Afghanistan withdrawal full, Hurricane Ida, COVID-19 masks mandates, EU journey, Mollie Tibbetts killer sentenced. It is Monday’s information.

The last plane carrying US forces left Afghanistan, meeting the deadline to withdraw from the Taliban-led country after 20 years of war. States en route from Hurricane Ida are assessing the damage from a storm so strong it will reverse the current of the Mississippi River. And are bans on school mask requirements a violation of civil rights?

? Hello! It’s laura. Monday, Funday, right? To the right. Here is the news.

But first, mom to the rescue! ? A mountain lion attacked a 5-year-old boy who was playing in front of his house. His mother saved him by fighting the cat with her bare hands.

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Last plane carrying US forces leaves Afghanistan

Respecting the August 31 deadline for withdrawal from the Taliban-led nation, the last plane carrying US forces left Afghanistan on Monday, after 20 years of war that killed nearly 2,500 American soldiers and spanned four presidencies. The Biden administration has spent weeks evacuating Americans and Afghan translators who helped the American military after the Taliban quickly took control of Kabul on August 15. The withdrawal also comes after an ISIS-K suicide bombing that killed dozens of people, including 13 U.S. soldiers, on Thursday. The US responded with air strikes on Islamic extremists on Friday and Sunday. The evacuations originally began in July with at least 122,000 people evacuated from Afghanistan as of Monday, including 5,400 Americans.

? Evacuation from Afghanistan: Pentagon vague about final evacuation plans; Marine fired after critical social media post. Find out about the latest updates.

Hurricane Ida leaves a path of destruction

As day dawned on Monday, residents left their homes to see the damage caused by Hurricane Ida, while others, following calls from local officials, stayed inside to make room for rescue operations. More than a million households and businesses in part of Louisiana and Mississippi were without power, and thousands of people were housed in temporary shelters. Hurricane Ida roared ashore in Louisiana on Sunday with a force so strong it temporarily reversed the current of the Mississippi. Ida’s winds knocked down trees and tore roofs off buildings as the floods blocked roads and flooded cars. Ida is the fifth strongest hurricane to ever hit the US mainland and hit New Orleans exactly 16 years to the day after the deadly Hurricane Katrina. The storm was downgraded from a Category 4 hurricane to a tropical storm early Monday.

? Hurricane Ida: Lifeboats swarm across Louisiana amid Ida floods. For some, the power could be out for six weeks. Find out about the latest updates.

What everyone is talking about

EU removes USA from safe travel list

The European Union is no longer recommending its member states to lift restrictions on non-essential travel for Americans as COVID-19 cases increase. The US has been on a safe travel list since June when the EU recommended gradually easing all travel restrictions on US travelers regardless of vaccination status. According to the European Council, however, one of the criteria for the safe travel list in the last two weeks is a “stable or decreasing trend in new COVID cases”. The EU’s updated guidelines come as the US faces its fourth wave of COVID-19 powered by the highly contagious Delta variant. New US cases averaged over 150,000 a day, and for days now, deaths have been seven times higher than in early July. However, this does not mean the end of European travel. The EU recommendation is non-binding and each member state has the power to set its own travel restrictions.

Are bans on school mask requirements a violation of civil rights?

As thousands of schools return to full-time education, President Joe Biden’s administration is investigating five states that districts prohibit the use of masks on the grounds that such policies violate the civil rights of children with disabilities and underlying health conditions. State superintendents in Iowa, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee and Utah received letters Monday setting out how bans on indoor masking in schools are preventing counties from taking health and safety measures necessary to protect students are. The mask ban could prevent schools from “complying with their legal obligations not to discriminate on the basis of disability and providing equal educational opportunities to students with disabilities who are at increased risk of developing serious illness from COVID-19,” it said the letters. The Biden government had previously threatened to enforce its powers to enforce civil rights laws against states banning schools from wearing universal inner masks. According to federal law, public schools cannot discriminate on the basis of a person’s disability and must provide equal education to students with disabilities.

Quite fast

Mollie Tibbetts murderer sentenced to life imprisonment

Cristhian Bahena Rivera will spend the rest of his life in prison for the 2018 murder of Mollie Tibbetts. The man, convicted of the murder of the 20-year-old University of Iowa student, was convicted Monday after being convicted of the murder in May. A week before he was due to be sentenced in July, Bahena Rivera’s attorneys moved for a new trial. A judge denied Bahena’s motion after a long hearing on July 27th. Tibbetts’s body was found in August 2018, about a month after she disappeared while jogging near her hometown of Brooklyn, Iowa. Police eventually tracked a car seen on surveillance video to Bahena Rivera, a local servant. Then he led the police to their remains.

A break from the news

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