Rifts are growing among Taliban officials over the group’s decision to ban girls from secondary education, leading at least one minister to leave Afghanistan and forcing families to move so their daughters can continue their schooling.  As religious police patrol large parts of the country to ensure that rules are enforced, the restrictions have become so repressive that some senior members of the militant group have called for them to be rolled back in recent months, three Taliban officials told NBC News, which agreed not to identify them so they could speak candidly. All three said there was a growing divide between ultra-conservative Taliban members in the southern city...

Jay North, known for defining the image of a postwar American child as a trouble magnet on television’s “Dennis the Menace,” died Sunday. He was 73. His death was announced of facebook by Laurie Jacobson, a longtime friend and fellow actor on the original television show, saying North died peacefully at home Sunday morning after years long battle with cancer. Friend and Representative Bonnie Vent confirmed his death in an email. North started playing the main character on “Dennis the Menace” at age 6 in 1959. The show’s title character, often clad in overalls, clashed with a neighbor and kept...

Three U.S. aid workers were laid off while in Myanmar helping the rescue and recovery from the country’s massive earthquake, a former senior staffer said, as the Trump administration’s dismantling of foreign aid affects its disaster response. After travelling to the Southeast Asian nation, the three officials were told late this week they would be let go, Marcia Wong, a former official at the U.S. Agency for International Development, told Reuters. “This team is working incredibly hard, focused on getting humanitarian aid to those in need. To get news of your imminent termination — how can that not be demoralizing?” said Wong, former deputy administrator of USAID’s...

Seventeen-year-old Walid Ahmad, who had been held for six months without being charged, suffered from extreme malnutrition, and also showed signs of inflammation of the colon and scabies, said a report written by Dr. Daniel Solomon, who watched the autopsy, conducted by Israeli experts, at the request of the boy’s family. The Associated Press obtained a copy of Solomon’s report from the family. It did not conclude a cause of death, but said Ahmad was in a state of extreme weight loss and muscle wasting. It also noted that Ahmad had complained to the prison of inadequate food since at...