UNITED NATIONS — Warning that Afghanistan is facing “a make-or-break moment,” the United Nations chief on Monday urged the world to prevent the country’s economy from collapsing.
Secretary-General Antonio Guterres also appealed to the Taliban to stop breaking its promises to allow women to work and girls to have access to all levels of education.
Eighty percent of Afghanistan’s economy is informal, with women playing an overwhelming role, and “without them there is no way the Afghan economy and society will recover,” he said.
He said the U.N. is urgently appealing to countries to inject cash into the Afghan economy, which before the Taliban takeover in August was dependent on international aid that accounted for 75% of state spending. The country is grappling with a liquidity crisis as assets remain frozen in the U.S. and other countries, and disbursements from international organizations have been put on hold.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]
“Right now, with assets frozen and development aid paused, the economy is breaking down,” Guterres told reporters at U.N. headquarters in New York. “Banks are closing and essential services, such as health care, have been suspended in many places.”
The U.N. chief said that injecting liquidity to prevent Afghanistan’s economic collapse is a separate issue from recognition of the Taliban, lifting sanctions, unfreezing frozen assets or restoring international aid.
Guterres said cash can be injected into the Afghan economy “without violating international laws or compromising principles.” He said this can be done through U.N. agencies and a trust fund operated by the U.N. Development Program as well as non-governmental organizations operating in the country. He added that the World Bank can also create a trust fund.
Leaders of the world’s 20 largest economies — the G-20 — are holding an extraordinary meeting to discuss the complex issues related to Afghanistan on Tuesday. On the issue of “the injection of liquidity in the Afghan economy,” Guterres said, “I think the international community is moving too slow.”
The Taliban overran most of Afghanistan as U.S. and NATO forces were in the final stages of their chaotic withdrawal from the country after 20 years. They entered the capital, Kabul, on Aug. 15 without any resistance from the Afghan army or the country’s president, Ashraf Ghani, who fled.
Guterres pointed to promises by the Taliban since the takeover to protect the rights of women, children, minority communities and former government employees — especially the possibility of women working and girls being able to get the same education as boys.
“I am particularly alarmed to see promises made to Afghan women and girls by the Taliban being broken,” he said, stressing that “their ability to learn, work, own assets, and to live with rights and dignity will define progress.”
However, Guterres said “the Afghan people cannot suffer a collective punishment because the Taliban misbehave.”
He said the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan is growing, affecting at least 18 million people, or half the country’s population.
Guterres said the U.N. has been engaging the Taliban every day on the safety and security of its staff, unhindered humanitarian access to all Afghans in need, and human rights — especially for women and girls. “Gender equality has always been an absolute priority for me,” he said.
As an example, the secretary-general said, the U.N. has been engaging the Taliban province by province, to ensure that the U.N.’s female humanitarian staff have unimpeded access, and “we will not give up.”
In September, Guterres said, the U.N. reached agreement with the Taliban on freedom of access for women staffers in six provinces, up from three at the beginning of the month. It reached “partial agreement” in 20 provinces, up from 16 on Sept. 1, and no agreement in four, down from six at the beginning of the month, he said. It hasn’t been able to engage in four provinces.
While humanitarian assistance saves lives, it won’t solve the country’s crisis unless an economic collapse is avoided, Guterres said.
“Clearly, the main responsibility for finding a way back from the abyss lies with those that are now in charge in Afghanistan,” he said.
Nonetheless, he warned, “If we do not act to help Afghans weather this storm, and do it soon, not only they but all the world will pay a heavy price.”
Austria’s new Chancellor Alexander Schallenberg vowed to work closely with his predecessor and future party whip, Sebastian Kurz, who was reduced to a parliamentary role by a corruption scandal.
The new premier, almost two decades older than Kurz, said he’ll continue to work along the lines of a coalition program signed with the Green Party in 2020. That includes a wide-ranging tax overhaul that puts a price on carbon-dioxide pollution, he said after his inauguration on Monday.
