World

(LONDON) — The head of London’s Metropolitan Police, Dame Cressida Dick, was asked on Thursday about the new civil lawsuit against Prince Andrew filed Monday in a New York court by Virginia Giuffre, an alleged victim of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Giuffre is accusing Prince Andrew of sexually abusing her at locations including Epstein’s Manhattan mansion before she turned 18.

London’s chief of police said her team was “open to working with authorities from overseas” and are themselves reviewing their position, saying that “no one is above the law.” She also confirmed that there’s currently no investigation open.

Dick was speaking on her monthly radio phone-in program on LBC, a London radio station.

Nick Ferrari, the interviewer, asked her, “What investigation is taking place into the allegations of Virginia Roberts concerning Prince Andrew?”

She replied: “I’m not going to talk about individuals, but what I can say is that I think what you’re referring to is associated with Jeffrey Epstein, who I will talk about since he is deceased.

“The position there is that we have had more than one allegation that is connected with Mr. Epstein, and we have reviewed those, assessed those and we have not opened an investigation.”

Ferrari replied: “If there are reports of underage girls being trafficked to London to have sex with the Duke of York, isn’t that something you’d want to take a look at?”

Dick explained she’d reviewed the evidence twice and concluded that “that there is no investigation to open.”

“What we will look at is, is there evidence of a crime? Is this the right jurisdiction for it to be dealt with? And is the person against whom the crime alleged still alive?” she responded. “Those are the three things that we do look at and have looked at in these cases. And we have concluded that there is no investigation to open, and we haven’t.

“I’m aware that there’s been a lot of commentary in the media and an apparent civil case going on in America and we will again, of course, review our position.”

When asked for further explanation as to what the commissioner meant by “review our position,” the Metropolitan Police said in a following statement to ABC News: “We do not comment on named individuals who are alive unless they have been charged with an offence.”

In her interview with LBC, Dick also refused to comment on whether she’s seen the testimony from Prince Andrew’s police protection officers.

Ferrari quizzed her, “Have you seen the testimony from the Duke of York’s royal protection team pertaining to the night of the allegations which he strenuously denies what took place in a London apartment?”

Dick replied: “I’m not going to comment any further. … It’s been reviewed twice before, we’ve worked closely with the CPS, we are of course open to working with authorities from overseas, we will give them every assistance if they ask us for anything — within the law, obviously — and as a result of what’s going on I’ve asked my team to have another look at the material.”

“No one is above the law,” she added.

The Met police do not comment on security but there has been much speculation that their records could help to establish Prince Andrew’s movements on the night that Virginia Giuffre alleges he sexually assaulted her.

Prince Andrew has consistently denied these allegations. In a 2019 interview with the BBC, he said, “I’ve said consistently and frequently said that we never had any sort of sexual contact whatever.”

He claimed to have no memory of ever meeting her and suggested that a widely circulated photograph of him with his arm around the waist of the then-17-year-old Giuffre, allegedly taken by Epstein in the London home of Ghislaine Maxwell in 2001, might have been doctored.

“I don’t believe that photograph was taken in the way that has been suggested,” he said. “I think it’s, from the investigations that we’ve done, you can’t prove whether or not that photograph is faked or not, because it is a photograph of a photograph of a photograph. So it’s very difficult to be able to prove it, but I don’t remember that photograph ever being taken.”

The prince also contended that he had an alibi for the date of the alleged encounter, claiming he was home with his daughter, Beatrice.

“I was at home,” the prince said. “I was with the children, and I’d taken Beatrice to a Pizza Express in Woking for a party at, I suppose, sort of 4 or 5 in the afternoon. And then, because the duchess was away, we have a simple rule in the family that when one is away the other one is there. I was on terminal leave at the time from the Royal Navy, so therefore I was at home.”

The prince’s interview was harshly criticized in the British press and, within days, he released a new statement conceding that his “former association” with Epstein had become a major distraction for the royal family, and he stepped back from official duties.

He vowed in that statement that he would be willing “to help any appropriate law enforcement agency with their investigations.”

But since then there have been complaints from the Southern District of New York that the prince has not cooperated with their requests to interview him as a witness for the federal investigation into sex trafficking by Jeffrey Epstein and his associates.

Prince Andrew’s lawyers, Blackfords LLP, however denied this, issuing a statement in June 2020 saying the prince had offered “his assistance as a witness to the DOJ” several times.

The beleaguered royal was last seen Tuesday arriving at his mother’s Scottish home, Balmoral Castle, accompanied by ex-wife Sarah Ferguson. Several UK newspapers are reporting that they are holding crisis talks, deliberating the best response to this lawsuit.

“Now that this lawsuit has been filed, unless it is stopped in its tracks, it doesn’t seem that any of the options for Prince Andrew and his legal team will be particularly palatable to him,” said ABC News Royal Contributor Victoria Murphy.

Legal opinions vary as to what the prince might do, but his options appear to be fourfold.

Firstly, he could ignore the entire thing, the case could go ahead without him and a possible default judgment and damages could be entered against him.

