Your Tuesday Briefing

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We’re protecting the Taliban’s disputed declare to the Panjshir Valley and a sentence for a Belarusian opposition chief.

The Taliban claimed on Monday to have captured the Panjshir Valley, elevating their flag over Bazarak, the final Afghan provincial capital not firmly beneath their management, at the same time as opposition forces there stated that they’d battle on from the mountains.

The Taliban by no means managed to regulate Panjshir, a rugged space 70 miles north of Kabul, the final time they dominated Afghanistan, from 1996 to 2001. It was the launching level for the U.S.-led invasion after the Sept. 11, 2001, assaults on New York and the Pentagon.

Soviet forces, throughout their occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, made advances into the territory on no less than 9 events, solely to be repelled every time.

Particulars: Taliban fighters posted photos on-line stated to be of militants raising the flag of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, because the Taliban name the nation, in addition to of their forces speaking to native leaders.

Uncertainty: The opposition group, the Nationwide Resistance Entrance, disputed the Taliban’s declare of getting conquered your entire province, however conflicting accounts of what was occurring on the bottom have been exhausting to confirm as a result of web and phone service into the area has been reduce off.

A Belarusian court docket on Monday sentenced Maria Kolesnikova to 11 years in prison after a closed-door trial in Minsk, the capital.

Kolesnikova tried to run for president final 12 months. She and her colleague, Maksim Znak, one other opposition determine and a lawyer, have been charged with extremism, conspiring to grab energy illegally, and damaging state safety. Znak obtained a 10-year sentence in a most safety penal colony.

It was one other signal that President Aleksandr Lukashenko was pursuing an unrelenting crackdown on dissent after an election broadly condemned by many Western governments as a sham. An estimated tens of hundreds of opposition supporters have fled Belarus for the reason that crackdown started final 12 months.

“This verdict is prohibited and unfounded,” stated the pair’s lawyer, Yevgeny Pylchenko, saying an attraction. “It’s not based mostly on proof. Through the trial, neither their guilt, nor even the fee of the crimes imputed, was confirmed.”

Context: Kolesnikova grew to become one in every of Belarus’s most distinguished opposition leaders final 12 months after the candidate, whose marketing campaign she managed, was arrested and barred from operating. She threw her help behind Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who entered the race after her husband was additionally barred from operating and put in jail. They and a 3rd feminine candidate, Veronika Tsepkalo, drew tens of hundreds of supporters to their pre-election rallies.

New Zealand introduced on Monday that it might ease restrictions outside Auckland, ending a sequence of lockdowns that started in August.

Residents exterior Auckland can be allowed to return to work and college, and the nationwide alert level can be lowered to Stage 2 beginning Wednesday morning, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern stated at a information convention.

Auckland, a metropolis of round 1.7 million, will stay at Stage 4, which implies that everybody however important employees should keep at dwelling. Faculties will reopen on Thursday morning.

Context: New Zealand is likely one of the final international locations pursuing a so-called Covid zero strategy, implementing extreme restrictions on motion and actions. Different governments which have employed this technique, together with Hong Kong and Singapore, have stated they might begin loosening their measures.

Knowledge: The typical variety of every day new instances stays comparatively low, at 36, however New Zealand’s vaccination marketing campaign has gotten off to a sluggish begin: solely 49 p.c of the inhabitants has obtained no less than one dose, under the 62 p.c in the USA and the 72 p.c in Britain.

Listed here are the latest updates and maps of the pandemic.

In different developments:

Information From Asia

Piping plovers, an endangered fowl species within the U.S., have a defender once they roam New York seashores: the plover patrol. Volunteers monitor the world, ensuring that individuals keep away, hold their canines off the sand and hold the chicks out of hurt’s method.

Steven Pinker, the Harvard cognitive psychologist, has made the case for positivity in an unsure age. Our Talk columnist asked him about his latest book, which takes on rationality.

Your new ebook is pushed by the concept that it might be good if extra individuals thought extra rationally. What mechanisms would induce extra individuals to check their considering for rationality? Ideally there’d be a change in our norms of dialog. Counting on an anecdote, arguing advert hominem — these must be mortifying.

Essentially the most highly effective technique of getting individuals to be extra rational just isn’t to focus on the individuals. We obtain rationality by implementing guidelines for the neighborhood that make us collectively extra rational than any of us are individually. Individuals topic their beliefs to empirical exams.

Are there points of your individual life through which you’re knowingly irrational? The reply is sort of definitely sure. I in all probability do issues that morally I can’t justify, like consuming meat. I in all probability take dangers that if I have been to do the expected-utility calculation couldn’t be justified, like bicycling. However nonetheless I take pleasure in bicycling.

What about love? There’s nothing irrational about love. In the end our values are neither rational nor irrational. They’re our values; they’re our objectives.