Schallenberg, who has been serving as foreign minister, will need to pick up the pieces from the Kurz era and answer questions over whether it is really over. In his first comments after his appointment, the chancellor didn’t totally dispel the notion that the wily 35-year-old political survivor will be allowed to keep pulling the strings from the sidelines.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]
“I will of course work work very closely with Sebastian Kurz” as head of the People’s Party parliamentary group, Schallenberg said after his appointment. “Anything else in a democracy would be absurd.”
Kurz pledged an orderly handover of power before his swearing in as lawmaker, scheduled for Thursday.
“One thing is clear: I am not a shadow chancellor,” Kurz said in a statement Monday.
Events had caught up with Kurz by the weekend. On Friday he was resisting pressure from his junior partner, the Greens, to quit after prosecutors raided offices in the Chancellery as part of a bribery investigation. But the chorus of critics kept growing, and he was facing a vote of non-confidence Tuesday.
By Saturday evening, Kurz hastily summoned the media to announce he would step aside in favor of the man he hand-picked to represent Austria’s foreign policy in his second government.
By departing largely on his own terms, Kurz is trying to stay a step ahead. Most of the key allies who helped his rise to the top will remain in government as he tries to clear himself of potential criminal charges in at least two separate investigations.
“On the surface, this is one step back,” said Thomas Hofer, a political analyst and consultant in Vienna. “But Schallenberg is a very close ally and would step down the very minute Kurz tells him.”
It was 48 hours of political turmoil in central Europe, often caught in the middle of geopolitical tensions between east and west, and complicated ties to Russia and China. In the neighboring Czech Republic, scandal-ridden Prime Minister Andrej Babis unexpectedly lost by a razor-thin margin and his protector, the president, was rushed to hospital.
Kurz has shown resilience, and a deft touch, when faced with previous corruption allegations. In 2019, two years into his first government, he called snap elections after the leader of his far-right coalition partner, the Freedom Party, was caught on a leaked video tape offering favors to a woman posing as a Russian oligarch’s niece.
Kurz bounced back stronger than before with a carefully-choreographed campaign, and swam the ideological divide to form a coalition with the Greens. It was an early sign that the poster child of the anti-immigration populist movement in Europe was comfortable with compromise and could follow the zeitgeist.
The problem this time around, is that Kurz is directly implicated. He and nine others are suspected of funneling federal funds to a newspaper publisher in return for favorable coverage that helped fuel his meteoric political rise.
Kurz has denied the allegations.
The legal proceedings may drag on for years, weighing on his reputation. Any public backlash may soon be visible: a slump in opinion polls for his party in left-leaning Vienna could be an early signal.
In a televised speech late Sunday, President Alexander Van der Bellen said he wouldn’t sweep the scandal under the carpet and called on politicians to regain people’s trust.
The parliamentary math, though, is in Kurz’s favor. Without his People’s Party the Greens would have to form a messy and awkward coalition with different opposition parties including the far-right. The resignation offers Kurz a potential path back to power and to the Greens a chance to gain the upper hand and impose more ambitious climate policies such as a tax on carbon emissions and cheap train tickets.
“I think the chances are now good that the government will hold on until September 2024 when the next general election is scheduled,” Werner Kogler, vice chancellor and leader of the Greens said Monday.
The opposition Socialists blasted the Greens for squandering an opportunity to end the “Kurz System.”
This new chapter in Austrian politics, at least for the foreseeable future, won’t feature Kurz front and center. Green parliamentary whip, Sigrid Maurer, ruled out his return to power during the current legislative period ending 2024.
There is also the matter of winning back the trust of influential state leaders of his party. One has projected an expulsion for Kurz if courts found him guilty.
For the People’s Party, one of two groupings that have exerted the most influence since 1945, Schallenberg’s appointment is a return to more traditional style of governing which had been lacking under Kurz’s polarizing leadership. The millennial chancellor often aligned himself with Europe’s fiscal hawks, including the Netherlands, while giving space to the likes of President Viktor Orban in neighboring Hungary to test the limits of the EU’s rulebook.
Kurz dropped out of college to pursue politics as a career. By contrast, Schallenberg is a chain-smoking foreign-policy expert with a background in law and a descendant of one of Austria’s oldest families.
