As the Taliban took control of the Afghan capital of Kabul on Sunday, a spokesman for the group uploaded five videos to his official YouTube page. The videos, each between two to three minutes long, showed Taliban leaders congratulating fighters on their victories.

“Now is the time to serve the nation and to give them peace and security,” Mullah Abdul Ghani Barador, a co-founder of the Taliban, said in one video in Pashtun as he sat in front of senior officials in a curtained office.

Dozens of new pro-Taliban accounts that had sprung up on Twitter in recent days then shared the five videos. Within 24 hours, they had together racked up more than half a million views.

The videos were part of an effort by the Taliban to establish their authority and legitimize their rule across Afghanistan through the use of social media, researchers said. But by publishing on Facebook and YouTube, the Taliban defied what have been longtime bans by the platforms. The social...

Mark Wray was working at the concession stand of a movie theater when the pandemic lockdowns hit last year. The movie theater shut down, and he lost his job.

But instead of looking for another low-wage job, Mr. Wray sought a different path. He found a program teaching basic technology and business skills, completed it and landed a job at a fast-growing online mortgage lender. He started in March, working in customer service and tech support. He makes about $55,000 a year, compared with $17,000 at the movie theater.

“The pandemic, weirdly, was an opportunity,” said Mr. Wray, 25, who is a high school graduate and lives in Charlotte, N.C. “And this job is a huge steppingstone for me.”

People returning to the work force after the pandemic are expecting more from their employers, pushing companies to raise pay, give bonuses and improve health care and tuition plans. Paychecks are getting bigger. Wages rose strongly in July, up 4 percent from a year earlier,...

Getting vaccinated against Covid-19 is “an act of love,” Pope Francis says in a public service ad that will start circulating online and on television on Wednesday.

Working with the Ad Council, a nonprofit group, in its first campaign to extend beyond the United States, the pope encourages people around the world to get inoculated.

The ad shows the pope, speaking in Spanish with English subtitles, with church officials from the United States, Mexico, Brazil and other countries describing vaccination as a moral responsibility.

“Thanks to God’s grace and to the work of many, we now have vaccines to protect us from Covid-19,” the pope says in the ad. “They bring hope to end the pandemic, but only if they are available to all and if we collaborate with one another.”

Apple unveiled a plan two weeks ago founded in good intentions: Root out images of child sexual abuse from iPhones.

But as is often the case when changes are made to digital privacy and security, technology experts quickly identified the downside: Apple’s approach to scanning people’s private photos could give law enforcement authorities and governments a new way to surveil citizens and persecute dissidents. Once one chip in privacy armor is identified, anyone can attack it, they argued.

The conflicting concerns laid bare an intractable issue that the tech industry seems no closer to solving today than when Apple first fought with the F.B.I. over a dead terrorist’s iPhone five years ago.

The technology that protects the ordinary person’s privacy can also hamstring criminal investigations. But the alternative, according to privacy groups and many security experts, would be worse.

Facebook’s mission is to “bring the world closer together.” Increasingly, that’s not just about connecting friends and family to share messages, but also serving as a platform for people’s financial lives.

Some $100 billion in payments have been enabled by Facebook over the past year, said David Marcus, who runs the company’s financial services unit. But that’s just the start of the social network’s ambitions in the finance industry, Mr. Marcus writes in a new memo about the country’s “broken” payments system, reported in the DealBook newsletter.

At the center of Facebook’s push into payments is Novi, a digital wallet intended for users to move money around the world quickly and cheaply (free, in many cases). The company had plans to pair it with a “stablecoin” cryptocurrency called Libra, but that was shelved amid regulatory scrutiny, and now the scaled-back project, known as Diem, is overseen by an outside nonprofit group seeking the necessary government...

The former acting governor of the Afghan central bank, who has fled the country, said on Wednesday that nearly all of the bank’s $9 billion in reserves were beyond the reach of the Taliban, who took over the country’s government over the weekend.

Ajmal Ahmady, who was appointed to the central bank just over a year ago, said nearly all the money was held overseas, including $7 billion in assets by the Federal Reserve. In a series of Twitter posts, he added that $1.3 billion in assets were held by other international accounts and about $700 million were held by the Bank of International Settlements, which is based in Switzerland and acts as a bank for central banks.

“We can say the accessible funds to the Taliban are perhaps 0.1-0.2 percent of Afghanistan’s total international reserves,” he wrote. “Not much.”

On Tuesday, a Biden administration official said access has been blocked to Afghan central bank reserves held in the United States. This action, which was...

Facebook’s mission is to “bring the world closer together.” Increasingly, that’s not just about connecting friends and family to share messages, but also serving as a platform for people’s financial lives.

Some $100 billion in payments have been enabled by Facebook over the past year, said David Marcus, who runs the company’s financial services unit. But that’s just the start of the social network’s ambitions in the finance industry, Mr. Marcus writes in a new memo about the country’s “broken” payments system, reported in the DealBook newsletter.