Secondly, he could instruct lawyers to argue that the case is spurious and lacking in evidence in the hopes it would be thrown out before trial.

Thirdly, he could agree to answer questions under oath, attend the trial and defend himself.

And lastly, he could agree to settle the claims out-of-court.

Each option has its own pitfall.

“No one could have predicted just how low Prince Andrew’s reputation could have plummeted in the last two to three years,” Murphy added. “The accusations that have been leveled against him, the fact they’ve been so widely reported and his attempts to draw a line under them spectacularly backfiring have all left his reputation in tatters — and has the potential to seriously impact people’s perception of the monarchy.”

No member of the royal family has made a public comment about the latest developments, and Buckingham Palace told ABC News that this was a legal matter and for Andrew’s lawyers to respond. A spokesman for Prince Andrew said there would be no comment on the new lawsuit.

The Times of London, however, quotes a source close to Prince Charles as saying, “This will be unwelcome reputational damage to the institution. [Prince Charles] has long ago concluded that it is probably an unsolvable problem. This will probably further strengthen in the prince’s mind that a way back for the duke is demonstrably not possible, because the spectre of this [accusation] raises its head with hideous regularity.”

The source also said, “The prince loves his brother and has the ability to have sympathy for the slings and arrows that his brother endures, whatever the reasons may be. His ability to support and feel for those having a tough time is well known.”

It is a difficult position for the family to be in, Murphy explains, as they may be tainted by association whatever they do.

“The monarchy has done everything they can to distance itself officially,” she said. “He has stepped down from official duties, Buckingham Palace no longer speaks for him and he’s not being represented by royal lawyers, but the fact is, he is still the queen’s son. He’s at Balmoral now. There’s no avoiding that this will continue to damage the image of the monarchy and could even affect the standing of other royals.”

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(KABUL, Afghanistan) — As Taliban forces advance on more provincial capitals, the U.S. is warning that its fighters are committing atrocities that could amount to war crimes and the State Department will soon announce that it is significantly reducing its staff levels at the U.S. embassy in Kabul, according to a U.S. official.

State Department Spokesman Ned Price said that while the embassy in Kabul will remain open, they will be reducing their civilian footprint due to the “evolving security situation.” He added that they expect to draw down to a core diplomatic presence in Afghanistan.

To facilitate this decision, the Pentagon “will temporarily deploy additional personnel to Hamid Karzai International Airport.”

Price said they will continue to relocate qualified Afghans who assisted the American mission, such as interpreters and others who worked for the U.S. government, and flights will ramp up in the coming days.

The U.S. embassy in Kabul has also urged Americans to evacuate Afghanistan immediately, amid fears that the capital could fall into Taliban hands in a matter of weeks.

A military analysis said the city could be isolated in 30 to 60 days and be captured in 90 days, a U.S. official told ABC News, but that timeline seemed even more accelerated Thursday as the Taliban claimed Herat, Afghanistan’s third-largest city.

While the Taliban have previously denied reports that its fighters have executed Afghan troops, the U.S. embassy said Thursday it was “hearing additional reports of Taliban executions of surrendering Afghan troops” and said they were “deeply disturbing and could constitute war crimes.”

Extrajudicial killings are a war crime according to international law.

In addition, the Taliban have detained “several members of the Afghan government, including both civilian leaders and officers of the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces … in several locations,” the embassy said in a statement Thursday.

Those arrests “contradict the Taliban’s claim to support a negotiated settlement” and “contrast the Taliban’s own rhetoric providing for the safety of Afghan leaders and troops in areas recently seized by the Taliban,” the embassy added.

Critics have condemned the Biden administration for putting any stock in what Taliban leaders say or do in Doha, Qatar, where the militant group’s political leadership is based. Negotiations there with the Afghan government have been all but dead since they launched last September, but U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad is there this week in a last-ditch effort to revitalize them.

Khalilzad was meeting separately with Taliban and Afghan government negotiators Thursday, according to a State Department spokesperson.

But critics said the administration should not put faith in a group that the U.S. says is actively committing atrocities.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken told ABC News those reported atrocities were “deeply, deeply troubling,” but the administration has not taken any action to punish the group for them.

The Taliban have previously denied reports that they have killed Afghan troops — but CNN obtained video last month showing 22 Afghan commandos being executed after they’d surrendered.

State Department spokesperson Ned Price said Tuesday that the administration has “not taken any tool off the table except for this military presence on the ground,” but would use them “if it’s appropriate.”

It’s unlikely that the tools Price referenced — including U.S. sanctions — would have any impact at this point.

In the meantime, the U.S. embassy issued its second alert to urge all American citizens left in Afghanistan to immediately evacuate the country.

“Given the security conditions and reduced staffing, the Embassy’s ability to assist U.S. citizens in Afghanistan is extremely limited even within Kabul,” the embassy said in its alert.

Just like in a similar alert Saturday, the embassy reiterated Thursday that U.S. citizens should enroll in its emergency notification system “in the event of a future official evacuation flight.”

