The Commerce Department adds the Israeli cybersecurity firm to its Entity List, which limits its ability to use American tech.
The US Commerce Department on Wednesday announced restrictions on the NSO Group, the Israel-based cybersecurity firm behind the Pegasus spyware that was uncovered on the phones of activists, journalists and executives earlier this year.
The NSO Group was added to the Entity List, which limits its ability to use American tech, based on evidence that the firm “developed and supplied spyware to foreign governments that used these tools to maliciously target clarks shoes uk government officials, journalists, businesspeople, activists, academics, and embassy workers,” the Commerce Department said in a release. The agency added that NSO Group tools have also helped foreign governments “conduct transnational repression,” threatening international order.
The spotlight hit the NSO Group in September after Apple released security updates for its iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches and Mac computers to close a vulnerability reportedly exploited by the invasive Pegasus spyware. The security fix stemmed from research done by a public interest cybersecurity group called Citizen Lab, which found a Saudi activist’s phone had been infected with Pegasus. In July, researchers found evidence of attempted or successful installations of Pegasus on 37 phones of activists, journalists and business executives.
The NSO Group, which licenses surveillance software to government agencies, says its Pegasus software helps authorities combat criminals and terrorists who take advantage of encryption technology to go dark.
On Wednesday, the NSO Group said it was dismayed by the decision and will advocate for the action to be reversed.
“We look forward to presenting the full information regarding how we have the world’s most rigorous compliance and human rights programs that brooks shoes are based the American values we deeply share, which already resulted in multiple terminations of contacts with government agencies that misused our products,” said a NSO spokesperson.
The Commerce Department said the move was part of the Biden administration’s efforts to “put human rights at the center of US foreign policy, including by working to stem the proliferation of digital tools used for repression.”
Where’s Wall-E? A winning CG robot joins Hanks for a relatively gentle end-of-the-world on Apple TV Plus.
Tom Hanks is one man and his dog (and their robot) in Finch.
Finch takes us to the end of the world… again. But this familiar trek across the post-apocalypse on Apple TV Plus has two unique selling points: Tom Hanks and robots.
Originally titled BIOS, Finch was meant to come out in late 2020. Bought up by Apple and retitled to a less ambiguously pronounced name, Finch streams on Apple TV Plus this Friday, Nov. 5.
The film opens with a familiar setup. The world has ended and an apparently lone survivor (the titular Finch, played by Hanks) loots a store, tags it with a spray can and heads back to his base where we see the hardscrabble life he’s carved for nike sneakers himself. It’s something you’ve seen before in every post-apocalypse drama from I Am legend to A Quiet Place to Wall-E.
The film takes on something of its own texture when Hanks jumps into a giant dump truck and storms down the street crunching cars, although that gleefully muscular tone doesn’t last. Soft-voiced, shambling and gray-whiskered, Hanks is in Cast Away mode as a mild engineer keeping himself busy with a library of books in a secure silo.
Helmed by Emmy-winning Game of Thrones director Miguel Sapochnik, Finch is a visual treat thanks to a combination of sweeping vistas and clever CGI effects. But it’s also a pretty intimate tale that would feel more at home on the streaming screen even if pandemic disruption hadn’t pushed it out of a prospective theater release.
When a super-storm threatens Finch’s modest underground life, however, the film fires up its second selling point. Comparisons with Wall-E don’t just come from its setting in the blasted landscape of a ruined Earth. No, Finch also has cute droids Hanks builds to help navigate life in this solar-flare-ravaged world. These creations culminate in a human-shaped bot named Jeff, designed to join Hanks on a last-ditch road trip.
The spindly, jerky robot has an orange dome for a face but bags of personality. An impressive digital creation, Jeff is brought to life in a motion capture performance by Caleb Landry Jones, an actor best known for playing oddball characters in films such as Get Out and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri. Jones’ performance and the magic of the visual effects team invests Jeff with a charmingly goofy disposition, making an engaging slapstick sidekick for Hanks doing his grumpy but avuncular bit. Jeff is up there with other personality-infused robots in similar films like Netflix’s gripping thriller I Am Mother or melancholy ’70s sci-fi classic Silent Running (referenced here in the name of one of Hanks’ robots).
With a dog and a childlike robot piling into a 1984 Fleetwood RV Southwind recreational vehicle, ecco shoes the film hits the road with a freewheelin’ almost indie-comedy-drama sensibility. There’s an inherent danger in the situation, but the film downplays the menace. The hostile environment is reminiscent of The Martian but with no zombies or mutant biker gangs in pursuit, Finch often feels more like Little Miss Sunshine meets Short Circuit.
It also begins with Hanks crooning American Pie and actually drops Road to Nowhere by Talking Heads when the characters are, wait for it, on the road. At its worst, Finch heads into cloyingly sentimental territory with unfocused emotional reveals and vague life lessons. Still, it’s a charming diversion even if it journeys across pretty familiar territory. Tom Hanks and robots, you can’t go wrong.
Remains found in Southern California are that of Lauren “El” Cho, a New Jersey woman who disappeared in June, officials confirmed Thursday.
The positive identification brought a sad end to the monthslong search for Cho, a Korean American whose case gained renewed interest during the debate over racial disparities in news media coverage about missing persons.
“The cause and manner of death is steve madden shoes pending toxicology results,” according to a statement from the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Office. “No further information will be released on this case until such time toxicology results are available and new information is discovered as a result.”
The human remains were found on Oct. 9 in the rugged, open desert terrain near her last known location, an artist-oriented Airbnb rental in Yucca Valley, about 30 miles north of Palm Springs.
Authorities had searched the compound and surrounding area several times, according to the San Bernardino County Sheriff.
The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Specialized Investigation Division became involved in late September after local investigators “exhausted their investigation.”
Cho, 30, was first reported missing at around 5 p.m. on June 28, after friends and others staying at the compound said she departed in a state of agitation with no food, water or phone.
About a week later, relatives of Cho activated a Facebook page called “Missing Person: Lauren ‘El’ Cho” to raise awareness about her disappearance.
The case of Cho and those of other women of color appeared to get a boost in attention amid criticism of the news media’s intense focus on the late-summer ecco shoes disappearance and death of Gabby Petito, who was white.
Petito’s remains were found near Grand Teton National Park, and those discovered in the search for Cho were found near Joshua Tree National Park.
“I want to use the attention now and just power through,” one of Cho’s friends tweeted Sept. 20 after Petito’s case became a dominant national story.
