An Afghan girl carries a basket of bread, as she passes by a fruit juice shop in the city of Kabul.

Girls make up only 35 percent of children in school in Afghanistan, being kept out of the education system by a lack of female teachers, early marriage and the need to work, agencies said.
Attacks on schools by extremist militants also remained a challenge, a United Nations representative said as a provincial government reported that Taliban had abducted two teachers and a school superintendent, AFP reported.
“Currently, only 35 percent of enrolled children are girls,“ international humanitarian agency CARE said. “And, despite overall increase in numbers of enrolled children, the percentage of female students is not increasing.“
About 6.2 million children are enrolled in school in Afghanistan, according to the education ministry. This is up from around one million in 2001, when the extremist Taliban regime was removed after five years in power.
However, only half of all children in the war-wracked country go to school.
“Despite important progress made, we cannot overstate the continued exclusion of girls in education,“ Catherine Mbengue for the UN children’s fund, UNICEF, told a media briefing.
The disparity was reflected in literacy rates of 14 percent for girls aged between 15 and 24 years and 51 percent for boys of the same ages, she said.
Girls were being left out of school because many had to work or were forced into early marriage as well as a lack of female teachers, she said.
CARE said separately only 28 percent of teachers in Afghanistan were women.
“This inhibits girls’ participation in education, as parents are reluctant to have teenage girls being taught by a male teacher.“
“Likewise, parents are hesitant to send their girls to schools if they are far from their homes,“ it said in a statement.
The Taliban barred girls from going to schools and are today behind a bitter insurgency that has seen repeated attacks on the education system.
Such violence left 220 pupils and teachers dead in 2007, the education ministry said last month. UNICEF said there had been 236 attacks on schools in 2007 with 23 recorded so far this year.
In the most recent, gunmen captured a school superintendent near the south-central town of Ghazni late Sunday and made him give the addresses of two male teachers who were also picked up, the provincial government said.
“We are still trying to locate them,“ government spokesman Ziauddin Zadran said.
Chief Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahed said local loyalists of his militia had captured the three although he was still trying to find out why, and if they would be freed.
Mbengue said UNICEF was working with local communities and religious leaders to see how best to protect schools while also boosting the number of female teachers.
She said others outside the education system included street children, about 38,000 of whom were estimated to be working in Kabul alone, and those with disabilities or in detention centers.
There were 400-450 juveniles aged between 10 and 20 in rehabilitation centers around the country and 71 children aged between two months and 13 years with their mothers in Kabul’s main prison, Pul-i-Charki, she said.

The United Nations’ environment arm and the World Bank will work on a program worth over $250 million (158 million euros) to reduce pollution in the Mediterranean, the UN agency said.
The five-year project will focus on boosting reforms and investment in various countries that border the Mediterranean to safeguard biodiversity and stop habitat degradation, the United Nations Environment Program(UNEP) said, AFP reported.
The countries eligible for funding include Albania, Algeria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Montenegro, Morocco, Tunisia and Turkey, while the Palestinian Authority will also participate, the Athens-based organization said.
“Apart from the World Bank, the partnership involves other relevant UN agencies, international financial institutions and bilateral and multilateral donors, making it the largest partnership ever for pollution reduction in the Mediterranean,“ UNEP coordinator Paul Mifsud said in a statement.
Marine biologists note that rising temperatures in the Mediterranean Sea due to pollution-related causes have led to the migration of a number of species from warmer waters.
Last June, fishermen in Greece were warned to avoid a torpedo-shaped puffer fish from the Red Sea, Lagocephalus scleratus, that can be lethal for humans.

Climate Projects
Projects to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in developing countries have prevented 135 million tons of CO2 emissions from entering Earth’s atmosphere so far, the Norwegian classification group Det Norske Veritas (DNV) said.
The projects, known as Clean Development Mechanisms (CDMs) and defined in the Kyoto Protocol, allow industrialized countries and their companies to finance projects aimed at reducing greenhouse gases in developing countries.
In return the investors are credited with emission rights.
The 1,000th project has just been certified in India, said Det Norske Veritas, one of the world’s leading classification agencies.
“CDM projects have so far generated more than 135 million certified emission reductions (CERs, each unit of which is equivalent to one ton of CO2),“ it said.