Independent.co.uk: There is a little girl in the Meir Wais hospital with livid scars and dead skin across her face, an obscene map of brown and pink tissue. Then there is another girl, a beautiful child, Khorea Horay, grimacing in pain, her leg amputated, her life destroyed after her foot was torn to pieces. In another ward, two girls lie on their backs, a tent above their limbs. One has lost an arm, another – a 16-year-old – a leg. The black turbans are everywhere. So are the blue burkhas which we Westerners confidently – stupidly – believed would vanish from Afghan society.      Full news...

PAN (Translated by RAWA): In the common border of Torkham between Pakistan and Afghanistan about 4000 children engage in harsh work everyday. Besides being beaten by the border patrols of Pakistan they are also imprisoned. Rana, a 12-year old girl belonging to the Sarkhrud District of Ningarhar province, told PAN on 20 November that her father has Hepatitis and she is forced to work in Torkham. She added that everyday she has to bring a small bag of flour from the other side of the border to earn 10 rupees.      Full news...

King’s Journalism Review: A journalism student was sentenced to 20 years in an Afghani prison. He is charged with downloading and distributing an article he found online that criticized the rights of women in Islam. Yaqub Ibrahimi vividly remembers the day his brother, Sayed Parwez Kambakhsh was arrested. It was around ten in the morning on October 27, 2007. Four guards from Afghanistan’s national security service came to their small apartment, arrested Parwez and left. The security officers took Parwez to the Mazar-i-Sharif Prison and after a four-minute trial, sentenced him to death on January 22, 2008.      Full news...

AFP: Waheeda's arms were blown off in a suicide attack in the Afghan capital a few years ago. Flesh was also torn from one of her legs and she lost much of her vision. Her mashed face is split by an uneven scar. Now about 35, she has six children but not much else. "I cannot even drink water by myself," she weeps silently, dabbing at a tear with one of her stumped arms.      Full news...

Spiegel Online: It's all too often that the US military accepts civilian casualties as a necessary evil. An internal Air Force report describes its excessively violent methods as well as how officials have been trying to placate surviving family members with money. There have been times when artillary shells have killed innocent civilians after landing several kilometers off-target. That is what happened in Paktika Province in the country's southeast on July 19. In other instances, such as that of last Monday -- as well as on July 6 and other previous occasions -- wedding parties have been misidentified as groups of insurgents -- with deadly consequences.      Full news...

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty: Afghan education authorities say they are facing a difficult task of convincing parents to send their daughters to school as attacks on female students have increased in recent months. Three girls sustained severe burns in the southern town of Kandahar earlier in the week when unknown men sprayed acid on up to 15 girls. One of the girls might permanently lose her sight.      Full news...

IRIN: UXOs and explosive remnants of war have also been reported in other returnees' settlements in the eastern provinces of Nangarhar and Kunar. Hundreds of thousands have returned there in the past few years. "About 200 metres from our settlement the area is full of landmines and explosive devices which often kill animals," said Mohammad Afzal, a resident of a settlement in Nangahar Province. Provincial officials said mine-clearing agencies had been asked to re-examine areas in Baghlan and Nangarhar provinces for any hazardous explosives.      Full news...

BBC News: Attackers in Afghanistan have sprayed acid in the faces of at least 15 girls near a school in Kandahar, police say. They say the attack happened shortly before at least six people were killed in a bomb blast near a government building in the city.      Full news...

Los Angeles Times: The U.S. military acknowledged Saturday that 37 civilians were killed and 35 injured during fighting last week in Kandahar province between insurgents and coalition forces. The finding came just three days after provincial officials and the Afghan president's office asserted that three dozen people had died in an errant U.S. airstrike on a wedding party in a village outside the city of Kandahar.      Full news...

PAN: Over 14 security guards of a road construction company were killed in firing by American soldiers in the southeastern Khost province late Sunday evening, the provincial governor said. Arsala Jamal told PAN the firefight erupted in Khoni Khwar area of the province earlier Sunday evening. The clash occurred after American soldiers landed the helicopter on their way to Bak district.      Full news...

VOA: Pakistani security officials say suspected Taliban militants have killed two Afghan men, accusing them of spying for U.S. forces. Officials said the militants left the bodies on a road in the North Waziristan tribal area of Pakistan's volatile northwest.      Full news...

CNN News: The U.S. military is investigating two airstrikes this week that Afghan officials say killed as many as 60 civilians. Many Afghans accuse the United States of not taking caution when carrying out airstrikes in civilian areas and Karzai has been under enormous political pressure to stop the strikes.      Full news...

Workers World: For months now Afghanistan has been deadlier for U.S. troops than Iraq, even though there are 32,000 U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan and 160,000 in Iraq. A total of 1,004 foreign soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan since 2001. Some 625 of the casualties were from the United States. Forty percent of them occurred in the past two years. (icasualties.org)      Full news...

RTTNews: Civilian casualties were reported in an airstrike by U.S.-led coalition warplane in retaliation to Taliban militant attack in western Afghanistan Wednesday. This is the second consecutive day of civilian deaths in coalition force airstrikes in Afghanistan. Provincial council chief of Badghis province said around 30 civilians were killed in Wednesday's air raid, the American military did not confirm the death toll.      Full news...

ATN (Translated by RAWA): A 7-year old girl was raped by a young man in Ghazni province of Afghanistan. The girl is currently under treatment in the provincial hospital of Ghazni. Doctors in the hospital say that her condition is better now.      Full news...