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(YAKUTSK, Russia) — Gigantic wildfires are burning across Siberia on a record scale that is larger than all the fires raging this summer around the world combined.

The massive blazes in Russia are fueled in part by extreme heat waves and record droughts that scientists are blaming on warmer temperatures linked to climate change.

The worst hit region is Yakutia, a vast semi-autonomous republic around 3,000 miles east of Moscow that in winter is one of the coldest inhabited places on Earth. The fires have been burning since late spring in Yakutia and are already among the largest ever recorded.

The region is enduring a historic drought that is feeding the fires. The huge quantities of smoke has drifted as far as Alaska and the North Pole. Local authorities are struggling to contain the infernos, saying they have only a fraction of the manpower and equipment needed.

In the region’s capital Yakutsk last week, in an office cluttered with equipment, Sviatoslav Kolesov looked short of sleep as he showed the latest situation on a map marked with bright orange patches marking the miles of land burning.

A senior pilot-observer with Yakutia’s branch of the federal Aerial Forest Protection Service, Kolesov has been directing his small teams to contain the titanic fires and keep them away from villages outside Yakutsk.

“I’ve been working since 1988 and I have never seen such a summer,” Kolesov said. “Now is crazy. There are too many fires and pretty much all of them are major.”

A state of emergency has been declared in Yakutia over the fires that are estimated by local authorities to cover around 1.5 million hectares. For over a month, thick, acrid smog has hung over hundreds of miles over the region, frequently blanketing the capital and in places blocking out the sun.

Siberia’s warm summers and forest fires are part of life here but not on this magnitude. Since 2017, the region has had unusually dry summers and last year saw record temperatures, including the highest ever recorded in the Arctic.

Until 2017 the republic could expect one or two major fires a year, said Pavel Arzhakov, an instructor from the Aerial Forest Protection Service, who was overseeing efforts at a large fire about 150 miles west of Yakutsk.

But this year, he said, there are 30 to 40 major fires.

Greenpeace Russia estimates the fires have burned around 62,000 square miles across Russia since the start of the year. The current fires are larger than the wildfires in Greece, Turkey, Canada and the United States.

Russia’s emergency services says it is fighting nearly 200 fires across the country. But there are also dozens more that the agency is leaving to burn because they are not deemed a risk to population centers.

This year may pass Russia’s worst fire season in 2012 and Greenpeace has warned the biggest fire in Yakutia alone threatens to become unprecedented in scale.

“It’s possible it will be the biggest fire in the whole history of mankind. For now it’s competing with several famous historic fires in the U.S. in the 19th century,” he told Euronews.

The fire teams in Yakutia are in a vastly unequal fight with the blazes. Teams from the Aerial Forest Protection Service set up camps in the taiga and are trying to contain the fires with trenches and controlled burns. They have little equipment and firefighting planes are used only rarely.

Authorities have sent some reinforcements from other regions. At one camp, a team had flown around 2,000 miles from Khanty-Mansiyisk and have now been in Yakutia’s forest about a month.

“We’re putting the kraken back in the cage,” joked one fire fighter, Yura Revnivik as his team set a controlled burn, trying to direct a fire toward a nearby lake.

But there are nowhere near enough people for the scale of the fires, local firefighters said. Hundreds of local people have volunteered to try to fill the gap. Afanasy Yefremov, a teacher from Yakutsk, said he was spending his weekends trying to help.

“I have lived 40 years and I don’t remember such fires,” he said. “Everywhere is burning and there aren’t enough people.”

Local firefighters in Yakutia in part blamed the scale of the fires on authorities’ failure to extinguish the blazes early on, a consequence they said in part of cuts to the federal forestry fire service.

The fires are worrisome far beyond Russia. They are releasing huge quantities of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Yakutia’s fires have already produced a record amount of carbon emissions, according to the European Union’s Copernicus satellite monitoring unit.

The 505 megatons of emissions released since June would be more than Britain’s entire carbon dioxide emissions for the whole of 2019.

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(NEW YORK) — As the Taliban sweeps across Afghanistan and claims at least nine provincial capitals in just days, a new U.S. military analysis warns that the country’s capital, Kabul, could become isolated in 30 to 60 days and could fall to the militant group in 90 days, a U.S. official confirmed to ABC News.

The warning is even more dire than a previous intelligence assessment — a sign of how quickly the Taliban have gained momentum on the battlefield, surprising the Biden administration, according to two U.S. officials.

President Joe Biden announced in April that he would withdraw all remaining U.S. forces from Afghanistan, saying it was time to end America’s longest war and let the Afghan people, including the Taliban and the U.S.-backed Afghan government, decide the country’s future.

But that future is increasingly grim, with fears of the government’s collapse and all-out civil war. There are growing concerns for the U.S. personnel that will remain at the embassy in Kabul and the 650 U.S. troops who will stay to protect it, with planning underway for some time now about a possible evacuation, according to two other U.S. officials, who spoke to ABC News on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive plans.

“Our posture has not changed. As we do for every diplomatic post in a challenging security environment, we evaluate threats daily and make decisions on how best to keep those serving at our embassy safe,” a State Department spokesperson told ABC News.

