Germany Sends Winter Aid to Afghanistan

Germany has earmarked almost €400,000 ($500,000) in humanitarian aid to help Afghanistan through one of its worst winters in recent times, the foreign ministry said on Thursday. It said the World Vision Deutschland group would distribute much of the aid, including food and medicine, to the badly hit Ghor region in the west, where up to 460 people are thought to have died in the past month and a half. Other aid will be sent to the capital Kabul to help people made homeless, the ministry said in a statement. Some 600 people, many of them children, have died during Afghanistan's harshest winter in a decade and aid officials in the conflict-torn country are warning of a humanitarian crisis. The World Food Program has also warned of potentially catastrophic floods after the snow melts.