Windsor Star: Afghan women - particularly in the volatile south, where the Taliban was born - rarely appear in public without burkas and often show deference to the opposite sex, lowering gazes to the floor, almost shrinking when a man approaches. Given that some hard-line Islamists believe the Koran decrees women to be subservient to men, improving conditions for women in a war-torn country with one of the world's lowest literacy levels requires more than education. It requires social engineering.      Full news...

IRIN: Civilian deaths resulting from armed hostilities between insurgents, the US military, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan and government forces have increased by 24 percent so far this year compared to the same period in 2008, according to a report by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon. In May alone, 261 non-combatants lost their lives in conflict in Afghanistan, John Holmes, UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, told members of the Security Council at a meeting on 26 June.      Full news...

Time: While abductions of foreign journalists can end and have ended in tragedy, the risks facing Afghan journalists are even greater. The Taliban and other lawless elements in the country are often motivated by the potential ransoms — sometimes worth several million dollars — they believe foreigners can bring them. Afghan journalists who fall into their hands generally do not offer the same moneymaking possibilities. And so the escape of Ludin, who like some other local journalists acts as a "fixer" for foreign correspondents, was particularly welcome.      Full news...

IWPR: Khadija Ahadi used to be the most active journalism student in town. At press conferences in Herat, she would always be there with her video camera, usually the only woman in the room. Nobody was surprised that she landed a job as the deputy editor-in-chief of Radio Faryad after her studies. But now her successful career has suddenly been stopped – by force. “Some men threatened me because I am a reporter, but initially I kept working and I didn’t tell my family because they would have stopped me,” said Ahadi, 32. “Then one day they threw two grenades in my house. I have not gone to work since.’’      Full news...

Reuters: The big surprise in Tuesday’s revelations of prisoner abuse at Bagram is how long these stories have taken to reach the international media, given the scale of the problem. Bagram Airforce Base is Guantanamo Bay’s lesser known - but more evil - twin. Thousands of prisoners have been “through the system” at Bagram, and around 600 are currently held there. Meanwhile President Obama’s lawyers are fighting to hold them incommunicado; stripped of the right to challenge the reasons for their imprisonment.      Full news...

UNICEF: Child labour is an issue of growing concern in Afghanistan. The ongoing political tensions, insecurity and rising food prices have put the livelihoods of vulnerable families and children increasingly at risk. In Afghanistan, as in many other countries, the child labour problem is rooted in poverty and in socioeconomic inequalities based on gender and disability. Already, 30 percent of Afghan children aged 5 to 14 are engaged in some form of work.      Full news...

Channel 4 News: Nima Elbagir travels to Afghanistan's border with Pakistan, where a programme to eradicate opium production has led to an upsurge of child smugglers. In Tsasubi, village elders told us that forced to abandon poppy farming, and receiving no help in creating alternative livelihoods, they had turned to smuggling.      Full news...

The Independent: Some still think of the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan as a “good” war. They may change their minds after watching the latest Dispatches, Afghanistan’s Dirty War. Last August, US troops went looking for Taliban insurgents in Aziz Abad, a small village 400 miles west of Kabul. After a brief firefight, they called in an air strike, whereupon an AC-130 gunship tore the village apart.      Full news...

PAN (Translated by RAWA): A father brutally murdered his daughter and a young boy for having love affairs in Samangan province, Northern Afghanistan. He stabbed them many times with a knife. The girl was named Shakila and was 18 years old and the boy named Ghulam Sakhi was 22. This savage incident took place at 3 in the morning in Haji Umar Village of Aibak city (centre of Samangan).      Full news...

PAN: Unknown assailants beheaded a university student in the southern Kandahar province, birthplace of Taliban movement, officials and witnesses said on Friday. Studying in a mosque on university premises, medical faculty student from Kabul Muhammad Mushtaq was stabbed to death just before noon, one of his classmates told PAN.      Full news...

