The Connecticut River, 410 miles long, courses from the top of New Hampshire, along the Vermont border, and then through Massachusetts and Connecticut to the Long Island Sound. Along the way, it flows past countless scenes of human drama.

This summer, reporter Ben James rode his bike the length of the Connecticut – camera and microphone in tow.

In the first in a series, Ben brings us interviews with people working, grieving and getting by along the Upper Connecticut.

“Life on the Connecticut” was made possible through a partnership between NEPM, NHPR, Vermont Public and the New England News Collaborative.

At least six people have been killed and 13 more have been injured in a suicide bombing in the Afghan capital of Kabul.

Khalid Zadran, the spokesman for the Kabul police chief, told the Associated Press that the dead included a woman, and that all of the injured were civilians.

The explosion took place in the Qala Bakhtiar neighborhood of Kabul, and quoting Zadran, Afghanistan’s Tolo News reported that the bomber “concealed explosives on their body.”

No one has claimed responsibility for the bombing yet, although ISIS-K, a faction of the self-proclaimed Islamic State, sporadically carries out attacks around the country. They frequently target Afghanistan’s minority Shia population, although schools and maternity hospitals have also been struck by deadly attacks.

Until August 2021, the Taliban were responsible for much of the violence in Afghanistan as they fought with U.S. and NATO forces.

But once the group took over the country three years ago and U.S. and NATO troops fully withdrew, they promised Afghans a greater measure of security.

That promise was immediately tested when ISIS-K launched twin attacks on Kabul’s international airport and the nearby Baron Hotel on Aug. 26, 2021.

Nearly 200 people were killed, including 13 members of the U.S. military. Most of those killed were Afghan civilians.

Although ISIS-K and the Taliban are both Sunni groups, their ideologies differ.

As the Taliban re-stablished the control they lost over Afghanistan in 2001, ISIS-K has stepped up its recruiting tactics and attacks, often going after the very groups the Taliban promised to keep safe: Women, children, minorities, and even foreign dignitaries.

In September of 2022, an ISIS attack outside the Russian embassy in Kabul killed 2 embassy staff. Three months later, another attack targeted the Pakistani embassy in Kabul, wounding a guard inside the embassy compound.

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The United States has seized an airplane belonging to Venezuela’s hard-line president, Nicolás Maduro, in the Dominican Republic, the Justice Department said Monday.

The Justice Department alleges that the Dassault Falcon 900EX aircraft was purchased from a company in Florida for about $13 million by people affiliated with Maduro who used a Caribbean-based shell company and smuggled it out of the United States for use by Maduro and his associates, in violation of U.S. sanctions and export controls.

The Justice Department said it worked with the Dominican Republic to seize the plane and transfer it to Florida.

The U.S. has placed numerous sanctions on Venezuelan companies and individuals, including Maduro, for alleged corruption and human rights abuses among other things.

The plane confiscation came a little over a month after Venezuela’s contentious presidential election, in which both Maduro and the main opposition declared victory.

Speaking Aug. 1, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said there was “overwhelming evidence” that opposition candidate “Edmundo González Urrutia won the most votes in Venezuela’s July 28 presidential election.”

Last week, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, said Maduro will remain the South American country’s de facto president but that the EU rejects the legitimacy of his reelection claim.

Copyright 2024 NPR