A top Chinese official said Thursday that "all-round efforts" are needed to ensure Tibetans speak standard spoken and written Chinese and share the "cultural symbols and images of the Chinese nation."

Wang Yang made the remarks before a handpicked audience in front of the Potala Palace in Lhasa, the home of Tibet's traditional Buddhist leaders, at a ceremony marking the 70th anniversary of the Chinese invasion of the vast Himalayan region.

China's ruling Communist Party says it "peacefully liberated" Tibetan peasants from an oppressive theocracy and restored Chinese rule over a region under threat from outside powers.

Is that the scent of smoke? What's that red glare? Must be nothing.

Why are the wheels coming off the American Project? Afghanistan is front and center in the news flow for obvious reasons, but since I have no expertise on that nation or America's role there, I am stipulating these are general comments from a systemic perspective.

By the American Project I mean 1) global hegemony in both hard and soft power and 2) American Exceptionalism, the belief that America is not just uniquely strong but uniquely right in terms of holding the high moral ground.

1. If you don't understand the problem, you can't possibly arrive at a solution. It's long been painfully obvious that U.S. presidents would be best served by their closest advisors being anthropologists with long in-country experience in whatever nation the U.S. is engaging.

Any anthropologist with experience in Vietnam would have dismissed the idea of an American "victory" by any means as a possibility. The same can be said of Iraq and Afghanistan. Unfortunately, American presidents don't listen to anthropologists, they listen to advisors with no real understanding of the nation and people the U.S. is engaging. Lacking a grasp of the situation, every characterization of the "problem" will necessarily be completely misguided and the proposed "solutions" cannot but fail miserably.

Much of the world is shocked by the apparent incompetence of the Biden Administration in the human and geopolitical catastrophe that is unfolding in Afghanistan. While Biden speaks out of both sides of his pre-scripted mouth, stating that everyone else is to blame than his decisions, then stating "the buck stops here," only adds to the impression that the once sole-superpower is in terminal collapse. Could it be that this is all part of a long-term strategy to end the nation state in preparation for the global totalitarian model sometimes called the Great Reset by the Davos cabal? The 40 year history of the Afghan US war and the Afghani Pashtun who shaped the policy until today is revealing.

The airwaves of mainstream media across the globe are filled with questions of military incompetence or intelligence failure or both. It is worthwhile to examine the role of the Biden Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation at the State Department, Afghan-born Zalmay Khalilzad. For the one figure who has shaped strategic US foreign policy since 1984 in the Administration of Bush Sr., and has been US Ambassador to both Afghanistan and to Iraq at key times during the US wars there, as well as the key figure in the present debacle, astonishingly little media attention has been given the 70-year old Afghan-born operative.

The Al Qaeda leader made his prediction in a 2010 letter to a key lieutenant. It pains me to point out that, on this issue at least, he's unfortunately been proved completely right, albeit a few years later than he hoped.

In May 2010, the leader of Al-Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden, wrote a remarkable letter to one of his acolytes. In it, he urged his lieutenant to plot to kill President Barack Obama, because a Joe Biden presidency would result in a "crisis", as the then vice-president was "totally unprepared for that post."

The assassination attempt on Obama's life was to be made by two teams of terrorists, who would also target General David Petraeus, then head of the US Central Command, if either man visited Afghanistan or Pakistan.

A senior Biden administration official said US policy on Taiwan had not changed after President Joe Biden appeared to suggest the US would defend the island if it were attacked, a deviation from a long-held US position of "strategic ambiguity".

In an interview aired by ABC News on Thursday, Biden was asked about the effects of the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan and responses in Chinese media telling Taiwan this showed Washington could not be relied on to come to its defence. Biden replied that Taiwan, South Korea and NATO were fundamentally different situations to Afghanistan and appeared to lump Taiwan together with countries to which Washington has explicit defence commitments.

The president said:

"They are ... entities we've made agreements with based on not a civil war they're having on that island or in South Korea, but on an agreement where they have a unity government that, in fact, is trying to keep bad guys from doing bad things to them. We have made, kept every commitment. We made a sacred commitment to article 5 that if in fact anyone were to invade or take action against our NATO allies, we would respond. Same with Japan, same with South Korea, same with Taiwan. It's not even comparable to talk about that."

A senior Biden administration official said later on Thursday that US "policy with regard to Taiwan has not changed" and analysts said it appeared that Biden had misspoken.

