World

KABUL — A Taliban government spokesman has said the Afghan authorities were committed to engagement with the international community after a new morality law sparked tense exchanges over women's rights.

The United Nations and the European Union have warned that the law, requiring women to cover up completely and not raise their voices in public, could damage prospects for engagement with foreign nations and international organisations.

Deputy government spokesman Hamdullah Fitrat was responding to comments by a spokesman for the UN secretary-general assuring continued engagement with the Taliban authorities after Afghanistan's morality ministry said it would no longer cooperate with the UN mission in the country, UNAMA, over criticism of the law.

Fitrat said the authorities were "committed to positive interactions with all the countries and organisations in accordance with Islamic law", in a voice message to journalists on Saturday.

"Interaction is the only way to achieve solutions to problems and for the progression and expansion of relations," he said, urging nations and organisations to engage positively with the Taliban authorities.

Since taking power in 2021, no state has recognised the Taliban government but it has made diplomatic inroads recently, including attending UN-hosted talks on Afghanistan in Qatar.

On Friday, the spokesman for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said, "We will continue to engage with all stakeholders in Afghanistan, including the Taliban".

"We have always done so following our mandate and I would say impartially and in good faith, always upholding the norms of the UN, pushing the messages of human rights and equality," said Stephane Dujarric.

"We would urge the de facto authorities to, in fact, open more avenues for diplomatic engagement," he added.

Gender apartheid

Earlier Friday, the morality ministry had said it would no longer cooperate with UNAMA over its criticisms of the "Law on the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice", which was ratified last week.

The law, which includes rules on many aspects of Afghans' lives according to the Taliban's strict interpretation of Islamic law, sparked concern among Afghans, various countries, human rights advocates, UN agencies and the EU.

It prohibits women from raising their voices in public and requires them to cover their entire body and face if they need to leave the house "out of necessity".

Men's behaviour and dress are also strictly regulated by the law, which gives morality police powers to warn and detain people for non-compliance.

UNAMA head Roza Otunbayeva said last week that the law offered "a distressing vision for Afghanistan's future", adding that it could set back cooperation efforts, a warning echoed by the EU.

The Taliban government has consistently dismissed international criticism of its policies, including restrictions on women that the UN has labelled "gender apartheid".

Chief government spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid has said the law is "firmly rooted in Islamic teachings" that should be respected and understood, adding rejection of the law showed "arrogance".

RUSSIA — Hastily evacuated from their home in Russia's Kursk region in the face of Ukraine's offensive, Galina Tolmacheva and her husband Andrei endlessly checked their phone for news.

"We don't really know where to go," said Galina, a 50-year-old postwoman.

She told AFP that she and her husband had waited until "the last moment" to flee their house on August 19, along with their three children, aged 9, 13 and 30.

"There wasn't anyone left in the village any more," said Galina, who lived in Alexandrovka, a small settlement about 25 kilometres from the border with Ukraine.

Ukrainian armed forces launched a large-scale surprise offensive into Russia's Kursk region on August 6, with Kyiv saying its goal is to create a "buffer zone" to protect civilians living near the border, as well as put pressure on Moscow to agree to "fair talks".

Ukraine claims to have taken control of 100 settlements in nearly one month, pushing 130,000 Russian civilians to evacuate.

The Tolmachev family waited to leave until "shells were falling right under the porch and in the vegetable patch, too," said Galina. 

At that point, they had to leave "everything" as they were forced to evacuate by the Russian army.

Like many locals, they owned chickens, goats and rabbits.

"We set free all our livestock. We left the tractor, the car, our vegetable patch. Basically everything got left behind. We fled in just what we stood up in," said Galina.

Her mother was also evacuated, but she was already in poor health and died shortly afterwards.

 'No one was told' 

Since August 19 they have been staying at a large temporary reception centre set up by Moscow authorities in what used to be a supermarket, in an area of the Kursk region safe from the fighting, which AFP was able to visit.

