Afghan War Trends Signal "mounting Crisis": Senator

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When Kabul fell to the Taliban, returning the country to the fundamentalist group’s control after two transformative decades, scores of Afghan women were compelled to flee. Those who remained faced a reality in which they could no longer be who they are: journalists deleted evidence of their work, artists destroyed their creations, and graduates set fire to their degrees. While the Taliban forced many Afghan women to abandon their workplaces and universities, some chose to fight back.

BEIJING — The death toll from a collapsed highway in southeastern China climbed to 48 on Thursday as searchers dug for a second day through a treacherous and mountainous area. One side of the four-lane highway in the city of Meizhou gave way about 2 a.m. on Wednesday after a month of heavy rains in Guangdong province.

The British royal family is celebrating Princess Charlotte’s 9th birthday with a new portrait taken by her mother, Kate Middleton. The image—shared to the official Instagram and X (formerly Twitter) accounts of the Prince and Princess of Wales on Thursday morning—shows Charlotte in a garden, smiling beside a pink flower bush.

This article is part of The D. C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox. Across nearly every faith and in all but five states, a majority of Americans support at least some access to abortion. That’s a major conclusion of a new massive survey of 22,000 people from the Public Religion Research Institute.