Australia will bring its troops home from Afghanistan a year earlier than planned with most soldiers withdrawn in 2013, Prime Minister Julia Gillard said Tuesday.

Canberra, a key coalition ally of th

About 150 Afghan schoolgirls were poisoned on Tuesday after drinking contaminated water at a high school in the country's north, officials said, blaming it on conservative radicals opposed to female e

The Pakistan-based Haqqani network is suspected to have carried out the brazen suicide attacks on Western embassies and Parliament here, the Afghan interior minister has said.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai Monday blamed intelligence failures, particularly on the part of NATO forces supporting his government, for the worst coordinated insurgent attacks in 10 years of war.

K

Several attackers tried to enter the Afghan parliament in Kabul but were engaged by security forces and driven back, an official said.

They had taken cover in a building near the parliament and fight

Suicide bombers struck across Afghanistan in coordinated attacks on Sunday, with explosions and gunfire rocking the diplomatic enclave in the capital as militants took over a hotel and tried to enter

The United States embassy in Kabul was in lockdown on Sunday as explosions and gunfire rocked the capital, a spokesman said.

All staff were accounted for and safe, with no reports of injuries, spokes

At least one attacker was killed on Sunday as fighting raged in several locations in the Afghan capital, Kabul police chief, Mohammad Ayoubi Salangi told.

"Near the parliament, the first floor of a n

Gunmen launched multiple attacks across the Afghan capital Kabul on Sunday, with assaults in possibly seven different places, Afghanistan's NATO-led force said.

A spokesperson for NATO's Internationa

Germany's embassy in Kabul was damaged on Sunday but no one is believed to be injured, the foreign ministry said after explosions and gunfire rocked the diplomatic quarter of the Afghan capital.

A sp