The undisclosed location currently hosts 400 people, including 50 children, said Nikita Miroshnichenko, the centre's manager. They sleep in rows of makeshift beds.

Psychologists are providing counselling while daily activities such as entertainment for children and video games are organised, the manager told AFP, as a way to pass the time and boost morale.

Residents have found ways to occupy themselves -- some were reading or eating, others were doing laundry or putting on makeup.

But few were talkative and their faces showed signs of fatigue and tension.

Andrei Tolmachev, a 45-year-old tractor driver, said he was "satisfied" with the centre but was critical of local authorities, whom he said had not informed people about Ukraine's incursion or helped with evacuation.

"Basically no one was informed," he said, and people found out "from the Internet, from friends and acquaintances, from relatives".

"All the local people say that our local administration just abandoned us."

The couple fell silent, struggling with emotions as they re-lived events of the last few days.

Facing unhelpful local authorities and a lack of humanitarian aid, Andrei said he and his wife had picked up water, bread and canned food from abandoned shops and distributed them to elderly residents who had not evacuated and to soldiers on the front line.

In one neighbouring village, residents had "no electricity or water", he said.

While Kyiv has said it does not want to occupy the territory that its troops have taken in Russia, Galina expressed her fears: "We don't know what has happened to our house".

"If it's still standing, we hope to go back."

JOHNSTOWN, United States — Republican White House nominee Donald Trump sought Friday to contain the blast radius of a fierce backlash over his remarks publicly backing away from right-wing positions on reproductive rights.

The ex-president has been under fire from conservatives over an announcement that in a second term he would ensure free in vitro fertilization (IVF) -- an expensive fertility procedure that many in the anti-abortion movement want to see curbed.

The rift widened as he hit out at his home state Florida's six-week abortion ban, calling it too restrictive and suggesting he planned to vote for an upcoming ballot measure that would make the procedure legal until a fetus becomes viable.

Trump, 78, walked back the comment ahead of a rally in the battleground state of Pennsylvania on Friday, telling Fox News that "I will be voting no."

But conservatives had already begun criticizing Trump's ever-shifting positions on abortion, with a new Republican policy platform dropping calls for a national ban and the tycoon's recent claim that his government would be "great" for reproductive rights.

The pushback from anti-abortion groups on his latest remarks was swift, with activists warning that he risks alienating his base.

Evangelical theologian Albert Mohler said Trump's positions appeared "almost calculated to alienate pro-life voters" while conservative commentator Erick Erickson posted that Trump's abortion stance "will be a bridge too far for too many."

Trump's rally, in Johnstown, was notable for the absence of any remarks on reproductive rights, despite Thursday's big IVF announcement. 

The campaign of Democratic candidate Kamala Harris was happy to weigh in on the issue, smelling blood in the water. 

"The majority of Americans support abortion access, they support IVF, they support contraception," Mini Timmaraju, of the Reproductive Freedom for All lobby group, told reporters in a campaign call.

"[Trump] has finally figured it out, and he'll do anything to distract from his abysmal, horrifying record on this issue."

 'He is pro-life' 

Trump has been all over the map on abortion in the last 15 years, initially describing himself as "pro-choice" before calling for "some form of punishment" for women seeking the procedure. 

He boasts about appointing Supreme Court justices who ended federal protections for abortion access in 2022 but has more recently begun to worry that Republicans are out of step with the majority of voters on reproductive rights.

His IVF pledge appeared calculated to appeal to moderates but will upset conservatives who for years opposed Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act because they were against the redistributive economics of taxpayer-funded health insurance. 

Almost every Senate Republican voted against assuring IVF access in a vote in June -- including Trump's running mate J.D. Vance -- and more than half of the House Republican lawmakers have sponsored legislation that threatens its legality.

Republicans are divided on fertility treatments such as IVF, with many hailing them as a boost to American families.

Others, with strong beliefs that life begins at conception, oppose IVF because the procedure can produce multiple embryos, not all of which get used.

