The Guardian Weekly: Human rights are in crisis in Afghanistan, where fundamentalist warlords hold high office and child abuse and gang rapes are on the increase. When Malalai Joya, a young female Afghan politician, spoke out against the presence of 'war criminals' in the affairs of state, she was expelled from parliament among shouts of ‘whore’ and ‘communist’. The recipient of various international prizes for bravery, she speaks of her commitment to defend the rights of women and children despite numerous attempts on her life.      more...

Reuters: Dozens of angry Afghans pelted police with stones after a convoy of foreign troops killed one civilian and wounded three more in Kabul on Friday, the capital's police chief and witnesses said. Seething resentment against the presence of some 65,000 foreign troops is growing in Afghanistan after scores of Afghan civilians have been killed in a series of mistaken air strikes this year.      more...

PAN (Translated by RAWA): Doctors of the central hospital of Uruzgan say that ISAF forces, without permission, shot photos of the female patients in the hospital and distributed expired medicines and biscuits. In reaction to these actions on November 26, the doctors of the central hospital went on a strike from treating the patients. Amir Ahmad, the head physician, told PAN that ISAF forces came to the hospital without permission went to the female section and took their photos. He added that taking women’s photos are again the Afghani customs and culture.      more...

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.      more...

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.      more...

RAWA News: To condemn the presence of Afghan criminals in the Mini-Peace Jirga in Islamabad, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) held a sit-in protest on October 28, 2008. RAWA denounced the participation of corrupt people and criminals like Abdullah (head of the delegation), Kabir Ranjbar, Arif Noorzai and Farooq Wardak. RAWA emphasized that such murderers and traitors can’t solve the problem of terrorism in both the countries and in no way can represent the Afghan people. The hands of above-mentioned people are stained with the blood of our innocent people.      more...

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.      more...

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.      more...

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.”      more...

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.      more...

PAN (Translated by RAWA): Tens of residents of Sar-e-Pul accused Payinda Mohammad in the “Complaints Hearing Commission” of the Parliament, the representative of Sar-e-Pul in the parliament, for rape, murder, seizure of land and other crimes and claimed that Younis Qanooni, Speaker of the Parliament, supports this MP; but the other side called the allegations “false”. About nine months back, Payinda Mohammad’s son had also raped a 12-year old girl in Sar-e-Pul.      more...

AFP: The lawyer of an Afghan reporter sentenced to death on blasphemy charges accused authorities Thursday of holding his client beyond a legal deadline, as the young man neared a full year in detention. The appeal of Perwiz Kambakhsh -- arrested last October and sentenced to death by a primary court in January -- has been repeatedly delayed because witnesses who had first testified against him did not turn up to court.      more...

Telegraph.co.uk: In the diplomatic cable written by François Fitou, the deputy French ambassador, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles is also quoted as saying that the coalition's military presence is "part of the problem not the solution". In the cable, dated Sept 2 and published in the investigative and satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaîne, Sir Sherard is quoted as having said that "the current situation is bad. Security is worsening, but also corruption, and the current government has lost all credit."      more...

LEFT PARTY group in German Parliament: “By inviting the former warlord Haji Mohammed Mohaqeq to Berlin, the German government demonstrates once again that it supports the wrong concepts, the wrong instruments, and the wrong people”, explains MP Heike Hänsel. The spokes woman for development politics of the LEFT PARTY parliamentary group announced that she and her fellow MPs would establish a support network for democratic groups in Afghanistan.      more...

The National: RAWA was founded in 1977 by a group of female Afghan intellectuals with the aim of building a government along democratic and secular lines. In the ensuing decades it has protested against foreign occupation and religious extremism, while carrying out such social work as running schools and medical services for refugees who fled to Pakistan. RAWA has never been able to operate openly in this deeply conservative society. Its leader was assassinated in the late 1980s and members now believe US-backed warlords and officials are among those who      more...

IRIN News: Hundreds of Pashtun refugees who have returned from Pakistan to Afghanistan's northeastern Takhar Province say their properties have been seized by local people and militias from other ethnic groups. Their allegations were confirmed by the Ministry of Refugees and Returnees (MoRR).      more...

Reuters: Relatives of Afghans killed in a US-led coalition raid in western Herat province have offered to dig up graves to support claims of large-scale civilian deaths. The Aug. 22 air strike in Shindand district has outraged Afghans and opened a rift between coalition forces on the one hand and the Afghan government and the UN on the other, which both say that more than 90 civilians were killed.      more...

RINF News: An Afghan human rights organisation has accused the United States army of committing war crimes in Afghanistan. Afghanistan Human Rights Organisation (AHRO) said on Tuesday that, according to their own investigations, civilians are killed in most operations conducted by US forces.      more...

Xinhua: Hundreds of citizens in Afghan capital Kabul rushed into streets and burnt tires on the Kabul-Jalalabad highway on Monday protesting against the death of a Kabuli family caused by the raid of U.S.-led Coalition forces.      more...

PAN (Translated by RAWA): In the present year, 47 cases of self-immolation have been reported in special burn hospital in Herat. Out of these, 42 of the cases had been death as a result of the burns. This shows the rise in the graph of self-immolation, compared to last year. Seema Shir Mohammadi said the reasons for self-immolation are domestic violence, lack of awareness of families about each others’ rights, poverty and unemployment.      more...

New York Times: President Hamid Karzai strongly condemned on Saturday a coalition airstrike that he said killed up to 95 Afghans — including 50 children — in a village in western Afghanistan on Friday, and said his government would be announcing measures to prevent the loss of civilian life in the future.      more...