At the center of Facebook’s push into payments is Novi, a digital wallet intended for users to move money around the world quickly and cheaply (free, in many cases). The company had plans to pair it with a “stablecoin” cryptocurrency called Libra, but that was shelved amid regulatory scrutiny, and now the scaled-back project, known as Diem, is overseen by an outside nonprofit group seeking the necessary government...

The Daily Beast digital news site on Wednesday named Tracy Connor as its next top editor.

Ms. Connor, 54, will take over as editor in chief immediately, the company said in a statement. She has been acting in the role since the recent departure of Noah Shachtman, who left for the top job at Rolling Stone magazine.

A native New Yorker, Ms. Connor worked at the city’s tabloids, The New York Post and The Daily News, for more than a decade. She then moved to NBC News and spent time in its investigative unit, where she helped to lead an investigation into serial sexual abuse by the former gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar.

In 2018, she joined The Daily Beast as executive editor, working under Mr. Shachtman. She said in an interview that she came to The Daily Beast because it seemed “like an almost perfect blending of my tabloid background and also the passion that I had developed for deep digging.”

Ms. Connor will now lead all of the editorial strategy and...

Facebook’s mission is to “bring the world closer together.” Increasingly, that’s not just about connecting friends and family to share messages, but also serving as a platform for people’s financial lives.

Some $100 billion in payments have been enabled by Facebook over the past year, said David Marcus, who runs the company’s financial services unit. But that’s just the start of the social network’s ambitions in the finance industry, Mr. Marcus writes in a new memo about the country’s “broken” payments system, reported in the DealBook newsletter.

At the center of Facebook’s push into payments is Novi, a digital wallet intended for users to move money around the world quickly and cheaply (free, in many cases). The company had plans to pair it with a “stablecoin” cryptocurrency called Libra, but that was shelved amid regulatory scrutiny, and now the scaled-back project, known as Diem, is overseen by an outside nonprofit group seeking the necessary government...

Facebook faces unfair resistance in the financial industry, he wrote. “I’ve heard multiple conversations about how this proposal would be so great if only Facebook wasn’t involved,” he said. “I understand and accept the need for extra scrutiny due to our scale.”

But Mr. Marcus describes Facebook as a “challenger in the payments industry,” with no specific plan yet to monetize use of the Novi wallet, which won’t charge for person-to-person payments, even across borders.

He added that allowing users to pay with dollars, euros and other fiat currencies via the Novi wallet would bring a lot of value.

“So why not just do that and call it a day?” he wrote. “Well, we might.” But before deciding on that, he doesn’t want to “waste our shot” at incorporating stablecoins into an “open, interoperable protocol” for online payments. “To have the maximum impact, building a closed system using fiat only wasn’t going to cut it,” he said in the memo.

Crypto advocates say...

Facebook’s mission is to “bring the world closer together.” Increasingly, that’s not just about connecting friends and family to share messages, but also serving as a platform for people’s financial lives. Some $100 billion in payments have been enabled by Facebook over the past year, said David Marcus, who runs the company’s financial services unit. But that’s just the start of the social network’s ambitions in the finance industry, Marcus writes in a new memo about America’s “broken” payments system.

At the center of Facebook’s push into payments is Novi, a digital wallet intended for users to move money around the world quickly and cheaply (free, in many cases). The company had plans to pair it with a “stablecoin” cryptocurrency called Libra, but that was shelved amid regulatory scrutiny, and now the scaled-back project, known as Diem, is overseen by an outside nonprofit group seeking the necessary government approvals to launch.

In recounting some of Facebook’s...

Mark Wray was working at the concession stand of a movie theater when the pandemic lockdowns hit last year. The movie theater shut down, and he lost his job.

But instead of looking for another low-wage job, Mr. Wray sought a different path. He found a program teaching basic technology and business skills, completed it and landed a job at a fast-growing online mortgage lender. He started in March, working in customer service and tech support. He makes about $55,000 a year, compared with $17,000 at the movie theater.

“The pandemic, weirdly, was an opportunity,” said Mr. Wray, 25, who is a high school graduate and lives in Charlotte, N.C. “And this job is a huge steppingstone for me.”

People returning to the work force after the pandemic are expecting more from their employers, pushing companies to raise pay, give bonuses and improve health care and tuition plans. Paychecks are getting bigger. Wages rose strongly in July, up 4 percent from a year earlier,...

Apple unveiled a plan two weeks ago founded in good intentions: Root out images of child sexual abuse from iPhones.

But as is often the case when changes are made to digital privacy and security, technology experts quickly identified the downside: Apple’s approach to scanning people’s private photos could give law enforcement authorities and governments a new way to surveil citizens and persecute dissidents. Once one chip in privacy armor is identified, anyone can attack it, they argued.

The conflicting concerns laid bare an intractable issue that the tech industry seems no closer to solving today than when Apple first fought with the F.B.I. over a dead terrorist’s iPhone five years ago.