Family members behind the Facebook page described Cho’s personality and spirit:
“El is many things … a talented musician, an incredible baker, a hilarious and loyal friend, a strangely intuitive gift giver, and probably the coolest sister one could hope for. But this is where El really shines: as an aunt. The love she has for her nibling is unmatched. Even among family, the consensus is that her nibling is the person El loves most in this world.”
Scott Looney, the head of the Hawken School near Cleveland and a leader in private education, had become disenchanted. The majority of American high schools, even the best money could buy, he believed, were delivering a misguided education. They treated students as passive receptacles and downplayed the importance of attributes such as collaboration and the many types of learning taking place outside classrooms. They reduced the high school experience of students with college aspirations to a formulaic pursuit of success in a narrow set of advanced courses that blocked many from exploring their passions.
Looney wanted to create a new secondary-school model, not just at Hawken and other privileged private schools, but also for the public school system that educated the vast majority of the nation’s students. “The industrial production model of putting kids asics shoes on an assembly line when they’re 4 and moving them through at the same pace, asking them to do functionally the same work, is toxic,” he told us at his Hawken office in May.
He envisioned schools where students learned math, history and science not as isolated subjects in classroom-bound courses but while working together to address real-world issues like soil conservation, homelessness and illegal immigration. Such learning would make schooling more meaningful for students and thus more engaging, Looney believed. It would let students demonstrate more talents to colleges, holding out the prospect of a wider, more diverse range of students entering higher education’s top ranks.
The existing high school transcript, however, with its simple summary of courses and grades, wouldn’t do justice to the interdisciplinary, project-based learning he wanted. It wouldn’t capture students’ creativity, persistence and other qualities. Looney needed a radically different way to portray students’ high school experiences, one that replaced grades with a richer picture. But he didn’t know what it was.
Neil Mehta changed that. Mehta was a Hawken parent and faculty member at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine in 2013 when he attended one of Looney’s early presentations on his frustrations with high school education. Looney included grades among schooling’s “sacred cows” that should be abandoned, proposing instead that students be awarded credits for achieving a school’s standards on a range of knowledge, skills and learning traits.
After the presentation, Mehta mentioned to Looney that the Lerner medical school didn’t give grades and measured its students’ grasp of patient care, health-care systems and other topics by evaluating essays and supporting evidence gathered in electronic portfolios. “We’re already doing what you’re talking about,” he told Looney. Looney met with Mehta, studied the Lerner model, visited its campus and was convinced he could track on a single digital platform the knowledge and skills students acquired during high school, without grades – what he would go on to call a mastery transcript. “I thought, hell, if they could do it at a medical school, I should be able to do it in high schools, where no one dies if you get it wrong.”
Today, 275 private high schools and 125 public schools are part of the nonprofit Mastery Transcript Consortium (MTC). They are in various stages of designing and launching the transcript – and working to make Looney’s radical vision a reality. Started in 2017, the organization is expanding rapidly.
The head of the Cleveland public school system recently joined the consortium’s board of directors, and the consortium is in discussions with state and education officials in North Dakota, Vermont, Utah and elsewhere to bring the transcript to hundreds more public high schools. And after a pilot year, the consortium nike sneakers officially introduced the new transcript last fall, with 250 students in 14 of the member schools applying to more than 200 colleges and universities with the transcript – and earning admission to 170 schools as different as Middlebury College, MIT and the University of Oklahoma.
And yet, despite its early victories, Looney’s crusade for a fundamentally different way of capturing students’ high school experience has also drawn skeptics. They say that the mastery transcript is a bridge too far for already overburdened schools and college admission offices, and that abandoning grades would hurt disadvantaged students’ college prospects.
Indeed, the trajectory thus far of the mastery transcript illuminates how hard it is both to change entrenched educational practices and to level the educational playing field for students from communities with fewer resources. It remains possible that the concept will turn out to be merely an idealistic and flawed pursuit from a passionate educator. Then again, maybe the mastery transcript is, in fact, the harbinger Looney wants it to be – the start of an evolution that expands what learning is, where it happens and how it’s measured.
Looney, 57, was an unlikely revolutionary. He grew up in a working-class Chicago suburb, the son of a police officer and a customer service rep for a manufacturing company; he was born when his parents were teenagers. He went to desultory public schools, worked as a drugstore stock clerk at night, and was the first in his family to finish college, DePauw University in Indiana, where he showed up in a black Rush T-shirt. He graduated with a degree in psychology and went to work for schools that were a world apart from those he encountered growing up.
Looney parlayed a DePauw connection into a low-level admissions job at the private Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., a quintessential New England boarding school serving the wealthy and well-connected since 1778. Next, as an admissions director at Lake Forest Academy, he catered to Chicago elites. During a decade in admissions and administration at Cranbrook Schools in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., he educated auto-industry scions.
Then, in 2006, he was named head of Hawken, a school founded in 1915, when Cleveland was a leading industrial center. Before long, Looney ascended to the executive committee of the National Association of Independent Schools, the professional organization of the private school world. For years, he ran a respected three-day summer retreat for private-school admissions officers in Kennebunkport, Maine.
But if many private school leaders hewed to the status quo, Looney was different. In 2011 he brought Doris Korda, a Bell Laboratories engineer and software entrepreneur turned high school math teacher, to Hawken to revamp the school’s instruction. Later, she would help Looney launch a new Hawken high school to serve as a laboratory for his education ideas. It would be a school based entirely on “real world” learning, without traditional teaching and grades.
Looney and Korda built the mastery transcript together, combining the concept of “micro-credentials” emerging in higher education with a version of the digital portfolio – featuring students’ work samples – that Looney had discovered ecco shoes at the Lerner medical school. The transcript would reflect students’ mastery of competencies in half a dozen curriculum areas selected by their schools, many of them reaching beyond the borders of conventional high school subjects and classrooms. Students might earn mastery credits for “understanding cultural differences” in a school’s “global perspectives” curriculum category, for example, by studying non-Western history or by working on immigration issues at a local nonprofit.
In a sharp break with tradition, mastery credits would be based on a school’s standards rather than teacher judgment – in the same way that Advanced Placement tests are scored against national AP standards. Students would submit work to teams of teachers and outside experts, earning credit if they met school benchmarks. If not, they’d improve their work and resubmit it, a process stressing student growth. “Grades are teacher-level credits, not institutional credits, and given the arbitrariness of teacher grading, class rankings are absurd,” Looney told us.
