This is a first-person account by Maisam Iltaf, an Afghan who lost his cousin in an ISIL attack on a school in Kabul on August 15.

The teenage children at the academy, which was in a Hazara neighbourhood, had been studying for their university entrance exams.

Iltaf told Al Jazeera’s Shereena Qazi his story:

“It started out as a normal day: I woke up at 4am, hit the gym, showered, made myself breakfast and left for the office.

On that hot afternoon, I was at my desk working. My colleague was peacefully reading a report I had given her. Everything was fine.

I had just finished my tea when my phone rang. It was my mum. As usual, I thought she would be calling to ask me to buy some fruit on my way home.

‘Hello, mum, what’s up?’ I asked her.

Things were quiet at first, no one spoke.

‘Hello Maisam, Rahila is missing. There has been a suicide attack at her school,’ that is exactly what I heard, I remember.

‘Everyone is out looking for her,’ she continued with a shaky voice.

My world went dark at once. I quickly cleared my desk, packed and left my office.

I took a taxi home, picked up my other cousin and headed to Estiqlal hospital, where I’d heard that many victims were being taken.

On my way to the hospital, I saw noisy, rushing ambulances. Not one. Not two. Many. The sound of their sirens was clamouring in my head.

The sun was already sinking behind the clouds. The day was getting darker and my feelings more grim.

At the hospital, there were scenes of chaos.

I saw dead bodies and wounded people lying everywhere. Families and friends of those affected were screaming in search of their loved ones.

I skimmed through the casualty list, rushed to the hospital corridor and squeezed into a room full of dead people. A rank smell spread everywhere. I saw people’s wounded limbs, one was halfway burned.

Cries of a woman holding her son’s dead body pierced the hospital walls. There I got the first big hit: my soul scarred, heart smashed and mind lost.

But before I myself cried of despair, a friend grabbed my hand, embraced me, and said: “Everything is going to be OK.”

But, no. We both felt helpless and weak knowing that while we were safe, many others had not been so.

‘Where is Rahila?’

My friends and I re-grouped.

We searched nearly all of Kabul’s hospitals for six hours, but Rahila was nowhere to be found.

Soon, we heard news that she was slightly injured at Ali Abad hospital. It brought us back and restored our hope. 

I was so happy and hoped things would go back to normal. That we would leave fear and despair aside and invoke the forces of good instead.

That hope, however, soon faded and fear and despair grew larger as we found out that the injured victim was not Rahila, but someone who resembled her lying on the hospital bed.

“I found my girl,” a woman shouted. “It is her. It is Najiba. Thank God she is only injured!”

An hour later, we found what we were searching for.

Rahila’s brother and father had made their way through limbs and dead bodies, hoping that perhaps she had survived. Her father, shattered, whispered that he had found her, dead in the government morgue.

‘It was her,’ Hamid told me. ‘Every trace matched: bluish-purple dress, black cowboy jeans, black shoes, and a brown wristwatch with blood spattered all over it.’

When news of her death broke, I panicked.

The funeral

Rahila’s body was kept in a coffin in the mosque’s yard the night we found her. 

The next morning, at 4:30am, as the call to prayer from the mosque rose to a crescendo, everyone woke up for the prayer.

On that balmy morning, I felt faint and struggled to wake up. We prayed and waited for the sunlight to stream so we could go up to the rocky hilltop to bury Rahila.

On Wednesday, August 15, Rahila Monji along with 48 classmates were tragically killed and many more injured when a bomb ripped through their class at Mawoud academy in Kabul.

The youngest in her family, Rahila would brighten the darkest room and cheer up every spirit with her infectious laugh, smart sense of humour and a big beautiful smile.

Her home that was filled with life and light not long ago has turned into a place of mourning.

My heart bleeds every time I see Rahila’s little study area, where she would burn the midnight oil to increase her chances of getting the top score in the Kankor – a university entrance exam – to get into university and study economics, her favourite subject.

At only 17, she taught an English language course to a class of 25 students. She prioritised education over everything else.

I had seen her a few days before.

She was excited that she had gotten admission at Mawoud academy to start her university prep courses.

Rahila used to say she was planning to top the exam and bring change to society.

My mum and I congratulated her, held her in a warm embrace. Back then, I was thinking about her dreams.

But her dreams perished before my very eyes on Thursday, at the edge of the city, as people shovelled and dug up strips of earth.

We buried Rahila with all her dreams for education.

I stared at the sight of her getting buried. Feelings of woe, anger, guilt and heartache were so overwhelming.

As I looked at the grave that embraced Rahila, her last words in her diary kept resonating in my mind:

“I can be the Rahil [Rahila’s nickname] everyone needs – the society needs Rahil.”

