The Taliban Celebrate Victory, With a Crisis Looming


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In a few pockets of Afghanistan, resistance fighters are still opposing the Taliban.


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Historic London Synagogue Fights to Stay Out of the Shadows


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The world is still short of everything. Get used to it.


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A planeload of sorely needed medical supplies lands in Mazar-i-Sharif.


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Biden receives the bodies of soldiers killed in the Kabul bombing.


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The E.U. is set to reimpose travel restrictions on U.S. visitors.


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Saturday, 28 August 2021

Florida has a worse surge than states with similar vaccination rates. What went wrong?


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Reprisal strike killed two ISIS militants and wounded another.


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The U.K. is ending its civilian evacuations from Kabul today.


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New top story on Hacker News: Launch HN: Kalam Labs (YC S21) – Science Games and live game streaming for kids

Launch HN: Kalam Labs (YC S21) – Science Games and live game streaming for kids
3 by KLFaraaz | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Hi HN, we're Ahmad, Sashakt, and Harshit of Kalam Labs ( https://ift.tt/3j5hXgm ). Kalam Labs lets 6 to 14 year old kids learn their favourite science topics by watching live game streams and playing science games. It's like Twitch for science, except you also get to play :) Here's a sample video of our live stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGMmUg0N0HE High curiosity in kids is directly linked to better academic performance and better outcomes when they grow up. However, school leads to a drop in curiosity as they discourage asking questions and encourage “focussing on the blackboard.” Parents don’t have a solution, as internet resources are unstructured and unreliable and encyclopedias are static and boring for the kids. We were batchmates at our undergraduate degrees and worked together at India's largest educational body, NCERT. There we interacted with hundreds of kids, and they were really curious about science. Their heads were filled with questions like: Why is the sky blue? What is inside a black hole? etc. But the conventional teaching mediums were just too boring for them. So we started searching what do they want? Turns out almost every kid was on Roblox and Minecraft. There were entire communities there hanging out, hosting live streams chatting with each other. Digging deeper, we saw that Roblox and Minecraft are being extensively used as educational media. Microsoft has launched Minecraft for Education and Roblox has launched Roblox Education, and this was prompting teachers to migrate from Zoom to these multiplayer games. So we got it: we will use live game streaming to help kids learn science. We launched our MVP and saw phenomenal results. Generating $1k USD revenue in just a couple of days, we saw a market potential of scaling it and hence decided to start a startup around it. At Kalam Labs we host daily live game streams on kids' favourite science topics like space, black holes, and dinosaurs. During the live stream, an instructor takes the kids around a virtual world where they learn new topics by playing game-based exercises. The cool parts are: unlike a typical live game-stream on Twitch/YT where only the video of instructor playing a game is shared, at Kalam Labs kids can play the game with the instructor. This helps the instructor to give short fun activities for kids to solve for explaining any topic. In addition, our Live Chat has a tag-feature, which is really loved by kids. Instead of typing the entire chat, kids can just tap on the different recommendations and convey their thoughts. This leads to very high-engagement with sometimes kids liking the tapping feature more than the game itself. We are seeing cool metrics pop out due to this: Our average watch time of a live stream is 40 minutes - 5x higher than Youtube. Further, just launched in Mid-June our product has amassed thousands of paying customers growing 50% week-over-week. Please share your thoughts and feedback!

Canada authorizes Moderna vaccine for those 12 and older.


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After Airport Bombing, an Afghan Family Buries a Father, and Hope


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Afghans wounded in the attack recover at nearby hospitals.


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Italian Official Resigns After Uproar Over His Plans to Name Park After Fascist


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Thursday, 26 August 2021

Dozens Dead After Explosions at Kabul Airport


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Guam tries (and mostly fails) to lure tourists back with vaccines.


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Bottlenecks at an adult tricycle company illustrate continuing economic challenges.


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Scenes of chaos after blasts rock area around Kabul airport.


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New top story on Hacker News: Ask HN: Where can I live off 1k USD per month?

Ask HN: Where can I live off 1k USD per month?
18 by 41209 | 30 comments on Hacker News.
I'm planing on taking some serious time off to work on my side projects. I'm open to any country in the world, I want to just work on my games. So with that in mind I'll need good internet access. From what I can see, this is very doable in Eastern Europe. Eventually, I do plan on returning to the US, but I want to spend at least 6 months overseas.

U.N. has failed its Afghan employees, staff unions say.


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Five women on a famed Afghan robotics team arrive in Mexico.


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Uganda takes in evacuees from Afghanistan, honoring a U.S. request.


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Some 1,500 Americans still in Afghanistan in last days of U.S. evacuation.


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New Israeli Leader Backs Hard Line on Iran but Softer Tone With U.S.


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