Abortion rights activists worry that the Supreme Court decision threatens IVF and were given cause by a February ruling in Alabama that frozen embryos could be considered people, causing several clinics to briefly pause treatments.

Yet if the abortion and IVF rows threatened to alienate Trump's most loyal supporters, rally-goers in Johnstown weren't showing it.

"It's not enough to make me not vote for him, no way, because he is pro-life," said Lisa Davis, a 54-year-old retired office manager from the nearby town of Somerset.

"I know he wants to give some exceptions -- and I think there should be."

"Why should I pay with my tax dollars for a baby getting killed?" added retired nurse Rosemary Drzal, 69.

A fireside chat-style appearance at the conservative pressure group Moms for Liberty later Friday did not touch on the issue.

CARACAS — Power was gradually returning to Venezuela on Friday after a nationwide blackout that authorities blamed on sabotage of the national electrical grid, the latest crisis to hit the country after a disputed presidential election.

Venezuela experiences frequent blackouts, though rarely on such a large scale, which President Nicolas Maduro's government routinely attributes to unproven conspiracies to overthrow him.

Authorities reported the outage across 24 states began shortly before dawn, but by late afternoon AFP correspondents reported power began to return to parts of Caracas, the southwestern state of Tachira and western Merida.

"We are normalising, regularising, step by step," Maduro said on television Friday evening, without specifying the extent of the outages or recovery.

"This is an attack full of vengeance, full of hatred, coming from fascist currents relying on political sectors pretending to be the political opposition," he said, alleging US involvement.

Earlier, Communications Minister Freddy Nanez reported "an electrical sabotage, which has affected almost the entire national territory".

Opposition leaders and experts reject the Maduro government's conspiracy claims, instead blaming corruption and a lack of investment and expertise for the outages. 

The worst countrywide outage to strike Venezuela, in March 2019, lasted several days.

"It's complicated to get around without electricity. We don't know what's going to happen during the day," said Anyismar Aldana, a 27 year old cashier on her way to work in Caracas, in the working-class neighbourhood of Petare.

When the power goes out "we don't work, we don't know what to do for food", she added.

Economic collapse 

Western regions such as Tachira and Zulia, once capitals of the oil industry, experience daily power outages.

"We woke up to the blackout," said Carlos Pena, 39, owner of a small chicken shop in the centre of Caracas who came to work to "see if we can sell everything so that it doesn't go to waste."

Over the past decade, Venezuela has experienced an unprecedented economic collapse that has seen more than 7 million Venezuelans flee the country as GDP plunged 80 per cent.

Nanez said the government had put in place "anti-coup protocols" after the blackout, citing the recent July 28 election, the result of which has been widely disputed. 

Maduro was proclaimed the winner but the government-aligned National Electoral Council (CNE) has refused to release detailed data to verify the result.

The opposition says its candidate, Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia, won the election by a landslide, releasing polling station level data to back up that claim.

Opposition candidate summoned 

Gonzalez Urrutia on Friday ignored a third summons to appear before prosecutors over his claims he was the rightful winner of the vote.

Prosecutors said if he failed to appear an arrest warrant would be issued.

Gonzalez Urrutia is accused of "usurpation of functions" and "forgery" for the opposition's release of electoral results data. 

The opposition candidate has accused Attorney General Tarek William Saab of pursuing politically motivated charges and of not providing "guarantees of independence and due process".

Maduro has previously threatened to jail Gonzalez Urrutia and opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, accusing them of being responsible for post-election protests and violence.

At least 27 people have been killed, including two military personnel, and almost 200 wounded, with 2,400 arrests, in protest related violence since the election. 

The United States, the European Union and several Latin American countries have refused to recognize Maduro as having won without seeing detailed voting results.

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said Friday that he "does not accept Maduro's victory or that of the opposition. The opposition says it won. 

"He [Maduro] says he won but there is no proof. We demand proof," Lula told a local radio station.