Reuters: Afghanistan’s Taliban government ordered women on Saturday to cover their faces in public, a return to a signature policy of their past hardline rule and an escalation of restrictions that are causing anger at home and abroad. A decree from the group’s supreme leader, Haibatullah Akhundzada, said that if a woman did not cover her face outside home, her father or closest male relative would be visited and face potential prison or firing from state jobs.
VOA: For several months Pashtana kept rejecting marriage proposals made for her 14-year-old daughter, Zarghona, until she had to make a final decision. “I had to choose between the survival of my four little children and giving Zarghona to marriage,” Pashtana told VOA over the phone from the southern Afghan province of Kandahar, where last year her husband, an army soldier, was killed in clashes with then Taliban insurgents. The young widow made every effort to provide for her children, but there was no job for her under a Taliban regime that has banned work for women.
Deutsche Welle: It’s eight months since the Taliban took control of Afghanistan and the country has slipped down the news agenda. ’The world forgets about us,’ says Friba Rezayee, the first Afghan woman to compete at the Olympics. “I wish I didn’t exist,\
Etlaat-e-Rooz: A family in Jalalabad, the capital of Nangarhar province, claims that Taliban forces killed a teenage boy and wounded two others. Salahuddin, a member of the family, said that the incident took place last night (Saturday, April 24) in the seventh district of Jalalabad. According to him, a 15-year-old boy, his name was Adel, was killed in a Taliban shooting.
Amnesty International: Responding to the deaths of at least six people and the injury of 11 others, including children, following bomb blasts in schools in predominantly Hazara Shiite communities in Kabul today, Samira Hamidi, Amnesty International’s South Asia Campaigner, said: “These reprehensible attacks on schools highlight the violence that Afghan people continue to face in their daily lives. It also shows that the Taliban, as the de-facto authorities, are failing to protect civilians, especially those from ethnic and religious minority groups, from harm.