The Observer: Afghanistan, struggling with a huge indigenous drug problem, has a new crisis. Its drug treatment centres - particularly in the capital, Kabul - are being inundated by heroin-addicted former refugees, many forcibly expelled from neighbouring Iran and Pakistan. 'The biggest problem now is the returning addicts. It is a tsunami coming to this country,' Suliman said.      Full news...

RAWA News: A young boy in Kabul committed suicide by eating 100 Phenobarbatone tablets. The neighbors said that he was the bread winner of a very large family and also had the responsibility of feeding his orphan nieces and nephews. One person said, “Because there were no jobs he was left unemployed. This is a major problem and our government has the responsibility to provide jobs for our youngsters."      Full news...

PAN: 55-year old Gul Murad lived a life of poverty in the Zedori village with his wife Anar Gul and eight children. Gul Murad had not had food for four days and died. When the people were burying him his wife went unconscious. When she was being taken to the Mazar-e-Sharif Hospital for treatment, she died on the way. At first the people thought she had died of the sadness caused by her husband’s death but later found out that she too had not eaten anything for days and had died of hunger.      Full news...

Toronto Star: Three decades of war, millions of mines and unexploded ordinance (UXO) for children to trip over, suicide bombers, birth defects due to clannish intermarriage, congenital disabilities never corrected for lack of health care, ordinary ailments left untreated and the vast afflicted detritus accrued from preventable diseases such as polio, to say nothing of inestimable psychological trauma: Afghanistan is a wasteland of the mutilated and crippled.      Full news...

Reuters: When 19-year-old Fatima returned to her home in northern Afghanistan after years as a refugee in Iran, she struggled desperately to earn a living. She briefly found work with an NGO, before being let go, and then spent two months learning how to weave carpets, before the factory shut down and she was again out on the streets of Mazar-i-Sharif.      Full news...

IRIN News: Sayed Ali (not his real name) said he sold his 11-year-old daughter, Rabia, for US$2,000 to a man in Sheberghan city, Jawzjan Province in northern Afghanistan to feed his wife and three younger children. With food prices in Afghanistan having soared over the past few months and the 40-year-old father unable to find work, he said he had no other choice but to sell his daughter to save his family from starvation.      Full news...

The Independent: The city is awash with widows who have come with the same idea. It is one of Kabul's many problems, this influx of desperate humanity that has flooded the city with double, treble the people it ever housed before the Russian invasion in 1979. Three-quarters of Afghans are almost completely illiterate. Among widows, the proportion is much higher. Kabul is awash with street children, hundreds of thousands of them, scavenging through rubbish, selling plastic bags, repairing bicycles, labouring for shoe-makers, or asking for alms in return for sending unwelcome wafts of aromatic smoke from the tin cans they wave at likely-looking passers-by.      Full news...

Times Online: It is an unremarkable scene by Afghan standards – at first sight, just another sad monument to three decades of war. Yet this desolate, seemingly hopeless, place is the source of Afghanistan’s most recent chapter of violence – and possibly now of a brighter economic future.      Full news...

International Herald Tribune: Thieves raided the city flour market in broad daylight a few weeks ago, shooting and wounding two people before escaping with their loot. "We are not feeling safe," Haji Hayatullah, one of the flour merchants, said sitting on the floor of his shop with sacks of flour stacked around him. "We don't have security and we don't trust the government to provide it." The merchants got together and hired eight private security guards.      Full news...

Pajhwok Afghan News (Translated by RAWA): A family handed over two of its children to another family because they were unable to feed them. The father named Bashir Ahmad lives in Ashaba village in Jabl Saraj District of Parwan province. He said, “I announced my poverty in the Jamay Qal-e-Naw Mosque in Bagram District and some time later a man called Abdul Raziq came and agreed to take away my children and look after them.”      Full news...

AFP: Shamsuddin, who goes by one name, is among millions struggling to survive in war-ravaged Afghanistan, one of the world's poorest countries where unemployment is 40 percent and half the population is under the poverty line. It is the poorest who are worst hurt by a global rise food prices which have nearly doubled in three years, according to the World Bank.      Full news...

RFE/RL: Death during childbirth is a scourge in Afghanistan. On average, a woman dies there every 27 minutes from complications during pregnancy, according to the nongovernmental group Save The Children. It is a chilling statistic that contributes to making Afghanistan one of the most difficult places in the world to be a mother.      Full news...

