Leaving Kabul: The US is warning Americans  to stay away from the Kabul airport, telling anyone outside the perimeter to “leave immediately.”

  The Biden administration is warning that a terrorist group that’s an enemy of both the Taliban and the US poses a threat in the final days of the American airlift.

  The threatening group is identified as Islamic State Khorasan, or ISIS-K, created six years ago by Pakistani members of the Taliban. ISIS-K is said to have carried out dozens of attacks in Afghanistan this year. The Americans are afraid ISIS-K might drive a bomb truck into the crowds waiting outside the Kabul airport hoping to get out of the country.

  The perceived threat combined with impatience on the part of the Taliban, has probably contributed to the push to finish the refugee operation by the end of the day, August 31^st.  President Biden said, “Every day we’re on the ground is another day we know that ISIS-K is seeking to target the airport and attack both US and allied forces and innocent civilians.”

  As desperate Afghans wait outside the airport, some of them are wading in a sewage-filled trench. The US says it is focusing on getting American citizens out of the country. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said that, as of yesterday, there were still 500 Americans trying to get out of Afghanistan and another 1,000 who may not want to leave. 

  The airlift is taking out about 20,000 people a day, but the US estimates there may be as many as a quarter million more Afghans eligible to be taken out of the country.

Covid Nation: In Florida, where the governor fights vaccine and mask-wearing requirements, more people are getting infected with the coronavirus, being admitted to the hospital, and dying of Covid-19 than at any time previously during the pandemic. 

  This week the state has been averaging 227 deaths a day. Doctors say the people admitted to hospitals are skewing younger than the first wave of the pandemic, and most of them are unvaccinated.

  Dr. Chirag Patel, the assistant chief medical officer of UF Health Jacksonville, told The NY Times, “It’s just such a senseless and preventable way of ultimately dying.”

Political Prisoner: In his first interview from prison, Russian political prisoner Alexsei Navalny said he is forced to watch state television and propaganda films eight hours a day.  Navalny told The NY Times, “Reading, writing or doing anything else” is prohibited. Navalny said, “You have to sit in a chair and watch TV.” And if an inmate nods off, he said, the guards shout, “Don’t sleep, watch!”

  The Russian opposition leader is being held in Penal Colony No. 2 just east of Moscow.

  Navalny told the Times in a written interview that it’s not like the old days of labor camps in the Soviet Gulag. It’s political re-education and indoctrination.

  He said, “I most clearly understand the essence of the ideology of the Putin regime: The present and the future are being substituted with the past — the truly heroic past, or embellished past, or completely fictional past. All sorts of past must constantly be in the spotlight to displace thoughts about the future and questions about the present.”

Full Frontal:  Only days after announcing that it would no longer allow users to post explicit sexual material, the website OnlyFans has relented and said keep your clothes off.

  The company said it “secured assurances necessary to support our diverse creator community,”  which seems to be a way of saying credit card companies agreed to be the conduits for customers to pay for online porn.

  The website’s announcement only a week ago caused an uproar from its “content” creators, many of whom make their living or tons of extra cash posting sexual material for pay. CNN featured a former ICU nurse and married mother who’s making $200,000 a month as an “online content creator.”

  Founded in 2016, the site claims to have over 2 million “creators”, and more than 130 million registered users. 

The Spin Rack: Former President Donald Trump is threatening to invoke executive privilege to stop the House select committee investigating the January 6th Capitol riot from obtaining documents it’s demanding from several US government agencies, even though Joe Biden has the power to release them. — A federal judge in Michigan ordered sanctions against nine pro-Trump lawyers, including Sidney Powell and L. Lin Wood, because the lawsuit they filed last year to overturn the presidential election was loaded with conspiracy theories amounting to “a historic and profound abuse of the judicial process.” — A woman who produces for ABC’s “Good Morning America” has filed a lawsuit against the show’s former boss, Michael Corn, accusing him of sexually assaulting her while the two were in Los Angeles covering the Oscars. Corn had run the show since 2014 and mysteriously left the company without explanation in April, but this seems to be the reason why. —- The Krispy Kreme donut chain is doubling its vaccine offer to two free donuts to anyone who can show proof of vaccination. Death or donuts? What’ll it be?

The Naked Baby: The now 30-year-old man who was the naked swimming baby on the famous cover of the Nirvana album “Nevermind” is suing, claiming his image was used as “child pornography.”

  The album, one of the best-selling of  all time, features a four-month-old Spencer Elden shot from below in a swimming pool with a dollar bill floating by. Over the years following the record’s release, he recreated the photo moment — not naked — for the album’s 10th, 17th, 20th and 25th anniversaries. 

  But Elden is suing the band’s members as well Courtney Love, widow of the band’s headliner Kurt Cobain, claiming,  “Defendants knowingly produced, possessed, and advertised commercial child pornography depicting Spencer, and they knowingly received value in exchange for doing so.” 

  Sigh. He was such a cute baby.

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