Xinhua: As many as 37 civilians have been killed in an airstrike of U.S.-led troops in southern Afghanistan while attending a wedding party, local Afghan villagers said Wednesday. Haji Roozi Khan, owner of the mentioned house, told Xinhua on the spot that the air bombing and firing meant to retaliate on militants who hit the wedding gathering, killing 10 women, 23 children, and four men, all civilians.      Full news...

Canada Free Press: If you want to know what life was like in the seventh century, Afghanistan is the place to go. It is largely devoid of anything passing for modernity, by which we mean medical facilities, schools, roads, and such. Never mind the telephones and other detritus of modern life, the conversations have not changed in centuries. The only reliable element of Afghanistan’s economy is poppy cultivation for the opium trade which the CIA estimates generates “roughly $4 billion in illicit economic activity.” This is another way of saying that none of this money reaches what passes for a central government except in the form of bribes. It is a major source of funding for the Taliban.      Full news...

PAN: A woman in the district of Ali Shing, eastern Laghman province, committed self immolation and died on Friday night due to domestic violence. The woman, married in an exchange marriage, was mistreated by her in-laws, Muhammad Qader, resident of Shagi area, told Pajhwok Afghan News.      Full news...

Reuters: Nearly 15 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans seeking medical care from the U.S. Veterans Affairs Department have suffered sexual trauma, from harassment to rape, researchers reported on Tuesday. Kimerling said in a telephone interview the term "military sexual trauma" covers a range of events from coerced sex to outright rape or threatening and unwelcome sexual advances. "If you think about military service where you are living and working so closely with the same people, that even if it is not sexual assault ... it is possible that severe sexual harassment is just as traumatic," she said. The study does not cover active-duty servicemen and women, as VA services are only available to discharged veterans.      Full news...

AFP: Afghans are increasingly pessimistic about their country, with security, unemployment and high prices dominating concerns, according to an annual mood survey released Tuesday. Thirty-eight percent of respondents this year said Afghanistan was moving in the right direction, compared with 42 percent in 2007 and 44 percent in 2006.      Full news...

Green Left Weekly: While the war in Afghanistan has dropped off the front pages, seven years on, 56% of Australians say the 1000 Australian troops there should be brought home. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s talk about reconstructing the country haven’t fooled many. Most of the rebuilding projects have been handed over to profit-driven private corporations. Most roads and buildings remain in tatters. Average life expectancy is 44 years. Between 53% and 80% of Afghan people live below the official poverty line (depending on which part of the country).      Full news...

Canada.com: Thousands of people took to the streets of eastern Afghanistan Friday to protest against the killing of 27 civilians by Taliban insurgents. Witnesses said the victims, some as young as 15, were ordered off a bus by armed gunmen in the troubled Kandahar province on October 14 as they travelled to Iran in search of work. Organizers said more than 10,000 people attended the rally to protest against what they called an "un-Islamic" act.      Full news...

CISDA: The ridiculous sentence against Parwiz Kambakhsh shows that the justice programme designed and run by the Italian government has completely failed. This failure looks even worse if we consider the huge amount of money spent. In addition, this is also a defeat for Karzai and for Western governments that have dressed some well-known criminals with jacket and tie, named them "democratic" and put them in power.      Full news...

AlterNet: “I believe war is the crime of our times,” Blake Ivey, a specialist in the U.S. Army, said over the phone in a slow, deliberate voice. Ivey, currently stationed in Fort Gordon, Ga., is publicly refusing to deploy to Afghanistan. The 21-year-old soldier filed for conscientious objector status in July but was ordered to deploy while his application was being processed. Despite the threat of steep punishment, Ivey remains steadfast in his commitment to nonviolence. “I am against organized war,” he says. “It is flat-out murder.”      Full news...

The Independent: A Kabul appeals court has quashed a death sentence imposed on the Afghan student Sayed Pervez Kambaksh for downloading information from the internet on women's rights. The judges ruled however, that the 24-year-old trainee journalist should serve 20 years in jail -- a decision Kambaksh's lawyers insisted was unconstitutional and should be overturned by the country's supreme court.      Full news...

Rueters: Taliban insurgents killed 25 Afghan civilians, including a child, after firing on one bus and seizing control of another in the southern province of Kandahar, a local police chief said on Sunday. Violence in the war-torn country has surged this year with attacks at their highest level in six years, the United Nations' top envoy in Afghanistan said this month. Some 4,000 people have died so far this year, a third of them civilians.      Full news...

Quqnoos: Police have found the dead body of a 16-year-old girl, who police say was raped and then shot, in the south-eastern province of Khost (Afghanistan). The head of the province’s anti-crime branch, Gul Dad, said the body was found on Saturday and was handed over to the girl’s parents the next day.      Full news...

Times Online: A Nato airstrike in Helmand this afternoon may have killed as many as 18 women and children, according to local officials in the province. Angry local people brought the bodies of at least six women and children, some of them badly disfigured, to the provincial capital Lashkargar and placed the bodies outside the house of the provincial governor, according to witnesses who spoke to The Times in Lashkargar.      Full news...

PAN (Translated by RAWA): The Police Chief accused the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) of supporting criminals. Atmar said, “One of the main problems of the police is that the police arrests the dangerous criminals but then the Human Rights supports them; when a police is killed no one asks about him or the reason of his killing.”      Full news...

The Belfast Telegraph: All kinds of horrors flop on to my Beirut doormat. There's The Independent's mobile phone bill, a slew of blood-soaked local Lebanese newspapers — “Saleh Aridi's blood consolidates (Druze) reconciliation”, was among the goriest of the past few days — and then there are files from the dark memory lane through which all Middle East history has to pass.      Full news...