Spiegel Online: Afghans go to the polls Thursday to vote for a new president. But if the incumbent Hamid Karzai declares victory after the first round of elections, his opponents, who fear vote-rigging, are threatening to take to the streets. Observers warn that things could get bloody.      Full news...

Associated Press: Voting observers expect fraud during next week's Afghan presidential election and warn that cheating will most likely take place at polling stations in remote or dangerous areas where independent monitors won't be able to be present. A suspiciously high number of women _ far more than men _ have been registered to vote in culturally conservative provinces where President Hamid Karzai expects to do well, a leading election monitor said this week.      Full news...

Amnesty International: Days before the Afghan presidential elections, journalists from thirteen provinces in Afghanistan have told Amnesty International that they had recently been threatened by Afghan government officials because of their critical reporting. At the same time, the Taliban and other anti-government groups have also stepped up attacks against journalists and blocked nearly all reporting from areas under their control.      Full news...

The Guardian: Afghanistan has quietly passed a law permitting Shia men to deny their wives food and sustenance if they refuse to obey their husbands' sexual demands, despite international outrage over an earlier version of the legislation which President Hamid Karzai had promised to review. The new final draft of the legislation also grants guardianship of children exclusively to their fathers and grandfathers, and requires women to get permission from their husbands to work.      Full news...

Los Angeles Times: Separate roadside bombings in volatile Helmand province today killed at least 26 people, including 21 members of a wedding party and five police officers, Afghan officials said.Also today, the U.S. military reported the death a day earlier of an American soldier in western Afghanistan. That brought the number of U.S. troops killed so far this month to seven, out of a total of 11 Western military fatalities      Full news...

Amnesty International: As the Afghan people prepare to go to the polls in elections on 20 August, Amnesty International today published a Ten-Point Agenda for Human Rights in Afghanistan, targeting the 38 presidential candidates, in a bid to improve the country’s desperate human rights situation. “We have spoken to many Afghan citizens who expressed frustration and anger towards the Afghan government’s apparent indifference to human rights,” said Sam Zarifi, Amnesty International Director for Asia-Pacific.      Full news...

BBC News: More than 1,000 people were killed in the first six months of 2009, according to a UN report. The UN blamed insurgents for using increasingly deadly modes of attack. It also said air strikes by government-allied forces were responsible. There has been widespread concern in Afghanistan about civilian death tolls. In June the US military called for better training in an effort to reduce the numbers of civilian deaths.      Full news...

Inter Press Service: Being powerful in Afghanistan does not only mean that you can break the laws of government. It also means that you can abuse your fellow citizens in the most awful ways and never be punished. The rich and powerful in Afghanistan are known to rape women and young girls with impunity. The government's inability to stop these horrors have only encouraged those in positions of authority to continue abusing Afghanistan's most vulnerable.      Full news...

The Independent: I am not sure how many more days I will be alive," Malalai Joya says quietly. The warlords who make up the new "democratic" government in Afghanistan have been sending bullets and bombs to kill this tiny 30-year-old from the refugee camps for years – and they seem to be getting closer with every attempt. The story of Malalai Joya turns everything we have been told about Afghanistan inside out. In the official rhetoric, she is what we have been fighting for.      Full news...

The Independent: Having survived five assassination attempts, if there is one thing the Afghan woman is, it is brave. Her story is inextricably linked to the recent history of her country. Through her own determination she has become part of its legend; first as a teacher in the refugee camps of Pakistan, then as an activist covertly running schools for girls in Herat during the Taliban years. Politicised beyond her years she was elected to the Afghan parliament in 2005 as its youngest member.      Full news...

IRIN: Mohammad Aman has defused hundreds of anti-personnel landmines in various parts of Afghanistan in more than 13 years as a de-miner with the Mine Detection Center (MDC), a local NGO. “If each mine were to kill, maim or injure at least one person then I have saved more than 1,000 people and I am proud of that,” he told IRIN in Kabul. Mine clearance often requires working in very remote areas where de-miners are exposed to greater security risks and attacks by various armed and criminal groups.      Full news...

IPS News: It is easy to understand why epithets such as brave and courageous often accompany the name of Malalai Joya. Slight of stature and serenely demure, the young Afghan woman’s past and present encapsulate the plight of her countrywomen. alalai Joya returned to Afghanistan in 1998 - she had spent most of her life until then in refugee camps in Iran and Pakistan - as an underground volunteer educator of girls, a decidedly dangerous and difficult role given that the hardline Taliban were in power.      Full news...

AFP: A Taliban bomb attack killed 11 civilians, including children and toddlers, going to a shrine in Afghanistan on Friday, police said following a surge of attacks ahead of key elections. The explosives ripped through a civilian pick-up vehicle taking a group of men, women and children to visit a centuries-old tomb in Spin Boldak district in Kandahar province, just a few kilometres (miles) from the Pakistani border. "Three women, three men and five children were killed," General Saifullah Hakim, a senior border police official, told AFP.      Full news...

