A killer disease has united two women living 3,500 miles apart. One is a sufferer, the other a surgeon. Until recently they were strangers, but a London-based networking group brought them together in the wake of a campaign that has now attracted the support of Afghanistan’s First Lady. 

In India as part of a cultural exchange, Shirzad and three of his countrymen, two chefs and an administrator, are at the ITC Maurya, in Delhi, for a 10-day festival celebrating Afghani cuisine, after which they return with a similarly assembled Indian team to the Inter-Continental in Kabul for a 10-day showcase of Indian food.

North China's Shanxi Province has begun a training program for Afghan hospital administrators and medics. It will train 64 Afghans within the next two years, and 19 of them are already training in the province, its health department said on Saturday.

Afghanistan's President Ashraf Ghani and Chief Executive Officer Abdullah Abdullah celebrated the ancient festival of Nawroz, the Afghan New Year, as they headed to Washington, DC - their first official visit to the US.

Think open dialogue and reconciliation and China isn’t usually the first country that comes to mind. But in 2013 China shifted its principle of “non-interference in other countries” to one of active conflict resolution in some of the world’s most intractable contexts: Israel-Palestine, Myanmar, and Afghanistan. (...) But while it may be a welcome foray, its success will be muted at best unless China can overcome one major blind spot: religion.

“By far, the largest component of our requested budget increase is dedicated to the critical states of Afghanistan and Pakistan,” he told the committee in March 2010. (...) In the five years since those remarks, Shah has appeared to focus less and less on Afghanistan and more on other development programs, such as combating global poverty and the Ebola outbreak, while aid to Afghanistan accounts for billions more U.S. taxpayer dollars than any other country where the agency operates.