“She must help her society in its pursuit of prosperity and progress. Her society can overcome its current crisis with solutions that must be drawn from the knowledge and education of its youth.

“Rahil must be one of them – one of those who will raise the proud flag of this country [Afghanistan] in the world…” 

A day later, when I went to collect her belongings from the school, I found her bag. A black leather bag covered in dirt and blood.

The classroom she once studied in had turned into a complete ruin. Chairs spattered with blood.

A blackboard dotted with holes.

The shrapnel-filled suicide vest had done the worst things possible.

Now, from the quiet of my room, I reflect on Rahila’s life and lofty dreams. I cannot help but to also think about the lives of many of us in Kabul.

A city, I wonder, when was it at peace?”

Lots of weird things wash up on beaches. Sea potatoes. A very old message in a bottle. Unidentifiable sea creatures.

But by golly, this is one huge squid.

The 4.5 metre (14 foot, 9 inch) long cephalopod washed up on the south coast of Wellington, New Zealand on Sunday morning, its size easily eclipsing the mere mortals that dare to lie beside it.

Brothers Daniel, Jack, and Matthew Aplin told Newstalk ZB that they were looking for a place to dive when they spotted the creature.

“My brother said ‘what’s that over there?’ and pointed it out,” Daniel told the radio station. “It was right next to the track so we pulled over and we were like: ‘It’s a big squid’.”

A Department of Conservation spokesperson said while appearances are not common, they do appear from time to time. Just delightful.

 

WASHINGTON – NASA Administrator James Bridenstine is all but guaranteeing his agency will soon be back in the business of carrying humans into low-Earth orbit in 2019.

“Without question, by the middle of next year, we’ll be flying American astronauts on American rockets from American soil,” he told USA TODAY in an exclusive interview at NASA headquarters. “We’re so close.”

The pronouncement indicates the confidence the agency has in the two aerospace companies – SpaceX and Boeing – contracted under its Commercial Crew program to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station.

The last space shuttle – Atlantis – carried a crew to the orbiting lab in 2011. Since then, NASA has been hitching rides on Russia’s Soyuz rockets. The cost to U.S. taxpayers is $82 million a seat. 

Washington’s reliance on Moscow for rides to the space station the past several years has been a source of frustration among lawmakers and many of those involved in the U.S. space program.

Though the shuttle replacement program began under  President Barack Obama, the resumption of crewed missions from U.S. launch pads would present a symbolic victory to President Donald Trump, who has touted a renewed space program as part of his Make America Great Again agenda.

Earlier this month, NASA named the astronaut test pilots who will be the first to fly SpaceX and Boeing capsules launched from Florida’s Space Coast to the International Space Station within a year, according to updated schedules.

The latest schedules show SpaceX appearing slightly ahead in the competition to reach the space station, with plans to fly two astronauts – NASA’s Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley – in a Crew Dragon atop a Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy Space Center in April 2019.

More: These are the updated timelines for Boeing and SpaceX flights to the ISS

More: Pence promises moon in Johnson Space Center speech

More: Delays keep pushing back NASA shuttle replacement program

Boeing aims to launch a CST-100 Starliner capsule on an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in mid-2019, carrying a three-person crew: NASA’s Eric Boe and Nicole Mann, and Boeing’s Chris Ferguson.

That flight test would go to the station and could last two weeks to six months, depending on NASA’s needs, said  Boeing spokeswoman Rebecca Regan.

The tests flights would be preceded by unmanned orbital shakedown cruises.

On a visit last week to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Vice President Mike Pence, who chairs the National Space Council, praised the “remarkable progress” NASA has made to replace the space shuttle program.

But even if all goes smoothly next year, the arrival at the space station would be four years behind schedule.

When Commercial Crew was unveiled in 2010 under the Obama administration, the target date was 2015. But a lack of full funding from the Republican-controlled Congress led to delays. By the time Boeing and SpaceX won contracts in 2014, the date was pushed back to 2017. Further delays have slid schedules to next year.

NASA’s contract with Russia’s space agency Roscosmos goes through 2020, which gives the agency extra time in case Boeing and SpaceX run into problems. But Bridenstine said he envisions U.S. astronauts would keep riding Soyuz rockets for years to come.

“Even when commercial crew is fully ready, we want to maintain this partnership with Russia,” he said. “We would launch American astronauts on Soyuz and we would launch Russian cosmonauts on Commercial Crew (rockets).”

 

 

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Listen to live Somerset v Nottinghamshire Outlaws commentary in the T20 Blast quarter-final – Live – BBC Sport

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For eight years, since 2010, the electric car maker Tesla has enjoyed robust growth, even though it has never turned an annual profit. Today, the company is valued at between $60bn and $70bn. 