The Huffington Post: Since 2001, the US Air Force has dropped nearly 31 million pounds (14,049 metric tons) of bombs on Afghanistan. The UN estimates that US airstrikes alone accounted for 64 percent of the 828 Afghan civilians killed last year. Those numbers practically scream the need to abandon conventional warfare tactics in Afghanistan and dramatically shift US foreign policy to incorporate a more humanitarian approach. Instead, we're seeing the horrific images from IDP camps: refugees who have lost loved ones; parents so desperate they would rather sell their children than watch them starve; children scarred both physically and psychologically.      Full news...

Los Angeles Times: Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan -- Journalist Qais Azimy and a colleague spent three nights as unwelcome guests at Kabul's fortress-like National Directorate of Security headquarters this week before they were released. What happened to Azimy and another Al Jazeera producer, Hameedullah Shah, happens often to local reporters who offend top Afghan political and security officials.      Full news...

The National: Juma Gul’s muffled crying became noticeable only when she wiped the tears away using her burqa or slumped forward with her head in her hands. Speaking Uzbek, she described how she made the equivalent of about Dh440 by selling her baby daughter off for marriage. The girl’s fiancé had memorised the Quran and his father promised that her virginity would be respected until she was an adult. The couple eventually wed four years ago, when she was eight and he was in his late twenties.      Full news...

The Canadian Press: The trafficking and sexual exploitation of children in Afghanistan is a growing concern, Canada's Foreign Affairs Department was told in a confidential human-rights report prepared by senior officials. The illegal marriage of underage girls and the sexual abuse of young boys is commonplace, warned the Afghanistan Human Rights Report obtained by The Canadian Press under access-to-information laws. "Sexual violence is commonly reported but remains difficult to verify," said the partially censored review, written last summer.      Full news...

IWPR: America pledges to reduce price paid by civilians in war against Taliban, but disputes Afghan estimates for Farah airstrike death toll. Sayed Karim, 72, is now all alone. The elderly, white bearded man bowed his turbaned head as he told of the 13 members of his family who were killed in a May 4 airstrike by United States forces in Farah province, on Afghanistan’s western border. “I am no longer young,” he sighed. “I cannot build a new life.”      Full news...

Reporters Without Borders: Radio journalist Zakia Zaki’s murder two years ago tomorrow is still unpunished and her husband assures Reporters Without Borders that the lack of progress with the investigation is almost certainly due to the influence of the murder’s masterminds. The director of Sada-e-Solh (Peace Radio), Zaki was gunned down in her home in Jabalussaraj, in the northern province of Parwan, on 6 June 2007.      Full news...

MSNBC: Should detainees the United States has shipped to the Bagram air base in Afghanistan have the same constitutional right to challenge their detention in court that prisoners at the Guantanamo prison in Cuba have been given? President Barack Obama didn't answer that question in a May 21 speech outlining his policy for dealing with alleged terrorists. In fact, Obama didn't mention Bagram at all.      Full news...

Amnesty International: Millions of people living in southern and eastern Afghanistan, terrorized by the Taliban, other insurgent groups and local militias ostensibly allied with the government, suffered insecurity that further restricted their already limited access to food, health care, and schooling. Indiscriminate attacks, abductions and the targeting of civilians reached unprecedented levels. The Taliban and other anti-government groups significantly expanded their attacks to cover more than a third of the country, including areas once considered relatively safe in the centre and the north.      Full news...

The Guardian: British pilots in Afghanistan are firing an increasing number of "enhanced blast" thermobaric weapons, designed to kill everyone in buildings they strike, the Ministry of Defence has revealed. Since the start of this year more than 20 of the US-designed missiles, which have what is officially described as a "blast fragmentation warhead", have been fired by pilots of British Apache attack helicopters. A total of 20 were also fired last year after they were bought by the MoD from the Americans last May.      Full news...

