The Guardian: Afghanistan is at risk of a polio outbreak, health officials have warned, after the Taliban suspended the vaccination campaign over security fears and restrictions on women. The Taliban had “temporarily suspended” polio vaccinations in Afghanistan, a health official involved with the campaign confirmed to the Guardian, because of security concerns and women’s involvement in administering vaccines. A highly infectious viral disease, polio can cause paralysis and death, particularly in infants and young children.      Full news...

UN News: Kanni Wignaraja, Director of UNDP’s Regional Bureau for Asia and the Pacific, who recently visited the country, told correspondents in New York that 69 per cent of Afghans are “subsistence insecure” – meaning they do not have enough basic resources. “Something that really hit me … was the harsh impact of continuous natural disasters,” she said, adding that many parts of Afghanistan are facing “dramatic” scarcity of water further setting back development efforts.      Full news...

Indian Express News: Afghan women feel scared or unsafe leaving their homes alone because of Taliban decrees and enforcement campaigns on clothing and male guardians, according to a report from the UN mission in Afghanistan.The report, issued Friday, comes days before a UN-convened meeting in the Qatari capital is set to start, with member states and special envoys to Afghanistan to discuss engagement with the Taliban and the country’s crises, including the human rights situation.      Full news...

Taipei Times News: Human Rights Watch (HRW) yesterday said that Afghanistan’s public health system has been hit hard following a sharp reduction in foreign assistance, coupled with serious Taliban abuses against women and girls, jeopardizing the right to healthcare for millions of Afghans. In a new report, the New York-based watchdog said this has left the “Afghan population increasingly vulnerable to severe malnutrition and illness” among other effects of inadequate medical care.      Full news...

CNN: At least 78 people have died in freezing conditions in Afghanistan in the last nine days, a Taliban official said Thursday, deepening a humanitarian crisis affecting millions of people now living under the control of the radical Islamist group. Shafiullah Rahimi, a spokesperson for the Taliban’s Ministry of Disaster Management, told CNN that along with the loss of human life, more than 77,000 livestock had also frozen to death in recent days.      Full news...

BBC World Service: The young woman was crying, begging the doctor to kill her and her baby. Dr Nuri, an obstetrician in central Afghanistan, was about to deliver the baby by Caesarean section when the mother broke down. "I don't know how I can stay alive," she said, according to Dr Nuri, "so how can I give birth to another human being?" The women on Dr Nuri's ward are so malnourished that they know they are unlikely to have enough breast milk to feed their children.      Full news...

BBC: In a matter of weeks, the birthing unit Rabia delivered her baby in had been stripped down to its bare basics. She was given no pain relief, no medicine and no food.The hospital sweltered in temperatures topping 43C (109F) - the power had been cut and there was no fuel to work the generators. "We were sweating like we were taking a shower," says Rabia's midwife Abida, who worked tirelessly in darkness to deliver the baby by mobile phone light.      Full news...

Aljazeera: The death toll from this week’s flooding in Afghanistan’s eastern province of Nuristan has risen to at least 113, with dozens of people still missing, officials said.Rescue operations were still under way on Sunday, days after heavy rains overwhelmed Kamdesh district in the remote, Taliban-controlled province, about 200 kilometres (120 miles) northeast of the capital, Kabul, on Wednesday.      Full news...

AP: KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Gunmen on Tuesday targeted an anti-polio drive in eastern Afghanistan, killing at least five members of two vaccination teams in separate attacks, officials said.No militant group immediately claimed responsibility for the attacks that took place in the city of Jalalabad and the nearby districts of Khoyani and Surkhrud, according to Attaullah Khogyani, spokesman for the governor in Nangarhar province. Jalalabad is the provincial capital.      Full news...

The New York Times: KABUL, Afghanistan — Three health workers, all women, working for the government’s polio vaccine campaign were shot dead in Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan on Tuesday, local officials said, only weeks after three women working in television were killed in the same city.The women, all in their 20s, were going about their jobs in the bustling town near the border with Pakistan when they were gunned down in two separate attacks.      Full news...

Tolo News: Gul, 28, is a native of nearby Faryab province, but has sought refuge in Herat province amid the war and other violence. She said she did not have any other option except to sell her kidney and to pay the loans of her husband who was in Taliban custody. The Taliban has not commented.      Full news...

The New York Times: HERAT, Afghanistan — Amid the bustle of beggars and patients outside the crowded hospital here, there are sellers and buyers, casting wary eyes at one another: The poor, seeking cash for their vital organs, and the gravely ill or their surrogates, looking to buy.      Full news...

The Guardian: Khoja Zada found his son around noon; his body was under layers of rubble and mud. The rain had stopped and the sun was shining again when the 70-year-old dug him out. At midnight, he buried him again. Less than a week after flash floods killed at least 116 people – including Zada’s 35-year-old son – and injured 120 more in Charikar, the capital of Afghanistan’s Parwan province, Zada’s house lies destroyed, each room filled almost to the ceiling with what is now dry mud.      Full news...

CNN: Kabul, Afghanistan: Flash flooding in Afghanistan's Parwan province has killed at least 86 people and injured at least 106, according to Rahmatullah Haidari, deputy spokesman for the governor of the province. Officials in in the disaster management ministry said that torrential rain earlier this week triggered flash flooding in the country's Parwan province -- which borders Kabul -- Reuters news agency reported.      Full news...

(Pajwaok): The Ministry of Public Health (MoPH) has spent above eight million afghanis additional amount purchasing medicines, medical equipment and health products at exorbitant rates for the Afghan-Japan Hospital, Pajhwok Afghan News learned reliably on Monday.According to available documents, one IV bag, the original price of which is 65 afs, has been purchased for over 260 afs. In comparison with the market price, the total IV bags consumed 4.2 million afs extra.      Full news...

