The controversial Arizona 2020 election review is almost over, but top officials in the state's largest county and secretary of state's office aren't waiting for the conclusions, launching a pair of preemptive strikes against a report that could land as soon as next week.

Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, released a prebuttal laying out all of her office's criticisms of the so-called election "audit." She detailed the pre- and post-election testing election equipment underwent in Maricopa County and called the state Senate-led effort "secretive and disorganized" that routinely discarded best practices of an actual audit. Hobbs' office wrote:

"All credible audits are characterized by controls, access, and transparency that allow for the processes and procedures to be replicated, if necessary. As this report has described, the review conducted by the Senate's contractors has consistently lacked all three of these factors."

And Stephen Richer, the Republican county recorder in Maricopa County, on Thursday issued a lengthy report of his own, in the form of an open letter to state Republicans, challenging the credentials of the reviewers and defending his own Republican bona fides, wrote:

"I will keep fighting for conservatism, and there are many things I would do for the Republican candidate for President, but I won't lie about the election, and I will not unjustifiably turn my back on the employees of the Board of Supervisors, Recorder's Office, and Elections Department — my colleagues and friends."

Since late April, contractors hired by the Republican-controlled state Senate have been reviewing all the ballots cast in Maricopa County, which President Joe Biden won en route to flipping the state, along with examining election equipment.

Western commentators have chalked up sharp rises in online anti-vaccine sentiment and anger at Covid-19 rules to Russian bots. Now though, an internet whistleblower has said the reality is it's actually a homegrown phenomenon.

In an article for the UK's The Guardian on Wednesday, former Facebook data scientist Sophie Zhang said that the allegations had become a convenient way to blame Moscow, rather than face up to the worrying trends. According to her, the networking giant relentlessly focuses on whether posts are "authentic," and from actual users, or "inauthentic" and placed by those with ulterior motives. Zhang wrote:

"When I worked at Facebook, I spent two and a half years combating inauthentic behavior; I was responsible for Facebook taking down inauthentic campaigns by two national governments."

Ultimately, she quit the company and became a whistleblower after she claimed the Silicon Valley firm failed to take seriously her findings that it was effectively allowing major abuses of its policies to go ahead in places like Afghanistan, Iraq and Latin America in order to prioritize issues in the West.

CNN has been hit with a wave of anti-war sentiment after publishing a curious piece highlighting the $1 trillion worth of minerals in Afghanistan being left behind that "the world desperately needs."

When the US finishes its exit from the country after 20 years, it will be leaving behind valuable, untapped mineral deposits worth a $1 trillion, according to US military officials and geologists in 2010.

Minerals such as iron, copper, gold and lithium are found in huge quantities there, and have remained mostly untouched due to the unstable state of the nation, something that doesn't look to be changing as the US continues its chaotic exit from the country amid a Taliban takeover. Rod Schoonover, a scientist and security expert who founded the Ecological Futures Group, told the outlet about the deposits:

"Afghanistan is certainly one of the regions richest in traditional precious metals, but also the metals [needed] for the emerging economy of the 21st century."

Russian President Vladimir Putin rejected a request by U.S. President Joe Biden to allow an American military presence in countries near Afghanistan, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

Biden reportedly made the request at the two leaders' summit in Geneva, Switzerland, in June, hoping that Putin would allow the bases so that the U.S. could continue to carry out operations against terrorist groups. But the Russian leader, famously irritable at the U.S. presence in former Soviet territory, refused.

The Journal reported:

Russian President Vladimir Putin, during a June 16 summit meeting with President Biden, objected to any role for American forces in Central Asian countries, senior U.S. and Russian officials said, undercutting U.S. plans to act against new terrorist dangers after its Afghanistan withdrawal.

The previously unreported exchange between the U.S. and Russian leaders complicated Biden administration hopes of basing drones and other counterterrorism forces in countries bordering landlocked Afghanistan. That challenge has deepened with the collapse over the weekend of the Afghan government and armed forces.

The exchange also indicates that Moscow is more determined to try to maintain Central Asia as a sphere of influence than to expand cooperation with a new American president over the turmoil in Afghanistan, former and current U.S. officials said.
...
Without access to Central Asian nations, such as Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan or Tajikistan, the U.S. would need to rely on bases in Qatar, other Arab Gulf states and U.S. Navy aircraft carriers in the Indian Ocean to fly aircraft to Afghanistan. Flight times from the Gulf states are so long that a U.S. drone might spend more than 60% of its mission flying to and from Afghanistan from the U.S. base at Al Udeid, Qatar, a former senior U.S. military official said. This would limit the time for conducting reconnaissance or carrying out strikes over the country.

