The Independent: The city is awash with widows who have come with the same idea. It is one of Kabul's many problems, this influx of desperate humanity that has flooded the city with double, treble the people it ever housed before the Russian invasion in 1979. Three-quarters of Afghans are almost completely illiterate. Among widows, the proportion is much higher. Kabul is awash with street children, hundreds of thousands of them, scavenging through rubbish, selling plastic bags, repairing bicycles, labouring for shoe-makers, or asking for alms in return for sending unwelcome wafts of aromatic smoke from the tin cans they wave at likely-looking passers-by.      Full news...

The Associated Press: Khadija Ahadi, the 30-year-old director of Faryat radio station in the western city of Herat, was targeted on April 6 and again on Sunday, said Rahimullah Samandar, head of the Afghan Independent Journalists Association.      Full news...

AFP: An Afghan legislative committee has drafted a bill seeking to introduce Taliban-style Islamic morality codes banning women from wearing make-up in public and forbidding young boys from wearing female fashions. It also aims to ban women dancers performing during concerts and other public events as well as on television.      Full news...

The Age: A recent report by British-based women's rights group Womankind has concluded that Afghanistan remains one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a woman. Around 80% of women are affected by domestic violence; over 60% of marriages are forced, some of them between elderly men and girls as young as eight; half of Afghanistan's girls are married before the age of 16.      Full news...

ATN: An 8-year old girl was raped in the Takhar province. General Ziauddin Mahmoodi, the commander of the police of Takhar said that the man involved has been arrested and is in the custody of the police now. Dr. Ashrafuddin Aini, head of the Civil Hospital of Takhar said that the 8-year old is admitted in this hospital and is under treatment.      Full news...

AFP: Even Mother Nature was cruel on the day 15 years ago when rampaging thugs chopped off Marzia's fingers for a gold ring and shot dead her nine-year-old son when he cried out to object. It was a bone-chillingly cold morning, she recalls, when militia loyal to Pashtun warlord Abdul Rab-Rasoul Sayyaf -- now a parliamentarian -- captured her village, west of Kabul and dominated by ethnic Hazaras.      Full news...

PAN: A 16-year old girl was kidnapped by unknown armed men in the Nahreen District of Baghlan province. The parents of 16-year old Guldana claimed that she had been kidnapped by a group of five unknown, armed men in the middle of the night in the New City area.      Full news...

The Independent: There is no one as colourful and controversial among the warlords of Afghanistan as General Abdul Rashid Dostum, a man of immense power and huge wealth whose name became synonymous with bloodshed and betrayal during the long years of conflict.      Full news...

CBC News: More than six years after the United States invaded to establish a stable central regime in Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai's government in Kabul controls just 30 percent of the country, says the top U.S. intelligence official.      Full news...

AFP: Afghanistan's attorney general has suspended militia leader Abdul Rashid Dostum from his government post for not cooperating with an investigation into a raid on a rival, an official said Tuesday.      Full news...

The Washington Post: With its fortress-like outer walls and posh interior, its sumptuous brunches and post-sauna massages, the Kabul Serena Hotel was a symbol of both progress and privilege -- a haven for foreign visitors in a harsh, unfamiliar environment and an inaccessible tower for most poor Afghans.      Full news...

Asia Media (University of California): A crowd of people wait, cowering on the side of a road. They need to cross this road to get to their homes in the west of Kabul but they don't dare. Bullets are flying from all directions over their heads. So they keep their heads down, wait. Then there is a brief moment of ceasefire, a chance to cross the road unscathed and reach home. The first to dare is a man on a bicycle. He rides off, keeping his head low. Two children follow his example and start walking, first slowly, then quickly. Next is a woman. She grabs a girl's hand, leaves the crowd and starts running. The girl struggles to keep up with the woman. Moments later, a rocket is fired. It hits the cyclist and the two children who had followed his example and set off on the road. The three of them are instantly killed.      Full news...

IWPR: Personal feud becomes a test of the government’s ability and resolve to rein in powerful men with private armies. Even for General Abdul Rashid Dostum, it was an unusual sight. The burly former militia commander, atop his Kabul home, openly defied the police cordons surrounding him. Protected by his private militia and backed by thousands in the north, Dostum once again showed that he is above the law.      Full news...