The Huffington Post: I've come back to the Afghan capital again, after an absence of two years, to find it ruined in a new way. Not by bombs this time, but by security. The heart of the city is now hidden behind piles of Hescos -- giant, grey sandbags produced somewhere in Great Britain. They're stacked against the walls of government buildings, U.N. agencies, embassies, NGO offices, and army camps (of which there are a lot) -- and they only seem to grow and multiply.      Full news...

The Guardian (Editorial): British soldiers are notionally dying to allow a national election to take place in Helmand. Unless miracles happen, this poll will usher in four more years of a corrupt narco-regime whose leader, Hamid Karzai, is the not-so-private despair of everyone from Barack Obama downwards. Even the US commander in charge of two provinces on Kabul's doorstep voices his frustration by warning in this newspaper today that Mr Karzai's re-election could trigger a violent backlash from Afghans yearning for a government they can trust. Colonel David Haight put it pithily: "Four more years of this crap?"      Full news...

Dallas News: A truck filled with explosives and timber blew up Thursday in a village south of the Afghan capital, killing 25 people, including 13 children on their way to school. The U.S. military, meanwhile, reported that three U.S. soldiers were killed by roadside bombs, two in southern Afghanistan and one in the east. At least 17 U.S. and British troops have been killed in combat incidents in the last week.      Full news...

ReliefWeb: A new UN report on women in Afghanistan, issued Wednesday, describes the extensive and increasing level of violence directed at women taking part in public life, as well as the “widespread occurrence” of rape against a backdrop of institutional failure and impunity. The 32-page report, issued jointly by the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) and the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), notes that “violence, in the public and private spheres, is an everyday occurrence in the lives of a huge proportion of Afghan women.”      Full news...

The Nation (Pakistan)/ANN: A Canadian think-tank, CIFP, has produced a thorough report on Afghanistan under Fragile States. It is a worthy effort to define the prevailing pandemonium posted by the neo-cons in the wake of 9/11. After delving deep into doomsday details about the AfPak area based on Millennium Goals etc, the treatise indulges in imagining the worst/best case-scenarios. It underlines the fact that: "Indeed, 98 percent of Afghan civilians are directly affected by the present conflict and Afghanistan has the tenth highest average of the people killed per million per year."      Full news...

The Age: FRIENDS said he must have a death wish, going to Afghanistan. But online news editor Gregor Salmon was sick of watching disjointed images of the place on CNN. He wanted to find the truth behind the labels: the Taliban, warlords, guns and opium. And he was up for an adventure. With the help of local translators and "fixers", he spent eight months criss-crossing Afghanistan, interviewing hundreds of ordinary Afghans.      Full news...

The New York Times: The mood of the Afghan people has tipped into a popular revolt in some parts of southern Afghanistan, presenting incoming American forces with an even harder job than expected in reversing military losses to the Taliban and winning over the population. Villagers in some districts have taken up arms against foreign troops to protect their homes or in anger after losing relatives in airstrikes, several community representatives interviewed said. Others have been moved to join the insurgents out of poverty or simply because the Taliban’s influence is so pervasive here.      Full news...

Guardian.co.uk: Grana is the sole survivor of a coalition bombing in southern Helmand province that took her arm and her leg, and killed nine members of her family. Grana is just 12 years old, she is lucky to be alive. Grana and her family were victims of a coalition bombing. Locals claim over 70 people lost their live along whole of her family.      Full news...

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...

The Wall Street Journal: Today, the good, the bad and the ugly all flourish in Afghanistan—sometimes together, sometimes apart. But it’s not clear who is benefiting most from the drug trade. Is it the Taliban and al Qaeda or members of ?Afghanistan’s U.S.-backed government? Statistics vary wildly, but the U.N. estimates that drugs bring in upward of $300 million annually to the Taliban’s coffers. That still leaves billions unaccounted for.      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...

IRIN: Over 1,000 families in a camp for internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Kandahar Province, southern Afghanistan, have opted to return to their home areas in the north and northwest of the country because of worsening insecurity and lack of aid at the camp. Mohammad Azam Nawabi, director of the refugees’ department in Kandahar, told IRIN 1,087 families had formally expressed their desire to return.      Full news...

Three women were killed and another eleven civilian injured in a clash between NATO and armed Taliban the previous day in Dare Peech of Kunar Province. According to the governor, the Afghan and NATO forces retaliated and a fight took place. Wahidi said that during the clash some of the bullets were fired in a populated area on people’s homes, as a result of which 3 women were killed and 11 others, including 6 children, were injured.      Full news...

Reuters: Taliban fighters beat musicians, shaved their heads and left them tied to trees overnight because they performed at an Afghan wedding, a village tribal chief said Monday, a sign of the fighters' growing influence. The militants have returned to areas in the east and south of the country, where violence has sharply spiked in recent years.      Full news...

Quqnoos: A US-led air strike has killed 22 people, including 10 civilians in the central Ghor province, officials said. Deputy Governor of Ghor province, Ikramuddin Rezazada revealed that at least 10 civilians were killed in Tuesday’s air raid, carried out by the US-led coalition forces. A day earlier, US forces in statement said a prominent militant commander, Mullah Mustafa, and 16 other insurgents were killed in the bombing. Later, Mullah Mustafa in a phone interview told Quqnoos that he is “not harmed in the incident”.      Full news...