The Taliban’s spokesperson in Doha, Qatar, said Wednesday, “Anyone who attacks international embassies and institutions will be punished.” But the group’s fighters have committed atrocities across the country in districts they’ve retaken, according to U.S. and Afghan officials, including extrajudicial killings of police officers, airmen, women’s rights activists, journalists and more.

The U.S. embassy’s Emergency Action Committee is “no doubt … meeting every day to review the current level of threat and whether any additional steps need to be taken to increase security, reduce the number of personnel, or, if deemed necessary, initiate a full evacuation,” said Mick Mulroy, the former top Pentagon official for the Middle East who served in the CIA and U.S. Marines in Afghanistan.

The question is at what point does one become necessary.

“When does the situation make the continuation of the diplomatic mission untenable? When does it not make sense that 99.99% of the personnel in the embassy are for security? When will putting the remaining U.S. personnel at risk for a mission that has essentially ended not be worth it? These are the questions they will be asking, probably every day,” said Mulroy, now an ABC News contributor.

While two U.S. officials said evacuation planning has been reviewed for some time, State Department spokesperson Ned Price declined to comment on any plans. Instead, he told reporters Wednesday, “We have and will continue to make our own decisions based on, first and foremost, the threat assessment, the safety and security of our people.”

In the meantime, the U.S. embassy has continued to quietly draw down some staff since it went on ordered departure on April 27 — leaving only emergency personnel behind and allowing it to shift certain roles out of Afghanistan “whose functions can be performed elsewhere,” according to a State Department spokesperson.

But the Pentagon is pushing back on the “narrative” that the Taliban will seize the capital and other major cities, with its spokesperson John Kirby saying Wednesday, “No potential outcome has to be inevitable, including the fall of Kabul, which everybody seems to be reporting about.”

Kirby declined to comment on the U.S. military analysis, but he told reporters that while the Taliban “keep advancing,” there is still fight left in the Afghan security forces that the U.S. built, trained and equipped.

“The narrative that in every place, in every way, the Afghan forces are simply folding up and walking away is not accurate,” he said.

One U.S. official told ABC News, however, that those Afghan forces have an uphill battle, as momentum swings the Taliban’s way with their capture of nine provincial capitals — winning over heavy weaponry from Afghan troops, freeing their prisoners from government facilities, and building a powerful narrative about the government’s collapse.

The Afghan military strategy to hold onto major population centers meant deploying its best troops — special operations forces — to top cities like Herat, Lashkar Gah and Kandahar, according to this official. But while the Taliban have been held at bay there, the group’s fighters targeted other opportunities, winning critical successes across the country’s northern provinces.

“Right now what we see is an issue of leadership. It’s both political and military leadership. We need to see Afghans’ leaders united,” Price told reporters at the State Department.

Rallying that leadership has been part of U.S. special envoy Zalmay Khalilzad’s job in Doha, where he is trying to pressure both the Taliban and Afghan government delegations to resume peace negotiations — and urge the Taliban to accept a reduction in violence and a ceasefire.

Khalilzad held meetings Tuesday and Wednesday with both delegations and fellow envoys from the United Nations and key countries, including Pakistan, Qatar, China and Russia. On Thursday, he’s expected to meet the Taliban and Afghan government teams “separately to encourage them to engage productively in Afghan peace negotiations and not squander this historic opportunity to end 40 years of conflict,” the State Department spokesperson told ABC News.

Afghan Foreign Minister Mohammad Haneef Atmar said Wednesday that it is the U.S. and other powers that need to do more to “accelerate the negotiation process” and pressure the Taliban to participate in good faith, “backed up by real political, economic, maybe even enforcement measures.”

Critics continue to denounce the Biden administration for pursuing these negotiations — saying the Taliban has demonstrated it has no interest in talks. But Price said the U.S. continues to see diplomacy as the only way forward — calling the week’s meetings a “necessary, but insufficient step” and conceding progress “has been painfully slow.”

In the meantime, the humanitarian crisis for Afghan civilians continues to spiral. Over 18 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance across the country, around 400,000 have fled their homes to seek refuge and the U.N.’s humanitarian response remains vastly underfunded with a shortfall of almost $800 million, its spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said Wednesday.

But Biden himself seems un-phased by the violence, telling ABC News Tuesday, “I do not regret my decision.”

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(NEW YORK) — Eight months after Iran banned imports of any vaccines developed in the United States or the United Kingdom, the country is in the grips of its deadliest coronavirus surge yet, prompting criticism of the government for prioritizing politics over public health.

Over the past week, a daily average of 493 people died from COVID-19, according to official statistics, a deadlier toll than the country experienced even during the first wave of the pandemic in 2020, during which the country was badly hit. To date, the country has recorded over 4.2 million cases of coronavirus, with 95,647 deaths, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

After a surge in April this year, the country experienced a sharp decline in cases, but since July the numbers have been headed in the wrong direction. According to Our World in Data, only 11.2% of Iranians have received at least one dose of COVID vaccine, and only 3.3% have been fully vaccinated, mostly with China’s Sinopharm and AstraZeneca, which have been sent as part of humanitarian aids from Japan and other countries, as well as the domestically developed COVIran Barekat, which has not been recognized by international health bodies.

