Toronto Star: In dozens of mountain hamlets in this remote corner of Afghanistan, opium addiction has become so entrenched that whole families – from toddlers to old men – are addicts. Cut off from the rest of the world by glacial streams, the addiction moves from house to house, infecting entire communities. From just one family years ago, at least half the people of Sarab, population 1,850, are now addicts.      Full news...

IRIN: More than 200,000 Afghans have been expelled from Iran in the past six months, marking a 25 percent increase on the same period in 2008, according to officials. Most of the deportees are single males who had gone to Iran for employment opportunities. Hosting some 900,000 registered Afghan refugees, Iran has deported about one million Afghans considered "illegal migrants" over the past three years, according to aid agencies and government officials.      Full news...

IRIN: Most people in the Afghan capital Kabul live in illegal, unplanned and sub-standard houses that are prone to natural disasters and lack water and sanitation facilities, according to government officials. "Of the [estimated] five million people currently living in Kabul, at least three million are residing in illegal and unplanned houses," Abdul Wahab Sadaat, deputy director of city services at the Kabul Municipality, told IRIN.      Full news...

IRIN: Thousands of people who lost their houses in January-May flooding in different parts of Afghanistan need help to repair or rebuild their homes, or find new ones, before winter. “Where houses are damaged or completely destroyed, people are in urgent need of shelter,” Asif Khairkhwa, chairman of the Afghan Red Crescent Society (ARCS) in the northern province of Balkh, told IRIN. “People should have a shelter before the winter.”      Full news...

IRIN: Family planning services are available in over 90 percent of health facilities across Afghanistan but the number of women using them in rural areas is too low, according to the Ministry of Public Health (MoPH). Hamida Ebadi, director of MoPH’s reproductive health unit, reckoned only 14-15 percent of women in rural and remote regions use family planning services. Most pregnancy-related deaths happen in remote, isolated and insecure areas of the country where people have poor access to quality health services, officials say.      Full news...

UNICEF: Child labour is an issue of growing concern in Afghanistan. The ongoing political tensions, insecurity and rising food prices have put the livelihoods of vulnerable families and children increasingly at risk. In Afghanistan, as in many other countries, the child labour problem is rooted in poverty and in socioeconomic inequalities based on gender and disability. Already, 30 percent of Afghan children aged 5 to 14 are engaged in some form of work.      Full news...

Channel 4 News: Nima Elbagir travels to Afghanistan's border with Pakistan, where a programme to eradicate opium production has led to an upsurge of child smugglers. In Tsasubi, village elders told us that forced to abandon poppy farming, and receiving no help in creating alternative livelihoods, they had turned to smuggling.      Full news...

PAN (Translated by RAWA): An 18-year-old Afghan boy named Nabiullah set himself on fire on his father’s grave and died in hospital in the in Takhar province, in Northern Afghanistan. ... according to information Nabiullah was the youngest one in his family and had lost his father in recent years but his elder brothers stopped him from going to school and forced him to do a job... it is possible that the economic and family problems were causes of the boy’s self-immolation.      Full news...

IRIN: Over 1,000 families in a camp for internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Kandahar Province, southern Afghanistan, have opted to return to their home areas in the north and northwest of the country because of worsening insecurity and lack of aid at the camp. Mohammad Azam Nawabi, director of the refugees’ department in Kandahar, told IRIN 1,087 families had formally expressed their desire to return.      Full news...

IRIN: Farmers in Afghanistan’s top potato-producing province are complaining about declining profits, mainly because of cold weather, lack of storage facilities and bad roads. Potato cultivation in Bamyan Province, central Afghanistan, employs thousands of people and output can top 150,000 tons a year, according to the Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock.      Full news...

The National: Juma Gul’s muffled crying became noticeable only when she wiped the tears away using her burqa or slumped forward with her head in her hands. Speaking Uzbek, she described how she made the equivalent of about Dh440 by selling her baby daughter off for marriage. The girl’s fianc? had memorised the Quran and his father promised that her virginity would be respected until she was an adult. The couple eventually wed four years ago, when she was eight and he was in his late twenties.      Full news...

