Obaidullah Amin made his way last week to the Kabul airport with his wife, Maryam, and their two children, joining thousands of other Afghans desperate to board a plane to safety.

Unlike many others teeming outside the terminal, Mr. Amin had a golden ticket—a letter from a member of Congress attesting to his work as a translator for the U.S. military and urging his evacuation.

“Introduce yourself to Marines, show the letter, stand strong,” Andrew Darlington, a former Marine Captain who worked with Mr. Amin on a deployment to Afghanistan, texted him from his home in Florida. “You have served with them, introduce yourself. You’re one of us.”

Mr. Amin would still need to get through the crowds and past the security checkpoint at Abbey Gate. Mr. Darlington also gave him a plan for that: Carry a sign with the numbers “1,2,3,4” on it. That was a code for Marines at the gate to expedite his path.

The Amins almost made it. But as they neared the checkpoint last Thursday, a suicide bomber detonated 25 pounds of explosives, killing Mr. Amin, his wife and more than 200 others, including 13 Americans, most of them Marines.

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BRUSSELS—The European Union recommended halting nonessential travel from the U.S. because of the rise of Covid-19 cases, diplomats said Monday, ending a summer-vacation reprieve for American tourists.

The decision came amid the growing spread of the Delta variant in the U.S., where vaccination rates have also now fallen behind the average rates of shots in EU countries.

The EU travel list, which is reviewed every two weeks, isn’t binding on member states, but it has generally set the pattern for who can visit the bloc. The EU decided in June to add the U.S. to its safe list.

Still, member states retain control over all the rules for tourist travel, such as whether to impose quarantines on unvaccinated travelers and which certificates to accept as proof of having received a vaccine.

Announcing the decision, the EU stressed the decision doesn’t take away “the possibility for member states to lift the temporary restriction on nonessential travel…for fully vaccinated travelers.”

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OTTAWA—After a decade of trying to keep housing prices in check, Canada’s political leaders have a new tactic: build houses in an effort to drive down prices.

The new strategy is unfolding in an election campaign ahead of voting on Sept. 20. Polling among Canadians indicates that housing affordability has emerged as one of the top voter concerns not related to the pandemic.

Proposals by the ruling Liberal Party include billions of dollars to accelerate urban housing starts, while the Conservatives are looking to convert government offices into housing units. Canada has recorded among the fastest home-price increases in the developed world as it looks to pump up population growth through aggressive immigration targets.

Previous policies on housing supply focused exclusively on units for low-income individuals and households. Now campaign promises are focused on homes for middle-income earners who have difficulty affording to live near where they work.

Analysts said unaffordable housing could eventually deter Canada from retaining or attracting high-skilled talent.

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Zach Van Meter, a private-equity investor from Naples, Fla., phoned the government of Somaliland last week, asking if it would host thousands of Afghan refugees.

“He just called me out of the blue,” said Bashir Goth, the Washington representative for a region of Somalia seeking independence.

Two days later, on Aug. 25, Somaliland’s acting foreign minister signed a tentative accord with charities working with Mr. Van Meter, agreeing to temporarily house as many as 10,000 Afghan evacuees in Berbera, a port on the Gulf of Aden. It was part of an on-the-fly effort that Mr. Van Meter said has helped about 5,000 Afghans escape their country in the past two weeks, in one of the most successful known private efforts to extract Afghans.

From the Peacock Lounge, a conference room at the Willard InterContinental hotel in Washington, Mr. Van Meter and an ad hoc collection of war veterans, Afghan diplomats, wealthy donors, defense contractors, nonprofit workers and off-duty U.S. officials conducted a global military-style rescue operation.

The self-named Commercial Task Force dispatched former commandos to Kabul to retrieve evacuees, said Mr. Van Meter, president of New Standard Holdings, a private-equity company, and others affiliated with the group. It made a deal with the United Arab Emirates that allowed an airlift to carry Afghans from Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport to temporary shelter in Abu Dhabi where many of the 5,000 evacuees await permission to travel to countries willing to give them permanent refuge.

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The European Union is set to recommend halting nonessential travel from the U.S. because of the spread of Covid-19, diplomats said on Sunday.

European officials have been considering the move for much of the last month, with the average U.S. infection rate now above that of the EU.

The Slovenian presidency of the EU last week recommended removing the U.S. and five other countries from a list of countries allowed nonessential travel. A final decision is due on Monday. Two diplomats said they weren’t aware of any objections so far.

The EU travel list, which is reviewed every two weeks, isn’t binding on member states, but it has generally set the pattern over the past few months for who can visit the bloc. Some countries may decide to keep permitting U.S. tourists if they can prove they have been vaccinated.

Pressure to remove the U.S. from the travel list has also increased because Washington has maintained a ban on European nonessential travel to the U.S.

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North Korea appears to have resumed operation of its plutonium-producing reactor at Yongbyon in a move that could enable the reclusive country to expand its nuclear-weapons arsenal, the U.N. atomic agency said.

