Taliban guard airport as most NATO troops leave Afghanistan

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Taliban forces sealed off Kabul's airport Saturday to most Afghans hoping for evacuation, as the U.S. and its allies were ending a chaotic airlift that will end their troops' two decades in Afghanistan.

Western leaders acknowledged their withdrawal would mean leaving behind some of their citizens and many locals who helped them over the years, and they vowed to try to continue working with the Taliban to allow local allies to leave after President Joe Biden's Tuesday's deadline to withdraw from the country.

Although most of its allies had finished their evacuation flights, the U.S. planned to keep its round-the-clock flights going until the deadline, saying 113,500 people had been evacuated since Aug. 14, the day before the Taliban claimed Kabul. Biden warned Saturday that commanders had told him another attack was “highly likely in the next 24-36 hours," and the U.S. Embassy issued a new warning early Sunday for all Americans to avoid the airport area entirely.

Britain ended its evacuation flights Saturday, though Prime Minister Boris Johnson promised to “shift heaven and earth” to get more of those at risk from the Taliban to Britain by other means.

Britain’s ambassador to Afghanistan, Laurie Bristow, said in a video from Kabul airport and posted on Twitter that it was “time to close this phase of the operation now.”

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Biden: Another attack likely, pledges more strikes on IS

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden vowed Saturday to keep up airstrikes against the Islamic extremist group whose suicide bombing at the Kabul airport killed scores of Afghans and 13 American service members. He warned another attack was “highly likely” and the State Department called the threat “specific” and “credible.”

The Pentagon said the remaining contingent of U.S. forces at the airport, now numbering fewer than 4,000, had begun their final withdrawal ahead of Biden's deadline for ending the evacuation on Tuesday.

After getting briefed on a U.S. drone mission in eastern Afghanistan that the Pentagon said killed two members of the Islamic State group's Afghanistan affiliate early Saturday, Biden said the extremists can expect more.

“This strike was not the last,” Biden said in a statement. “We will continue to hunt down any person involved in that heinous attack and make them pay.” He paid tribute to the “bravery and selflessness” of the American troops executing the hurried airlift of tens of thousands from Kabul airport, including the 13 U.S. service members who were killed in Thursday's suicide bombing at an airport gate.

The evacuation proceeded as tensions rose over the prospect of another IS attack. The State Department issued a new security alert early Sunday morning Kabul time instructing people to leave the airport area immediately “due to a specific, credible threat.”

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Slain Marine who cradled baby at Kabul airport loved her job

A woman who cradled a baby in her arms at the airport and posted on social media that she loved her job. A young husband with a child on the way. Another man who always wanted to be in the military. A man who planned to become a sheriff’s deputy when his deployment ended. Heart-wrenching details have emerged about some of the 13 U.S. troops killed in a horrific suicide bombing at Afghanistan’s Kabul airport, which also claimed the lives of more than 160 Afghans.

Eleven Marines, one Navy sailor and one Army soldier were among the dead, while 18 other U.S. service members were wounded in Thursday's bombing, which was blamed on Afghanistan’s offshoot of the Islamic State group. The U.S. said it was the most lethal day for American forces in Afghanistan since 2011.

Here are the stories of the victims killed and the people who are mourning them:

NICOLE GEE, 23

A week before she was killed, Sgt. Nicole Gee cradled a baby in her arms at the Kabul airport. She posted the photo on Instagram and wrote, “I love my job.”

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Hurricane Ida strengthens, Louisiana braces for severe blow

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Forecasters warned residents along the northern Gulf of Mexico coast to rush preparations ahead of an intensifying Hurricane Ida, which is expected to bring winds as high as 130 mph (209 kph), life-threatening storm surge and flooding rain when it slams ashore in Louisiana on Sunday.

The National Hurricane Center warned that super-warm Gulf waters could rapidly magnify Ida's destructive power, boosting it from a Category 2 storm to an extremely dangerous Category 4 hurricane in just 18 hours or less. Landfall was expected Sunday afternoon.

Coastal highways saw heavy traffic Saturday as people moved to escape the storm's path. Trucks pulling saltwater fishing boats and campers streamed away from the coast Interstate 65 in south Alabama. Traffic jams clogged Interstate 10 heading out of New Orleans.

“We’re going to catch it head-on,” said Bebe McElroy as she prepared to leave home in the coastal Louisiana village of Cocodrie. “I’m just going around praying, saying, ‘Dear Lord, just watch over us.’”

Ida was poised to strike Louisiana 16 years to the day after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Mississippi and Louisiana coasts. A Category 3 storm, Katrina was blamed for 1,800 deaths and caused levee breaches and catastrophic flooding in New Orleans, which took years to recover.

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EXPLAINER: Ida, Katrina similar but tiny differences are key

Hurricane Ida is looking eerily like a dangerous sequel to 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, the costliest storm in American history. But there's a few still-to-come twists that could make Ida nastier in some ways, but not quite as horrific in others.

Ida is forecast to make landfall on the same calendar date, August 29, as Katrina did 16 years ago, striking the same general part of Louisiana with about the same wind speed, after rapidly strengthening by going over a similar patch of deep warm water that supercharges hurricanes.

What could be different is crucial though: Direction and size.

Katrina hit Louisiana from due south, while Ida is coming to the same part of the state from southeast. A day-and-a-half before landfall Ida’s hurricane-force winds extended 13 miles (21 kilometers) from the center compared to 106 miles (170 kilometers) for the much more massive Katrina at the same time before landfall.