For the company’s investors, Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk is a visionary whose electric car is giving us a glimpse into the future that successfully integrates clean energy with transport and home power. But the company produces only a fraction of the cars that close competitors Ford, General Motors and others produce.

In recent months, it has been beset by recalls, a Security and Exchange Commision investigation and, most recently, a pair of tweets by Musk that have left shareholders and critics wondering if Tesla is on the verge of profitability or if the car maker meets technology innovator is in a bubble. 

In early August, the Financial Times reported that Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund had quietly been building a 4.5-4.6 percent stake in Tesla. Within half an hour, Musk took to Twitter, saying he was considering a leveraged buyout that would take Tesla private. Days later, her reassured shareholders that the company would remain public, for the time being.

In this week’s Counting the Cost, Al Jazeera asks Arash Massoudi, the Financial Times editor who broke the story of Saudi Arabia’s stake in Tesla, what may have been behind Musk’s tweets and earlier hints that his company was poised to organise one of the biggest leveraged buy-outs in history.

Editor’s note: the following interview has been edited for brevity. 

Al Jazeera: What is the latest that you’re hearing on the company possibly going private? Obviously, Mr Musk has been tweeting about this and it’s caused quite a ripple in the financial community – but what exactly is going on?

Arash Massoudi: As far as I can tell, it was unprecedented in terms of corporate finance battles and take-overs in history where a CEO takes to social media and amplifies basically another organisation’s story and uses it to really change the narrative around his company.

Musk may have taken some actions which violated Securities and Exchange Commission policies which have sparked a series of investigations into his actions, and as a result, also, left him scrambling to put together this plan and make it look like there was more meat than there was actually on the bone. And so, at the moment, banks are all running around and trying to figure out whether they even want to work with him on this, because it’s such a wild proposal and seemingly unrealistic and at the same time not wanting to miss out on potentially the largest leverage buyout in history.”

Al Jazeera: And on the all important question of profitability, when do you think it might turn a profit?

Arash Massoudi: There’s no indication that Tesla will turn a profit anytime soon. It’s burning cash at a phenomenal rate. It can barely produce a couple thousand cars a year, it can’t keep up with demand from consumers, and so there’s no sign of profitability in the foreseeable future. And then you hear constant stories about problems with the cars, problems with deliveries and it’s a sort of endless stream of negative news – but what keeps this company going and what keeps investors there is this sort of cult-like icon of Elon Musk where he can captivate the market into seeing the vision. He just dreams big.

We’re in a world where, as one person wrote, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are creating these real micro start-ups that have no real direction but that will create profitable companies for their enterprise. But Elon Musk doesn’t do that. Elon Musk sets visionary ideas out and says I’m going to change the way transport works, I’m going to change the way energy works … and then he lays out these really attractive narratives which, obviously in a world where there’s small ideas, we all want big ideas – so that can captivate the market and investors who are willing to back an entrepreneur.

But the facts and the details, when you dig into them, present a much murkier picture, and that’s why so many people have bet against Tesla’s stock. It’s one of the most bet against stocks in the US market and there are a lot of people who expect this company to come crashing down and who have bet a lot of money against it.

Al Jazeera: Is this really sustainable? If you talk there about the negative side of this, problems supply lines and all … is this a bubble that’s going to burst?

Arash Massoudi: The Tesla story is part of the story of where we are in the world right now. There are so many bubbles in the world right now. We’re in a real-estate bubble, we’re in a technology bubble and Tesla sort of encapsulates one of these bubbles. The way they can get through this is if they actually just focus on building cars and delivering their demand. That is clearly the best way to run this company. If he can meet the thousands of supply orders he’s already registered and deliver those cars to consumers, then you could see a foreseeable run rate for Tesla to survive.

But this is a company that produces a fraction of what Ford, GM, etc, produce on an annual basis and yet it has a higher market value. At some point, reality will catch up if Musk can’t deliver.

Al Jazeera: Why would Elon Musk want to bring the market into private hands?

Arash Massoudi: That feeds into one of themes of our time which is that the markets are extremely short-term oriented and that investors want profits and returns on their profits. If you think about all the activist investors that are squeezing pennies out of companies and torturing CEO’s for more capital return, who are more aggressive on action. We’re sort of in this rampant environment where hedge funds and portfolio managers are demanding a maximum amount of stuff from big companies and it’s oftentimes very hard to deliver. And, you couple that with the ego of someone like Elon Musk … You can see through his actions that it’s almost like a personal vendetta, that he wants to burn through the short-sellers and prove them wrong.