Three U.S.-based academics won the 2021 Nobel Prize for economics for work using experiments that draw on real-life situations to revolutionize empirical research.
David Card at the University of California Berkeley, Joshua D. Angrist of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Guido W. Imbens at Stanford University will share the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, officials of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced in Stockholm on Monday.
“This year’s economic sciences laureates have demonstrated that many of society’s big questions can be answered,” the academy said on Twitter. “Their solution is to use natural experiments—situations arising in real life that resemble randomized experiments.”
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]
BREAKING NEWS:
The 2021 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel has been awarded with one half to David Card and the other half jointly to Joshua D. Angrist and Guido W. Imbens.#NobelPrizepic.twitter.com/nkMjWai4Gn
The winners have specialized in such analysis and methodology, and Card used this approach to address key questions in labor economics such as the effects of minimum-wage policies and immigration.
The award chimes with a focus of the academy on real-world applications of the economics discipline in recent years. The 2020 laureates, Paul Milgrom and Robert B. Wilson of Stanford University, invented new auction formats used in mobile-phone frequencies, while researchers whose work ranged from inequality to climate change have been among other prior recipients this century.
“I’m just thrilled to share the prize,” Imbens, who hails originally from the Netherlands, told reporters by phone. “I’m just very fortunate in having had lots of great colleagues doing very interesting work.”
The winners of the economics prize will share prize money of 10 million kronor ($1.1 million), with Card getting half of it and the other two sharing the rest.
Male Winners
The announcement on Monday means 89 men have now won in this category. The economics prize has a particularly poor record of honoring women compared to the other more longstanding Nobel awards, and had never done so until Elinor Ostrom won in 2009. In 2019, Esther Duflo became the second female recipient.
The peace prize given on Friday to journalists Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov is the only one this year to have featured a female winner.
Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite who died in 1896, left much of his fortune for the creation of the annual prizes in physics, chemistry, medicine, peace and literature.
Sweden’s central bank added the prize for economics in 1968. William Nordhaus, Paul Krugman, Amartya Sen and Milton Friedman are among the most well-known recipients of the award.
Timothée Chalamet and I are on the run, chasing down Sixth Avenue on a bright September day in search of a place to talk. The restaurant in Greenwich Village where we had planned to meet ended up getting swarmed by NYU students while I was waiting for him, chattering excitedly to one another—“Timothée Chalamet is here!” “Shut up!” “Yeah, he’s right outside!”—so, trying to avoid a deluge of selfie seekers, I bolt from the table, tapping Chalamet on the shoulder where he stands under the awning, on the phone, and we make our escape. Face covered with a mask and hoodie pulled up over his curly hair, he’s mostly incognito but still cuts a distinct enough figure that we’d better find a new location fast, and standing at a crosswalk with him, I feel briefly protective, like I should be prepared to body-block an onslaught of fans at any moment.
<strong>“I feel like I’m here to show that to wear your heart on your sleeve is O.K.”</strong>[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]
Luckily, we go undetected as we make our way to another diner a few blocks down—a true New York greasy spoon, less crowded and doggedly uncool—and slide into a back booth. He orders black coffee and matzo-ball soup, which he says he has been craving. It’s not an easy thing to come by in London, where he’s been in rehearsals for Wonka, an original movie musical that will serve as a prequel of sorts to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, following the titular chocolatier as a young man. He just spent a weekend recording music for the film at Abbey Road. “I felt out of my league,” he says of working in that legendary space. “Like I was desecrating history!” But working on this project has been good for him. “It’s not mining the darker emotions in life,” he says. “It’s a celebration of being off-center and of being O.K. with the weirder parts of you that don’t quite fit in.”
Photograph by Ruven Afanador for TIME
If Chalamet—whom most people call, affectionately, Timmy—sees himself as off-center, so far it’s working. He’s back in New York for the Met Gala, which he’s co-chairing alongside Billie Eilish, Naomi Osaka and Amanda Gorman. (He walked the red carpet in a Haider Ackermann satin tuxedo jacket and sweatpants.) On Oct. 22, he’ll appear in two films released on the same day. There’s Wes Anderson’s ensemble The French Dispatch, which earned raves out of Cannes, in which Chalamet appears opposite Frances McDormand as a revolutionary spearheading a student liberation movement. He also stars as royal Paul Atreides in Denis Villeneuve’s towering sci-fi epic Dune, an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s beloved 1965 novel, budgeted at a reported $165 million and slated for a massive worldwide release.