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin acknowledged that some Americans attempting to leave Afghanistan have been beaten by Taliban militants, Politico reported on Friday. Austin told House lawmakers during a briefing:

"We're...aware that some people including Americans have been harassed and even beaten by the Taliban. This is unacceptable and [we] made it clear to the designated Taliban leader."

Pentagon spokesman John Kirby also acknowledged that the U.S. was aware of reports of beatings. He told reporters:

"We're certainly mindful of these reports and we've communicated to the Taliban that that's absolutely unacceptable and we want free passage through these checkpoints for documented Americans. By and large, that's happening."

The comments come less than two hours after President Biden claimed that the U.S. had not received reports of American citizens being unable to enter Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul. Secretary Austin was present at that press conference. Biden said:

"We have no indication that they haven't been able to get in Kabul through the airport. We know of no circumstance where American citizens who are carrying an American passport are trying to get through to the airport" [unsuccessfully].

Brazil's far-right President Jair Bolsonaro raised the stakes in his battle with the country's Supreme Court on Friday, sending the Senate a request for the impeachment of one of its justices, according to the request seen by Reuters.

Bolsonaro is seeking to impeach Justice Alexandre de Moraes after he opened an investigation into the president for allegedly leaking to the media a secret federal police report of a hacking that backed up his views that Brazil's electronic voting system was vulnerable to fraud.

Moraes has also begun investigating Bolsonaro for his attacks on the Supreme Electoral Court, which has maintained that the electronic system is safe and can be audited.

The president of the Senate, Rodrigo Pacheco, told reporters he will look at the request, but said he does not see political or technical grounds to impeach Moraes.

A lot of nonsense about Afghanistan is being written in Britain and the United States. Most of this nonsense hides a number of important truths.

First, the Taliban have defeated the United States.

Second, the Taliban have won because they have more popular support.

Third, this is not because most Afghans love the Taliban. It is because the American occupation has been unbearably cruel and corrupt.

Fourth, the War on Terror has also been politically defeated in the United States. The majority of Americans are now in favor of withdrawal from Afghanistan and against any more foreign wars.

Fifth, this is a turning point in world history. The greatest military power in the world has been defeated by the people of a small, desperately poor country. This will weaken the power of the American empire all over the world.

Sixth, the rhetoric of saving Afghan women has been widely used to justify the occupation, and many feminists in Afghanistan have chosen the side of the occupation. The result is a tragedy for feminism.

This article explains these points. Because this a short piece, we assert more than we prove. But we have written a great deal about gender, politics and war in Afghanistan since we did fieldwork there as anthropologists almost fifty years ago. We give links to much of this work at the end of this article, so you can explore our arguments in more detail.^[1]

Lloyds is planning to become one of the UK's biggest landlords as it aims to buy 50,000 homes in the next decade.


The banking giant is to charge tenants rent as a private landlord under its recently launched Citra Living brand.

The Financial Times, which first reported the story, said the bank was aiming to buy 10,000 homes by the end of 2025.

Lloyds is currently the largest mortgage lender in the UK, providing nearly one in four home loans.

My first instinct has been to ignore the circus surrounding Biden's apparent bungle of the troop exit from Afghanistan, primarily because I think it distracts from the much bigger danger of despotic covid mandates and vaccine passports that Biden and his handlers are trying to push forward right now on our home soil. That said, I have received numerous requests from readers to discuss the situation and I've found certain aspects of the pull-out rather suspicious. The basic assumption here is that Biden is senile and his handling of the exit is tainted by his stupidity, but maybe there is more to this than meets the eye...

First, I think it's important to dispel a propaganda narrative being circulated by the media that conservatives are somehow calling for troops to stay in Afghanistan by criticizing Biden's exit strategy. This is typical leftist gaslighting. One can be in favor of a troop draw-down and still be critical of Biden's handling of it. Frankly, the US should have been out of Afghanistan several years ago; I don't think that it's too much to ask that there be a concrete plan in place to mitigate damage to those people who relied on our presence to protect them from the Taliban.

It was Barack Obama who first promised an exit from Afghanistan by 2014 while claiming that the "combat mission was over." This of course never happened and the political left ignored Obama's deception in favor of the progressive savior narrative.

To be fair, the Trump Administration did the same exact thing, platforming the idea of a major draw-down or a full exit and then instituting troop surges instead, but at least conservatives were far more critical of his backpedaling. Trump finally committed to troop reductions in 2020, with most of the assets relocated AFTER the November election, leaving 2500 military personnel in Afghanistan along with 17,000 private contractors.