares, or build an in-game meeting space where an impressive, expensive avatar will be key to networking, like the equivalent of a fancy Zoom background. Our physical lives are already so saturated with Facebook and its other properties that the company must build new structures for the virtual iterations of our lives, and then dominate those as well in order to keep expanding.

Zuckerbergs comments brought to my mind an earlier iteration of online life, a game and social space called Neopets. Neopets launched in 1999; I remember playing it in middle school, trading strategies with friends. In the game, the player takes care of small digital creatures, feeding and grooming them as well as buying accessories with Neopoints earned from in-game activities. It was a point of pride and a form of self-expression, albeit a nerdy one, to have a highly developed profile in the game. In the metaverse Facebook envisions, however, you are the Neopet, and your in-game activities may affect every sphere of life that Facebook already touches: careers, relationships, politics. In Zuckerbergs vision, Neopoints become Facebook dollars, only usable on the platform; your self-presentation online becomes a choice limited to options that Facebook provides. A blue-and-gray virtual universe looms. The more immersive it is, the more inescapable it becomes, like an all-encompassing social-media feed, with all the problems thereof.

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Facebook Wants Us to Live in the Metaverse - The New Yorker

Dating app maker and Tinder parent Match Group said during its Q2 earnings it will bring audio and video chat, including group live video, and other livestreaming technologies to several of the companys brands over the next 12 to 24 months. The developments will be powered by innovations from Hyperconnect, the social networking company that this year became Matchs biggest acquisition to date when it bought the Korean app maker for a sizable $1.73 billion.

Since then, Match Group has been relatively quiet about its specific plans for Hyperconnects tech or its longer-term strategy with the operation, although Tinder was briefly spotted testing a group video chat feature called Tinder Mixer earlier this summer. The move had seemed to signal some exploration of social discovery features in the wake of the Hyperconnect deal. However, Tinder told us at the time the company had no plans to bring that specific product to market in the year ahead.

On Tuesdays earnings, Match Group offered a little more insight into the future of Hyperconnect, following the acquisitions official close in mid-June.

According to Match Group CEO Shar Dubey, who stepped into the top job last January, the company is excited about the potential to integrate technologies Hyperconnect has developed into existing Match-owned dating apps.

This includes, she said, AR features, self-expression tools, conversational AI and a number of what we would consider metaverse elements, which have the element to transform the online meeting and getting-to-know-each-other process, Dubey explained, without offering further specific details about how the products would work or which apps would receive these enhancements.

Many of these technologies emerged from Hyperconnects lab, Hyper X the same in-house incubator whose first product is nowone of the companys flagship apps, Azar, which joined Match Group with the acquisition.

Dubey also noted that the work to begin these tech integrations was already underway at the company.

By year-end, Match Group said it expects to have at least two of its brands integrated with technologies from Hyperconnect. A number of other brands will implement Hyperconnect capabilities by year-end 2022.

In doing so, Match aims to transform what people think of when it comes to online dating.

To date, online dating has been a fairly static experience across the industry, where apps focus largely on profiles and photos, and then offer some sort of matching technique whether swipes or quizzes or something else. Tinder, in more recent years, began to break out of that mold as it innovated with an array of different experiences, like its choose-your-own-adventure in-app video series, Swipe Night, video profiles, instant chat features (via Tinders product, Hot Takes) and others. But it still lacked some of the real-time elements that people have when meeting one another in the real world.

This is an area where Match believes Hyperconnect can help to improve the online dating experience.

One of the holy grails for us in online dating has always been to bridge the disconnect that happens between people chatting online and then meeting someone in person, Dubey said. These technologies will eventually allow us to build experiences that will help people determine if they have that much elusive chemistry or not Our ultimate vision here is for people to never have to go on a bad first date again, she added.

Of course, Match Groups positioning of the Hyperconnect deal as being more interesting because the innovation it brings and not just the standalone apps it operates also comes at a time when those apps have not met the companys expectations on revenue.

In the second half the of 2021, Match Group said it expects Hyperconnect to contribute to $125 to $135 million in revenue a financial outlook that the company admits reflects some pullback. It attributed this largely to COVID impacts, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region where Hyperconnects apps operate. Other impacts to Hyperconnects growth included a more crowded marketplace and Apples changes to IDFA (Identifier for Advertisers), which has impacted a number of apps including other social networking apps, like Facebook.

While Match still believes Hyperconnect will post solid revenue growth in 2021, it said that these new technology integrations into the Match Group portfolio are now a higher priority for the company.

Match Group posted mixed earnings in Q1, with revenue of $707.8 million, above analyst estimates, but earnings per share of 46 cents, below projections of 49 cents a share. Paying customers grew 15% to 15 million, up from 13 million in the year-ago quarter. Shares declined by 7% on Wednesday morning, following the earnings announcement.

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Match Group to add audio and video chat, including group live video, to its dating app portfolio - TechCrunch