RAWA News: Mohammad Hashim Zare, the governor of Jowzjan province in Northern Afghanistan, has been accused of wasting the aid donated to the people of this province by Turkmenistan, central government and other organizations which has been sent to the flood-affected people in that province. Ferouza Quraishi, the deputy of the Provincial Council of Jowzjan called the governor inefficient” and said the aid has not reached those in need.      Full news...

IRIN: Poverty, community pressure and the low quality of education mean 25 percent of children in Afghanistan aged 7-14 are at risk of leaving school and drifting into exploitative work situations, according to a new report by a Kabul-based think-tank. The cost of education, lack of role models and family pressures were cited as reasons why children often ended up being exploited in backstreet workshops, factories or as domestic servants.      Full news...

IRIN News: Facing unemployment, insecurity and lack of socio-economic opportunities at home, many Afghans, mostly young males, have increasingly resorted to costly and perilous illegal migration to European and other industrialized countries. Over 18,000 Afghan asylum-seekers were registered in 44 industrialized states in 2008 - a significant increase on previous years, according to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR).      Full news...

The Canadian Press: An international aid expert says only pennies from each dollar being sent to Afghanistan are actually reaching the people who need help. Marco Vicenzino says he is appalled by the inefficiency of humanitarian aid efforts. Vicenzino, who is a strategic adviser for the Afghanistan World Foundation, says about 80 cents of every dollar goes back to donor countries - largely through the contractors doing the work.      Full news...

The Trentonian: If so, maybe it’s time to look at the other Afghan surge: its population growth. It’s been seven years now since George W. Bush committed American troops to Afghanistan. Since then, Afghanistan’s population has jumped by 22 percent. Under current projections, its population will be twice as large in 2026 as it was in 2001. That’s because the average Afghan woman has almost seven children, one of the highest fertility rates in the world.      Full news...

The Times: Millions of pounds in taxpayers’ money have been wasted on failed reconstruction projects in Afghanistan, according to an internal assessment by the Department for International Development. An evaluation by independent consultants criticised the department’s approach to planning, risk management and staffing, and said poor co-ordination with the rest of Whitehall meant that the department was slow to shift strategy as the military effort moved to counter-insurgency.      Full news...

IRIN: Flash floods, landslides and earthquakes in different parts of Afghanistan in the last 10 days or so have damaged thousands of houses, killed hundreds of livestock and made thousands homeless, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has said. “In Balkh Province [northern Afghanistan] about 1,500 families need emergency assistance,” said Sheilagh Henry, an OCHA field coordinator.      Full news...

Reuters: Mohammed Ali has no idea that the Taliban who once drove him from his home are staging a comeback in parts of Afghanistan. As a hired farmer, he is too busy worrying how to feed a family of seven on $100 a year. At the moment his children live off just bread and tea, but that is better than the harsh winter months when there is sometimes nothing. Many Afghans face a more urgent daily battle against poverty and hunger.      Full news...

IRIN: Open defecation, lack of toilets and poor sanitation in makeshift internally displaced persons (IDP) camps throughout Afghanistan are a health threat, particularly to children, health workers and aid agencies say. According to the Afghan government, at least 230,000 people are living in formal IDP camps and informal settlements where few sanitary, water and toilet facilities are available. About 500 families (2,500 individuals) displaced from southern regions have set up shacks, tents and mud huts in Qambar on the western outskirts of Kabul.      Full news...

The National: Even as the international community renews its pledge to help develop Afghanistan’s infrastructure and public services, health workers throughout the nation’s capital paint a picture of a daily struggle against the odds in conditions that have barely improved since 2001. The lack of funding is so severe that operations are being carried out with old versions of the wrong instruments and patients must often supply themselves with medicines. In some cases, easily preventable deaths have apparently resulted.      Full news...

