Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth removed Gen. Christopher Donahue, a widely admired military leader once described as a “once-in-a-generation” officer, after reportedly becoming preoccupied with a viral image he believed was a “selfie.”

Donahue, 57, became part of one of the most recognizable images from the chaotic end of the Afghanistan war when an Army photographer captured him as the final U.S. service member to leave the country after a deadly ISIS suicide bombing.

The grainy, green-tinted night-vision photo showed the general stepping onto the last aircraft out of Afghanistan, following the Army tradition that the commander is the final soldier to depart.

According to The New York Times , the image was taken by an Army photographer using a cellphone and night-vision equipment at 11:59 p.m. on August 30, 2021 — just one minute before the deadline for the full American withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The photo spread rapidly online and became an enduring symbol of the U.S. exit from Afghanistan. Senior Pentagon officials told the outlet that Hegseth later fixated on the image, incorrectly describing it as a “selfie.”

Just four days beforehand, an ISIS suicide-bomber had killed 13 American service members and at least 170 Afghans in an attack at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul. 

President Donald Trump, on his 2024 campaign trail, slammed former President Joe Biden for the withdrawal and the attack on the airport, dubbing the incident ‘the most embarrassing moment in the history of the United States.’ 

He also questioned why no one had been reprimanded over the attack, the Times reported. 

In February 2020, Trump had made a deal with the Taliban for the final withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan following a near two-decade war sparked after the September 11 attacks in New York City. 

Eighteen months later, Afghanistan’s president fled the country and its government collapsed – leaving Afghan forces dissolved, the Times reported. 

Donahue was called back to Kabul on August 17, where he met with Qari Hamdullah Mokhlis, a Taliban commander who had been a primary target of the general’s commandos since 2020. 

The two made an agreement to form a partnership, with paratroopers recalling Donahue’s words to the Taliban commander as: ‘You don’t like me; I don’t like you. But we’re going to have to work together,’ according to the outlet. 

Both recognized their biggest threat lay with the Islamic State terror group, which was plotting to turn the US withdrawal into an opportunity to attack, US intelligence had determined. 

While the US military would take charge of the airport and its entry gates, commanders wanted the Taliban, with checkpoints surrounding the airport, to allow Americans citizens and allies through while keeping potential suicide-bombers out, according to the Times. 

Abbey Gate, under the control of the Marines, was identified as a prime target of the terror group. The Marines were planning to leave and hand over control to Donahue’s troops, the outlet reported. 

On August 24, Donahue visited the gate and was met with thousands of Afghans surrounding Marines attempting to screen them. The general told his troops at the time that the chaotic scene created a perfect opportunity for an attack, the Times reported. 

While Donahue thought it risky to wait to shut the gate down on August 27, as planned, British forces also using the gate for evacuation asked to keep it open and the Pentagon agreed, US officials told the outlet. 

The deadly attack unfolded at 5.48pm on August 26 while the Marines remained in control of the gate. Eleven Marines lost their lives, as well as one Navy medic, one Army soldier and many Afghans. 

Donahue recalled hearing and feeling the blast from his headquarters at the other side of the runway, the outlet reported. 

It was on August 30 that the war came to an end and the general boarded the final plane leaving the war-torn area. 

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As Donahue landed in Qatar, he called his wife to let her know they had got out.

‘I know,’ she said. 

‘How did you know?’ he asked. 

‘Everybody knows.’

She forwarded the photo of Donahue getting onto the plane out of Kabul that had been shared across news sites globally.

‘This is not good,’ he said at the time.

Hegseth had resigned from the Army following reportedly questionable behavior and blamed his departure from service on Army generals with ‘bloated’ ranks.

His vision to ‘clean house’ was one he believed that Trump shared. 

‘He wants fewer generals,’ Hegseth said at the time, according to the outlet.

Donahue had been a top candidate to take over for General Christopher G. Cavoli who would be retiring in the summer of 2025 – and Hegseth agreed, until he told staff that Trump was looking for someone to go down for the attack in Kabul. 

Joe Kasper, Hegseth’s chief of staff, was presented with a small window of opportunity to defend Donahue, a well-respected and revered general who had seen more combat in his more than 20 deployments than almost any officer in the military.

Kasper clarified to Hegseth that the photo from Kabul which pictured Donahue was not a selfie, the general had nothing to do with its distribution and the Marines had in fact been in charge of the gate when the attack unfolded, the Times reported. 

‘I don’t care,’ Hegseth told Kasper, according to the outlet. 

Despite many fighting to keep Donahue, describing him as a key strategist preparing for future war, Hegseth was determined to get the general out.