An early sketch of the transcript looked like a page full of Boy Scout badges. With the help of a Seattle consulting company, Looney settled on a landing page with students’ contact information and personal statements, a school profile and a graphic akin to a theater-in-the-round seating chart showing the number of credits students earned in each of their schools’ focus areas. It also included summaries of the work students submitted to earn mastery credits – writing, presentations, performances, charts, graphs and photographs, all of which could be uploaded into the transcript and were clickable – as well as a statement of the school’s standards, a description of how many advanced credits students at the school typically earn, and teacher comments. There would be no grades.
Looney and Korda knew that if they couldn’t get leading colleges and universities to support the mastery model, the transcript and the educational insurgency it represented would be a non-starter. But convincing higher-ed officials wouldn’t be easy, given that the traditional transcript, introduced a century ago, was the single most influential component of college admissions.
It meant adding features to the transcript that addressed higher education’s concerns, including distinguishing between “foundational credits” that represented graduation requirements and “advanced credits.” It also meant that a summary page had to be readable in three minutes, the amount of time admissions officers said they could give the transcript during a first read. The transcripts would live on the MTC website, reached through a student ID number, and they would be printable as PDFs to put in admissions folders – another nod to colleges. (Ultimately, Looney patented the transcript and gave the patent to the MTC.)
But winning over higher education’s elites also meant persuading other leading private schools to join his crusade. Private schools educate some 7 percent of the nation’s high school students but a third or more of many top colleges’ enrollees. And so, Looney reasoned, leveraging their influence could get the Harvards and Stanfords of the world on board while sending a powerful signal to the rest of higher education.
“Higher education takes its signals from the elites, so we had to convince them to take us seriously,” he says. Similarly, if he could enlist more brand-name private schools, many other high schools, public and private, would follow, he sensed, in the same way Advanced Placement courses had started in elite private schools and spread throughout public education. “I want to use both the independence that I have as an independent school head and the privilege I have by being proximate to powerful people to put as big a dent in the traditional school model as I can,” he told us.
So Looney worked his many private school connections, getting leaders of more than two dozen prominent schools to come to Cleveland in 2016 to hear his transcript pitch. Even he was surprised when nearly every school endorsed his heresy, becoming founding members of his Mastery Transcript Consortium. A second event later that year drew another three dozen top schools.
To convince his Hawken faculty of the value of a transcript that showed a wider range of student talents, Looney blacked out the names on the traditional transcripts of 10 graduating seniors and asked his teachers to identify the students. They couldn’t because the students’ transcripts were nearly identical. When Looney revealed the students’ names and asked the teachers to describe them, they talked at length. “They took the same classes, sat there for the same amount of time, got the same grades, but they were radically different human beings,” Looney says.
The Hawken board of trustees didn’t need convincing to follow Looney’s lead. His enterprising approach had already turned an under-enrolled school with a dispirited faculty into a shining star, with sparkling new buildings, an expanding student body that was more than 30 percent people of color, and Korda’s innovative educational experiences. They weren’t about to say no to his latest idea.
Saida Brema and Sophia D’Attilio were among the first high school students to use the mastery transcript in college admissions. They were seniors last year at Pathways High, not an elite private school but a racially diverse public charter school housed in a decommissioned Lutheran church on Milwaukee’s west side. The mastery transcript was perfect for the ungraded, project-based high school, where students studied election law by drafting voting legislation and learned coding, physics and data analytics by building drones.
D’Attilio, a soft-spoken former gymnast and self-described perfectionist, had met Pathways’ minimum of 26 foundational credits across the school’s six concentration areas – credits such as historical connections, scientific process and oral fluency. She had also earned nine advanced credits, in topics such as advanced design concepts. She set about constructing her transcript early in her senior year, with the help of a private college counselor provided by her parents, saying in her personal statement steve madden shoes that she wanted to “activate the voices of others” – and presenting as samples of her work a podcast she and classmates had produced in a seminar on “Native American Stereotypes in Media and Mascots,” background research defending the late-18th-century revolt of enslaved Haitians for a mock trial, and her reflections on producing and directing a school play her junior year.
Despite working as a nanny and teaching gymnastics while attending school, she had everything entered into the MTC portal by November of last year and sent a link to the transcript, along with applications, to a dozen colleges. In December, she was accepted at New York University, one of 4,593 of 17,451 early-decision applicants admitted. She had been anxious about using the gradeless mastery transcript but went ahead with it because, she told us on a Zoom call last winter, “it actually shows you who I am as a person.”
NYU agreed. While her transcript required more time to read, the absence of a grade-point average wasn’t a problem, says Jonathan Williams, the university’s assistant vice president for undergraduate admissions. “The rigor behind a 4.0 grade-point average varies greatly from city to city, school to school, district to district,” he says. By offering detailed descriptions of what D’Attilio learned in high school and concrete examples of her work, the mastery transcript provided “a deeper understanding of what kind of learner” she was. “She presented an academic profile that shows that she’s smart and thoughtful and committed to learning,” he says, “but also a personal profile that’s really compelling.”
Brema’s experience with the mastery transcript was very different. She was born to Sudanese parents in a Kenyan refugee camp and arrived in the States as a 7-year-old speaking Swahili and a bit of English. Her father had been a doctor in Sudan, her mother a health worker, but in Milwaukee her father worked in school transport because his medical credentials weren’t recognized. Both parents were busy with six children; Brema had discovered Pathways at a Milwaukee high school fair, and was largely on her own when it came to navigating the college process.
Trying to complete her courses and college applications while working 20 hours a week at a pizzeria and taking care of her 8-year-old brother, she put off organizing her mastery transcript until the last minute. Having to do everything via Zoom during the pandemic didn’t help. Nor did the fact that the mastery transcript was new and complicated for Pathways and its seniors to compile in a relatively short time. Pathways’ dean of culture spent hours on video conferences with Brema helping her work through it.
She was thinking about applying to nearby Marquette University but didn’t get her mastery transcript completed in time; in the end, she applied solely to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and only after barely meeting the school’s deadline. It was, says Brema, who has a sly sense of humor and a wide smile, “a really stressful experience.”
But she was happy to be among the 12,584 (out of 14,599 applicants) accepted to the school in the spring. With the university’s high admission rate, the question was primarily whether the school would accept Brema’s gradeless transcript. It did – and Kathleen Breuer, the admissions coordinator who read Brema’s application, told us that the transcript proved helpful, especially after Milwaukee and the dozen other University of Wisconsin schools paused their SAT and ACT testing requirements during the pandemic. While it’s easier to judge students with grades, she said, the mastery transcript gave her a clear sense of Brema’s writing ability. Plus, Brema’s projects coding a computer game and redesigning a classroom “jumped out” at her, demonstrating actual high school work that would have been harder to capture in traditional college applications.