The Guardian: Millions of people are being pushed towards hunger by the coronavirus pandemic, which could end up killing more people through lack of food than from the illness itself, Oxfam has warned.Closed borders, curfews and travel restrictions have disrupted food supplies and incomes in already fragile countries, forcing an extra million people closer to famine in Afghanistan and heightening the humanitarian disaster in Yemen, where two-thirds already live in hunger.      Full news...

The National: The economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic is pushing Afghan children into early marriage or labour work and away from education. Few children in Afghanistan have suffered severe coronavirus-related health issues, but pandemic-induced economic hardships expose families to inequalities that many richer countries don’t face.      Full news...

The KHAMA PRESS News Agency: Afghanistan; amid the rampant increase in the COVID-19 cases, faces off its all-weather foe, corruption. the 2018 Transparency International corruption index ranked Afghanistan the 3rd most corrupt country in the world. The shaky system, hit by decades-old war, is not in a position to regulate its retroactive intuitions to contain the pandemic and properly utilize the foreign slash.      Full news...

Al-Jazeera: Gunmen stormed a maternity hospital in the western part of the Afghan capital Kabul, setting off an hours-long shootout with the police and killing 16 people, including two newborn babies, their mothers and an unspecified number of nurses. An image showed a woman who had been killed lying on the ground still holding tightly to her baby, who a nurse in the unit confirmed to Reuters news agency had survived and had been moved to an intensive care unit at another hospital.      Full news...

The New York Times: One Wednesday in March, 11,627 people crossed the Iranian border into the Afghan province of Herat. A sea of young men formed outside an immigration center that could accommodate only 300 people at a time. Some carried backpacks, others large sacks overstuffed with their belongings. One carried a child’s bicycle, another a string instrument. One had just two blankets folded under his arm, another a canary in a cage.      Full news...

Los Angeles Times: When a suicide bomber targeted a wedding hall in the Afghan capital last week, killing at least 80 people, many of the bodies were brought to a dilapidated two-story block on the perimeter of Kabul. This is the Forensic Medicine Directorate, Criminal Techniques Department, the only functioning criminal forensic laboratory in Afghanistan, where a team of four molecular biologists juggles hundreds of cases a week, including victims of rape, drug overdoses, homicide, and bombings.      Full news...

ReliefWeb: One year after the worst drought on record forced nearly half a million Afghans to leave their homes, many families remain in tents on the outskirts of Herat city. Unable to return home due to ongoing conflict, they struggle to survive as support is cut back.      Full news...

Common Dreams: The majority of American veterans and members of the general public agreed in two new surveys that the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the U.S. military campaign in Syria were all “not worth fighting.” The Pew Research Center, for the pair of polls published Wednesday, asked all respondents to consider the costs versus the benefits to the United States in their analysis of whether each conflict was worthwhile.      Full news...

The Defense Post: Taliban fighters have stormed several security posts providing protection to Afghanistan’s historic minaret of Jam, cutting access to the UNESCO World Heritage Site and killing 18 security forces, officials said Wednesday, May 29. The attack comes less than a week after the revered 12th-century minaret, located in a remote part of the western province of Ghor, was threatened by surging floodwaters.      Full news...

Foreign Policy: The respiratory ward of Kabul’s Indira Gandhi Children’s Hospital, built with Indian aid, is filled with children gasping for breath. Some scream as they’re treated, their cries echoing off the concrete walls. Amid the shrieks, doctors, parents, and patients struggle to heal, soothe, and breathe. The ward follows a seasonal rhythm—in the summers, it’s used to treat gastric issues, but during the winter, doctors treat Afghanistan’s vulnerable population for chronic respiratory illnesses that they attribute to pollution in the air, a mix of heating from homes and pollution from industrial sources.      Full news...

Al Jazeera: In a recent address to Afghanistan’s healthcare providers, Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah said, “With what we spend on a single day of war, we could build a state-of-the-art hospital.” With that statement, Abdullah - a medical doctor himself - summed up the state of healthcare in the country plagued by limited resources and an ongoing war.      Full news...

The New Humanitarian: Twice a week, Farid Rahimi gets up at dawn, wraps a blanket around his shoulders to keep warm, gathers his empty jerrycans, and waits beside the tap outside his house in a hillside neighbourhood above Kabul. At 7am sharp, water bursts from the pipes, filling Rahimi’s tank and buckets. He labours away, saving every drop until – just an hour later – the last drop falls.      Full news...

Associated Press: Wheat and opium farmer Murad Khan Ishaqzai, 80, has never seen a drought as bad as the one ravaging western Afghanistan where more than 250,000 people have been forced to abandon their homes. After his crops dried up in Gormach district of Badghis province earlier this year, Ishaqzai rented a truck and drove his family hundreds of kilometres through Taliban-infested areas to the neighbouring province of Herat.      Full news...

VOA: A new round of a polio immunization campaign went into action Monday in Afghanistan amid concerns insurgent bans could possibly deprive hundreds of thousands of children from receiving the vaccine. During the five-day campaign, officials say, about 52,000 Afghan vaccinators will visit 6.4 million children under the age of five.      Full news...

Asia Times: Despite his current role as head of a Chinese security and logistics company, Erik Prince is warning the Trump administration of the threats posed by China, and offering the company’s services as part of a remedy. In a presentation given to the Trump administration, published in full by Buzzfeed on Thursday, Prince outlined a plan to privatize US military operations in Afghanistan and mine rare-earth elements in the country.      Full news...