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The effectiveness of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine against Covid-19 declines faster than that of the AstraZeneca jab, according to a new study published on Thursday.

"Two doses of Pfizer-BioNTech have greater initial effectiveness against new COVID-19 infections, but this declines faster compared with two doses of Oxford-AstraZeneca," researchers at Oxford University said.

Videos of Taliban fighters parading in US-made armored vehicles, wielding US-supplied firearms and climbing on American Black Hawk helicopters after the defeat of Afghan government forces have embarrassed the White House.

The Islamist insurgents, who easily captured control of the country after a months-long campaign, seized huge amounts of weaponry, equipment and munitions from the Afghan armed forces, most of it supplied over the past two decades by Washington.

As the Taliban entered Kabul, the country's president fled without a word.

Then a former leader, Hamid Karzai, stepped in from the shadows -- and it appears he is following his old playbook of traditional tribal deal-making.

On Fox News this week, hosts have lambasted President Joe Biden for being MIA while Afghanistan falls into chaos. But the reality, according to an exclusive Axios report reveals that behind the scenes, the Biden team is scrambling to save American allies.

There is a backlog of Special Immigrant Visas (SIV) applications that the U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan was rushing to process using just a skeleton staff. Now, Afghan allies are in a complicated position because the Taliban won't allow them through to the airport without the proper paperwork. Afghans can't get the paperwork unless they get the necessary documents from the Embassy staff who are at the airport.

The chaos in Afghanistan as the United States leaves was expected by President Joe Biden, according to an interview with ABC News. But other military experts claim that it wasn't and that the steps taken ahead of this week laid the groundwork for chaos.

MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace showed a clip of CNN International from Tuesday evening in which President Donald Trump's former Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper, explained that it was clear this was all going to happen.

In an exclusive interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos, President Joe Biden revealed that he always expected the withdrawal from Afghanistan would result in the kind of chaos that was witnessed on television over the past few days.

"So you don't think this could have been handled -- this exit could have been handled better in any way, no mistakes?" asked Stephanopoulos.

During a press conference this Wednesday, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley claimed that the U.S. did not foresee that Afghanistan would fall back into the hands of the Taliban so quickly after the U.S. military's withdrawal, The Daily Beast reports.

"There was nothing that I or anyone else saw that indicated a collapse of this army in this government in 11 days," Milley said, adding they were advised the turnover would take much longer.

After a briefing by Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin and Gen. Mark Milley, MSNBC spoke to Zorah Aziz, who is working to get her husband out of Afghanistan.

She described the organized way that Germans currently in Afghanistan have managed to have a meeting place for areas of the country where they can then transport their people safely to leave the country. But for Americans or Afghans authorized to leave with Americans, that isn't available.

Editor's note: Afghan scholar Hanif Sufizada, who works at the Center for Afghanistan Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha, got caught in Kabul during the chaos of the U.S. military pullout, when thousands of Afghans fled to the airport, seeking a way out of the country. Editor Catesby Holmes sent Sufizada an email on Aug. 17, 2021, telling him that she hoped he was OK – and his email back let us know that he wasn't.

Sufizada's dispatches from Aug. 17 and 18 advance an important story: He brings an on-the-ground account of his struggle to leave Afghanistan and the impossible and irrational obstacles he had to overcome in order to flee – all of which he faced even though he is a U.S. resident with a green card and a family in Omaha. Sufizada, an economics scholar and former Afghan government official whose most recent story for The Conversation was “The Taliban are megarich – here's where they get the money they use to wage war in Afghanistan," wrote us from Qatar on Wednesday morning, Aug. 18, that he finally secured passage on a plane out of a U.S. military base in Qatar and is headed back to the U.S.

Tropical storm Grace strengthened to a hurricane on Wednesday as it barreled toward Mexico's Caribbean coast, threatening to bring heavy rain, flash flooding and large waves, meteorologists said.

A hurricane warning was in effect for a string of beach resorts, including Cancun, on Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, the US National Hurricane Center (NHC) in Miami said.

The United Arab Emirates said on Wednesday that it is hosting former Afghan president Ashraf Ghani "on humanitarian grounds", after he fled his country amid a Taliban takeover.

Ghani's whereabouts had been unknown after he fled Afghanistan at the weekend in the face of a sweeping advance by the Taliban.