Mail Online: Blood samples taken from Afghan schoolgirls who collapsed in an apparent mass poisoning showed traces of toxic chemicals found in nerve gas, the Health Ministry said today. Suspicion has fallen on the Taliban, the hard-line Islamist militia that opposes education for women and prohibited girls from going to school before it was ousted in the 2001 U.S.-led invasion.      Full news...

Care2: On the eve of Obama's speech on the Iraq transition, the last thing anyone needs is another reason to have misgivings about the situation in Afghanistan - but that's certainly what a piece from this weekend's San Francisco Chronicle provides. Among the Pashtun, Afghanistan's major ethnic group, sexual relationships between grown men and boys as young as nine are common, according to Joel Brinkley, a journalism professor at Stanford.      Full news...

AFP: An Afghan police commander said Friday that NATO warplanes targeting Taliban insurgents killed six children in a mountainous region of eastern Afghanistan known to be a militant hotbed. The alliance said it was investigating claims that civilians had died following the air strike on Thursday against militants who were attacking a military outpost in the restive province of Kunar, which borders Pakistan.      Full news...

Reuters: About 40 schoolgirls became ill and were taken to hospital after a suspected gas poisoning in the Afghan capital on Wednesday, another apparent attack by hardline Islamists opposed to female education. The Taliban banned education for girls during their Afghan rule from 1996-2001, but have condemned similar attacks in the past.      Full news...

IRIN: The rising number of civilian casualties and the leaking of thousands of confidential war papers by whistleblower website Wikileaks have prompted fresh calls to bring alleged war criminals in Afghanistan to book. Immediately after the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) released a 10 August report on civilian casualties, the UK-based Amnesty International said the Taliban must be prosecuted for war crimes.      Full news...

The Guardian: Survivors of an alleged Nato rocket attack on a small town in Helmand, which the Afghan government says killed 52 civilians, spoke today of their anger at what they claim was a deliberate air strike, despite coalition denials. Many residents of the town say they believe the strike, which they say was a missile attack on a mud house where people were hiding from nearby fighting, was deliberate. “The foreign forces could see us,” said Haji Abdul Ghafar, a 38-year-old farmer who had fled to Regey from a nearby village.      Full news...

The Guardian: The Nato coalition in Afghanistan has been using an undisclosed "black" unit of special forces, Task Force 373, to hunt down targets for death or detention without trial. Details of more than 2,000 senior figures from the Taliban and al-Qaida are held on a "kill or capture" list, known as Jpel, the joint prioritised effects list. In many cases, the unit has set out to seize a target for internment, but in others it has simply killed them without attempting to capture.      Full news...

PAN: Seven children were injured when coalition forces bombed a village in the southern province of Helmand on Saturday, health officials said. Three girls and four boys were injured in the air strike in Sangin district, the director of Mirwais Hospital, Dr. Abdul Qayyum Pukhla, told Pajhwok Afghan News. He said the condition of the seven was improving.      Full news...

CNN: About 60 schoolgirls in Afghanistan's Balkh province appear to have been poisoned and required hospitalization, the Ministry of Health said Sunday. The victims ranged in age from 9 to 14. Most suffered minor reactions, ministry spokesman Sakhi Kargan told CNN. It's at least the third suspected poisoning of girls attending schools in Afghanistan this week.      Full news...

PAN: The number of schoolgirls fallen ill after a suspected poisonous gas attack on their school in the volatile southern province of Ghazni has reached 60, medics said on Saturday. The teenage girls of the Jehan Malika High School in Ghazni City, the provincial capital, were hospitalised after smelling the poisonous gas, said the director of Ghazni Civil Hospital, Dr. Ismail Ibrahimi.      Full news...

AFP: Nine civilians, including four women and three children, died when a bomb ripped through a minibus travelling along the main road leading to the capital of Kandahar province. Eight other civilians were wounded in the attack, which took place in the Maywand area, provincial government spokesman Zalmai Ayobi said.      Full news...

The Times of India: Suspected Taliban militants executed a seven-year-old boy in southern Afghanistan after accusing him of spying for the government, a provincial official said Wednesday. The child was captured by the militants in Sangin district of southern province of Helmand Tuesday, Daoud Ahmadi, a spokesman for the provincial governor, said.      Full news...

PAN (Translated by RAWA): The sons of a female member of the Provincial council of Helmand, who raped a child last year, are still free from the hold of the law despite repeated demands and the orders of the authorities. Not everyone has the ability to watch the extremely shocking video clip of this rape, which has reached Kabul as well.      Full news...

PAN: Students at schools in northern Baghlan province have accused education officials of selling their text books to shops in the bazaar. Although the academic year started three months ago, the students say they have not received their books from the Ministry of Education. Stationary and book store owners said officials had sold them the new textbooks.      Full news...

Amnesty International: Afghan people continued to suffer widespread human rights violations and violations of international humanitarian law more than seven years after the USA and its allies ousted the Taliban. Access to health care, education and humanitarian aid deteriorated, particularly in the south and south-east of the country, due to escalating armed conflict between Afghan and international forces and the Taliban and other armed groups. Conflict-related violations increased in northern and western Afghanistan, areas previously considered relatively safe.      Full news...