Vietnam will deploy troops in Ho Chi Minh City and prohibit residents from leaving their homes, authorities said on Friday, as the country's biggest city turns to drastic measures to slow a spiralling rate of coronavirus deaths.

Vietnam's toughest order yet comes amid a spike in fatalities and infections, despite weeks of lockdown measures in the business hub of 9 million people, the epicentre of the country's deadliest outbreak.

"We are asking people to stay where you are, not to go outside. Each home, company, factory should be an antivirus fort," Pham Duc Hai, deputy head of the city's coronavirus authority, said on Friday.

The government said it was preparing to mobilise police and military to enforce the lockdown and deliver food supplies to citizens.

Police with loudspeakers were seen driving around residential areas on Friday instructing people to follow protocols and assuring them food supplies would be provided.

The defence ministry plans to send 1,000 military medics and medical equipment over the weekend, according to a military document reviewed by Reuters.

The government also extended restrictions on Friday in the capital Hanoi by a further 15 days, state media reported.

Officials at the Kabul embassy directly warned the Biden administration about the imminent danger of the Taliban forces in Afghanistan.

Days after President Biden publicly doubted the strength of the Taliban to take over Afghanistan, the Kabul embassy in July 2021 warned Secretary Antony Blinken and the State Department of exactly that.

The Wall Street Journal reports that embassy officials in Kabul sent a memo to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and "another top State Department official" in July warning of the potential collapse of Kabul after the full withdrawal of troops from the region.

Faced with a sharp rise in the number of desperate people from Africa and the Middle East seeking refuge coming through the forested frontier from Belarus, the EU is now stumping up cash and equipment to try and stem the flow.

In a statement issued after the bloc held talks on the crisis on Wednesday, member states' interior ministers "agreed to deploy additional experts and agency teams as well as the necessary technical equipment" to Latvia, Lithuania and Poland.

According to the release, "the ministers expressed solidarity with the three affected states". Slovenia's Interior Minister Aleš Hojs, whose country currently holds the presidency of the EU Council, further reiterated that the bloc stands against Belarus' purported "attempts to instrumentalize human beings for political purposes". In recent weeks, Minsk has been accused of flying in vulnerable refugees from countries like Iraq, Syria and the Congo, before bussing them to the border with the EU and encouraging them to cross over in an effort to stoke a political crisis in response to sanctions from Brussels.

The European Union's foreign policy chief on Thursday called the fall of Afghanistan's capital and the resurgence of the Taliban "a catastrophe" and "nightmare" that laid bare a failure of intelligence and trans-Atlantic cooperation.

EU foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell further criticized U.S. President Joe Biden for underplaying the commitment to nation-building in Afghanistan. Borrell insisted that instilling the rule of law and achieving basic rights for women and minorities were goals of the Western military intervention in the country, along with the initial goal of stamping out terrorism emanating from the region.

"President Biden said the other day that it has never been the purpose, state building was not the purpose. Well, this is arguable," Borrell told a European Parliament committee.

The first Taliban press conference after this weekend's Saigon moment geopolitical earthquake, conducted by spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid, was in itself a game-changer.

The contrast could not be starker with those rambling pressers at the Taliban embassy in Islamabad after 9/11 and before the start of the American bombing - proving this is an entirely new political animal.

Yet some things never change. English translations remain atrocious.

Here is a good summary of the key Taliban statements, and here (in Russian) is a very detailed roundup.

UK Labour Party leader Keir Starmer argued in Parliament on Wednesday that the invasion of Afghanistan "brought stability" to the region and reduced the threat of terrorism in the West - days after the Taliban took over Kabul.

During a House of Commons debate over the withdrawal of US and UK troops from Afghanistan this week, which led to the Taliban quickly taking over the country, Prime Minister Boris Johnson declared that the UK would "judge" the new "regime on the choices it makes and by its actions rather than its words."

Starmer, meanwhile, condemned the "disastrous week" and "staggering complacency from our government about the Taliban threat," before attempting to argue that the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks was meaningful and worthwhile.