Blinken defends handling of program to help Afghans who helped US
CNN
Secretary of State Antony Blinken defended the Biden administration's actions on the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) program in the lead up to the fall of Kabul but acknowledged that those efforts were not the same as "a full-on evacuation."
The top US diplomat on Sunday indicated that the administration thought it would have more time to execute on those efforts to relocate the Afghans and their families who worked alongside the US government. "Because we believed that the government was not about, was not going to collapse, the military was not about to fade away when it did, we believed that we could do this with, in a very expedited way, more resources, more effort, more people out, but that we would have time to do it effectively," he said on "Fox News Sunday."
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CIA Director John Ratcliffe on Wednesday said in a statement that the agency had obtained “a body of credible evidence [that] indicates Iran’s Nuclear Program has been severely damaged” by recent strikes, underscoring a broad intelligence community effort is ongoing to determine the impact of the US strikes on three of the country’s nuclear sites on Saturday.
Ecuador’s most wanted man and leader of the Los Choneros gang, Jose Adolfo Macias, was captured on Wednesday, according to the country’s President Daniel Noboa.
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A federal judge on Tuesday indefinitely blocked President Donald Trump’s effort to terminate the collective bargaining rights for more than a million federal employees.