NPR: A growing number of Afghans — including children — are escaping the pain of war and poverty by using opium or heroin, for as little as a dollar a day. A United Nations survey begun this month is widely expected to show that at least 1 in 12 people in Afghanistan abuses drugs — double the number in the last survey four years ago. Experts say that the alarming trend is not being addressed by the Afghan government and its international partners, even though most officials acknowledge that the drug scourge threatens lasting stability in Afghanistan.      Full news...

Common Dreams: The proposed new Afghan law requiring (among other things), women to have sex with their husbands on demand and not leave home unescorted, has shocked the West. But for women in Afghanistan whose rights have always been bargaining chips to be given or taken away for political gain, it comes as no surprise. Despite the rhetoric from the Bush Administration in 2001 that “to fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women (Laura Bush),” Bush’s own military strategy set the stage for the new Taliban-like law today. In hiring the fundamentalist warlords of the Northern Alliance to defeat the Taliban, the US knowingly sacrificed women’s rights for political gain.      Full news...

IRIN: Despite a July 2008 joint emergency appeal for US$404 million to help the most vulnerable 550,000 pregnant and lactating women and under-five children in Afghanistan, nutritious food aid - specially fortified food -is yet to reach those in need. Some 24 percent of lactating women are malnourished, over 19 percent of pregnant women have a poor nutritional status (low on minerals, vitamins, food insecure and weak) and about 54 percent of under-five children are stunted, according to a joint survey by UN agencies and the government.      Full news...

IRIN: Millions of trees have been lost in Nangarhar and the neighbouring provinces of Kunar and Nooristan and the ecosystem has been severely damaged because of deforestation, in part induced by drought, officials say. "In the past, over 134,000 hectares of land in the 11 districts of Nangarhar Province were forest, but now tree cover is down to less than 15,000 hectares," Nazir said. Large tracts of forest have also been lost to what were initially small fires. These often get out of control as Nangarhar only has two fire engines and very limited fire-fighting resources.      Full news...

Reuters: Afghanistan sits on one of the largest mineral deposits in the region, the country's mines minister said, urging foreign firms to invest in oil, gas and iron ore sectors. A U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) had shown that the war-torn nation may hold far higher amounts of minerals than previously thought, Mohammad Ibrahim Adel said.      Full news...

IRIN: Life for Jamaluddin’s family was much better when they lived as refugees in Pakistan in the 1990s; things have got worse since they returned to Afghanistan in 2008. Like millions of other Afghans, war and fear of death forced Jamaluddin to flee to Pakistan. Insecurity, land disputes and lack of jobs have stopped tens of thousands of returnees from moving to their original areas and rebuilding their houses. Some households, including Jamaluddin’s, have set up tents and mud huts in different parts of the eastern Afghan province of Nangarhar.      Full news...

PAN: Expressing its deep concern, Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) has said that 80 percent of children in western Ghor province have been forced into labor due to poverty. The human rights official described the child labor a stigma in the society and stressed the need for improving the situation and provision of education opportunities to the children.      Full news...

IRIN: Wheat flour, rice and cooking oil prices have dropped by over 15 percent in the past three months but adequate food is still unaffordable for millions of Afghans living on less than US$1 a day, according to officials. The average price of a 50kg bag of wheat flour was 1,100 Afghanis (about US$21) on 10 March in Kabul, down from $36 in December 2008. A 24.5kg sack of rice has gone down to $25 from $37, and the cost of a 16kg canister of ghee is now $20 instead of $31.      Full news...

Xinhua: Around 10 million out of the whole population of the war-torn Afghanistan are jobless, a local newspaper reported Tuesday. "About 10 million out of 25 million populations of Afghanistan are without job," the newspaper Arman-e-Millie quoted Mohammad Zahir Kargar, the president of Workers Union of Afghanistan, as saying. Based on the remarks of Kargar, the daily said that high rate of unemployment and joblessness is the main reason for taking people towards committing criminal activities, armed robberies, suicide attacks and resorting to drug smuggling and addictions.      Full news...