This makes it a big moment for Chalamet, who is not just an actor who works often, although he does, and not just a celebrity, although he is one, but a movie star in the old-fashioned sense of the word. (More on this later.) He’s now the rare performer who, at 25, studios are betting can help launch a blockbuster franchise and a festival hit on the same day, with a pandemic still rumbling out of view. With great power, of course, comes great responsibility—including a spotlight on everything from his personal life (he’s been linked to actor Lily-Rose Depp) to his activism (he’s outspoken on climate change) to what he wears, whether on a red carpet or dashing to the bodega. The latter runs the gamut from embroidered joggers to tie-dye overalls to space-age suiting—or, say, a Louis Vuitton hoodie spangled with 3,000 Swarovski crystals. (All this has led GQ to crown him one of the best-dressed men in the world.)
Chalamet belongs to a generation that’s known for oversharing, particularly on social media, but his Instagram is frequently enigmatic; he holds more back than many of his contemporaries. He cites as role models Michael B. Jordan, Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence—the latter two of whom he’ll appear opposite in Adam McKay’s star-studded Don’t Look Up on Netflix in December—actors who are more likely to talk about craft than to post selfies doing sponsored content. If fame is surreal to him, he also doesn’t make a show of resisting it. “I’m figuring it out,” Chalamet says. “On my worst days, I feel a tension in figuring it out. But on my best days, I feel like I’m growing right on time.”
As we sit and talk, a procession of fans stop by the table to ask for photos—mostly young women, but there’s one sheepish-looking guy, too, who looks to be in his 40s. Chalamet indulges them all gamely, making conversation. “Oh, you go to Columbia?” he says to one girl. “That’s cool! I did too.” He stops himself. “Well, I dropped out.”
If the challenge is staying level amid all this attention, he has a game plan. “One of my heroes—I can’t say who or he’d kick my ass—he put his arm around me the first night we met and gave me some advice,” he says. What was it, I ask?
“No hard drugs,” Chalamet says, “and no superhero movies.”
Chalamet grew up in midtown Manhattan, where his mom was a Broadway performer and his father worked as an editor for UNICEF. He went to the arts high school La Guardia, where he performed onstage. Not long after graduating, he booked a role as Matthew McConaughey’s son in Christopher Nolan’s 2014 space drama Interstellar, which he, along with everyone he knew, expected would catalyze his career. “I remember seeing it and weeping,” he says, “60% because I was so moved by it, and 40% because I’d thought I was in the movie so much more than I am.”
He briefly attended Columbia, then NYU, but didn’t finish college, which he says seems “insane in retrospect.” He remembers the insecurity of those years, which he describes as “the soul-crushing anxiety of feeling like I had a lot to give without any platform.” But he waited for the kinds of jobs he wanted, trying to avoid getting locked into a commitment that might stifle his growth, like a years-long TV contract. “Not that those opportunities were coming at me plenty,” he says, “because they weren’t. But I had a marathon mentality, which is hard when everything is instant gratification.”
That paid off in 2017 with the release of Luca Guadagnino’s gay love story Call Me by Your Name, which earned him an Oscar nomination and catapulted him to fame. (He demurs when asked about co-star Armie Hammer, who has denied a widely publicized accusation of rape. “I totally get why you’re asking that,” he says, “but it’s a question worthy of a larger conversation, and I don’t want to give you a partial response.”) That same year, he featured in Greta Gerwig’s Oscar-nominated Lady Bird. He followed up with the addiction drama Beautiful Boy, then Gerwig’s adaptation of Little Women, both of which earned him still more critical praise.
