World

On Tuesday, The Washington Post reported that Rep. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) has gone rogue to travel to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan on a rescue mission, in the face of multiple warnings not to do so from the Pentagon and State Department — and that nobody knows where he is.

"Mullin told the [Tajik] embassy that he planned to fly from Tblisi, Georgia, into Tajikistan's capital, Dushanbe, in the next few hours and needed the top diplomat's help, according to the two U.S. officials familiar with the incident, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose private conversations about a sensitive matter," reported Tayler Pager and John Hudson. "Embassy officials told Mullin they could not assist him in skirting Tajikistan's laws on cash limits on his way to visiting one of the most dangerous places on earth."

Many Republican lawmakers are spinning the withdrawal from Afghanistan as the worst thing ever to happen throughout the entirety of American history.

However, one foreign policy expert schooled the GOP on this historic distortions during an appearance on MSNBC Tuesday.

The United States reportedly had a secret deal with the Taliban to escort Americans to the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, CNN.com reported Tuesday.

An official revealed the U.S. special operations forces had a "secret gate" at the airport and established "call centers" to help Americans get through the process. None of the information was previously known publicly and the information was clearly hidden from the news, perhaps as a way of protecting against further ISIS attacks.

Nargis Nehan, a former member of Afghan president Ashraf Ghani's cabinet who days ago fled Afghanistan for Norway, on Tuesday condemned the US handling of the withdrawal from Afghanistan.

"The US have been in Afghanistan for 20 years, staying one more year longer wouldn't have made any difference for them, at least financially as well as politically," Nehan told AFP from Oslo where she is staying in quarantine after arriving last week.

A Paris auction house will seek to sell in October the world's biggest known example of the dinosaur triceratops, known as "Big John", with the spectacular skeleton on show to the public beforehand, organisers said Tuesday.

The triceratops is among the most distinctive of dinosaurs due to the three horns on its head -- one at the nose and two on the forehead -- that give the dinosaur its Latin name.

Johnson & Johnson's highly anticipated HIV vaccine failed to demonstrate adequate protection in a clinical trial involving more than 2,600 young women in sub-Saharan Africa, the company and US health authorities said Tuesday.

Though the vaccine was found to be safe, with no serious side effects, its efficacy in preventing HIV infection was just over 25 percent.

In the wake of the Taliban's takeover of Kabul and the ouster of the Afghan national government, alarming reports indicate that the insurgents could potentially access biometric data collected by the U.S. to track Afghans, including people who worked for U.S. and coalition forces.

Afghans who once supported the U.S. have been attempting to hide or destroy physical and digital evidence of their identities. Many Afghans fear that the identity documents and databases storing personally identifiable data could be transformed into death warrants in the hands of the Taliban.

While many are focusing on getting as many people out of Afghanistan as possible, Republicans are already promising hearings for the mistakes that were made and focusing on what went wrong. One report from Vanity Fair reporter Adam Ciralsky revealed that turf wars between the State Department and Pentagon hampered the exit from Afghanistan.

The story began by explaining that a physician and a veteran of the Army's elite special operations unit, "Doc" Walters ran Operational Medicine or OpMed. The unit is out of the State Department and is used to help organize dangerous rescues of U.S. officials or Americans abroad. It was started in 2013 after the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. Secretary Anthony Blinken had wanted to elevate the unit, renaming it the Bureau of Contingency and Crisis Response (CCR), but that all changed in July.

Families of a giant rodent native to South America have been invading a luxury gated community in Argentina, highlighting the country's controversial environmental and social policies.

Nordelta is a 1,600 hectare (3,950 acre) luxury private urban complex built on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, on a wetland from the Parana river that is the capybara's natural habitat.