Afghan beauty salons in struggle to survive after Taliban ban

Donald Trump is simply unable to shake off the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. A part of his support base is furious over Trump's flip-flopping on Epstein's alleged "client list". In a bid to deflect attention, as The Washington Post notes, Trump created a debate about a football team's name, released hundreds of thousands of classified documents pertaining to the death of Martin Luther King Jr, surmised about how former USAID ambassador Samantha Powell made her money and then reposted a bizarre AI-generated video appearing to show former president Barack Obama being arrested by federal agents. According to one analyst, "nobody turns the page better than Donald Trump". However, this scandal has called into question his ability to do so because he's in a real fight with his own base and the mainstream media are more than happy to fan the flames of discord.

Le Monde newspaper, meanwhile, has published a series focusing on the US tech titans who are cosying up to Trump. It’s a long-format read which takes us behind the scenes of Trump's inauguration earlier this year: in particular, the notable presence of tech billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. Bezos' overt embracing of Trump contrasts with his previous support for Democrats. As for Zuckerberg, his management style was previously more casual and informal but has since transformed to more authoritarian – all in a bid to curry favour with Trump.

Turning to Afghanistan, the International Criminal Court (ICC) wants to arrest Taliban leaders over gender persecution of Afghan women, in what the academic website The Conversation calls a world first. Earlier this month, the court in The Hague issued arrest warrants against Taliban leaders in Afghanistan, accusing them of being guilty of crimes against humanity of persecution on gender grounds. In other words, the court hopes to bring them to account for the draconian measures imposed on girls and women in Afghanistan, who have been forbidden from going to school after the age of 12 and banned from public spaces since the Taliban's takeover in 2021. The Washington Post specifically looks at the plight of beauty salons in Afghanistan. In the aftermath of the takeover, beauty salons were largely excluded from Taliban's draconian crackdown on society. Women flocked to the country's 12,000 beauty salons, which provided much-needed financial stability for the often female salon owners. Until 2023, that is. Officials then ordered women to shut down their salons, citing sharia law violations. At the time, the government justified its decision by saying that 95 percent of Afghans did not want women to go to work. More recently, they've tried to take a more moderate line, with women able to work in girls' schools or female hospitals and prisons. But as the Post notes, in a country scarred by four decades of war, women are often the only or primary breadwinners for many families — and many are now struggling make ends meet.

Finally, the French regional newspaper Ouest-France talks about all the bizarre – and sometimes ugly – gifts that sports champions are given when they win! When you are a high-level athlete, winning might not be as hard as feigning happiness for an odd gift you receive from the host organisers. Tennis player Loïs Boisson recently won a competition in Hambourg sponsored by the shipping company MSC. In return, she received a miniature shipping container! Mathieu van der Poel, the winner of the Paris-Roubaix cycling race – known as the Hell of the North for its hard roads – received a piece of pavement as a reward. And cyclist Benoît Jarrier received a pig in 2015 – not for winning, but for being the first Breton to cross the finish line in a Brittany cycling race. He won that accolade four times!

You can catch our press review every morning on France 24 at 7:20am and 9:20am (Paris time), from Monday to Friday.