If his filmography has made him an art-house darling, Dune feels like the perfect big movie for an actor like Chalamet: despite the booming score and dazzling visual effects, there’s a gravity to it—and an unusual prescience. “Dune was written 60 years ago, but its themes hold up today,” Chalamet says. “A warning against the exploitation of the environment, a warning against colonialism, a warning against technology.”
Dune is also the kind of cinematic event that demands to be seen in theaters, which spelled controversy when Warner Bros. announced that, due to the pandemic, all of their 2021 films would premiere on the streaming service HBO Max concurrent with their theatrical release dates. Chalamet shrugs about it. “It’s so above my pay grade,” he says. “Maybe I’m naive, but I trust the powers that be. I’m just grateful it’s coming out at all.”
A day later, we meet at a bar in Tribeca. As he arrives, he’s wrapping up a call. “Love you too, Grandma,” he says gently into the phone as he’s hanging up.
Male movie stars have long been defined by an old model of masculinity. Chalamet, who rose to fame playing a queer character and whose style is frequently described as androgynous, evinces a kind of masculinity that’s a little different: more sensitive, more emotional, in keeping with his generation’s permissive attitudes about self-expression. “Timothée is a thoughtful, poetic spirit,” says Villeneuve. “I am always impressed by his beautiful vulnerability.” Chalamet doesn’t always reveal much, but what he does is intentional. Ask him what he stands for, and he considers it seriously. “I feel like I’m here to show that to wear your heart on your sleeve is O.K.,” he says.
Yet Chalamet knows better than to obsess about how he’s perceived by the public. “To keep the ball rolling creatively takes a certain ignorance to the way you’re consumed,” he says. He calls it a “mirror vacuum”: the black hole you disappear into studying your own reflection. He wants to use his platform thoughtfully, to spread the right kinds of messages through the world—whether that’s about mental-health awareness, a subject which he wants to see become “less of an Instagram slide share and something more intrinsic,” or climate. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the same generation that inherits the overheated planet is the generation saying, ‘Hey, there’s a level of complacency here,’” he says.
All that said, Chalamet doesn’t take himself too seriously. The idea that he’s seen as a movie star—let alone his generation’s most promising—seems to make him squirrelly. “I don’t want to say some vapid, self-effacing thing,” he says. “It’s a combination of luck and getting good advice early in my career not to pigeonhole myself.” The term movie star, to him, is “like death.” All it does is make him think about ’90s-nostalgia Instagram feeds.
“You’re just an actor,” Chalamet says, like a mantra. “You’re just an actor!” Then he looks to me, as if checking to see if he’s convinced me it’s true.
Cover styled by Erin Walsh; grooming by Jamie Taylor
A U.S. delegation met with senior Taliban representatives in Doha, Qatar, over the weekend to discuss issues including security, terrorism and human rights, their first direct talks since the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in late August.
The “candid and professional” discussions covered the need for safe passage of U.S. citizens, other foreign nationals and Afghan partners, State Department spokesman Ned Price said in a statement Sunday. The U.S. also called for “the meaningful participation of women and girls in all aspects of Afghan society.”
“The two sides also discussed the United States’ provision of robust humanitarian assistance, directly to the Afghan people,” Price said, adding that “the Taliban will be judged on its actions, not only its words.”
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]
The meetings were among the first formal engagements between the State Department and the Taliban since the U.S. evacuated its diplomats and troops from Kabul. The Biden administration has wrestled with how to deal with the Taliban, which have taken the mantle of Afghanistan’s government but are still officially labeled a terrorist organization and haven’t been given access to Afghanistan’s central bank reserves.
After sweeping to power in late August, the Taliban have seen their authority challenged by Islamic State fighters, prompting fears that the country could descend into civil war once again. More than 40 people were believed killed on Friday after a suspected Islamic State suicide bomber attacked a mosque in the northern city of Kunduz.
U.S. officials have said they’re still trying to help Afghans who want to flee the country, including vulnerable women and girls and some of the thousands of people who worked with the U.S. government over the course of a 20-year occupation. Several dozen American citizens — mostly of Afghan descent — are also estimated to remain in the country.
BRUSSELS — Thousands of people young and old marched through Brussels on Sunday to push world leaders to take bolder action to fight climate change at the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow starting this month.
