By the end of the year at least 30 per cent of seats on all public buses in Afghanistan will be reserved for women under an ambitious United Nations-backed programme launched in a country where drivers now speed past stops if only women are waiting while men refuse to give up seats for women and barge past them to board.
The United Nation refugee agency's fifth season of assisted returns to Afghanistan from Pakistan, expected to reach 400,000 this year, has begun amid some uncertainty and indecision among refugees.
After decreasing by 21 per cent in 2005, the cultivated area of opium in Afghanistan, the world’s largest supplier of the drug from which heroin is produced, looks likely to rise this year, a United Nations spokesman said today.
The United Nations today expressed shock at the “cowardly” murder of an Afghan national contracted by the UN Human Settlements Programme (UN HABITAT), who was dragged from the car he was travelling in and shot dead on Saturday.
