Police responding to claims of suspected explosives in a vehicle near US Capitol

WASHINGTON, DC - JULY 26: The U.S. Capitol Building is seen as the sun sets and a heavy thunderstorm blew through the area on Capitol Hill on July 26, 2021 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Samuel Corum/Getty Images)

(CNN)Police are responding to a claim of an explosive device in a truck near the Library of Congress, according to law enforcement sources.

Police are sending negotiators to engage with a man in the truck making the threat, one of the sources said.

US Capitol Police warned on Twitter they are responding to the incident of a "suspicious vehicle" near the Library of Congress.

Congressional staffers have been alerted to shelter in their offices, according to messages seen by CNN.

This story is breaking and will be updated.

CNN's Lauren Fox contributed to this report.

Taliban celebrates Afghan independence and faces new challenges

KABUL (AP) – The Taliban celebrated Afghanistan’s Independence Day on Thursday by declaring that it defeated the United States, as challenges to its power began to emerge, ranging from the management of the paralyzed national government to the possibility of facing a armed opposition.

From cashless ATMs to concerns about food in a country of 38 million people dependent on imports, the Taliban face all the challenges that the civilian government they toppled had without the level of international aid available to it. Meanwhile, opposition figures who fled to the Panjshir Valley are now talking of launching an armed resistance under the banner of the Northern Alliance, which allied with the United States in the 2001 invasion.

At the moment, the group has not disclosed its plans for the government it plans to head beyond saying it will abide by sharia, or Islamic law. But the pressure continues to mount.

“A humanitarian crisis of incredible proportions is unfolding before our eyes,” warned Mary Ellen McGroarty, director of the World Food Program in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan’s Independence Day commemorates the 1919 treaty that ended British rule in the central Asian nation.

“Fortunately, today we celebrate the anniversary of Britain’s independence,” the Taliban said. Afghanistan”.

What the insurgents did not recognize, however, was the violent crackdown on a protest in the eastern city of Jalalabad, in which protesters removed the Taliban flag and replaced it with the Afghan tricolor. At least one person passed away.

In Khost, Taliban authorities instituted a province-wide 24-hour curfew after dispersing a similar protest by force, according to reporters from journalists monitoring the situation from abroad. The insurgents did not immediately acknowledge the incident or the restrictions.

Although they have urged the population to return to work, most government officials are still hiding in their homes or trying to flee from the Taliban. On the other hand, doubts persist about the country’s 9 billion dollars in foreign currency, most of which would be frozen in the United States. The Central Bank warned that the amount of dollars in cash in the country is “close to zero”, which will cause inflation to increase the prices of basic foods while depreciating the local currency, the Afghani.

On the other hand, a drought has spoiled more than 40% of the country’s crops, McGroarty noted. Many escaped the Taliban advance and now live in parks and outdoor spaces in the capital Kabul.

“This is truly Afghanistan’s time of greatest need and we urge the international community to support the Afghan people at this time,” he added.

Mahdi Ali, a grocery store owner in western Kabul, said that although some markets and shops have started to open, challenges remain.

“Today I bought everything I could from local companies that bring food supplies by car,” he said. Meanwhile, he saw Taliban fighters seize government cars and lift controls to search vehicles. Insurgents have also searched his store on several occasions.

Two of the main border crossings with Pakistan, Torkham – near Jalalabad – and Chaman – near Spin Boldak – are now open for trade, Pakistani Interior Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed said. But traders continue to fear insecurity on the roads, confusion over customs duties and pressure to raise prices even higher given economic conditions.

There has been no armed opposition to the Taliban. But videos shot in the Panjshir Valley, a region north of Kabul that is a stronghold for Northern Alliance militias that allied with the United States against the Taliban in 2001, appear to show potential opposition figures gathering there. It is the only province that has not yet fallen to the Taliban.

