PARWAN, Afghanistan -- Hamid lies on a dirty street corner consuming heroin from a small yellow bag, open sewage running nearby.
The weary teenager, draped in a dirty blanket, says he bought the heroin at the main shopping street in Charikar in northern Parwan Province. Shopkeepers there sell everything from tranquilizers to heroin, he says.
KONAR, Afghanistan -- Local Afghan officials have called for a military intervention in the country's northeast after scores of suspected Pakistani Taliban fighters overran several districts in Nuristan, a remote province bordering Pakistan.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has backed a statement from the country's top religious body calling for stronger restrictions on women's freedoms.
On March 2, the Ulema Council issued a statement saying that men and women should not mix in the workplace or schools and that women must always be accompanied by a male relative when they travel.
"Open your eyes, look in the mirror/Look at your surroundings/Do not stop, wake up/Enough is enough."
These rap lyrics might not jump out as "gangsta" -- that is, if you're expecting profanity-laced rants and explicit calls for social and political change.
PRAGUE -- The much-acclaimed Iranian film, "A Separation," headlined Prague’s inaugural Iranian Film Festival this week, in a showcase event highlighting the best of Iran’s distinguished film industry.
Thousands of children roam the dusty streets and grimy alleyways of Afghanistan, working to earn desperately needed money for their families.
The sight of shabbily-dressed children, sometimes as young as three years old, is a common one around the military bases and shopping areas where they ply their trades under the blazing sun of summer or the biting cold of winter.
Gray desert surrounds the camp, a forbidding compound of watchtowers, mud walls, and razor wire.
Beyond the iron gates, dozens of makeshift tents dot the sands inside the compound, where hundreds of refugees -- men, women, and children -- lie in human excrement and other filth.