In January, the Islamic Republic’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei banned the purchase of Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines made in the U.S. and U.K. Khamenei claimed that Americans wanted to “test the vaccines on other nations,” without providing any evidence or reasons to back up his claim.

However, in a televised speech on Wednesday, with the country now experiencing a fifth wave coronavirus infections, Khamenei indicated a potential change in heart with the onset of the more transmissible delta variant.

“Corona vaccines must be accessible for all people from any possible way, be it domestic production or through importing,” he said. “As the disease or the enemy takes on a new form, so should our defense.”

Disappointed by the response of their own officials, many Iranians have criticized the government on social media. Users have posted tweets, photos and videos to document the situation in hospitals across the country, using the hashtag #SOSIran. Users ask the international community to pay attention to the situation in Iran and address the Islamic Republic officials to stop the ban on importing vaccines.

“It was an ideological approach to a health issue from the beginning,” Sarvenaz, an Iranian psychiatrist whose full name cannot be published for security reasons, told ABC News. “It was a gesture to show that the Islamic Republic won’t import medical products from a country it has been calling the Great Satan and its biggest enemy. But it has cost thousands of lives.”

In the past, regime officials have attributed the shortage of medicines and supplies in the country to international sanctions, but now the ire of Iranians has turned to the government, with the ban on importing effective vaccines taking that excuse away.

With the delta variant of the coronavirus ravaging the country, graveyards, as well as hospitals, are struggling to deal with the surge.

In the holy city of Mashhad, the officials at city cemeteries have asked for taxi drivers to allow their cars to be used as hearses as the city has run out of enough hearses to carry dead bodies, the Islamic Republic’s News Agency reported on Wednesday.

On the ground, medical professionals have warned that hospitals are struggling to deal with the surge, even as vaccination rates remain low.

Dr. Morteza Gharibi, head of the emergency unit of Iran’s University of Medical Sciences in Markazi Province, told ABC News that that the hospital is running out of basic medication, and expects the death toll to climb even higher.

“Even if the vaccination gets accelerated — which I do not think [will] happen — it takes at least three weeks for the first shot to produce antibodies. It is already too late for that in this spike,” he explained.

“I foresee an estimation of around 1,200 daily COVID death cases in about three weeks in the country,” he added.

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(JERUSALEM) — Beginning Wednesday, all travelers from the United States arriving in Israel will be required to quarantine for seven days, regardless of their vaccination status.

Israel’s Knesset Labour and Health Committee approved the measure earlier this month. Currently, there are only ten countries from which travelers landing in Israel are exempt from the one-week isolation.

Four countries – Austria, Hungary, Moldova and the Czech Republic – are allowing travelers from Israel to enter their borders. Anyone arriving in Israel from those countries will have to quarantine only until they receive a negative PCR test for COVID-19. That test would be administered at the airport after landing.

Earlier this week, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention moved Israel to its highest level of travel advisory, “level 4: very high level of COVID-19.” That change signals that Americans should avoid traveling to Israel, and anyone who must travel there should be fully vaccinated before their trip.

The Israeli Health Ministry reported more than 5,000 new cases of COVID-19 on Monday.

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(TIJUANA, Mexico) — A California man has been arrested in connection with the deaths of his two young children in Mexico, authorities said.

The man, identified by Mexican authorities as Matthew Taylor, 40, of Santa Barbara, California, checked into a hotel near Tijuana, Mexico with the two children on Saturday, Baja California prosecutor Hiram Sánchez Zamora’s office said in a statement Tuesday.

On Monday at 2:54 a.m. local time, Taylor allegedly left the hotel with his children — a 3-year-old girl and a 1-year-old boy — and returned at 6:33 a.m. that day without them, authorities said. He left the hotel about three hours later, according to Zamora’s office, which shared security footage that allegedly shows Taylor checking into the hotel with the children and then leaving without them.

Mexican authorities responded to a 911 call around 7:30 a.m. Monday reporting the discovery of the children’s bodies near a ranch about 18 miles from the hotel, authorities said. The girl had been found stabbed 12 times in the chest and the boy stabbed 17 times, authorities said. A wooden stake believed to be the alleged murder weapon was found at the site.

U.S. authorities arrested Taylor when he attempted to cross the border via the San Ysidro bridge, according to Zamora.

Taylor, who authorities said owns a surf school in Santa Barbara, is currently in federal custody amid the ongoing investigation, according to the FBI. It is unclear if he has an attorney.

Santa Barbara police had received a missing persons report for a man and his two children who were “believed to have crossed the southern border into Mexico,” the FBI said in a statement to ABC News Tuesday. “A joint investigation is underway among the Santa Barbara Police Department, the FBI in Los Angeles and San Diego, U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Mexican authorities.”

The children’s mother had reported the three missing after approximately 24 hours, according to the Santa Barbara Police Department.