While Pathways’ experience with the MTC has had bright spots, it also points to the significant barriers to the transcript’s expansion. Even before the school launched the transcript last year, teachers and administrators spent more than a year settling on mastery categories and credits, and ensuring their choices aligned with state education standards – a formidable task for a charter school with ample autonomy, much less a big public school district with many powerful voices. Chicago Public Schools, the nation’s third largest district, recently left the mastery transcript out of a school reform project after weighing the work needed to put it in place – and the radical rethinking that would be required of administrators, teachers, parents and students – according to the project’s manager, Damarr Smith. “It’s a lot harder at a district with over 300,000 students,” he says. “How do you bring all the stakeholders together in an equitable way?”
There’s also the challenge of training teachers to judge students’ work against school mastery standards. Plus, giving students a stake in their transcripts by having them assemble work samples is another heavy lift. Small schools like Pathways and pricey private schools may have the staff to help students, and some students like D’Attilio may have the resources for private counselors. In many public high schools, though, students are on their own, and there aren’t enough guidance counselors to go around. “The solution is building advisory systems,” says Pathways director Kim Taylor, “with each teacher helping a dozen or so students with their transcripts, starting in the ninth grade.” Still, the prospect of large, under-resourced schools managing a thousand or more students’ work on mastery transcripts is daunting.
Another hurdle: state regulations tying education funding to school-based learning and mandating substantial numbers of courses in traditional academic subjects. Washington state education authorities, for example, initially wouldn’t fully fund an MTC school for the time students spent off-campus learning at a Boeing jet engine plant. Yet increasing numbers of states are granting high schools greater flexibility in how they award graduation credits, and the shuttering of schools during the pandemic is likely to intensify the trend by forcing policymakers to think more flexibly about how and where students learn. What’s more, the MTC says there’s no reason the mastery transcript can’t be used in high schools with conventional courses – as long as schools replace grades with mastery credits.
Perhaps the bigger challenge, research by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching suggests, is a persistent adherence to traditional education practices. Vermont’s largest public high school, in Champlain Valley, abandoned a mastery transcript pilot program last year in the face of the pandemic, but also because school leaders sensed the affluent community wasn’t yet ready to do anything that might alter students’ college prospects.
The higher education side of the equation isn’t any easier. Persuading colleges and universities to embrace the mastery transcript isn’t just about admissions, but also scholarships and sports eligibility.
The National Collegiate Athletic Association requires courses, grade-point averages and SAT or ACT scores (suspended during the pandemic) of high-schoolers hoping to play Division I or II sports, as do many state-sponsored scholarship programs. The prestigious, 280,000-student University of California system bases admissions decisions on courses, grades, class rank and, until recently, test scores. Several of the system’s campuses admitted MTC students to this fall’s first-year class, but through a narrow “admission by exception” policy. And some state universities receiving vast numbers of applications simply won’t read those lacking GPAs. “The minute you move away from a formula, it becomes a lot harder and more expensive for institutions,” says Angel Pérez, the chief executive of the National Association for College Admission Counseling.
The MTC is working hard to address these challenges. The organization holds weekly open houses via Zoom for admissions officers and reaches out to introduce the mastery transcript to the top five college choices of every MTC student.
And there has been progress. Beyond the 170 colleges and universities admitting students with mastery transcripts last year, the NCAA told us that its eligibility staff would work with schools sending mastery transcripts to translate them into course and grade equivalencies. And many states are willing to provide flexibility in their scholarship programs; lawmakers in Utah, North Dakota and West Virginia have directed their public higher education systems to put alternative transcripts on equal footing with regular transcripts in awarding scholarships.
All this points to a growing sentiment in higher education that Looney is right in arguing that current admissions metrics don’t do justice to students’ unique talents. “Young people are much more complicated than the model of ‘grades plus test score equals success’ suggests,” says Pérez. While some commentators warn that the gradeless mastery transcript could hurt students with top GPAs in lesser-known high schools, Pérez, who sits on the MTC’s higher education advisory board, believes the mastery transcript may help get more underrepresented students into the college pipeline. “Many disadvantaged students may not shine in a rigid testing environment but may shine in other ways,” he says.
The decision by many colleges and universities to temporarily abandon SAT and ACT admissions testing during the pandemic has fueled that prospect. “The mastery transcript provides a lot more space for students to articulate different ways that they’ve learned,” Kay Eilers, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s associate vice chancellor of enrollment management, told us. “From an equity lens, there’s so much value in students being able to describe their skills and abilities in a variety of ways.” And Looney argues the transcript isn’t just a better tool for high school students heading to college. “It helps identify themes and threads for career development or trade development,” he says, qualities like teamwork and resilience that are important to employers.
Looney isn’t naive about the challenges he faces in competing with a deep-rooted element of the education landscape. In his first pitch to private school leaders at the Cleveland Botanical Garden, he suggested they build project-based programs alongside their existing schools because it could take years to transition to high-quality mastery models. But he’s undeterred. He launched his project-based school – the Mastery School at Hawken – last fall with three dozen ninth- and 10th-graders near Cleveland’s arts district, surrounded by scores of nonprofit organizations offering a wide range of learning opportunities. He envisions the school becoming a 180-student test site for educators around the country to learn from.
When we visited in the spring, teams of students had been studying why caffeinated water wasn’t selling in local convenience stores and how to reduce vandalism in abandoned homes in a nearby neighborhood. We attended a session that introduced students to mastery credits and the mastery transcript, giving them the building blocks of this model early in their high school careers – a key to the transcript’s success, Looney believes.
It’s too early to know how MTC students are doing in college, much less how widely the mastery transcript will travel. The prominent private schools that lent their names to Looney’s campaign early on have trailed public charter schools and upstarts in the private sector in launching the mastery transcript, MTC officials say. Elite schools are eager to endorse the work and engage with the consortium’s new ideas but have been slowed by old definitions of educational excellence among faculty, boards of trustees and parents. Regardless, Looney’s not taking his big bet on the mastery transcript off the table.
“We need another way to see kids,” he says, “one that reflects who they really are and what they really learn.”
WASHINGTON — Colin Powell, the retired four-star general who became the country’s first Black secretary of state and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, died Monday due to complications from Covid-19, his family said in a statement on Facebook.
