Category: Новини

Members of Afghanistan’s women’s youth development soccer team arrived in Britain early Thursday after being flown from Pakistan with the help of a New York rabbi, a U.K. soccer club and Kim Kardashian West.

A plane chartered by the reality star and carrying more than 30 teenage players and their families, about 130 people in all, landed at Stansted Airport near London. The Afghans will spend 10 days in coronavirus quarantine before starting new lives in Britain.

English Premier League club Leeds United has offered to support the players.

Britain and other countries evacuated thousands of Afghans in a rushed airlift as Kabul fell to Taliban militants in August. Many more people have since left overland for neighboring countries in hopes of traveling on to the West.

Women playing sports was seen as a political act of defiance against the Taliban, and hundreds of female athletes have left Afghanistan since the group returned to power and began curbing women’s education and freedoms.

Khalida Popal, a former captain of Afghanistan’s national women’s team who has spearheaded evacuation efforts for female athletes, said she felt “so happy and so relieved” that the girls and women were out of danger.

“Many of those families left their houses when the Taliban took over. Their houses were burnt down,” Popal told the Associated Press. “Some of their family members were killed or taken by Taliban. So the danger and the stress was very high, and that’s why it was very important to move fast to get them outside Afghanistan.”

Australia evacuated the members of Afghanistan’s national women’s soccer team, and the youth girls’ team was resettled in Portugal.  

Members of the development team, many of whom come from poor families in the country’s provinces, managed to reach Pakistan and eventually to secure U.K. visas. But they were left in limbo for weeks with no flight out of the country as the time limit on their Pakistani visas ticked down.

The team got help from the Tzedek Association, a nonprofit U.S. group that previously helped the last known member of Kabul’s Jewish community leave Afghanistan.

The group’s founder, Rabbi Moshe Margaretten, has worked with reality TV star Kardashian West on criminal justice reform in the U.S. He reached out to her to help pay for a chartered plane to the U.K.

“Maybe an hour later, after the Zoom call, I got a text message that Kim wants to fund the entire flight,” Margaretten said.

Kardashian West’s spokeswoman confirmed that the star and her brand SKIMs had chartered the flight.
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The head of the Women’s Tennis Association on Wednesday voiced concern over an email it received in which Chinese professional tennis player Peng Shuai was said to deny her previous allegations of sexual assault. 

Peng, one of China’s biggest sport stars, said on social media earlier this month that former Chinese vice premier Zhang Gaoli coerced her into sex and that they later had an on-off consensual relationship. 

Her post was quickly deleted and she had not been seen publicly or made a statement since then, alarming the global tennis community. 

On Twitter, Chinese state-affiliated media outlet CGTN released what it said was an email Peng had sent to WTA Chairman and CEO Steve Simon in which she denied the allegations, and that she was not missing or unsafe, but just “resting at home.”  

But in his own written statement, Simon said the email only raised his concerns as to Peng’s “safety and whereabouts,” and that he had a hard time believing she actually wrote the email.   

Peng is a former World No. 1-ranked doubles player, taking 23 tour-level doubles titles, including Grand Slams at Wimbledon in 2013 and the French Open in 2014. 

She hasn’t competed on tour since the Qatar Open in February 2020, before the COVID-19 pandemic forced tennis to take a hiatus. 

Former Vice Premier Zhang retired in 2018 and has largely disappeared from public life, as is usual with former Chinese officials. 
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China has been making patriotic movies for its domestic audiences while tightening control of its film industry, developments that have left Hollywood wondering whether its movies will still be welcome in China’s lucrative market. VOA’s Elizabeth Lee has the details.
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