“The mother was concerned for the wellbeing of her husband and their two children,” the department said in a statement Tuesday.

The American consulate is also assisting relatives in identifying and claiming the bodies of the two children, Zamora said.

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(WASHINGTON) — President Joe Biden’s envoy for Afghanistan will meet with the Taliban’s political leadership this week to urge them “to stop their military offensive and to negotiate a political settlement,” the State Department announced.

But as the militant group seized a seventh provincial capital Tuesday, Biden’s administration is making clear that it will not halt the U.S. military withdrawal, even as nearly daily American airstrikes are one of the last things keeping more cities from falling into Taliban hands.

Instead, U.S. officials have been calling on Afghan security forces to step up and “to use those advantages” and “to exert that leadership,” as Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby said, that two decades of American training and investment were supposed to have brought to bear.

“We will certainly support from the air where and when feasible, but that’s no substitute for leadership on the ground. It’s no substitute for political leadership in Kabul. It’s no substitute for using the capabilities and capacity that we know they have,” Kirby told reporters Monday.

Instead, with the U.S. withdrawal scheduled to finish in just three weeks, the administration is putting diplomatic efforts to end the Taliban offensive front and center. U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad is in Doha, Qatar, where the Taliban leadership is based and where peace negotiations between them and the Afghan government of President Ashraf Ghani began last September.

Those negotiations have yielded nothing but an agenda and repeated commitments to keep talking. Khalilzad himself – who negotiated former President Donald Trump’s withdrawal deal with the Taliban and was retained by Biden – conceded last week that the two sides remain “far apart.”

But he hopes to bring the pressure from the international community on the militant’s leadership, meeting counterparts from Pakistan, China, the United Nations, and more on Tuesday. The State Department said the group will work “to help formulate a joint international response to the rapidly deteriorating situation in Afghanistan,” including by reaching an agreement on demanding an urgent reduction in violence and opposing any government “imposed by force.”

It seems clear that the Taliban will care little for another joint declaration by world powers – and despite commitments to talks from its political leadership, its fighters continue to conquer territory and, according to the U.S. embassy in Kabul, commit atrocities that could amount to war crimes.

Khalilzad said last week that the Taliban want to take the “lion’s share of power” for themselves in any future Afghan government, although he and other State Department officials have also argued there is still hope for diplomacy, especially if the international community stands united against the Taliban offensive.

Have negotiations “achieved the results any of us want? Of course not, not yet. But we’re not ready to throw in the towel on diplomacy,” State Department spokesperson Ned Price said last Tuesday.

But critics say the talks are nothing more than political cover for the Taliban, as it consolidates gains on the battlefield with brutal efficiency – intent on taking power by force.

“Supporting negotiations is helpful, but only talking about negotiating while the other side is winning militarily and pushing for surrender is futile,” wrote five retired U.S. ambassadors who served in Afghanistan – James Cunningham, Hugo Llorens, Ronald Neumann, Richard Olson, and Earl Anthony Wayne.

In an op-ed Friday, the group called for sustaining U.S. air support for Afghan forces “to prevent the defeat and collapse of the Afghan state until a stalemate can force serious negotiations and a sustainable settlement.”

The Biden administration, however, is not interested in doing so.

“There are difficult choices every commander-in-chief needs to make on behalf of the American people. President Biden has been clear: After 20 years at war, it’s time for American troops to come home. And as President Biden has said, the status quo was not an option,” a senior administration official told ABC News.

During the last two decades of war, the Taliban made incremental gains on the battlefield, particularly in more rural districts. But before Biden’s withdrawal announcement, fighting was largely stalemated, and the militant group rarely gained control of capital cities in Afghanistan’s 34 provinces or held them for long, according to Michael Kugelman, deputy director of the Wilson Center’s Asia Program.

The group had been preparing for this moment, however, developing footholds outside cities, amassing heavy weaponry and an illicit fortune, and capitalizing on weaknesses in Afghan security forces, Kugelman tweeted: “What’s happening now has been alarmingly speedy, but not sudden.”

That speed may have taken some U.S. officials by surprise, and it’s pushing Ghani and his administration to boosting support for local militias and warlords to help fight back. Some analysts fear that raises the risk of all-out civil war, with competing factions, backed by foreign powers, fighting for control.

In the end, it is Afghan civilians that continue to suffer. In the last 72 hours alone, 27 children were killed, and 136 were injured, according to UNICEF, as fighting displaces tens of thousands of people.

“As a mom, I want this war to end,” tweeted Shaharzad Akbar, head of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission. “I don’t want more children reliving my childhood. War has no winners. It has all been loss.”

ABC News’ Luis Martinez and Molly Nagle contributed to this report.

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(NEW YORK) — Greek residents waited out the wildfires through the night on Sunday, after being evacuated on a ferry off the coast of Pefki, a town in the north of Evia.

In a televised address, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis announced that 586 fires broke out in the last few days after temperatures reached 113 degrees in one of the worst heat waves the country has seen in more than three decades.

