Afghanistan: 100 days of Taliban rule

Deaths from opioid use in the US have skyrocketed over the last year. Provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) showed that 88,000 people had died from drug overdoses in the 12 month period ending in August 2020 – an increase of 27% on the previous year. The US authorities say…

The Indian government has left individual states in the country to deal with the Covid-19 “tsunami” of infections on their own, Pawan Khera of the opposition National Congress Party said. He told BBC World News that during the first wave the government had carried out a centralised response and had “an obsession” with “premature credit…

Team BRIT is a motorsport team made up of six disabled drivers who use adapted cars to compete in races against non-disabled drivers equally. BBC Click’s Paul Carter went to visit the team to find out more about the car and the team’s hopes for the future. See more at Click’s website and @BBCClick

The winner of this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature says he thought the phone call telling him he’d won was a cold caller. Luckily, Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah was persuaded not to hang up. Speaking to the BBC’s Ros Atkins, he says he was making a cup of tea when the phone rang, telling the…

Israel’s military was trying to minimise civilian casualties in Gaza, but Hamas was effectively using Palestinian civilians as human shields, the Israeli Defence Forces spokesperson has said. “Hamas, purposely embeds its military infrastructure within the civilian population creating an almost impossible situation where they are using Palestinian civilians as their human shields while they fire…

Hundreds of Afghan children – some as young as seven or eight years old – are risking their lives to smuggle sweets and cigarettes into neighbouring countries. They’re hiding under lorries to cross national borders in the hope they’ll be able to get money for their families in exchange for these and other small, saleable…