Republican Senator Tim Sheehy staked his alliance with Donahue, but was told by General Dan Caine that his support was only fueling Hegseth’s notion that Donahue was too powerful, the Times reported. 

‘Do you think Secretary Hegseth would work with me if I was there,’ Donahue asked, referring to an offer to take command in Austin, Texas, by Senator Joni Ernst – who had attempted to suggest Donahue lead the Army instead of Hegseth’s pick, General Christopher LaNeve.

‘Honestly, no,’ Ernst responded, according to the Times. 

A senior White House official allegedly told Ernst that Hegseth would never nominate Donahue for the job, the outlet reported. 

After Hegseth had allegedly dodged, canceled or rescheduled meetings, Donahue retired on August 27 surrounded by those who fought with him.

According to the Daily Beast, Hegseth has fired or blocked promotions for around 80 of the USA’s top officers – marking roughly 10 percent of the US military’s highest-ranking officers.  

As Celeste Rivas Hernandez’s family prepares to mark what would have been her 16th birthday, they are urging prosecutors to seek the harshest possible punishment against D4vd.

In an exclusive statement to the California Post, Celeste’s parents said they believe the death penalty would be the “perfect” sentence for the jailed singer, who has been accused of killing and dismembering the teenager last year.

Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman is now deciding whether to pursue capital punishment or life in prison for the performer, whose legal name is David Burke, as his trial is expected to move forward later this year.

Celeste would have turned 16 on Monday. The following day marks the first anniversary of the grim discovery of her body, which was found in the back of a Tesla at a Hollywood tow yard.

Alongside the release of a previously unseen photo of their daughter, the family told The Post: “If the death penalty were activated, it would be perfect for this kind of human being, devoid of feelings and emptiness inside, and without conscience, who only caused pain to our daughter, our family, and the world that supports our precious daughter.”

It added: “But that’s not in our hands, but rather in God’s, and the California justice system.” It’s signed “The Rivas Hernandez Family.”

The decision on whether Burke faces life in prison or death if convicted on the charges lies in Hochman’s hands.

Last Monday, moments after Burke dropped his high profile legal team for a public defender in a dramatic hearing, Hochman took to the mics and said he had not made a decision yet. 

The DA said he was awaiting a mitigation packet from Burke’s previous legal team outlining the reasons why Burke should not face the death penalty, but had not received it.

He said he will allow the new public defender time to submit a packet if he chooses. Hochman earlier this year reversed policy when it came to the death penalty, releasing a ground breaking statement. 

He said: “Effective immediately, the prior administration’s extreme and categorical policy forbidding prosecutors from seeking the death penalty in any case is rescinded.

“In its place, the new murder with special circumstances policy will consider pursuing the death penalty only after an extensive and comprehensive review and only in exceedingly rare cases.”

He also said families of murder victim’s survivors will have “consultation” and “full input, to ensure that the punishment sought by the office is just, fair, fitting and appropriate.”

The Post contacted the DA’s office for reaction to the Rivas Hernandez statement. 

Celeste’s parents watched in horror during D4vd’s hearings over the past few weeks as horrific images of her decapitated and mutilated corpse were displayed in a court.

Her family ignored their attorney’s request to look away as the pictures were displayed in a Los Angeles courtroom during the first day of the singer’s preliminary hearing last month.

The couple were later spotted crying in the hall of the courthouse after viewing their daughter’s severed limbs, head, torso and fingers that were allegedly found in the trunk of D4vd’s Tesla.

The singer is accused of ordering an Uber to deliver Rivas from her family home in Lake Elsinore to his Hollywood Hills home on the night of April 23, 2025, after dating her for months and getting her pregnant.

He then stabbed her and stood by while she bled out, prosecutors claim.

It is alleged he loaded her body in his Tesla and drove to Santa Barbara. Hernandez’s passport card was allegedly found in the exact same spot Burke’s Tesla was tracked months later by a Cal Trans worker.

Burke allegedly ordered a shovel from Home Depot  and had it delivered to his home by Postmates. About a week later, he ordered two chainsaws from Amazon that were delivered to his home, and on May 5, he allegedly ordered a body bag, heavy-duty laundry bags and a blue inflatable pool, court documents say.

Investigators testified Burke dismembered Hernandez with a chainsaw in the pool. Pieces of it were found on her remains during the autopsy, according to the medical examiner.

A major emergency operation is unfolding at Miami International Airport after an Amazon cargo aircraft ran off a runway, hit several vehicles and burst into flames during a landing at about 2 p.m. local time, according to the Federal Aviation Administration, Miami-Dade Fire Rescue and airport officials who spoke with News Media.

Airport officials said Prime Air Flight 7598 overran Miami International Airport’s diagonal runway and came to a stop disabled near the northwest end of the airfield.