“This has the potential to be more of a natural disaster whereas the big issue in Katrina was more of a man-made one” because of levee failures, said University of Miami hurricane researcher Brian McNoldy. Levee failures pushed Katrina’s death toll to 1,833 and its overall damage to about $176 billion in current dollars and experts don’t expect Ida to come near those totals.

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How Instagram star helped rescue dozens from Afghanistan

Dozens of desperate Afghans who had been trying to flee the Taliban before Tuesday's deadline for the U.S. withdrawal from Kabul made it to safety with help from an unexpected place: Instagram influencer Quentin Quarantino.

Quarantino is the alter ego of 25-year-old Tommy Marcus of New York City, previously best-known for his liberal memes and his jokes about opponents of COVID-19 vaccinations. Along with his followers, Quarantino raised $7 million within days on GoFundMe to launch rescue missions into Afghanistan to evacuate as many people as possible, many of whom said they had been threatened by the Taliban.

On Wednesday, their mission “Operation Flyaway” helped ferry 51 people from Afghanistan to Uganda on a privately chartered plane financed by the GoFundMe campaign.

More than 121,000 people had donated to the campaign after Marcus made an appeal to his 832,000 followers, making it one of the largest humanitarian fundraisers in GoFundMe’s history.

“It’s beyond humbling that they have that faith in me, that they’re willing to put significant amounts of money into hands that I trust,” Marcus told The Associated Press.

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Experts warn of dangers from breach of voter system software

ATLANTA (AP) — Republican efforts questioning the outcome of the 2020 presidential race have led to voting system breaches that election security experts say pose a heightened risk to future elections.

Copies of the Dominion Voting Systems software used to manage elections — from designing ballots to configuring voting machines and tallying results — were distributed at an event this month in South Dakota organized by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, an ally of former President Donald Trump who has made unsubstantiated claims about last year's election.

“It’s a game-changer in that the environment we have talked about existing now is a reality,” said Matt Masterson, a former top election security official in the Trump administration. “We told election officials, essentially, that you should assume this information is already out there. Now we know it is, and we don’t know what they are going to do with it.”

The software copies came from voting equipment in Mesa County, Colorado, and Antrim County, Michigan, where Trump allies had sue unsuccessfully challenging the results from last fall.

The Dominion software is used in some 30 states, including counties in California, Georgia and Michigan.

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How much impact could Sturgis rally have on COVID caseload?

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) — Rumbles from the motorcycles and rock shows of the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally have hardly cleared from the Black Hills of South Dakota, and the reports of COVID-19 infections among rallygoers are already streaming in — 178 cases across five states, according to contact tracers.

In the three weeks since the rally kicked off, coronavirus cases in South Dakota have shot up at a startling pace — sixfold from the early days of August. While it is not clear how much rallygoers spread the virus through secondary infections, state health officials have so far reported 63 cases among South Dakota residents who attended the event.

The epicenter of the rally, Meade County, has become red-hot with new cases, reaching a per capita rate that is similar to the hardest-hit Southern states. The county reported the highest rate of cases in the state over the last two weeks, according to Johns Hopkins researchers.

The Black Hills region's largest hospital system, Monument Health, warned Friday that it has seen hospitalizations from the virus rise from five to 78 this month. The hospital was bracing for more COVID-19 patients by converting rooms to intensive care units and reassigning staff.

Virus cases were already on the rise when the rally started, and it's difficult to measure just how much the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally is to blame in a region where local fairs, youth sports leagues and other gatherings have resumed.

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Crews battle to protect Lake Tahoe region from wildfire

SOUTH LAKE TAHOE, Calif. (AP) — Firefighters faced a critical day in efforts to prevent a massive California wildfire from reaching the Lake Tahoe resort region Saturday, hoping to take advantage of calmer winds before hot, heavy gusts return.

The Caldor Fire churned through mountains just southwest of the Tahoe Basin, cloaking much of the area in toxic smoke and sending tourists packing at a time when summer vacations would be in full swing ahead of the Labor Day weekend.

A favorable turn in weather Saturday afternoon allowed firefighters to make progress and increase containment of the Caldor Fire to 19%, up from 12% the day before, said Capt. Stephen Horner, a Cal Fire spokesman for the Caldor Fire. The fire so far has burned about 149,000 acres, or 233 square miles (603 square kilometers).

“It’s going to be a very pivotal day for us,” Horner said.

The fire’s eastern edge was about 7 or 8 miles (11 or 13 kilometers) from the city of South Lake Tahoe and did not advance much overnight thanks to operations known as “backfiring,” where firefighters get ahead of the blaze and burn up fuel so the fire has nothing to ignite, Horner said.

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Marchers across US call on Congress to bolster voting rights

WASHINGTON (AP) — Thousands of voting rights advocates rallied across the country Saturday to call for sweeping federal laws that would wipe out voting restrictions advancing in some Republican-controlled states that could make it harder to cast a ballot.

Many activists view the fight over voting rules as the civil rights issue of the era. But frustrations have mounted for months because two expansive election bills have stalled in the U.S. Senate, which is split evenly between Democrats and Republicans and the measures lack the votes to overcome a GOP blockade.

The rallies, which were held in dozens of cities, were intended to increase pressure on Democrats to rewrite procedural rules that would allow Democrats to muscle the legislation through without Republican votes. But they were also aimed at coaxing President Joe Biden to become a more forceful advocate on the issue.

“You said the night you won that Black America had your back, and that you were going to have Black Americans’ backs,” the Rev. Al Sharpton, who helped organize the national demonstrations, said at a rally in Washington. “Well, Mr. President, they’re stabbing us in the back.”

More than a thousand people turned out in sweltering heat on the National Mall on Saturday, the 58th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s “I Have a Dream” speech.

News from © The Associated Press, 2021