Powell, 84, was fully vaccinated from Covid-19, his family said, and had been treated at Walter Reed National Medical Center, but was suffering from serious underlying conditions.
“We have lost a remarkable and loving husband, father, grandfather and a great American,” the family said.
Powell and his wife, Alma, were tested for Covid last Monday skechers outlet and both tested positive, a family spokesperson told NBC News. Powell was then hospitalized at Walter Reed. Powell had multiple myeloma, a cancer of a type of white blood cell, which can harm the body’s immune system, surgery for prostate cancer when he was Secretary of State and, more recently, Parkinson’s disease.
Powell became the first Black secretary of state under President George W. Bush. As the nation’s chief diplomat, Powell delivered a well-known speech to the United Nations Security Council in February 2003 laying out the White House argument for invading Iraq and stating that there was intelligence that the country had weapons of mass destruction.
U.S. troops launched an invasion the following month. The evidence he presented about Iraq having biological weapons was later proven to be incorrect. Powell left the administration shortly after Bush’s re-election in 2004.
Powell later expressed regret over the remarks before the U.N., saying in a 2005 interview with ABC News’ Barbara Walters that it would tarnish his reputation and describing it as a “blot” on his record that “was painful then” and “painful now.”
Bush said in a statement Monday that he and former first lady Laura Bush were “deeply saddened” by Powell’s death.
“He was a great public servant, starting with his time as a soldier during Vietnam,” Bush said. “Many presidents relied on General Powell’s counsel nike outlet and experience. He was such a favorite of presidents that he earned the Presidential Medal of Freedom — twice. He was highly respected at home and abroad. And most important, Colin was a family man and a friend.”
Secretary of State Colin Powell holds up a vial he said could contain anthrax as he presents evidence of Iraq’s alleged weapons programs to the United Nations Security Council in this Feb. 5, 2003 file photo.
After rising through the military ranks, Powell became a four-star general and then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President George H.W. Bush. He had served as U.S. national security adviser and deputy national security adviser for President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Powell served twice in Vietnam — during the first tour, he was wounded in action and on the second tour, he received the Soldier’s Medal for rescuing several men from a burning helicopter.
In a statement Monday, former Vice President Dick Cheney called himself “fortunate” to work with Powell, and said during both wars with Iraq he saw Powell’s “dedication to the United States and his commitment to the brave and selfless men and women who serve our country in uniform.”
President Joe Biden, who ordered flags to be flown at half-staff, said in a statement Monday that when he served in the Senate, he worked closely with Powell, whom he called a friend.
“Easy to share a laugh with,” the president said. “A trusted confidant in good and hard keen shoes times. He could drive his Corvette Stingray like nobody’s business — something I learned firsthand on the race track when I was vice president. And I am forever grateful for his support of my candidacy for president and for our shared battle for the soul of the nation. I will miss being able to call on his wisdom in the future.”
Despite serving Republican presidents, Powell said days after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol that he could no longer call himself a Republican.
“I’m not a fellow of anything right now,” he said in an interview on CNN. “I’m just a citizen who has voted Republican, voted Democrat throughout my entire career. And right now I’m just watching my country and not concerned with parties.”
Powell broke with his party on several occasions in recent years, including when he endorsed Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., for president in 2008 over then-Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. Powell endorsed Obama again in 2012 over the GOP’s nominee that year, Mitt Romney, and later became a vocal critic of President Donald Trump.
Former President Obama expressed his condolences in a statement Monday, saying that he appreciated Powell’s endorsements, especially in 2008.
“At a time when conspiracy theories were swirling, with some questioning my faith, General Powell took the opportunity to get to the heart of the matter in a way only he could,” Obama said, repeating Powell’s remark on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” at the time about the conspiracy theories that were swirling about Obama’s faith.
“’The correct answer is, he is not a Muslim; he’s a Christian,’ General Powell said. ‘But the really right answer is, ‘What if he is?’ Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no, that’s not America,’” Obama wrote.
In 2016, it was revealed in leaked emails that Powell called the then-GOP presidential candidate a “national disgrace.” In June 2020, Powell and other retired military leaders blasted Trump for threatening to use military force against protesters. Powell said in an interview on CNN that Trump had turned away from the Constitution and that he was a habitual liar.
“We have a Constitution. We have to follow that Constitution. And the president’s drifted away from it,” said Powell, who made clear that, like in 2016, he would not vote for Trump for president and instead planned to vote for Joe Biden.
Powell was born in 1937 in Harlem, New York, to immigrants from Jamaica and grew up in the South Bronx, going on to get a bachelor’s degree from the City College of New York.
He is survived by his wife, their three children and multiple grandchildren.
The number of Americans quitting their jobs has hit record highs over the past several months in a phenomenon economists have been calling the “Great Resignation.” In August, 4.3 million U.S. workers — almost 3 percent of the entire American workforce — voluntarily left their positions, the highest number since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking “quits” in 2020.
Workers are quitting at high rates in every industry, hey dude but the trend has been especially pronounced for frontline businesses like restaurants, hotels, retail stores and health care providers. Recent quit rates are a stark contrast to early in the coronavirus pandemic, when the number of quits plummeted to the lowest levels in a decade, as COVID-related business closures put millions of Americans out of work.
The Great Resignation comes at a time when businesses across the country are struggling to find workers to fill open positions. There were 10.4 million job openings in August, down slightly from the record of 11.1 million openings the previous month.
Economists generally believe that relatively high quit rates are a signal of a healthy economy, since it suggests workers feel optimistic about their prospects and have leverage to improve their circumstances. In the short term, however, some worry that having so many companies unable to meet staffing needs could slow economic recovery and contribute to mounting supply chain issues.
Why there’s debate
Rather than offering one reason so many Americans are quitting their jobs, experts mostly believe the Great Resignation is the result of a variety of forces coming together. Something not on that list is employer vaccine mandates, which don’t appear to have caused a significant number of people to quit.
One of the most common explanations is that workers are simply burned-out. The high quit rates in customer-facing jobs and health care suggest that people in these fields have become exhausted after 18 months of extra hours, confrontations over COVID mitigation rules and fear of catching the virus. dr martens boots Many white-collar workers, on the other hand, may be eager to maintain some of the elements of pandemic-era work that benefitted them — like remote work and flexible hours — and willing to move on as their employers transition back to the office.