Reuters: Scarred by decades of turmoil and grief, 66 per cent of Afghans suffer from depression or some form of mental disorder, and an increasing number are turning to illegal drugs, a top health official said.      Full news...

The Globe and Mail: Indeed, many of the corruption problems date back to the early months of the Afghan war, in 2001, when U.S. Army Special Forces and CIA agents gave millions of dollars to regional fighters such as Mr. Sherzai to battle the Taliban, and then, after the Taliban had been ousted, allowed them to become the de facto government.      Full news...

PAN: Hundreds of teachers of 15 schools in Zaranj city capital of western Nimroz province went on protest on Saturday over the low salary and non-payment since last three months. Thousands of students were waiting in classes; however the teachers did not attend the classes.      Full news...

Tolo TV: The Pakistani police at the Torkham border killed a 7-year-old Afghan girl for carrying 3 kg of flour by crushing her under a car.      Full news...

Tolo TV: In Kabul a family was forced to sell two of their children to buy themselves food. This poor family which lived in a shabby house on a hill was forced to sell its children because of hunger and poverty. This family has six small children and their father is the only bread winner in the family.      Full news...

Reuters: About 1,600 Afghan women die in childbirth out of every 100,000 live births. In some of the most remote areas, the death rate is as high as 6,500. In comparison, the average rate in developing countries is 450 and in developed countries it is 9. Virtually everyone in Afghanistan can recount a story about a relative dying in childbirth, often from minor complications that can be easily treated with proper medical care.      Full news...

IRIN News: Hundreds of people have abandoned their homes and moved to urban areas in different parts of Afghanistan, and some have reportedly migrated to neighbouring Pakistan, due to worsening food insecurity, largely resulting from soaring food prices and low cereal supplies, provincial officials said.      Full news...

Reuters: Badakhshan, bordering Tajikistan to the north, is far from the fighting with Taliban insurgents in the south, but is still one of Afghanistan's poorest provinces. Those that fare worst live in the mountains where they are snowed in for up to six months of the year. In outlying districts such as Raghistan, Kohistan and Darwaz, there is little cultivable land and people survive on mulberries and other types of wild food, aid workers say.      Full news...

AFP: About 400 people demonstrated in eastern Afghanistan on Tuesday against skyrocketing food prices, witnesses said, in the country's first protest at food costs rising worldwide.      Full news...

IRIN News: Shops and mud-huts owned by Afghan refugees in Jalozai refugee camp in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province have been demolished and refugees who still live there have been ordered to vacate the area by the end of April, according to Pakistani officials and the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR).      Full news...

Reuters: The government says free basic healthcare is available within two hours walking distance to 85 percent of the population, from just 9 percent in 2003. But people say they are far from adequate and decent healthcare is available only to those who can afford to pay, travel to the capital city, or go overseas.      Full news...

Reuters: Scarred by decades of turmoil and grief, 66 percent of Afghans suffer from depression or some form of mental disorder, and an increasing number are turning to illegal drugs, a top health official said.      Full news...

AFP: Ten Afghans have died and more than 100 have fallen ill with liver disease after eating wheat contaminated with a poisonous plant, heightening food insecurity in the country, officials said Thursday.      Full news...

IRIN News: Afghanistan would have great potential to ensure food security for its estimated 26.6 million people if donors invested in agricultural infrastructure and/or if the country's over 190,000 hectares of poppy were converted to wheat production, a senior official of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said.      Full news...

BBC: In northern Afghanistan it appears some parents are being driven by poverty and hunger to marry off their daughters at an early age. Jenny Cuffe investigates for Radio 4's Seven Days.      Full news...

IRIN News: Over 2,200 children are working long hours in dozens of brick-making factories in Nangarhar Province, eastern Afghanistan, to pay off their families' debts, a survey by the Child Action Protection Network (CAPN), an Afghan body, has found.      Full news...

Feministe.us: It’s like a perfect storm of right-wing policies: The War on Drugs, women’s liberation by way of imperialism, and “freedom” at the barrel of a gun. The vast majority of the world’s opiates originate in Afghanistan. To fight drug production, the solution has been to target individual farmers and destroy their crops — without offering them any other option for survival.      Full news...

The Washington Post: More than six years after U.S.-led forces launched a military campaign here against the ruling Taliban movement, drug addiction is fast becoming a major concern for the government. With opium production reaching an all-time high of 6,000 tons last year, according to the United Nations, domestic addiction rates in this nation of nearly 32 million have also soared. A 2005 U.N. report estimated that Afghanistan was home to about 1 million drug abusers.      Full news...