FAIZABAD, Afghanistan (Reuters) – Jam Bigum, a drug addict in Afghanistan’s impoverished northern province of Badakhshan, feeds her three-month-old son opium three times a day to keep him quiet.

KABUL (AFP) – Japanese Foreign Minister Masahiko Komura met President Hamid Karzai during a surprise visit to Afghanistan on Sunday in which he urged better relations with Pakistan.

KABUL (AFP) – Pakistan should stop “terrorists” from using its soil to attack Afghanistan if it makes deals with Taliban militants along the troubled border, the Afghan defence ministry said.

KABUL, Afghanistan – Hungry Afghans looking for their next meal eye bread scraps piled up like heaps of trash at a Kabul market as a vendor weighs out fistfuls of the stale crusts on a scale. A Pashtun woman waits with an empty plastic sack.

FAIZABAD, Afghanistan (Reuters) – A woman hemorrhages to death as she lies screaming in agony in a Spartan hut in a remote region of Afghanistan. There is no doctor or midwife to help and the hospital is several days journey away.

A strike force of US marines punched through Taliban frontlines in southern Helmand today as part of an Afghan “mini surge” intended to weaken the insurgents’ grip on the war-ravaged south.

SEOUL (AFP) – The United States has asked South Korea to send civilian and police personnel to Afghanistan, less than four months after Seoul withdrew its military forces, officials said Saturday.

Senior al Qaeda planner Abu Obeida al Masri, identified by authorities as a key suspect in the 2005 London transit bombings and a foiled 2006 plot to blow up U.S.-bound commercial airliners, has died, U.S. counterterrorism officials said yesterday.

At least 35 people, including 17 civilians and a Nato-led soldier, have been killed in Afghanistan today. The country’s interior ministry announced that 17 civilian road-workers were killed when Taliban rebels attacked them in the southern region of Zabul.

WASHINGTON (AFP) — Democrats have called on President George W. Bush to refocus US counter-terror efforts to Afghanistan and Pakistan, saying that over-emphasis on Iraq has allowed Islamic extremists to regroup along the Afghan-Pakistan border. “The negligent policies of the last half-decade have permitted al-Qaeda and the Taliban to regenerate, …