AFP: A FEMALE Afghani journalist was stabbed and wounded today, authorities said, a day after unknown men threatened to kill her unless she quit her job at a local television station. "A woman came to my home and asked for a glass of water. As I was to bring her water she stabbed me in abdomen," Ms Habibi said.      Full news...

Toronto Star: Six years after the fall of the Taliban, the cocooning burqa hangs on, even in a liberated capital rushing headlong into modernity, as if leaping millennia in one breathless hurdle. Tradition, family pressures, shyness and a sense of personal security without violation – all are given as reasons for clutching still to the metres of billowing fabric that cascade from scalp to ankle.      Full news...

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...

Aatash.org: Five unknown persons including a woman had entered her vehicle, beaten her up and warned her to death if she continues to appear on TV. She was attacked in Darb-e Malik locality of Herat city while she was on her way to office. The attackers were in black clothes.      Full news...

ATN: An eight-year old girl was murdered in Takhar province by her rapists, after she was raped. Security officials of Takhar said that five people have been arrested for being involved in the murder and they have confessed their crime.      Full news...

RFE/RL: Death during childbirth is a scourge in Afghanistan. On average, a woman dies there every 27 minutes from complications during pregnancy, according to the nongovernmental group Save The Children. It is a chilling statistic that contributes to making Afghanistan one of the most difficult places in the world to be a mother.      Full news...

Reuters: About 1,600 Afghan women die in childbirth out of every 100,000 live births. In some of the most remote areas, the death rate is as high as 6,500. In comparison, the average rate in developing countries is 450 and in developed countries it is 9. Virtually everyone in Afghanistan can recount a story about a relative dying in childbirth, often from minor complications that can be easily treated with proper medical care.      Full news...

Reuters: Half of Afghan children are still not going to school and the biggest group missing out on an education are girls, the United Nations said on Monday."We still have 1.2 million girls of school age who do not have access to school in this country," Catherine Mbengue, head of UNICEF in Afghanistan, told the news conference.      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...

BBC: In northern Afghanistan it appears some parents are being driven by poverty and hunger to marry off their daughters at an early age. Jenny Cuffe investigates for Radio 4's Seven Days.      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...

The Washington Post: More than six years after U.S.-led forces launched a military campaign here against the ruling Taliban movement, drug addiction is fast becoming a major concern for the government. With opium production reaching an all-time high of 6,000 tons last year, according to the United Nations, domestic addiction rates in this nation of nearly 32 million have also soared. A 2005 U.N. report estimated that Afghanistan was home to about 1 million drug abusers.      Full news...

AFP: An Afghan woman MP controversially expelled from parliament a year ago for causing "insult" to fellow lawmakers said Saturday she had filed a petition for reinstatement. The war-torn nation's legislature, dominated by former anti-Soviet Islamic warlords, kicked out Malalai Joya after she described fellow MPs as "worse than donkeys and cows" in a television interview last May.      Full news...

NDTV: Termed as "opium brides", the daughters of poor poppy farmers are often given to drug traffickers if their fathers are unable to pay the loan taken for growing the illicit crop because of the official action.      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...

Belfast Telegraph: US soldiers have killed six Afghan civilians during a military raid in the east of the country this morning, according to a local official. A woman and two children are said to be among the dead following the operation in the village of Hom, close to the Pakistani border.      Full news...

Internationalen Weekly: Undeterred by the “international community’s” political exigencies, the Afghan woman has not given up her struggle for peace, democracy, liberation as well as her right to education, health and work. Nowhere, perhaps nowhere in the world, one finds a woman as keen for education as an Afghan woman. And embodiment of this struggle is RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of the Woman of Afghanistan. Alerting the world since 1977 to the sufferings and struggle of Afghan woman, RAWA is the only woman, if not political, formation to have survived 30 years of Afghan war. An achievement in itself. ‘There is no organization on earth like it’, says John Pilger.      Full news...

PAN: Poverty and parental fights led a young girl named Farzana in Jowzjan province in Northern Afghanistan to hang herself and commit suicide.      Full news...

Spero News: Since March of 2007 until now, there has been a 40% increase in reports of physical violence against women in Afghanistan, according to United Nations sources.      Full news...

Rabble.ca's Derrick O'Keefe recently gathered a significant statement by Malalai Joya, one of the more courageous and heroic political figures in Afghanistan today. She makes the memorable statement below about the billions of dollars in military spending and aid money which has effectively been squandered in Afghanistan by the run-away corruption of the Karzai government.      Full news...

UN News Centre: Some 24,000 Afghan women die every year while giving birth, according to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), which is working with the Government and other partners to reduce maternal mortality and improve the overall health of women and girls in the war-torn nation.      Full news...

RAWA: The woman belonging to Gulran District of Herat province in Western Afghanistan had been burnt with hot water, a bullet had been found buried in her abdomen and her hair had been pulled out with his hands. She says he fired on her by a pistol but she survived.      Full news...

The Independent: Girls as young as six are being married into a life of slavery and rape, often by multiple members of their new relatives. Banned from seeing their own parents or siblings, they are also prohibited from going to school. With little recognition of the illegality of the situation or any effective recourse, many of the victims are driven to self-immolation – burning themselves to death – or severe self-harm.      Full news...

RAWA: A fourteen-year old girl named Bashira belonging to Sar-e-Pul province was gang-raped by three men on February 18, 2008. One of the rapists is Najibullah, the son of Haji Payinda, a member of parliament from Sar-e-Pul.      Full news...

RAWA News: A young girl was gang-raped, yet again, in Northern Afghanistan by three men. Bashira, a fourteen year old student of the sixth grade who had come to the city on Feb.18, 2008 to get the aid which was being distributed, was gang raped by three men in Sarpul province.      Full news...

Pajamas Media Inc.: I lived in Kabul nearly fifty years ago. It was enchanting and dangerous. I lived on a wide and gracious street lined with trees. We had electricity, phones, hot and cold running water, and marble bathrooms. There was a movie theatre and an American-style cafeteria restaurant. Bazaars flourished, mosques shimmered, a thousand (all male) tea-houses thrived. Barefoot boys scurried bearing tea for businessmen all day long.      Full news...

RAWA: On February 12, 2008, Amina the daughter of Said Gul of Khushk Aaba Village in Khaksafed District of Farah province was sentenced to death in a field trial by the local clerics Scholars Council of the village for running away from her home with a stranger. Her husband and other close relatives approved of the punishment.      Full news...