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Afghan school year starts without millions of teenage girls

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Afghanistan’s schools have reopened for the new academic year, but hundreds of thousands of teenage girls remain barred from attending classes as Taliban authorities ban their attendance in secondary school.

Education Minister Habibullah Agha confirmed in a statement that schools up to grade six “will currently be open for girls”, effectively retaining a ban on high school for female students.

Madrassas, or Islamic schools, are the only education centres open for girls of all ages. Yalda, a ninth grader in Kabul, told Al Jazeera that the madrassa was good for enhancing her knowledge of religion.

But “the madrassa cannot help me become a doctor, because that’s done in school”, she said.

Tenth grader Sara said she daydreamed of schools reopening “all the time”.

“Maybe someday schools will reopen and my education will progress further. I will never lose hope,” she said.

Taliban authorities have imposed an austere interpretation of Islam since storming back to power in August 2021 after the withdrawal of United States-led foreign forces that backed the previous governments.

The ban on girls’ secondary education came into effect in March last year, just hours after the education ministry reopened schools for both girls and boys. No Muslim-majority country bans women’s education.

Taliban leaders, who also banned women from university education in December, have repeatedly claimed they will reopen secondary schools for girls once “conditions” have been met, including remodelling the syllabus along Islamic lines.

Taliban officials have justified the school ban and curbs on women’s freedom due to a lack of a “safe environment”. Some senior Taliban leaders, however, said that Islam granted women rights to education and work.

(aljazeera.com)

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Over 13,000 children killed in Gaza

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Israel has killed more than 13,000 children in Gaza since October 7 while others are suffering from severe malnutrition and do not “even have the energy to cry”, says the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

“Thousands more have been injured or we can’t even determine where they are. They may be stuck under rubble … We haven’t seen that rate of death among children in almost any other conflict in the world,” UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell told the CBS News network on Sunday.

“I have been in wards of children who are suffering from severe anaemia malnutrition, the whole ward is absolutely quiet. Because the children, the babies … don’t even have the energy to cry.”

Russell said there were “very great bureaucratic challenges” moving trucks into Gaza for aid and assistance as famine stalks more than two million Palestinians since Israel’s “genocidal” war began.

Moreover, according to the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), one in three children under the age of two in northern Gaza is now acutely malnourished. The agency also warned that famine is looming in the besieged enclave facing relentless Israeli bombing for more than five months.

International criticism has mounted on Israel due to the death toll of the war, the starvation crisis in Gaza, and allegations of blocking aid deliveries into the enclave.

On Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu repeated his threat of a ground assault on Rafah, the town bordering Egypt where more than a million Palestinians have taken refuge.

“No amount of international pressure will stop us from realising all the goals of the war: eliminating Hamas, releasing all our hostages and ensuring that Gaza will no longer pose a threat against Israel,” Netanyahu said in a video released by his office.

“No amount of international pressure will stop us from realising all the goals of the war: eliminating Hamas, releasing all our hostages and ensuring that Gaza will no longer pose a threat against Israel,” Netanyahu said in a video released by his office.

Since October 7, Israel’s military campaign has killed at least 31,645 Palestinians in Gaza, mostly women and children, according to Gaza’s health ministry, and displaced nearly two million of its residents.

The Israeli operation has also led to accusations of genocide, being probed at the UN’s International Court of Justice.

Israel has repeatedly denied the genocide charges and stressed that it is acting in self-defence after the October 7 attack by Hamas that it says killed more than 1,130 people and took more than 200 as captives.

(aljazeera)

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A volcano in Iceland is erupting for the fourth time in 3 months

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A volcano in Iceland erupted Saturday evening for the fourth time in three months, sending orange jets of lava into the night sky.

Iceland’s Meteorological Office said the eruption opened a fissure in the earth about 3 kilometers (almost 2 miles) long between Stóra-Skógfell and Hagafell mountains on the Reykjanes Peninsula.

The Met Office had warned for weeks that magma — semi-molten rock — was accumulating under the ground, making an eruption likely.

A volcano in Iceland erupted Saturday evening for the fourth time in three months, sending orange jets of lava into the night sky.

Iceland’s Meteorological Office said the eruption opened a fissure in the earth about 3 kilometers (almost 2 miles) long between Stóra-Skógfell and Hagafell mountains on the Reykjanes Peninsula.

The Met Office had warned for weeks that magma — semi-molten rock — was accumulating under the ground, making an eruption likely.

Grindavik was evacuated in November when the Svartsengi volcanic system awakened after almost 800 years with a series of earthquakes that opened large cracks in the ground north of the town.

The volcano eventually erupted on Dec. 18, sending lava flowing away from Grindavik. A second eruption that began on Jan. 14 sent lava toward the town. Defensive walls that had been bolstered after the first eruption stopped some of the flow, but several buildings were consumed by the lava.

Both eruptions lasted only a matter of days. A third eruption began Feb. 8. It petered out within hours, but not before a river of lava engulfed a pipeline, cutting off heat and hot water to thousands of people.

RUV quoted geophysicist Magnús Tumi Guðmundsson as saying that the latest eruption is the most powerful so far. The Met Office said some of the lava was flowing towards the defensive barriers around Grindavik.

Iceland, which sits above a volcanic hot spot in the North Atlantic, sees regular eruptions and is highly experienced at dealing with them. The most disruptive in recent times was the 2010 eruption of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano, which spewed huge clouds of ash into the atmosphere and led to widespread airspace closures over Europe.

No confirmed deaths have been reported from any of the recent eruptions, but a workman was declared missing after falling into a fissure opened by the volcano.

(AP)

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Indian gangster ties knot in Delhi

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Indian Gangster Sandeep alias Kala Jathedi on Tuesday got married at a banquet hall in Delhi’s Dwarka area.

His bride was Anuradha Chaudhary, who is also known as ‘Revolver Rani’ and faces several criminal charges.

Police had made heavy security arrangements in and around the banquet hall, Santosh Garden, in Dwarka Sector-3, which has been booked by Sandeep’s lawyer for ₹ 51,000.

The Delhi Police had also made a strategic plan to avert any incident keeping in mind the gangster’s notoriety and his previous record, according to sources.

Once a wanted criminal with a reward of ₹ 7 lakh on his head, Sandeep from Sonipat got a six-hour parole for his wedding from a Delhi court.

(Excerpts : NDTV)

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