On Thursday morning, about 74 girls attending Bibi Hawa Girls High School became ill after ingesting a poisonous gas. Police and school representatives transported the girls to the hospital after they fell unconscious and other classmates looked on and cried. The 8th, 10th, and 11th grade students were treated by Dr. Jamil Frotan, who stated, "We have already sent samples of their blood to the Ministry of Public Health and it will soon ... Read More

25-year-old graffiti artist Shamsia Hassani is one of the handful of Afghan “art activists” who have been taking to the streets of Kabul to paint political pieces around the war-torn city. Her motivation is to bring art to Afghanistan and get people thinking. Before graffiti, the self-taught artist served as an associate professor of sculpture at Kabul University. Shamsia has traded traditional art for spray cans and ... Read More

A woman on a bike is no big deal, right? The average female cyclist doesn't raise many hairs these days, but as we pointed out in last fall's Oct/Nov story "Riding High," this hasn't always been the case. In Victorian America, it was actually pretty taboo for women to ride, and the ensuing restrictions helped to spark the activism of the twentieth century women's rights movement. Over a century later, history is repeating itself in ... Read More

  Sosan Firooz, the first Afghani female rapper, has recently been hit with a spate of menacing text messages and phone calls demanding that she stop performing.  “If your daughter appears on TV again,” one caller said to her mother, “we will cut off your head.” This seems nuts—but considering recent news from her home country, it doesn’t seem impossible. Sosan, 23, performs with her hair ... Read More

Well, this is terrible: two men have been arrested by Afghan police due to allegations of beheading a 15-year-old girl after her father turned down a marriage proposal. The young girl was allegedly attacked while she was walking home with drinking water for her family. “Our investigation shows those who killed her were people who wanted to marry her,” a Kunduz province police official told the BBC. The two suspects were ... Read More