Others see the Great Resignation as the sign of a major shift in the power dynamic between workers and their employers. Labor Bureau data doesn’t track whether people quitting are finding another position, but record levels of job openings mean prospects for quitters have never been higher. While many have struggled financially during the pandemic, a large share of Americans have actually increased their savings — meaning they have more of a cushion to absorb a job transition. These factors mean workers have greater freedom to leave unsatisfying jobs to pursue something that suits them better.
On top of these short-term influences, some experts argue that the pandemic has had a more fundamental and lasting impact on Americans’ relationship with work. They argue that the human tragedy — and, in some cases, indifference from their employers — that workers have experienced over the past year and a half has led millions of people to deprioritize work in their lives.
What’s next
The big unanswered question about the Great Resignation is whether it’s a short-term phenomenon brought on by extreme circumstances or a more lasting shift in attitudes toward work. If it is in fact temporary, it’s possible there could be a correction in the near future that sees quits drop dramatically, some economists say.
Perspectives
Frontline workers are fed up
“Frontline workers in health care, child care, hospitality and food service industries, pushed to the brink of human endurance, decide that the grueling hours, inadequate pay, lack of balance and abuse by employers and clientele are no longer acceptable trade-offs for their mental and physical well-being.” — Karla L. Miller, Washington Post
Tough jobs became intolerable with the added stressors of the pandemic
“Covid-19 placed systemic problems in steve madden shoes sharp relief. Workers were expected to show up every day and risk their health for far less than a living wage, without the support of child care or benefits. What was a raw deal before became, for many, untenable.” — Laura Entis, Vox
Lots of job openings mean it’s easy for workers to move on to something better
“People have options. And because they have options, their demands and their interests and their tolerance for things that are not aligned with their values on how they want to live their lives, they’re going to leave and they’re going to look for it elsewhere.” — Tsedal Neeley, Harvard Business School professor, to PBS NewsHour
The balance of power has shifted in workers’ favor
“For at least two generations, workers have been on their back heels. We are now seeing a labor market that is tight, and prospects are becoming increasingly clear that it’s going to remain tight. It’s now going to be a workers’ market, and they’re empowered. I think they are starting to flex their collective muscle.” — Mark Zandi, economist, to Time
The pandemic accelerated a generational shift in attitudes toward work
“The Great Resignation is not a mad dash away from the office; it’s the culmination of a long march toward freedom. More than a decade ago, psychologists documented a generational shift in the centrality of work in our lives. Millennials were more interested in jobs that provided leisure time and vacation time than Gen Xers and baby boomers. They were less concerned about net worth than net freedom.” — Adam Grant, Wall Street Journal
Many employers took their workers for granted during the COVID recession
“See, since forever, the conventional wisdom held that in downturns, the employer could get away with almost anything; employees needed work and so would be grateful merely to have a job — frills and niceties were 100 percent unnecessary. But the common thread that runs through virtually every motivation for the Great Resignation departures we are seeing is a decision to no longer accept the unacceptable.” — Phillip Kane, Inc.
The pandemic led millions to reevaluate their priorities
“We know that when human beings come into contact with death and illness in their lives, it causes them to take a step back and ask existential questions. Like, what gives me purpose and happiness in life, and does that match up with how I’m spending my [life] right now? So, in many cases, those reflections will lead to life pivots.” — Anthony Klotz, psychologist, to Business Insider
Pandemic relief programs have given many workers more financial freedom
“Thanks to several pandemic-relief checks, a rent moratorium, and student-loan forgiveness, everybody, particularly if they are young and have a low income, has more freedom to quit jobs they hate and hop to something else.” — Derek Thompson, Atlantic
Some of the current wave of quits is simply making up for last year’s low quit rate
“It’s also possible that many of these mid-level employees may have delayed transitioning out of their roles due to the uncertainty caused by the pandemic, meaning that the boost we’ve seen over the last several months could be the result of more than a year’s worth of pent-up resignations.” — Ian Cook, Harvard Business Review
WASHINGTON — Even by the standards of President Donald Trump, it was an extraordinary Oval Office showdown. On the agenda was Trump’s desire to install a loyalist as acting attorney general to carry out his demands for more aggressive investigations into his unfounded claims of election fraud.
On the other side during that meeting on the evening of Jan. 3 were the top leaders of the Justice Department, who warned Trump that they and other senior officials would resign en masse if he followed through. They received immediate support from another key participant: Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel. nike sneakers According to others at the meeting, Cipollone indicated that he and his top deputy, Patrick F. Philbin, would also step down if Trump acted on his plan.
Trump’s proposed plan, Cipollone argued, would be a “murder-suicide pact,” one participant recalled. Only near the end of the nearly three-hour meeting did Trump relent and agree to drop his threat.
Cipollone’s stand that night is among the new details contained in a lengthy interim report prepared by the Senate Judiciary Committee about Trump’s efforts to pressure the Justice Department to do his bidding in the chaotic final weeks of his presidency.
The report draws on documents, emails and testimony from three top Justice Department officials, including the acting attorney general for Trump’s last month in office, Jeffrey A. Rosen; the acting deputy attorney general, Richard P. Donoghue, and Byung J. Pak, who until early January was U.S. attorney in Atlanta. It provides the most complete account yet of Trump’s efforts to push the department to validate election fraud claims that had been disproved by the FBI and state investigators.
The interim report, expected to be released publicly this week, describes how Justice Department officials scrambled to stave off a series of events during a period when Trump was getting advice about blocking certification of the election from a lawyer he had first seen on television and the president’s actions were so unsettling that his top general and the House speaker discussed the nuclear chain of command.
“This report shows the American people just how close we came to a constitutional crisis,” Sen. Richard J. Durbin, D-Ill., and chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a statement. “Thanks to a number of upstanding Americans in ecco shoes the Department of Justice, Donald Trump was unable to bend the department to his will. But it was not due to a lack of effort.”
Durbin said that he believes the former president, who remains a front-runner for the Republican nomination in 2024, would have “shredded the Constitution to stay in power.”
The report by Durbin’s committee hews closely to previous accounts of the final days of the Trump administration, which led multiple congressional panels and the Justice Department’s watchdog to open investigations.
But, drawing in particular on interviews with Rosen and Donoghue, both of whom were at the Jan. 3 Oval Office meeting, it brings to light new details that underscore the intensity and relentlessness with which Trump pursued his goal of upending the election, and the role that key government officials played in his efforts.
