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By Noor Zahid Afghan provincial officials reported a rise in girls' enrollment rates across eastern Nangarhar Province, despite constant attacks and threats by Islamic State and other militant groups in the area. "Of the 14,000 graduates last year, we had 3,000 girls. This year, 4,000 girls graduated out of the total 18,000 graduates," said Mohammad Asif, a spokesperson for the department of education in Nangarhar. Asif added that girls constituted 45 percent of the 820,000 total students in the province. Girls are traditionally deprived of education in Afghanistan's remote areas and were not allowed to go to school when the Taliban was in power. Decades-long conflict in the country has had negative effects on education, but there has been improvement in the last 15 years, with millions of students including girls, returning to school. Urban and rural disparities Analysts say more girls are attending school in urban areas than it is in rural parts of the provin...

Chicago police search for evidence at the scene of a shooting in Chicago, Illinois, on February 11, 2017. (Photo via the Chicago Tribune) Two teenage girls have been shot in the head in separate incidents less than 30 minutes apart in Chicago, Illinois. A police bulletin released on Sunday said that one of the girls, aged 11, was in the back seat of a parked car at around 7:40 pm, when someone fired shots, "striking her in the head." The girl, identified by her grandmother as Takiya Holmes, was said to be in critical condition at Comer Children's Hospital. "They are treating her as best as they can with all kind of aggressive measures that the hospital can do for her, but it's grim and we want prayers to go up for her. We want whoever saw what happened to tell the police," Patsy Holmes told local media. According to police, she was hit in the back of the head during the incident on the city’s South Side, which saw another head shooting less than half a...