These personalities include members of the overthrown government – Vice President Amrullah Saleh, who declared on Twitter that he is the legitimate president of the country, and Defense Minister General Bismillah Mohammadi – as well as Ahmad Massoud, son of the murdered head of the Alliance. of the North, Ahmad Shah Massoud.

In an opinion piece published by The Washington Post, Massoud asked for arms and help to fight the Taliban.

“Today I write from the Panjshir Valley, ready to follow in my father’s footsteps, with Mujahideen fighters who are ready to face the Taliban again,” the text reads. “The Taliban is not the exclusive problem of the Afghan people. Under the control of the Taliban, Afghanistan will undoubtedly become ground zero for radical Islamist terrorism: conspiracies against democracies will be hatched here again. “

https://www.zyri.net/2021/08/19/taliban-celebrates-afghan-independence-and-faces-new-challenges/

A Big Tech whistleblower said Google altered its algorithm in order to ensure that negative stories from the establishment media about former Present Donald Trump were what people saw when using the highest-trafficked website on the internet.

Zach Vorhies, who previously worked for Google, said in an interview with The Epoch Times that the tech titan specifically tailored its news algorithm to harm the former president.

Vorhies has written a book about his experience working at Google. He said he wanted to “take conspiracy theory and turn it into conspiracy fact” by sharing the practices he saw as a longtime former employee, working on both Google and YouTube projects.

Google rewrote its algorithms for news searches in order to target #Trump, according to @Perpetualmaniac, #Google whistleblower, and author of the new book, “Google Leaks: An Expose of Big Tech Censorship."

Get 10 videos FREE with your email at #EpochTV👉https://t.co/W5RDCFTTMt pic.twitter.com/OoNcxmYSDB

— EpochTV (@EpochTVus) August 13, 2021

“People kind of suspect this is happening. That certain keywords trigger things within the algorithm … That is actually happening,” he told the Times, noting that newly written stories about Trump were digitally married with older ones to ensure they remained at the top of search results.

“They actually have that. They show like a graph, a tree, and they say actually this forms a super-story that spans eight days,” he said.

“So, with the Trump/[former FBI Director James] Comey thing, they’re able to keep the stories boosted all the way at the top because the algorithm was able to fold a news story into the stories that were preceding it in the last five days,” Vorhies added.

“They allowed the mainstream media to structure their stories so that they could remain at the top of their search index, of their news index,” he continued.

Vorhies’ new book is called “Google Leaks: A Whistleblower’s Exposé of Big Tech Censorship.” The book dropped earlier this month.

“The madness of Big Tech and their attempt to mold our reality into a version compatible with their globalist view of the world has never been portrayed better than in this chilling account by Google whistleblower,” the book’s listing on Amazon states.

“As a senior engineer at Google for many years, Zach was aware of their bias, but watched in horror as the 2016 election of Donald Trump seemed to drive them into dangerous territory. The American ideal of an honest, hard-fought battle of ideas — when the contest is over, shaking hands and working together to solve problems — was replaced by a different, darker ethic alien to this country’s history,” the description adds.

Vorhies said he left Google in 2019 with 950 pages of internal documents and gave them to the Justice Department.

It is unclear what, if anything, the DOJ did with those documents.

Vorhies also made the documents public with the help of Project Veritas in 2019. The former employee previously told Project Veritas and founder James O’Keefe how he was able to get ahold of the documents from his former employer in 2019.

“These documents were available to every single employee within the company that was full time. And so as a full-time employee at the company, I just searched for some keywords, and these documents started to pop up,” he said.

“And so once I started finding one document and started finding keywords for other documents and I would enter that in and continue this cycle until I had a treasure trove and archive of documents that clearly spelled out the system, what they’re attempting to do in very clear language,” he concluded.

Vorhies spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference earlier this year, alongside O’Keefe and Project Veritas.

“Google, Facebook and the Big Tech oligarchs represent the Trojan horse for totalitarianism,” he said.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/top-google-engineer-abandons-company-reveals-big-tech-rewrote-algos-target-trump