The New York Times: Dozens of armed police officers laid siege on Sunday to the house of a powerful ethnic Uzbek leader, Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, in the diplomatic district of the capital, Kabul’s police chief said. The action came after about 50 of General Dostum’s followers attacked and briefly abducted a political rival Saturday night.      Full news...

Badger Herald: Every now and then, I run across a news story that reminds me of the importance of individual liberties in modern society. One of these stories came out of Afghanistan this Wednesday.      Full news...

Reporters Without Borders: A court in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif today passed the death sentence on a young journalist, Sayed Perwiz Kambakhsh, for alleged blasphemy. The trial was held behind closed doors and without any lawyer defending him. His brother, fellow journalist Sayed Yaqub Ibrahimi, told Reporters Without Borders: "I saw my brother leave the court. He was very anxious. All the family was, too."      Full news...

Reuters: Male tailors in an Afghan province have been barred from measuring female clients for fittings following a new local ruling that resembles the restrictions the ultra-conservative Taliban imposed on the country when in power.      Full news...

New Statesman: The US and Britain claim defeating the Taliban is part of a "good war" against al-Qaeda. Yet there is evidence the 2001 invasion was planned before 9/11. "To me, I confess, [countries] are pieces on a chessboard upon which is being played out a game for dominion of the world."      Full news...

WorldNetDaily: GOP presidential candidate Sen. John McCain knocked President Bush for failing to capture Osama bin Laden despite "opportunities over the past six years, and vowed to "get" the terrorist kingpin if voters put him in the White House.      Full news...

AFP: Afghanistan's Islamic clerics have called on President Hamid Karzai to clamp down on a burgeoning television industry which it accused of spreading "immorality and unIslamic culture." The call was made during a meeting between Karzai and dozens of clerics from an influential religious council in Kabul on Friday, an official in Karzai's office told AFP under condition of anonymity on Saturday.      Full news...

The Guardian: I bought The Kite Runner in the hope that it might provide some insights into Afghanistan, one of the many areas of the world about which much is said through the lens of the powerful, but little is seen of the actualities of the everyday lives of the people. What I read was anything but.      Full news...

IRIN News: Children are being recruited and in some cases sexually abused by the Afghan police and/or various militias that support the police, as well as by private security companies and the Taliban, according to human rights and provincial officials.      Full news...

The Telegraph: The British Army says it is "taking seriously" claims that children were shot and several adult villagers had their throats cut during a secret military operation by unidentified forces in Helmand province.      Full news...

IWPR: Journalist Sayed Yaqub Ibrahimi says his brother Parwez has been jailed and threatened with death because of his own reporting on human rights violations in the north.      Full news...

Pajhwok Afghan News: Some 200 former Mujahideen commanders from the northeastern four provinces, in a meeting in Takhar province Thursday warned the government of dire consequences if they were not awarded their due place and rights.      Full news...

AFP: UN rights chief Louise Arbour criticised Afghanistan Tuesday for stalling on a plan to address atrocities and human rights abuses committed in its more than two decades of armed conflict.      Full news...

The Ottawa Citizen: The Defence Department is keeping secret the names of dozens of companies that received almost $42 million worth of contracts in Afghanistan. However, an analysis by CanWest News Service suggests that more than $1.1 million in business has been awarded to an Afghan company that bears the same name as one of Kandahar's most infamous warlords.      Full news...

Reuters: They are known as "bacha bereesh," boys without beards, teenage boys who dress up as girls and dance for male patrons at parties in northern Afghanistan. It's an age old practice that has led to some of the boy dancers being turned into sex slaves by wealthy and powerful patrons, often former warlords, who dress the boys up as girls, shower them with gifts and keep them as "mistresses."      Full news...

The Associated Press: As many as two-thirds of the 77 people killed and 100 wounded in a suicide bombing Nov. 6 were hit by bullets from visiting lawmakers' panicked bodyguards, who fired into a crowd for as long as five minutes, a preliminary U.N. report says.      Full news...

CTV: As Afghan police scrambled to the scene of a bomb blast Tuesday that killed five lawmakers and dozens of children, Malalai Joya, haunted by death threats and assassination attempts in Afghanistan, sat on the other side of the world, clutching a cup of tea with her eyes cast downward.      Full news...