The research is published in the journal,

"They were direct threats. They were saying: 'We will find you and if we find you, we will not let you live. If we find one of you we will find all of you.'"I was so worried about all of the team girls. We all needed a safe place."

That safe place was to come from an unlikely source on the other side of the world.Thousands of miles away, Mel Jones was sitting in quarantine in an Australian hotel during the Covid-19 pandemic when she received a message from an Indian journalist asking whether she had heard about the Afghan cricket team's situation.The players had looked to the Afghanistan Cricket Board (ACB) for assistance after the Taliban took over but received none.

On their own, they were terrified under the rule of the hardline Islamist group.The journalist put Jones in touch with one of the players and she asked if there was anything she could do to help. The player replied to say that all her team-mates and the backroom staff needed to get out of Afghanistan.

Jones, who won two World Cups with Australia, then went through her contact book and brought volunteers on board, including her friend Emma Staples, who used to work for Cricket Victoria, and Dr Catherine Ordway, who had helped to evacuate Afghan women footballers.

Creating a tight network of people who could help, including on the ground in Afghanistan, they organised visas and transport to eventually get 120 people out of the country, mainly into Pakistan and then on military flights to Dubai. From there they flew to Melbourne or Canberra on commercial flights supported by the Australian government."The concerns were about the mandate – not the technology," said carmaker lobby group president John Bozzella of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation.

But the Natural Resources Defense Council said halting the standards made "no sense"."They reduce costs for drivers, boost domestic manufacturing, improve air quality, and help address the climate crisis," president Manish Bapna said.

"If other states don't like California's approach, they don't need to follow it—but federal lawmakers shouldn't be intervening to block states from providing cleaner air and a healthier environment."California, where electric cars made up about a quarter of new car sales last year, has received waivers from the EPA to establish stricter standards for decades, in order to address the state's long-running air quality issues.