Firefighters were still struggling to extinguish the blazes Monday on Evia island, one of the hardest-hit areas. Twenty countries, including the U.S., have been sending in firetrucks, reconnaissance support and manpower to Greece, according to Geoffrey Pyatt, the U.S. ambassador to Greece.

“In response to a request for support from the government of Greece, I am grateful that the U.S. European Command’s Navy component, part of the U.S. Naval Forces Europe, is providing a P-8 aerial reconnaissance aircraft to support firefighting efforts,” Pyatt said in a statement.

Mitsotakis apologized for the “weaknesses” of the fire response, saying the wildfires made “obvious that the climate crisis is knocking on the door of the whole planet.”

“It’s a shame,” one volunteer firefighter told ABC News. “This morning, there was nothing. Now there are two helicopters since 5 p.m.,” the volunteer said, deploring the lack of resources to fight the fires.

On Monday evening, five firefighting trucks and water tankers from Slovakia arrived on the island of Evia to support the local fire brigades.

Hundreds of volunteers are organizing rescue and support for stranded villagers and evacuees.

“If it weren’t for them, the young men … we would have burned,” Gianna Anastasiou, a restaurant owner on Evia island told ABC News. Her village has been cut off for days, without electricity and running water.

A volunteer firefighter and her family saved 12 pets from the fires that tore through Evia, as some were left behind during evacuations.

“This one is a survivor,” 27 year-old Eva Karakassi told ABC News, pointing to one kitten that was rescued from a burning house by a firefighter on Sunday morning.

The pets and their saviors spent the night on the beach, as villages around the island are still in danger from the flames. Over 2,700 residents have been evacuated from the island of Evia, according to the Hellenic coast guard, and the island is under a constant cloud of smoke.

Greek authorities announced that 500 million euros would be spent on these areas.

“It’s not over yet,” Anastasiou said, fighting through tears and thanking the residents from all over Greece for sending supplies to the affected villages.

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(NEW YORK) — An alleged victim of deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein filed a lawsuit against Prince Andrew of Britain on Monday, accusing the embattled 61-year-old royal of sexually abusing her at Epstein’s Manhattan mansion and elsewhere when she was under the age of 18, according to court records.

The lawsuit, filed by Virginia Roberts Giuffre in federal court in New York, comes almost two years to the day that Epstein died in a New York jail while he was awaiting trial on conspiracy and child sex trafficking charges. The legal action also comes just days before the expiration date of a New York state law that permits alleged victims of childhood sexual abuse to file civil claims that might otherwise be barred by statutes of limitations.

“If she doesn’t do it now, she would be allowing him to escape any accountability for his actions,” Giuffre’s attorney, David Boies, chairman of Boies, Schiller Flexner, told ABC News. “And Virginia is committed to trying to avoid situations where rich and powerful people escape any accountability for their actions.”

The lawsuit seeks unspecified compensatory and punitive damages and accuses Andrew of sexual assault and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

“Twenty years ago, Prince Andrew’s wealth, power, position, and connections enabled him to abuse a frightened, vulnerable child with no one there to protect her. It is long past the time for him to be held to account,” the lawsuit states.

Reached late Monday, a U.K.-based spokesperson for Prince Andrew said there would be no comment on the suit.

“I am holding Prince Andrew accountable for what he did to me. The powerful and the rich are not exempt from being held responsible for their actions. I hope that other victims will see that it is possible not to live in silence and fear, but one can reclaim her life by speaking out and demanding justice,” Giuffre said, via her lawyers, in a statement to ABC News.

“I did not come to this decision lightly. As a mother and a wife, my family comes first. I know that this action will subject me to further attacks by Prince Andrew and his surrogates. But I knew that if I did not pursue this action, I would be letting them and victims everywhere down,” the statement said.

Giuffre, now a 38-year-old mother living in Australia, first accused the prince of sexual abuse in public court filings in December of 2014, in a case brought by alleged Epstein victims against the U.S. Department of Justice. That lawsuit challenged Epstein’s lenient deal with federal prosecutors in Florida in 2008.

Giuffre alleged in those court submissions that she was directed by Epstein and his longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell to have sex with Andrew on three occasions in 2001, in London, New York and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Her claims were met then with vehement denials from Maxwell and from Buckingham Palace on behalf of the prince, the second son of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II.

“It is emphatically denied that [Prince Andrew] had any form of sexual contact or relationship with [Giuffre]. The allegations made are false and without any foundation,” the Palace statement said.

Since that time, Giuffre’s lawyers contend they have made multiple attempts to engage with Andrew or his advisers in discussions about her allegations in an effort to avoid litigation. But those efforts, Boies said, have been ignored.

“Since 2015, we’ve been trying to have a dialog with Prince Andrew or his lawyers,” Boies said. “We have given him every opportunity to provide any explanation or context that he might have. We’ve tried to reach a resolution without the necessity of litigation. Prince Andrew and his lawyers have been totally non-responsive.”

The most recent letter to the prince’s presumed legal team was sent last month and warned that a lawsuit would soon be filed unless the prince agreed to enter into discussions for an alternative resolution, according to the court filing Monday.