The technology that protects the ordinary person’s privacy can also hamstring criminal investigations. But the alternative, according to privacy groups and many security experts, would be worse.

When the Paycheck Protection Program began last year to help small businesses that were struggling during the pandemic, the federal government was determined to get the relief money out fast — so it waived much of the vetting lenders traditionally do on business loans.

The absence of those safeguards meant that fraud was highly likely. But just how much of the program’s $800 billion was taken illicitly?

A new academic working paper released on Tuesday contains an estimate: Around 1.8 million of the program’s 11.8 million loans — more than 15 percent — totaling $76 billion had at least one indication of potential fraud, the researchers concluded.

“There’s been a lot of anecdotes about fraud, but the tricky thing about anecdotes is that it’s very difficult to put them together and get at the scale of what’s going on,” said Samuel Kruger, an assistant professor of finance at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business and one of the paper’s...

A scion of the Sackler family, the billionaire owners of Purdue Pharma, vowed in court on Tuesday that the family would walk away from a $4.5 billion pledge to help communities nationwide that have been devastated by the opioid epidemic, unless a judge grants it immunity from all current and future civil claims associated with the company.

Absent that broad release from liability, said David Sackler, 41, a former board member and grandson of one of the founders, the family would no longer support the deal that the parties have painstakingly negotiated over two years to settle thousands of opioids lawsuits brought by states, cities, tribes and other plaintiffs.

“We need a release that is sufficient to get our goals accomplished, and if the release fails to do that, then we will not support it,” Mr. Sackler declared during the fourth day of fractious testimony in the confirmation hearing for the bankruptcy plan of Purdue Pharma, whose misleading marketing of the...

When the Paycheck Protection Program began last year to help small businesses that were struggling during the pandemic, the federal government was determined to get the relief money out fast — so it waived much of the vetting lenders traditionally do on business loans.

The absence of those safeguards meant that fraud was highly likely. But just how much of the program’s $800 billion was taken illicitly?

A new academic working paper released on Tuesday contains an estimate: Around 1.8 million of the program’s 11.8 million loans — more than 15 percent — totaling $76 billion had at least one indication of potential fraud, the researchers concluded.

“There’s been a lot of anecdotes about fraud, but the tricky thing about anecdotes is that it’s very difficult to put them together and get at the scale of what’s going on,” said Samuel Kruger, an assistant professor of finance at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business and one of the paper’s...

George Brian McGee, a finance executive in Florida, was driving home in a Tesla Model S operating on Autopilot, a system that can steer, brake and accelerate a car on its own, when he dropped his phone during a call and bent down to look for it.

Neither he nor Autopilot noticed that the road was ending and the Model S drove past a stop sign and a flashing red light. The car smashed into a parked Chevrolet Tahoe, killing a 22-year-old college student, Naibel Benavides.

One of a growing number of fatal accidents involving Tesla cars operating on Autopilot, Mr. McGee’s case is unusual because he survived and told investigators what had happened: He got distracted and put his trust in a system that did not see and brake for a parked car in front of it. Tesla drivers using Autopilot in other fatal accidents have often been killed, leaving investigators to piece together the details from data stored and videos recorded by the cars.

“I was driving and dropped my...

SEATTLE — Amazon has eclipsed Walmart to become the world’s largest retail seller outside China, according to corporate and industry data, a milestone in the shift from brick-and-mortar to online shopping that has changed how people buy everything from Teddy Grahams to teddy bears.

Propelled in part by surging demand during the pandemic, people spent more than $610 billion on Amazon over the 12 months ending in June, according to Wall Street estimates compiled by the financial research firm FactSet. Walmart on Tuesday posted sales of $566 billion for the 12 months ending in July.

Alibaba, the giant online Chinese retailer, is the world’s top seller. Neither Amazon nor Walmart is a dominant player in China.

In racing past Walmart, Amazon has dethroned one of the most successful — and feared — companies of recent decades. Walmart perfected a thriving big-box model of retailing that squeezed every possible penny out of its costs, which drove down prices and...

George Brian McGee, a finance executive in Florida, was driving home in a Tesla Model S operating on Autopilot, a system that can steer, brake and accelerate a car on its own, when he dropped his phone during a call and bent down to look for it.

Neither he nor Autopilot noticed that the road was ending and the Model S drove past a stop sign and a flashing red light. The car smashed into a parked Chevrolet Tahoe, killing a 22-year-old college student, Naibel Benavides.

One of a growing number of fatal accidents involving Tesla cars operating on Autopilot, Mr. McGee’s case is unusual because he survived and told investigators what had happened: He got distracted and put his trust in a system that did not see and brake for a parked car in front of it. Tesla drivers using Autopilot in other fatal accidents have often been killed, leaving investigators to piece together the details from data stored and videos recorded by the cars.

“I was driving and dropped my...