Reuters: An Afghan who has spent over six years at the U.S. military's Guantanamo Bay prison was only around 12 years old when he was detained, not 16 or 17 as his official record says, an Afghan rights group said on Tuesday. Interviews with the family of Mohammed Jawad, who like many poor Afghans does not know his exact age or birthday, showed he was probably not even a teenager when he was arrested in 2002, the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission said.      Full news...

AFP: The Afghan government is planning curbs on Internet use, starting with blocking pornography sites, as the country's first fiber optic cable is due to be on-line in weeks, officials said Sunday. The communications and information ministries are studying limits on web access because the current "free Internet environment" is being misused in particular by the youth, communications ministry spokesman Abdul Hadi told AFP.      Full news...

MADRE: Women in Afghanistan are routinely denied basic human rights, including education, healthcare, freedom from violence, and freedom of movement. Afghan women who fight to change this reality are attacked and even assassinated by ultra-conservatives. Meanwhile, US airstrikes that kill civilians further endanger Afghan women and their families. They also increase the power of the Taliban and other reactionary forces as more Afghans turn to them for protection from the United States.      Full news...

PAN: A teenage mother was stabbed to death by her in-laws in northwestern Faryab province on Wednesday what appears to be a result of domestic violence, officials said Thursday. Raheela, 18, who died from multiple stab wounds was the mother of one who got married four years ago, women affairs director in Faryab, Sharifa Azimi told PAN. Raheela's family members charged her father-in-law for killing her.      Full news...

VOA News: NATO says an airstrike by one of its warplanes has killed eight civilians in southern Afghanistan, in the midst of a controversy over civilian casualties. The NATO-led international military force on Wednesday said its troops called in the airstrike Tuesday in Helmand province after a clash with about 25 insurgents. A NATO statement accused the militants of using the civilians as human shields.      Full news...

Quqnoos: Foreign troops gunned down a local farmer Monday in Pushtrod District of the western Farah province, an official said. The US convoy opened fire on the farmer when he war irrigating his farms early Monday morning in the district, north of the provincial capital city. Bilqees Roshan, a provincial council member said the body of the farmers is flamed.      Full news...

Human Rights Watch: NATO forces in Afghanistan should immediately release the results of their investigation into a March 14, 2009, incident in which an 8-year-old girl in Kapisa province was burned by white phosphorus munitions, Human Rights Watch said today. A NATO spokesperson has denied allegations from the girl's father that NATO forces had fired the rounds that caused her injuries.      Full news...

The Sunday Times: When civilians get killed in conflicts in Sudan, Zimbabwe or Sri Lanka, the United Nations predictably raises hell. But when civilians are victims of domestic insurgencies or military conflicts involving the five big powers -- the US, Britain, France, China and Russia (plus Israel) -- the Security Council invariably remains silent or paralysed.      Full news...

AFP: Hundreds of Kabul University students labelled the United States "the world's biggest terrorist" on Sunday as they protested against US air strikes said to have killed scores of Afghan villagers. Chanting "Death to America", "Death to the biggest terrorist" and "long live Islam", up to 1,000 protesters marched outside the university to condemn what is believed to be the deadliest such incident in nearly eight years.      Full news...

Quqnoos: The tiny roads of the Afghan village do not witness the cheer of kids, the muddy houses are destroyed and the survival villagers even cannot find a place to mourn the victims of the fatal air-raid. It’s incredibly harsh to tolerate a second in Geranai, a remote village in Bala-Buluk district of the western Farah province, where the green rural area is heavily bombed and single smiling face can hardly be seen. One or two are remaining from a family of 10 to 15 members and the village is mourning the deaths, exceeding 100.      Full news...

The Independent: Of course there will be an inquiry. And in the meantime, we shall be told that all the dead Afghan civilians were being used as "human shields" by the Taliban and we shall say that we "deeply regret" innocent lives that were lost. But we shall say that it's all the fault of the terrorists, not our heroic pilots and the US Marine special forces who were target spotting around Bala Baluk and Ganjabad.      Full news...