This has created an incredible distraction around him, around his company and himself, where he’s not focused on the execution. So, I think part of his thinking is if I can get this company private, then I don’t have to focus on these massive distractions and I can do that. The problem is, it’s really cute to want that, but also you relied on the public markets to get to where you are. You didn’t magically become a $60bn company without having sold things to investors or having sold things to the public.

One other major topic here is the corporate governance around Tesla. The board includes his brother. It’s “lead independent director” is someone who’s been named in court filings as his ‘close friend,’ so it’s basically a mockery to corporate governance, the tesla board. And that’s another big issue that’s under examination now is how can a US company have such a captured board that is close to the CEO. 

Al Jazeera: What would the implications be for Tesla shareholders if there’s a private buyout, both for institutional and individual shareholders?

Arash Massoudi: In a traditional sense, if you want to take a public company private, the easiest way to do that is through a “leveraged buyout” where you take a slice of equity and a bunch of borrowing and you saddle the company up. You offer a premium to the share price and everyone gets a premium and sells their shares and then you take the company private with your new ownership team.

Unfortunately, that only works when you have a cash-flow positive company, because creditors don’t want to lend you money if you’re burning through money and have no capacity to pay back the money, so to basically launch the world’s biggest leveraged buyout in history is impossible here and therefore none of the world’s major banks will participate in such a plan – because Tesla doesn’t have the capacity to repay its debts.

So, then you have to find another way and the idea that they’re discussing is this “going dark” philosophy where a small group of shareholders will buy out other shareholders and take the company private with minimal equity checks, which is why everyone got excited about the way Musk spun the Saudi line that we [Financial Times] broke. Unfortunately, my reporting suggests that the Saudis have no intention of spending an extra $5bn, $10bn or $15bn to take the company private and if they had discussions, it was very, very informal and not of the nature and development that Musk may have suggested through his tweets and his subsequent communications to the market.

Al Jazeera: What’s in it for the Saudis?

Arash Massoudi: No discussion of Saudi Arabia can take place these days without discussion of the prince, Mohammed bin Salman, the gregarious 32-year-old who is leading the country, trying to transform its economy … and the vehicle through which he’s doing that and to take the country’s reliance off of oil is the country’s sovereign wealth fund, which is called the Public Investment Fund. It has about $250bn in assets and he wants to grow it to $400bn by 2020, he wants 25 percent of those assets to be in overseas holdings and he’s clearly a guy who is attracted by people who have big ideas, who are trying to change industries.

That’s why they went and invested $3.5bn in Uber, that’s why they gave $45bn to Japan’s soft bank in Masayoshi Son, this incredibly large tech investment fund which everyone has been talking about for the last two years, it’s why he’s put a $1bn in Virgin Galactic with Richard Branson. It’s why he’s put up to $20bn with Steve Schwarzman in Blackstone … and this is very much in line with those bets, a big entrepreneur trying to change an industry, potentially even a hedge to Saudi Arabia’s oil based economy by investing in electric cars, and with Elon Musk. 

And the way that I reported the story was to say that when Mohammed bin Salman went to the US in March and April of this year, he and the Saudi sovereign wealth fund soon after approached Tesla and said, “We’d be interested in buying newly issued shares to both help support your company, but also we’d like to be an investor.” And Musk, for whatever reason, did not accept that offer and the Saudis with the help of JPMorgan Chase built the stake in the Tesla stock in the subsequent weeks and months and it was private until I broke the story. 

Source: Al Jazeera

President Donald Trump reportedly rejected sending out a statement praising Sen. John McCain, opting instead to write a short tweet.

According to the Washington Post, Trump nixed the statement, despite calls from his senior aides, including press secretary Sarah Sanders and Chief of Staff John Kelly.

The statement, drafted before the senator’s death Saturday, would have commended the Arizona Republican for his military service and his decades in the Senate. It also would have called him a “hero.” A final draft of the statement was ready for the president’s approval, per the Post.

But Trump reportedly told his aides that he’d prefer to send out a tweet. In that missive, he was brief – and his words focused on the McCain family and didn’t offer praise for the senator’s legacy.

“My deepest sympathies and respect go out to the family of Senator John McCain. Our hearts and prayers are with you!” the president wrote late Saturday.

White House aides went on to post official statements from others in the administration, including Vice President Mike Pence and others in the Cabinet.

The tweet capped off a strained relationship between the two Republicans. Before his death, McCain decided Trump should not be invited to his funeral – where former Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush are expected to speak.

More: President Donald Trump’s brevity on John McCain speaks volumes about their strained relationship

More: Arizona Senate candidate Kelli Ward suggests John McCain statement on ending treatment timed to hurt her campaign

More: John McCain to lie in state at U.S. Capitol, an honor bestowed on only 30 other people

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