The government typically has an advantage when defending its policies against legal challenges. Courts generally defer to the executive branch’s factual declarations and formal representations about what is happening and why, rather than probing for what may actually be going on. But the flood of litigation unleashed by the radical opening months of President Trump’s … Read more
President Trump has promised a bold new American approach to the world. Nowhere is that more urgently needed than in Afghanistan. Not only have its Taliban rulers crushed dissent and stripped away the rights of the country’s women and girls; they have also taken Americans hostage and are allowing Afghanistan to serve as a nerve … Read more
In one of its final acts, the Biden administration secured the release of two Americans held in Afghanistan in a prisoner swap for a Taliban member imprisoned in the United States on narcotics charges. The Taliban government freed Ryan Corbett and William Wallace McKenty in exchange for Khan Mohammed, who was released from a U.S. … Read more
A view of National Investigation Agency (NIA), in New Delhi. File. | Photo Credit: Sushil Kumar Verma The National Investigation Agency (NIA) has filed a supplementary charge sheet against two alleged members of an al-Qaeda linked terrorist group’s module operating from Assam. The two accused, identified as Mohammed Akbar Ali and Abul Kalam Azad, had … Read more
Editor’s Note: A version of this story appears in today’s Meanwhile in the Middle East newsletter, CNN’s three-times-a-week look inside the region’s biggest stories. Sign up here. Abu Dhabi, UAE CNN — Shortly before leaving for his first state visit to China on Tuesday, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi issued a thinly veiled criticism of his … Read more
A version of this story appeared in CNN’s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here. CNN — Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, after trying for 10 years, is on the cusp of getting Congress to repeal the authorizations that led the US into war against Iraq in … Read more
CNN — Top Biden administration officials met in-person with the Taliban on Saturday for the first time since al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri was killed by the US in his apartment in Kabul in late July, two officials familiar with the talks said. The administration sent the CIA’s deputy director and the top State Department … Read more
President Joe Biden announced Monday that the United States had killed Al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri, one of the world’s most wanted terrorists and suspected mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks. In a televised address, Biden said the strike in Kabul, Afghanistan had been carried out on Saturday. “I gave the final approval to go … Read more
A Bangladeshi anti-terrorism tribunal on Tuesday sentenced six Islamist militants, including a fugitive ex-army major, to death in the brutal murder of a gay rights activist and his friend in 2016. “They will be hanged by neck until their death,” Judge Md Majibur Rahman of the Anti-Terrorism Special Tribunal pronounced as four of the convicts … Read more
The United States spent billions supplying the Afghan military with the tools to defeat the Taliban, but the rapid capitulation of the armed forces means that weaponry is now fuelling the insurgents’ astonishing battlefield successes. “We provided our Afghan partners with all the tools — let me emphasise: all the tools,” US President Joe Biden … Read more