“If she had simply failed to sue now, it would have validated the stonewalling tactics that Andrew and his advisers have employed,” Boies said.

For nearly a decade, the prince has been under scrutiny for his association with Epstein, a multi-millionaire financier and the subject of state and federal investigations since the mid-2000s for allegedly recruiting underage girls for illicit massages and sex.

Epstein initially avoided federal charges involving allegations of abuse of nearly three dozen girls by agreeing to plead guilty to two comparatively minor charges in Florida state court in 2008. He served just 13 months of an 18-month term in a county jail.

Prince Andrew, who said he’d first met Epstein in 1999, became embroiled in the controversy in late 2010 when he was photographed walking with the convicted sex offender through New York’s Central Park shortly after Epstein’s sentence ended in Florida.

Epstein was charged again, in July 2019, in a two-count federal indictment for child sex trafficking and conspiracy for alleged crimes in New York and Florida between 2002 and 2005. He died in prison on Aug. 10 from an apparent suicide.

Following those new charges against Epstein, the prince again found himself under scrutiny from the press and prosecutors for his association with Epstein both before and after the wealthy financier was designated as a sex offender.

In a rare television interview with the BBC in November 2019, Andrew categorically denied Giuffre’s allegations that he had sexual contact with her. He claimed to have no memory of ever meeting her and suggested that a widely-circulated photograph of him with his arm around the waist of then 17-year-old Giuffre, allegedly taken by Epstein in the London home of Maxwell in 2001, might have been doctored.

“I don’t believe that photograph was taken in the way that has been suggested,” he said. “I think it’s, from the investigations that we’ve done, you can’t prove whether or not that photograph is faked or not, because it is a photograph of a photograph of a photograph. So it’s very difficult to be able to prove it, but I don’t remember that photograph ever being taken.”

The prince also contended that he had an alibi for the date of the alleged encounter, claiming he was home with his daughter, Beatrice.

“I was at home,” the prince said. “I was with the children, and I’d taken Beatrice to a Pizza Express in Woking for a party at, I suppose, sort of 4 or 5 in the afternoon. And then, because the Duchess was away, we have a simple rule in the family that when one is away the other one is there. I was on terminal leave at the time from the Royal Navy, so therefore I was at home.”

The prince’s interview was harshly criticized in the British press and, within days, he released a new statement conceding that his “former association” with Epstein had become a major distraction for the royal family, and he stepped back from official duties.

He vowed in that statement that he would be willing “to help any appropriate law enforcement agency with their investigations.”

But Geoffrey Berman, then the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan, publicly called out the prince a few months later for failing to live up to his stated promise. At a press conference in front of Epstein’s New York mansion early last year, Berman said Prince Andrew has provided “zero cooperation.”

Giuffre’s court filing Monday contains a copy of the photograph of her standing beside Andrew, along with references to flight records from Epstein’s private planes that indicate Giuffre was a frequent passenger to destinations in the United States and abroad while she was under 18.

Giuffre contends in her lawsuit that the prince engaged in the alleged sexual acts with her “knowing that she was a sex-trafficking victim being forced to engage in sexual acts with him” and that he was aware of her age. She contends she did not consent to engaging in sexual acts with the prince.

“[Giuffre] was compelled by express or implied threats by Epstein, Maxwell, and/or Prince Andrew to engage in sexual acts with Prince Andrew, and feared death or physical injury to herself or another and other repercussions for disobeying Epstein, Maxwell, and Prince Andrew due to their powerful connections, wealth, and authority,” the suit alleges.

Giuffre has previously settled two federal lawsuits she filed in connection with her allegations that she was recruited by Maxwell and Epstein into a life of sexual servitude to Epstein and other powerful men. She settled with Epstein in 2009 and reached an out-of-court settlement in her defamation claim against Maxwell in 2017. There were no admissions of wrongdoing in either case, and the financial terms of the settlements were not disclosed.

Maxwell, in deposition testimony in the defamation case, denied Giuffre’s allegations and described her accuser as an “absolute liar.”

“She has lied repeatedly, often, and is just an awful fantasist,” Maxwell said during a 2016 deposition.

Maxwell, who is currently awaiting trial on charges she aided Epstein’s alleged abuse of four underage girls, denied recruiting Giuffre for sexual activities with Epstein and denied instructing Giuffre to have sex with the prince or other men.

“I never saw any inappropriate underage activities with Jeffrey ever,” Maxwell said.

Maxwell has pleaded not guilty to all the charges against her. She has not been charged in connection with Giuffre’s allegations of sexual abuse, though she is facing two perjury charges for alleged false statements in the 2016 depositions.

Boies told ABC News on Monday that it is his hope that the lawsuit finally leads to Prince Andrew agreeing to answer questions under oath.

“It’s one thing to ignore me. It’s another thing to ignore the judicial process of the state of New York and the United States,” Boies said. “If Prince Andrew does not take seriously the rule of law in this country, he is being very ill-advised. This is a serious lawsuit, and the court will take it seriously. We take it seriously. If he doesn’t take it seriously, it is at his peril.”

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