Some 80 organizations took part in the protest, aiming for the biggest such event in the European Union’s capital since the start of the coronavirus crisis, which stopped the climate movement’s weekly marches in its tracks.
Cyclists, families with children, and white-haired demonstrators filled city streets, chanting slogans demanding climate justice and waving banners in English, French and Dutch. One carried a stuffed polar bear on her head.
Environmentalists worry that the 26th Climate Change Conference of the Parties, known as the COP26, in Glasgow starting Oct. 31 will produce policies that don’t do enough to slash carbon emissions and slow the warming of the planet.
The crowd included a mix of people with and without masks. With one of the world’s highest vaccination rates, Belgium is starting to ease virus restrictions and allow such gatherings again.
ISLAMABAD — The Taliban on Saturday ruled out cooperation with the U.S. to contain extremist groups in Afghanistan, staking out an uncompromising position on a key issue ahead of the first direct talks between the former foes since America withdrew from the country in August.
Senior Taliban officials and U.S. representatives are to meet Saturday and Sunday in Doha, the capital of the Persian Gulf state of Qatar. Officials from both sides have said issues include reining in extremist groups and the evacuation of foreign citizens and Afghans from the country. The Taliban have signaled flexibility on evacuations.
Taliban political spokesman Suhail Shaheen told The Associated Press there would be no cooperation with Washington on going after the increasingly active Islamic State group affiliate in Afghanistan. IS has taken responsibility for a number of attacks, including a suicide bombing that killed 46 minority Shiite Muslims and wounded dozens as they prayed in a mosque.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]
“We are able to tackle Daesh independently,” Shaheen said, when asked whether the Taliban would work with the U.S. to contain the Islamic State affiliate. He used an Arabic acronym for IS.
IS has carried out relentless assaults on the country’s Shiite Muslims since emerging in eastern Afghanistan in 2014. IS is also seen as the greatest threat to the United States.
The weekend meetings in Doha are the first since U.S. forces withdrew from Afghanistan in late August, ending a 20-year military presence, and the Taliban rose to power in the nation. The U.S. has made it clear the talks are not a preamble to recognition.
The talks also come on the heels of two days of difficult discussions between Pakistani officials and U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman in Islamabad. The focus of those talks was also Afghanistan. Pakistani officials urged the U.S. to engage with Afghanistan’s new rulers and release billions of dollars in international funds to stave off an economic meltdown.
Pakistan also had a message for the Taliban, urging them to become more inclusive and pay attention to human rights and its minority ethnic and religious groups.
Afghanistan’s Shiite clerics assailed the Taliban rulers following Friday’s attack demanding greater protection at their places of worship. The IS affiliate claimed responsibility and identified the bomber as a Uygher Muslim. The claim said the attack targeted both Shiites and the Taliban for their purported willingness to expel Uyghers to meet demands from China. It was the deadliest attack since foreign troops left Afghanistan at the end of August.
Michael Kugelman, deputy director of the Asia Program at the U.S.-based Wilson Center, said Friday’s attack could be a harbinger of more violence. Most of the Uyghur militants belong to the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, which has found a safe haven in the border regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan for decades.
“If the (IS) claim is true, China’s concerns about terrorism in (Afghanistan)—to which the Taliban claims to be receptive—will increase,” he tweeted following the attack
Both Afghanistan and Pakistan want the anticipated economic benefits from China’s multi-billion Belt and Road initiative project linking Beijing to Central and South Asia. They have been willing to ignore China’s persecution of its Muslim Uyghur population. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid last month called the Chinese project the region’s most important economic venture.
During the Doha talks, U.S. officials will also seek to hold Taliban leaders to commitments that they would allow Americans and other foreign nationals to leave Afghanistan, along with Afghans who once worked for the U.S. military or government and other Afghan allies, a U.S. official said.
The official spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record about the meetings.
The Biden administration has fielded questions and complaints about the slow pace of U.S.-facilitated evacuations from Taliban-ruled Afghanistan since the U.S. withdrawal.
___
Associated Press writer Ellen Knickmeyer in Washington contributed to this report.