The development, disclosed in the agency’s annual report on North Korea’s nuclear activities, adds a new challenge to President Biden’s foreign policy agenda, alongside the dangerous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and stalemated talks on restoring the 2015 deal on Iran’s nuclear program.

“Since early July, there have been indications, including the discharge of cooling water, consistent with the operation of the reactor,” said the report by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The Yongbyon reactor appeared to have been inactive from December 2018 until the beginning of July 2021, the report noted. It added that signs that the reactor is now being operated coincides with indications that North Korea is also using a nearby laboratory to separate plutonium from spent fuel previously removed from the reactor.

The agency, whose inspectors were kicked out of North Korea in 2009, described the twin developments as “deeply troubling” and a clear violation of United Nations Security Council resolutions.

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WASHINGTON—With America’s longest war in its final hours, the Biden administration vowed to remain committed to Afghanistan after Tuesday’s final withdrawal, even as the U.S. diplomatic and military footprint faded fast amid mounting security concerns.

America’s final exit from Afghanistan raises the grim prospects that thousands of Afghans who worked alongside American forces, diplomats and humanitarian groups could be left behind. It also compromises the international community’s ability to protect women and girls and certain religious minorities, which are considered vulnerable to persecution by the Taliban regime.

On Sunday, President Biden met with the grieving Gold Star families of the 13 service members lost in a suicide bombing outside the airport last week. The Pentagon said it launched a new unmanned drone strike, targeting a vehicle carrying suspected suicide bombers near Kabul airport.

The strikes underscored the continuing security challenges in Afghanistan as the U.S. worked quickly to have its military and diplomatic personnel out of the country by Tuesday, the date previously agreed upon by the Taliban before it would take control of the airport in Kabul.

The U.S. said early Saturday it had conducted an airstrike in eastern Afghanistan against ISIS-K, the group that claimed responsibility for Thursday’s attack, killing two individuals whom the Pentagon described as a planner and a facilitator. Mr. Biden warned in a statement on Saturday that another attack was “highly likely” and said he ordered his military commanders to “take every possible measure to prioritize force protection.”

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A U.S. drone struck a vehicle packed with explosives in a residential area of Kabul on Sunday, preventing an imminent attack on the city’s airport, the Pentagon said, as the massive international airlift out of Afghanistan entered its final hours.

The vehicle contained multiple suicide bombers affiliated with Islamic State who intended to strike the airport, possibly targeting U.S. troops, the official added.

The Kabul airstrike came three days after an Islamic State suicide bombing at the city’s airport killed 13 American troops and nearly 200 Afghans. It followed another drone strike against an alleged Islamic State planner in the eastern province of Nangarhar.

“Significant secondary explosions from the vehicle indicated the presence of a substantial amount of explosive material,” said Capt. Bill Urban, spokesman for the U.S. Central Command. He added that the U.S. military was assessing the possibility of civilian casualties, but had no such indications. Habibi Samangani, a senior Taliban official in Kabul, confirmed that a vehicle carrying explosives had been hit, and that its driver had been killed.

The State Department, meanwhile, said that the U.S., the European Union and more than 70 other nations “have received assurances from the Taliban that all foreign nationals and any Afghan citizen with travel authorization from our countries will be allowed to proceed in a safe and orderly manner to points of departure and travel outside the country” after the air evacuations end and U.S. forces depart on Tuesday.

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SINGAPORE—A surge of Covid-19 cases in Malaysia, a little-known but critical link in the semiconductor supply chain, has opened a new front in the battle to fix manufacturing woes that have rippled across industries during a global shortage of computing chips.

The Southeast Asia nation is one of the world’s top destinations for assembly and testing of the devices that control smartphones, car engines and medical equipment. Disruptions in Malaysia threaten to prolong uncertainty over chip supply well into next year, dashing hopes of relief in the second half of 2021.

The supply crunch in Malaysia, caused primarily by staff shortages linked to virus-control measures combined with a sharp surge in global demand, poses a new problem for the auto industry. For the first half of this year, shortages largely stemmed from companies miscalculating the pace of economic recoveries and not ordering enough parts. Now they can’t always get the parts they need because Covid-19 outbreaks are denting factory output.

“It’s a bit like a game of whack-a-mole,” said Ravi Vijayaraghavan, a Singapore-based partner at the consulting firm Bain & Co. specializing in semiconductors. “We think we have supply sorted out, and then a problem suddenly pops up somewhere else.”

Some of the world’s leading car makers including Toyota Motor Corp. , Ford Motor Co. , General Motors Co. and Nissan Motor Co. have disclosed major production cuts due largely to chip shortages from factories in Malaysia. Ford suspended work for about a week at an F-150 plant in the Kansas City, Mo., area and a Fiesta factory in Cologne, Germany because of missing parts, while Toyota said it would cut global production by around 40% in September. General Motors said it expects to make 100,000 fewer vehicles in North America in the second half of the year.

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