Miami-Dade Fire Rescue said the aircraft caught fire after the crash, prompting a large-scale response of more than 60 fire units to an incident involving multiple patients.

“Units arrived to find an airplane that had caught on fire as a result of this crash, with heavy flames and smoke showing. Firefighters are working on extinguishing the fire and assessing patients,” Miami-Dade Fire Rescue said in a post on X.

Fire officials also told News Media that crews remain focused on putting out the flames while evaluating and treating multiple patients at the scene.

Authorities have not yet released details on injuries or fatalities.

The FAA said 21 Air Flight 7598, a Boeing 767-300, departed from Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport in San Juan, Puerto Rico. 

County CAD records indicate the emergency call was received at about 1:55 p.m.

The FAA’s Air Traffic Control System Command Center noted there is a ground stop at MIA in effect until at least 4:30 p.m.

“All runways and taxiways at MIA are currently closed as of 3:00 p.m. and a ground stop is in effect,” airport officials said. 

The FAA will investigate the incident. 

Department of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy also said first responders were assessing the scene.

“We’ve issued a full ground stop at Miami International while first responders assess the scene after an Amazon cargo plane overran the runway. If you’re traveling through the area, please expect significant delays and potential cancellations,” he said in a post on X. 

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

Dave Mustaine has long traced some of his earliest and most volatile songwriting to what he describes as “religious abuse” during his upbringing, shaped by his mother’s strict devotion to the Jehovah’s Witness faith until her death in 1990.

The Megadeth frontman has said the rules of that childhood — no birthday parties, no Christmas presents and not even participation in the Pledge of Allegiance — left him feeling isolated, robbing him of a normal youth and setting him apart from other children.

By his teenage years, Mustaine pushed back hard. He has spoken about turning toward black magic and the occult before eventually breaking into the music world as the lead guitarist for Metallica.

After being dismissed from the future Grammy-winning metal giants amid struggles with drugs and alcohol, Mustaine launched Megadeth, the band that would make him a thrash metal icon with tracks such as “Symphony of Destruction” and “Holy Wars.”

Now 64, the veteran rocker has suggested that the religion at the center of his childhood played a role in an even deeper family wound — a painful chapter he says has followed him for decades and, heartbreakingly, can never be fully repaired.

In his upcoming memoir, In My Darkest Hour, Mustaine, who also battled throat cancer in 2019, writes about growing up in a ‘weird and dysfunctional household (I wouldn’t even call it a home).’

He says he always suspected that the woman who raised him, Emily Marie Mustaine, was not his mother at all, but that one of his sisters had committed the cardinal sin of getting pregnant as an unwed teenager.

‘Maybe,’ he writes in the memoir, ‘out of embarrassment and religious and social pressure, they had “gone away” for a while (as people sometimes did in those days), and then turned the baby over to grandma to raise as her own. Grandma, in this case, being the woman I knew as my mother.’

He adds: ‘Maybe the tumult had contributed to my father disappearing.’

His mother and violent alcoholic father got divorced when Mustaine was just four. Mustaine has talked in the past about how he lived in fear of his father’s unpredictable and violent mood swings.

‘Maybe,’ he adds, ‘it had led my mother into the insane vortex of religious zealotry.

‘I can’t fully explain why I felt this way, but I did. Sometimes I’d even dream about it.’

In those dreams, his mother and father were both absent, and in their place was his oldest sister, Michelle.

‘She was always looking out for me, in a doting, caring kind of way, like she was worried something terrible would happen.

‘We looked alike, too, which I realize is not much of a shock, given that we were siblings, but I always wondered why I bore more of a resemblance to my sister – well, to all three of my sisters, actually – than to my own mother.’

Of course, he admits this could all have simply been a case of wishful thinking – a childish desire to make sense of his chaotic, traumatic childhood.

But just as he was finishing his memoir, he received a mysterious call from his middle sister, Suzanne, who is in hospice with Parkinson’s, ‘suffering from all the horrific stuff that comes with that disease, including dementia.’

He writes: ‘She drifts in and out of lucidity, telling stories that are dead accurate and others that make no sense whatsoever.’

Together with his sister’s assistant, he attempted to piece together coherent sentences from this ‘admittedly fuzzy conversation.’

They heard the name ‘David.’

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‘What did you say?’ the assistant asked.

Suzanne mumbled some more.

‘He’s your baby?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘You mean David?’

After a long pause, Suzanne replied: ‘Yes.’

Mustaine admits his sister could have been using the word ‘baby’ in the colloquial sense – ‘as a big sister might do when referring to a little brother.

‘Or,’ he adds, ‘does one read something more gothic into it, something more sinister?’