PAN: Afghan National Army opened fire on angry protesters who were protesting the killing of dozens of civilians in the US bombardment in Shindand district of western Herat province. Hundreds of civilians came out in streets of Azizabad city.      more...

PAN: local commanders and local officials still forcibly collect money by different names and forms from the farmers in northern Afghanistan, farmers and shepherds lamented. Commanders and local officials get unlawfully ten sheep as well as cash money from shepherds while they graze their sheep on different areas and mountains.      more...

The Christian Science Monitor: Naseer Fayaz, one of Afghanistan's most famous television presenters, is used to fans and other well-wishers coming by the office. The host of a popular weekly program, "The Truth," his exposés of government malfeasance have won him awards as well as a devoted following. But after a recent episode of the show that was especially critical of the government, Mr. Fayaz received unexpected visitors: members of the Afghan secret police.      more...

AP via MSNBC: Rape — a crime long hidden in Afghanistan by victims fearing a life of scorn — is getting a public airing in this conservative Islamic country. In recent weeks, several outraged families have appeared on nightly news shows, demanding justice while sharing heartbreaking stories of sexual assaults on teenage daughters.      more...

The Financial Times: The hospital that Amina had been checked into a few days before is, by Afghan standards, one of the best in the country, built with international money, staffed by foreign- trained doctors and kitted out with modern equipment. She could not hope for better treatment.      more...

PAN: Dozens of tribal elders and residents Monday staged a protest against the killings of four members of a family during on overnight operation in the southern Ghazni province.      more...

After my detention and release from the intelligence agency, I am feeling very scared. Only last night when I was reading Dari bulletin on our ATN channel, one of my colleagues in the station received a call from my brother at home informing that he has been witnessing some suspicious movements around my house. Over telephone he said that several armed persons with big turbans and suspected attire were moving around my residence. He told me not to go home because it could be threat to my life. And right from that time I have not visited my house; I am at a safer place provided by my employer ATN.      more...

"Reporters Without Borders calls for the release of Mohammed Naseer Fayyaz, the host of the programme Haqeeqat (The Truth) on privately-owned Ariana TV, who was arrested yesterday by members of the Directorate for National Security (DNS) at the government's behest." "The Committee to Protect Journalists is alarmed by reports that Afghan television reporter Mohammad Naseer Fayyaz was detained one day after his television station aired a documentary that was critical of some cabinet members and their ministries."      more...

Reporters Without Borders: Hundreds of Afghan journalists and writers took part in demonstrations yesterday in 15 provinces to call for the release of Sayed Perwiz Kambakhsh, a young journalist under sentence of death. This exemplary show of solidarity came as Kambakhsh’s appeal against his conviction has ground to a halt in Kabul and no date has been set for the next hearing.      more...

Xinhua: Anti-war protesters repeatedly interrupted U.S. President George W. Bush's Independence Day speech Friday in Charlottesville, Virginia, ABC News reported. By the time Bush finished his 10-minute remarks, at least nine protesters had been taken away from the event by police.      more...

PAN: A young girl was raped in Raghistan district of Badakhshan province. 17-year old Razia claimed that 40-year old Altaf Al-Rahman had raped her several times three days back. She told PAN that she wanted justice and the punishment of the rapist but didn’t give any further details.      more...

AFP: Hundreds of protesters took to streets in eastern Afghanistan on Monday after a father and son were allegedly killed by gunfire from US-led soldiers, a governor and witnesses said. Around 200 people demonstrated in the Khogyani district of Nangarhar province.      more...

PAN: More than a dozen protestors suffered injuries as police fired to disrupt a peaceful demonstration against NATO operations in the southeastern province of Paktia, residents and officials said on Saturday.      more...

Hundreds of families of the war victims in a show off protest in front of the UN office called upon president Hamid Karzai and the UN to bring to justice those responsible for three decades long war in the country killing millions of innocent people. Referring to the Paris conference they said hundreds of millions of aid is poured into Afghanistan, but no considerable progress can be seen in the reconstruction of the country.      more...

HRW: The Afghan government and international donors should place human rights issues including freedom of expression in the war-ravaged country at the centre of discussions at the donors' conference in Paris tomorrow, Human Rights Watch said today.      more...

Amnesty International: The international community and the Afghan government have not met their pledge to provide the Afghan people, particularly women and girls, with better security, more responsive governance, and sustainable economic development, Amnesty International said today in a briefing paper issued ahead of the International Conference in Support of Afghanistan being held on 12 June in Paris.      more...

Chicago Tribune: Faced with skyrocketing food prices and no job, Mohammad Daud decided he had suffered enough. The 27-year-old swallowed 100 sleeping pills and died. His decision late last month reflects panic in this war-torn country over the price of food, especially wheat, the staple of the Afghan diet. Afghanistan, landlocked and drought-ridden, depends on aid and food imports to survive, and the world's food crisis has hit hard.      more...

SocialistWorker.org: A U.S. Marine Corps general has decided not to bring criminal charges against two officers who led their unit on a March 2007 killing spree that left 19 Afghan civilians dead and 50 more wounded. By contrast, the U.S. media barely noticed. For its part, the New York Times featured an article on Afghanistan a few days later celebrating a "fierce battle" by a Marine unit that drove Taliban fighters outside of the southern town of Garmser. The article referenced last March's massacre--but not the Marines' decision not to press charges.      more...

PAN: An outspoken legislator was expelled from a session of the Wolesi Jirga, or lower house of parliament, for his strident criticism of proceedings and working of a committee, officials said here on Tuesday. Ramazan Bashar Dost, former minister planning minister, was ousted from a meeting of the Wolesi Jirga on grilling Emergency Committee members after he raised a series of objections to the absence of the bodys head, Vice-President Karim Khalili.      more...