— The report fleshes out the role of Jeffrey Clark, a little-known Justice Department official who participated in multiple conversations with Trump about how to upend the election and who pushed his superiors to send Georgia officials a letter that falsely claimed the Justice Department had identified “significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election.” Trump was weighing whether to replace Rosen with Clark.
Of particular note was a Jan. 2 confrontation during which Clark seemed to both threaten and coerce Rosen to send the letter. He first raised the prospect that Trump could fire Rosen, and then said that he would decline any offer to replace Rosen as acting attorney general if Rosen sent the letter. Clark also revealed during that meeting that he had secretly conducted a witness interview with someone in Georgia in connection with election fraud allegations that had already been disproved.
— The report raised fresh questions about what role Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa., played in the White House effort to pressure the Justice Department to help upend the election. Perry called Donoghue to pressure him into investigating debunked election fraud allegations that had been made in Pennsylvania, the report said, and he complained to Donoghue that the Justice Department was not doing enough to look into such claims. Clark, the report said, also told officials that he had participated in the White House’s efforts at Perry’s request, and that the lawmaker took him to a meeting at the Oval Office to discuss voter fraud. That meeting occurred at around the same time that Perry and members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus met at the White House to discuss the Jan. 6 certification of the election results.
— The report confirmed that Trump was the reason that Pak hastily left his role as U.S. attorney in Atlanta, an area that Trump wrongly told people he had won. Trump told top Justice Department officials that Pak was a never-Trumper, and he blamed Pak for the FBI’s failure to find evidence of steve madden shoes mass election fraud there. During the Jan. 3 fight in the Oval Office, Donoghue and others tried to convince Trump not to fire Pak, as he planned to resign in just a few days. But Trump made it clear to the officials that Pak was to leave the following day, leading Donoghue to phone him that evening and tell him he should preemptively resign. Trump also went outside the normal line of succession to push for a perceived loyalist, Bobby L. Christine, to run the Atlanta office. Christine had been the U.S. attorney in Savannah, and had donated to Trump’s campaign.
The report is not the Senate Judiciary Committee’s final word on the pressure campaign that was waged between Dec. 14, when Attorney General William Barr announced his resignation, and Jan. 6, when throngs of Trump’s supporters fought to block certification of the election.
The panel is still waiting for the National Archives to furnish documents, calendar appointments and communications involving the White House that concern efforts to subvert the election. It asked the National Archives, which stores correspondence and documents generated by previous presidential administrations, for the records this spring.
It is also waiting to see whether Clark will sit for an interview and help provide missing details about what was happening inside the White House during the Trump administration’s final weeks. Additionally, the committee has asked the District of Columbia Bar, which licenses and disciplines attorneys, to open a disciplinary investigation into Clark based on its findings.
The report recommended that the Justice Department tighten procedures concerning when it can take certain overt steps in election-related fraud investigations. As attorney general, the report said, Barr weakened the department’s decadeslong strict policy of not taking investigative steps in fraud cases until after an election is certified, a measure that is meant to keep the fact of a federal investigation from affecting the election outcome.
The Senate panel found that Barr personally demanded that the department investigate voter fraud allegations, even if other authorities had looked into them and not found evidence of wrongdoing. These allegations included a claim by Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer and a prime force behind the unfounded election fraud allegations, that he had a tape that showed Democratic poll workers kicking their Republican counterparts from a polling station and fraudulently adding votes for Joe Biden into the count.
Pak testified that Barr asked him to look into that claim and directed the FBI to interview a witness about the matter, even though the Georgia secretary of state had deemed the tape to be without merit.
On Dec. 1, just two weeks before saying he would step down, Barr said that the Justice Department had found no evidence of voter fraud widespread enough to change the fact that Biden had won the presidency.
The report underscored how Trump kept coming back to unsubstantiated accounts of election fraud and demanding that the Justice Department jump on them.
Soon after the completion of the Oval Office meeting on the night of Jan. 3, the committee’s report said, Trump reached out to Donoghue, asking him to look into reports that the Department of Homeland Security had taken possession of a truck full of shredded ballots outside of Atlanta.
Fans of the seminal rap ensemble Wu-Tang Clan were generally thrilled by 2019’s first season of Hulu’s Wu-Tang: An American Saga, and the show’s first 10 episodes barely scratched the surface on the seismic contributions the New York supergroup would ultimately make to the hip-hop landscape.
Season 1 of the Clan’s fictionalized biography was mostly a precursor on their brooks shoes inevitable grouping, kicking off so early in Wu’s timeline with the series premiere showing Raekwon (Shameik Moore) nearly killing future partner-in-rhyme Ghostface Killah (Siddiq Saunderson), and ultimate ringleader Bobby Diggs, aka RZA (Ashton Sanders) caught in the middle of their spat.
So fans should really dig Season 2, which not only depicts the original nine-man crew also including the late Ol’ Dirty Bastard (TJ Atoms), Method Man (Dave East), GZA (Johnell Xavier Young), Inspectah Deck (Uyoata Udi), Masta Killa (JaQwan J. Kelly) and U-God (Damani Sease) assembling, but the making of 1993’s Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), an instantly classic masterpiece that changed the face of hip-hop.
Wu-Tang: An American Saga
“Season 1 we had a chance to look at Wu, pre-36 Chambers, and still kind of scattered. And in Season 2 we get to see the Wu combine, unify and record the 36 Chambers album,” RZA tells Yahoo Entertainment during a recent virtual interview (watch above).
“I know I’m [one of the creators] of that album, but beyond my own participation, it’s definitely considered an iconic, groundbreaking album for hip-hop and for music. And so it’s really a joy that we get to re-enact those stories and share them with the world. Because for me, this is just for me, Wu-Tang is a spoonful of positivity.”
RZA’s description of the group — which has long documented grimy tales of drug-peddling, drive-bys and surviving a volatile lifestyle in the projects of Staten Island — calls to mind a motto that fans have adopted and passed onto the next generation:clarks shoes uk “Wu-Tang Is for the Children.” The slogan has spawned a clothing line, and the producer, rapper and filmmaker is known to share collections of photos from Wu fans with their kids in the apparel on social media.
“That’s one of the greatest joys. But there’s a little bit of bitterness because ODB is the one who said that first,” RZA says, referring to the 1998 Grammy Awards where ‘Ol Dirty Bastard commandeered the stage after Wu-Tang lost Best Rap Album to Puff Daddy and the Family six years before dying of a drug overdose in 2004.
“He meant it so much. We used to talk about that all the time. Even though there was profanity in the language, he was like, ‘Nah, we’re giving people the real when others [are] giving them the fake. And so we gotta be for the children.’ I just thought that that was so enlightening… Don’t judge the book by the cover. Dig deeper.”
