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By TAMEEM AKHGAR, MATTHEW LEE, LOLITA C. BALDOR, RAHIM FAIEZ and CALVIN WOODWARD Bone-tired like everyone else in Kabul, Taliban fighters spent the last moments of the 20-year Afghanistan war watching the night skies for the flares that would signal the United States was gone. From afar, U.S. generals watched video screens with the same anticipation. Relief washed over the war’s winners and the losers when the final U.S. plane took off. For those in between and left behind — possibly a majority of the allied Afghans who sought U.S. clearance to escape — fear spread about what comes next,...

Cantonese is a China dialect spoken mostly in Southeast China and Hong Kong, but also by China people immigrants all over the world. The Cantonese language has a reputation for being difficult to master class. The best approach in learning Cantonese is to discover a program that fits your chosen learning style, schedule, business, goals, and objectives. We’ve compiled a list of online resources to assist you to learn speaking, reading, and writing skills in Cantonese. Learning Cantonese Online If you want to try Hong Kong language adventure, we’ve included both free and paid resources, like Pimsleur, Babble, Italki, and Cantoneseclass101....

By HOWARD FENDRICH AP Tennis Writer NEW YORK — Novak Djokovic missed an overhead along the way to getting broken for the only time Thursday night and stared at a man in the Arthur Ashe Stadium stands who made noise during the point. After breaking right back in the next game of his second-round victory at the U.S. Open, Djokovic glared in that direction again, as if to say, “How you like me now?” Miffed as the distractions persisted, he later spoke to the chair umpire about what is considered a no-no in tennis. That, then, is pretty much what...

Last summer in the first swings of the global pandemic, sitting at home finally able to tackle some of my electronics projects now that I wasn’t wasting three hours a day commuting to a cubicle farm, I found myself ordering a new smartphone. Not the latest Samsung or Apple offering with their boring, predictable UIs, though. This was the Linux-only PinePhone, which lacks the standard Android interface plastered over an otherwise deeply hidden Linux kernel. As a bit of a digital privacy nut, the lack of Google software on this phone seemed intriguing as well, and although there were plenty...

As the most spoken language in the world by native speakers, learning Chinese Mandarin is a worthy and beneficial endeavour. Those who speak Chinese gain greater access to one of the world’s biggest economies and the ability to communicate with native speakers from China, Taiwan, Singapore, and other diasporic Chinese communities all over the world. In addition, students of Mandarin are exposed to one of the oldest and richest cultures in the world. Learning Chinese is an increasingly important skill, and yet, it remains a rarity among English speakers. While it has developed a reputation for being tough for English...