Good morning.
The Taliban has called for international aid as Afghanistan reels from an earthquake that killed more than 900 people and left thousands injured.
Rescuers searched into the night on Monday for survivors after the quake struck on Sunday, destroying entire villages across the country’s eastern Kunar province, which borders Pakistan.
Many people remained trapped under the debris of mud and stone houses built into steep valleys as rescuers struggled to reach remote areas due to rough mountainous terrain and inclement weather.
What kind of earthquake was it? The quake, which struck at about midnight, was a magnitude 6.0 – but it was also a shallow earthquake, taking place just six miles beneath the Earth’s surface, making it particularly destructive.
What did the Taliban say? Sharafat Zaman, a spokesperson for the health ministry in Kabul, called for international aid. “We need it because here lots of people lost their lives and houses,” he said.
Leaked ‘Gaza Riviera’ plan dismissed as ‘insane’ attempt to cover ethnic cleansing
A plan circulating in the White House to develop the “Gaza Riviera” as a string of hi-tech megacities has been dismissed as an “insane” attempt to provide cover for the large-scale ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian territory’s population.
On Sunday, the Washington Post published a leaked prospectus for the plan, which would involve the forced displacement of Gaza’s entire population of 2 million people and put the territory into a US trusteeship for at least a decade.
Named the Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation Trust – or “Great” – the proposal was reportedly developed by some of the same Israelis who created and set in motion the US- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation with financial planning contributed by Boston Consulting Group.
What’s the most controversial part of the plan? The 38-page plan suggests what it calls “temporary relocation of all of Gaza’s more than 2 million population” – a proposal that would amount to ethnic cleansing, potentially a genocidal act.
Graham Greene, Dances with Wolves actor, dies age 73
Graham Greene, the prolific Oscar-nominated Canadian First Nations actor and Hollywood trailblazer, has died age 73 in a Toronto hospital after a long illness.
“He was a great man of morals, ethics and character and will be eternally missed,” Greene’s agent, Michael Greene (no relation), told Deadline. “You are finally free.”
Greene was born in 1952 in Ohsweken, on the Six Nations reserve in Ontario, Canada. His Hollywood breakthrough came when Kevin Costner cast him as real-life Lakota Sioux medicine man Kicking Bird (Ziŋtká Nagwáka) in his Academy Award-winning 1990 western Dances with Wolves. Greene’s performance landed him an Academy Award nomination and launched his Hollywood career.
What else was he in? After Dances with Wolves, he appeared in Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995), The Green Mile (1999) and The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009). More recently, Greene appeared in Taika Waititi’s FX series Reservation Dogs, HBO’s dystopian series The Last Of Us and Taylor Sheridan’s series 1883 and Tulsa King.
In other news …
More than 1,000 people were killed in a landslide in western Sudan on Sunday, according to a rebel group that controls the area. The landslide, which followed heavy rain, destroyed a village in the Marra mountains area.
A Labor Day rally in Chicago was one of hundreds of protests organized across the US as part of the national “Workers Over Billionaires” effort, a mass action calling for the protection of social safety nets such as social security.
Doctors have found a bullet fragment lodged in the neck of a 10-year-old boy who gave a widely shared account of how his friend helped protect him during the mass shooting in Minneapolis last week.
Nevada sheriffs are asking for help in identifying a man found in a pool of blood in what police are treating as a homicide at the Burning Man festival.
Don’t miss this: Donald Trump says he is not a dictator. Isn’t he?
Speaking in the Oval Office this week, Donald Trump insisted he wasn’t a dictator. Yet his actions – deploying troops to Washington, threatening universities with funding cuts, targeting critics and demanding investigations into opponents, all while his family profits – suggest otherwise. None of these things are typical for a democratic leader. So … is Trump a dictator?
… or this: why more people are tuning out the news
News has never been more accessible – but for some, that’s exactly the problem. Flooded with information and relentless updates, more people around the world are tuning out. The reasons vary: for some it’s the sheer volume of news, for others the emotional toll of negative headlines or a distrust of the media itself. “Now that I don’t watch the news, I just don’t have that anxiety. I don’t have dread,” said Mardette Burr, an Arizona retiree.
Climate check: global temperatures to remain above average despite return of La Niña, says UN
The cooling La Niña weather phenomenon may return between September and November, but even if it does, global temperatures are expected to be above average, the United Nations has said, and it won’t stop human-induced climate change increasing temperatures and exacerbating extreme weather.
Last Thing: Clanker! This slur against robots is all over the internet – but is it offensive?
“Clanker”, first used for battle droids in a 2005 Star Wars game, has become a popular online insult for robots and AI chatbots such as ChatGPT. Spread through memes and TikTok, it reflects frustration with fake content and fears over automation. Linguists are warning its normalisation risks echoing real-world prejudice, but for now the machines don’t seem too offended.
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