The Associated Press: Six schoolboys and four teachers were injured Tuesday in a bombing on a school in eastern Afghanistan, while 30 schoolgirls fell ill in a suspected poisoning in the north, officials said. The blast, triggered by a bomb hidden inside the building, occurred as students were entering Rohi High School in the Mandozai district of the south-eastern province of Khost, said Mubarez Zadran, spokesman for the provincial governor.      Full news...

The Women’s International Perspective: The revelation that the number of opium-addicted Afghan children has reached new highs is a sad unintended consequence of that war. It dramatically illustrates how adult war games can doom generations of children to a miserable life. A group of researchers hired by the US State Department found staggering levels of opium in Afghan children, some as young as 14 months old, who had been passively exposed by adult drug users in their homes.      Full news...

The Guardian: Some Muslims are fond of condemning western morality – alcoholism, nudity, premarital sex and homosexuality often being cited as examples. But Muslims do not have a monopoly on morality. In the west, child marriages and sex with children are illegal. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for many Muslim countries. I recently saw the documentary on the Dancing Boys of Afghanistan.      Full news...

Globe and Mail: Terrifying threats of dying from multiple gang rape “by four big black guys” who would catch little Afghan boys in the shower of a U.S. prison, was used by interrogators at Bagram to scare detainees into confessing, Omar Khadr’s lead interrogator admitted today. “It was a factious story that we made up” because we knew “Afghans were terrified of rape,” the interrogator said.      Full news...

PAN (Translated by RAWA): 22 children under the age of five and 15 children below the age of one die every hour. And every 30 minutes, a mother dies during childbirth. These statistics were announced by Dr. Suraya Dalil, Deputy Minister for Policy and Planning and Acting Minister of Ministry of Public Health (MoPH) in a press conference in Kabul with Dr. Eric Laroche, Assistant Director-General Health Action in Crises, World Health Organization (WHO).      Full news...

AOL News: For girls in Afghanistan, getting an education has always been difficult, if not impossible. But their struggle appears worse than ever recently as a series of poison gas attacks on girls' schools has sent at least 88 girls, some as young as 7, to the hospital. The attacks in Kunduz province, in the north of the country, come amid heightened Taliban influence in the region, raising fears that ultra-conservative elements in society are becoming bolder in their efforts to exert influence over social behavior.      Full news...

DPA: Afghan officials said Tuesday that NATO forces shot dead four Afghan school students, but NATO said those killed were Taliban militants and their associates. The incident happened around three kilometres south of Khost city, the capital of the south-eastern province of Khost, on Monday night, Mubarez Mohammad Zadran, a spokesman for the provincial governor, told the German Press Agency dpa.      Full news...

Reuters: The world is ignoring the daily deaths of more than 850 Afghan children from treatable diseases like diarrhoea and pneumonia, focusing on fighting the insurgency rather than providing humanitarian relief, Save the Children said on Wednesday. According to the British charity, a child dies in the impoverished, war-torn nation every two minutes - mainly due to poverty, malnutrition and a lack of basic healthcare - and Afghan children have the worst chance in the world of surviving to their fifth birthday.      Full news...

CBC News: German troops have admitted they accidentally killed six Afghan soldiers during a gunfight with what they thought were Taliban insurgents, the Afghan army said Saturday. Three Germans died in the incident Friday in northern Kunduz province. German soldiers in an armoured personnel carrier opened fire after coming across two civilian vehicles that refused to stop.      Full news...

PAN: At least two Afghan civilians were killed and four others wounded in crossfire between NATO-led forces and Taliban militants in southeastern Afghanistan, officials said. A mortar shell fired by NATO forces hit a house in the Chargoti village, killing a teenaged couple and injuring a man, his wife and two of their children, Madad added.      Full news...

Reuters: Afghanistan is the hardest place in the world to be a child, the South Asia regional director for UNICEF said, with high child mortality rates, poor levels of nutrition and rampant sexual abuse. "The situation in Afghanistan as a whole is one of the most dramatic in South Asia and also in the world. Afghanistan is the most difficult place to be born as a child," Daniel Toole said on a visit to Afghanistan this week.      Full news...

DAWN: Almost half of school-age children in Afghanistan do not have access to education, President Hamid Karzai said Saturday as he inaugurated the new school year. “Five million school-age children in our country do not go to school, some because of war or because their schools have been closed by the Taliban or others, some because they do not have the ability to go to schools,” he said.      Full news...

McClatchy Newspapers: The military helicopters swooped in from behind the three-vehicle convoy as it wound through a remote road in southern Afghanistan , and survivors of last week's deadly attack said they had no idea they were in danger until the lead four-wheel drive exploded. After seeing the gruesome aftermath of that rocket strike, survivors of the NATO attack told McClatchy , women jumped from the second car and frantically waved their head scarves to try to stop the attack.      Full news...

BBC News: United Nations aid agencies are increasingly concerned about the number of children from Afghanistan migrating across Europe alone. Latest figures from the UN Refugee Agency show that the number of Afghan children under 18 who applied for asylum in Europe last year rose by 64%, from 3,800 to more than 6,000.      Full news...

This is a story about the women and children of Badam Bagh, the only women’s prison in Kabul. It is home to some 90 inmates, many of them mothers. Eighteen-year-old Krishma is one of them..... Fawzia, inmate: “It’s been two months since my arrest. I’m in here because after my husband had hit me, I got angry so I left my house and went to stay with my sister-in-law.” ... In another country, Fawzia and many of the women here would not even be in jail. They would be considered victims rather than perpetrators.      Full news...