What, he muses, if it wasn’t Michelle who was his mother at all. She’d been the eldest – 18 years older than Mustaine – so it made most sense. She was also very protective and loving around her baby brother.

Suzanne, on the other hand, had been just 15 when Mustaine was born.

‘Her giving birth to an illegitimate child would have been more scandalous. And maybe that would explain the bitterness and the resentment she so often exhibited toward me,’ he writes.

‘Maybe I had ruined her life. Maybe the mere fact of my existence provoked sadness and anger.

‘Or maybe my imagination was working overtime, as it sometimes does.’

Whatever the truth, he will likely never find the answer he seeks.

Both his mother and Michelle are now dead. His youngest sister, Debbie, meanwhile, is just three years older than he is, so has no memory of his birth.

‘And Suzanne is here, but not really here,’ he writes. ‘So it will remain an enigma for the rest of my life.

‘What is the importance of any of this?’ he asks. ‘Why not leave it all behind, with the other detritus of my Dickensian childhood? Why burrow into rabbit holes best left unexplored?

‘I guess the answer to that would be: I don’t want to leave it behind. I don’t want to forget. The memories drive me. The hunger, physical and metaphorical, motivates me to live a better life, to make the most of my time on the planet. I’ve always felt that way, but cancer has a way of turning up the volume on the ticking clock.’

The guitarist, who converted to Christianity around 2002 and, for years, refused to play some of the band’s most controversial hits, admits that he’d spent a lot of time praying during cancer treatment.

Those prayers, he says, were largely focused on keeping his family, wife of 35 years Pam and their children Electra, 28, and Justis, 34, together.

Now seven years cancer free, he writes: ‘Here we are, the same tight family we’ve always been. I can’t help but feel blessed, and it isn’t so much cancer that drives that point home, but the persistent, ceaseless memory of where I came from and the fractured family from which I escaped.’

In My Darkest Hour by David Mustaine is published September 8 by Da Capo, an imprint of Hachette Book Group.

Rapid progress in artificial intelligence could bring humans closer than ever to understanding—and potentially communicating with—animals. But as the technology advances, some researchers and advocacy groups are raising a new concern: whether decoding animal behavior may intrude on animals’ right to privacy.

Using machine learning, scientists are increasingly able to sort, analyze and even reproduce the calls, songs and signals animals use with one another. Supporters say these AI tools could transform the study of animal communication, offering deeper insight into how other species navigate their social worlds.

Yet the ethical implications are still catching up with the science. “One risk that is currently not taken into account in research ethics is the concern that we might be violating the privacy of animals by collecting data on their vocalizations and movements,” researchers wrote in an article published by Springer Nature.

The authors argue that privacy is not only a human concern. “An interest in privacy is an interest in controlling how you appear to others, and the complex social lives of many nonhuman animals offer strong support for thinking animals have this interest.”

Beyond privacy, experts warn that the ability to “speak” with animals could create broader risks for ecosystems if the technology is misused or disrupts natural behavior in the wild.

The controversy involves a technique known as “playback,” which is the practice of broadcasting recorded animal calls in the wild.

Biologist Vittorio Baglione, who has spent his career cataloging the calls of carrion crows, was blown away by how AI models could help sort his recordings and point out commonalities in specific cries.

Among the calls was one that Baglione described as essentially, “Hey! Come help!” as the crows would use it to summon others to help defend the nest, he told Bloomberg.

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But Baglione said his research and the breakthroughs in communication could be co-opted by hunters or anyone with ill-intent to lure in the crows.

“You can stress the animals. You can disrupt their social environment. You can pose conflicts between them, especially if you don’t really understand the meaning of the call,” the scientist said of such playback.

This is why playback remains controversial, as it takes advantage of an animal’s trust in a specific sound to make it act in whatever way the user wants, explained César Rodríguez-Garavito, director of the More-Than-Human Life, or MOTH, Program at New York University.

In his 2025 report on the development of AI models striving for animal communication, Rodríguez-Garavito said the technology has the capacity to expose animals to mobs of people wanting to chat or to even weaponize them.

Researchers and animal-rights groups have pointed to previous playback experiments to show the distress an animal can suffer when confronted with an imitation call from a machine.

In 2007, zoologist Katy Payne admitted she caused an elephant great distress when playing a recording of her dead grandfather’s voice.

Despite the concerns, there remains a $10 million reward for a project that can establish communication with an animal without that animal recognizing that it is communicating with humans.

Private equity billionaire Jeremy Coller, who funds the Coller Doolittle Challenge, said during the challenge’s latest prize event in June that humans will likely reach this goal within the decade.

“Because AI is so fast, I have absolute conviction we will crack the code by 2030,” he said.