LA PAZ, Bolivia (AP) — The body of an American man who died while climbing one of Bolivia’s highest peaks arrived Sunday in the country’s capital after a two-day recovery effort.
Rescue workers said Daniel Granberg, 24, died atop the Illimani mountain.
“We found Daniel lifeless, seated at the summit. His lungs did not hold out; he couldn’t get up to continue,” said Sergio Condori Vallejos, a mountain guide who works with Bolivian Andean Rescue and who led the recovery effort.
Condori said Granberg died at an altitude of 6,216 meters (20,391 feet) on the second day of a trek across the mountain, an iconic part of the view brooks shoes from Bolivia’s capital, La Paz. He was on the longest and most difficult trail across the mountain, which involved scaling at least two of its peaks.
Granberg had arrived in Bolivia two months ago and had climbed several other peaks.
On his trip up Illimani, he was accompanied by two guides who sought help from rescuers, who needed two days to bring the body down the mountain.
His body was brought to a morgue at a hospital in La Paz, according to members of the local fire department.
He died from high-altitude pulmonary distress, said his mother Jean Granberg. He had some shortness of breath the night before and a mild headache, she said, but nothing to indicate his life was in peril.
Granberg grew up surrounded by mountains in Montrose, Colorado, and graduated with a math degree from Princeton University, where he also sang tenor in various groups.
His mother described him as a warm-hearted, well-traveled and adventurous young man who had friends all over the world, and their heartfelt condolences were buoying her and his younger sister Jennifer Granberg.
Jean Granberg said she knows that her son was doing what he loved when he died.
“But I, just as a mom, my heart’s broken. Twenty-four years is not long enough and I just wish somehow there’d been some kind of warning,” she said, crying. “If he had felt like he was in danger in any way, he would have come down the mountain. clarks shoes uk But I think it happened so fast.”
Her son was a subcontractor who worked as a remote programmer for the U.S. Department of Energy, his mother said. He taught himself physics because his high school did not have a program and received the top score on the Advanced Placement exam, she said.
“He was the smartest person that I knew,” Jennifer Granberg said.
Tracy Lightsey, one of Daniel’s high school teachers and later a friend, organized a fundraiser on GoFundMe to help the family. As of Sunday afternoon, more than $21,000 had been raised.
“The response from people is entirely because this young man was an incredible human and he touched people wherever he was,” Lightsey said.
WASHINGTON – President Joe Biden warned those behind a deadly terrorist attack that killed and wounded American service members and Afghan civilians in Kabul on Thursday that the U.S. would “hunt you down and make you pay.”
A day later, he followed through on that threat.
A military drone strike on Friday killed two “high-profile” members of ISIS-K and wounded a third, the first American attack on the terrorist group following a bomb attack at Hamid Karzai International Airport, the Pentagon said Saturday.
The Pentagon’s initial brooks shoes announcement of the strike said one ISIS-K member had been killed. Military officials updated the death toll on Saturday.
Those killed were ISIS-K “planners and facilitators,” said Army Maj. Gen. William D. “Hank” Taylor, joint staff deputy director for regional operations. Their names were not made public.
Biden met with his national security team at the White House on Saturday and, afterward, warned that another attack is likely in the coming days.
“The situation on the ground continues to be extremely dangerous, and the threat of terrorist attacks on the airport remains high,” he said in a statement. “Our commanders informed me that an attack is highly likely in the next 24-36 hours. I directed them to take every possible measure to prioritize force protection.”
Biden vowed to avenge any additional attacks. “Whenever anyone seeks to harm the United States or attack our troops, we will respond,” he said. “That will never be in doubt.”
Thirteen U.S. service members – 11 Marines, a Navy corpsman and an Army soldier – and at least 169 Afghan people died in Thursday’s airport bombing, which unfolded as American and allied forces were scrambling to evacuate people from Afghanistan.
The attack – one of America’s deadliest days in the nearly 20-year war in Afghanistan – drew fierce censure from Republicans, stoked fears about the final days of America’s evacuation mission and threatened to define Biden’s still-young presidency as one of chaos instead of the competence skechers uk he promised on the campaign trail.
The bombing came five days before next Tuesday’s deadline that Biden set for withdrawing U.S. troops and amid warnings that more terrorist strikes could come soon.
Wounded Afghans lie on a bed at a hospital after an attack on the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Aug. 26.
Even before the bombing, Biden was facing harsh criticism over his strategy for winding down the war that started in 2001 when the United States invaded Afghanistan, which sheltered the terrorists who carried out the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Just hours after the attack Thursday, a somber Biden called the American service members killed “heroes” and promised to exact revenge on those behind the strike.
“We will not forgive,” he said at the White House. “We will not forget.”
After the tragedy of the Kabul bombing,hey dude shoes Republican lawmakers universally rushed to condemn Biden’s handling of Afghanistan while demanding his administration keep troops in the increasingly unstable country past Tuesday’s deadline to ensure the safe evacuation of all remaining Americans
Taylor would not provide details of Friday’s drone strike, but the Pentagon has said it occurred in the Nangahar Province of Afghanistan.
Military officials believe the ISIS-K officials targeted were involved in planning future attacks. A U.S. official who was not authorized to speak publicly about the attack said Friday one of the targets was killed while traveling in a vehicle with an associate. It was not immediately clear whether the associate was the second target killed.
“The fact that two of these individuals are no longer walking on the face of the earth, that’s a good thing,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said.
Officials know of no civilian casualties in the strike, Taylor said.
ISIS-K leadership generally operates in Nangarhar and Kunar provinces in Afghanistan.
ISIS-K considers the Taliban, the Islamic militant group that is noted for its brutality and now controls Afghanistan, to be insufficiently devout in its adherence to Islam. The two militant groups have attacked each other.
Around the same time as the drone strike against the ISIS-K targets, the U.S. Embassy in Kabul issued a fresh warning urging Americans waiting at four airport gates to “leave immediately” because of security threats.
The U.S. Department of State Bureau of Consular Affairs tweeted: “Due to security threats at the airport, we continue to advise U.S. citizens to avoid traveling to the airport and to avoid airport gates. Those at Abbey gate, East gate, North gate or New Ministry of Interior gate should leave immediately.”
A State Department spokesperson said the agency would not address intelligence matters, but noted the “dynamic and volatile security situation on the ground” in Afghanistan.
