RAWA News: A young boy in Kabul committed suicide by eating 100 Phenobarbatone tablets. The neighbors said that he was the bread winner of a very large family and also had the responsibility of feeding his orphan nieces and nephews. One person said, “Because there were no jobs he was left unemployed. This is a major problem and our government has the responsibility to provide jobs for our youngsters."      Full news...

PAN: 55-year old Gul Murad lived a life of poverty in the Zedori village with his wife Anar Gul and eight children. Gul Murad had not had food for four days and died. When the people were burying him his wife went unconscious. When she was being taken to the Mazar-e-Sharif Hospital for treatment, she died on the way. At first the people thought she had died of the sadness caused by her husband’s death but later found out that she too had not eaten anything for days and had died of hunger.      Full news...

The New England Journal of Medicine: Self-immolation is the act of burning oneself as a means of suicide. Although reliable data on the scope of this practice are difficult to obtain in Afghanistan and elsewhere, there are indications that self-immolation is occurring at a notable and steady rate. In 2004, in response to an apparent increase in cases of self-immolation in the country, the Afghan government, AIHRC, and the UNAMA undertook separate reviews of identified cases to try to determine why the practice was occurring.      Full news...

Toronto Star: Three decades of war, millions of mines and unexploded ordinance (UXO) for children to trip over, suicide bombers, birth defects due to clannish intermarriage, congenital disabilities never corrected for lack of health care, ordinary ailments left untreated and the vast afflicted detritus accrued from preventable diseases such as polio, to say nothing of inestimable psychological trauma: Afghanistan is a wasteland of the mutilated and crippled.      Full news...

PAN: An influential international rights watchdog Wednesday renewed its call for Afghan parliament to reinstate its outspoken member Malalai Joya, suspended a year ago. Human Rights Watch (HRW), hailing the youngest member of the Wolesi Jirga as a bold human rights activist, said the 29-year-old had publicly criticised warlords and drug barons in her country.      Full news...

World Socialist Web Site: A United Nations investigator released a preliminary report last week citing widespread civilian deaths in Afghanistan, often at the hands of unaccountable units led by the CIA or other foreign intelligence agencies. Alston focused on civilian killings by US and other international military forces, citing 200 reported deaths in the first four months of 2008.      Full news...

Adnkronos International: Taliban fighters in Afghanistan claim to have killed a woman by slitting her throat after accusing her of spying for US forces in Afghanistan.      Full news...

Reporters Without Borders: RWB calls on the authorities to do everything possible to protect women journalists, several of whom have been attacked or threatened since the start of the year. One, Niloufar Habibi, has continued to receive death threats since leaving hospital after being stabbed on 15 May in the northwestern city of Herat and has to change residence every day.      Full news...

Rabble.ca: Malalai Joya has a low tolerance for high-level corruption among public figures, elected and appointed, and she’s never been shy about saying so. Viewed by some as courageous, others as foolhardy, in my view her outspoken criticism cannot constitute legitimate grounds for permanent expulsion, without due process and with no appeal procedure from Afghanistan's Parliament to which she was democratically elected by her people.      Full news...

Reuters: When 19-year-old Fatima returned to her home in northern Afghanistan after years as a refugee in Iran, she struggled desperately to earn a living. She briefly found work with an NGO, before being let go, and then spent two months learning how to weave carpets, before the factory shut down and she was again out on the streets of Mazar-i-Sharif.      Full news...

Spiegel Online: A young Afghan has been sentenced to death for printing out a Web page in which Muhammad is described as a misogynistic prophet. The case will help to determine whether an Islamic country can open itself up to the West.      Full news...

IRIN News: Sayed Ali (not his real name) said he sold his 11-year-old daughter, Rabia, for US$2,000 to a man in Sheberghan city, Jawzjan Province in northern Afghanistan to feed his wife and three younger children. With food prices in Afghanistan having soared over the past few months and the 40-year-old father unable to find work, he said he had no other choice but to sell his daughter to save his family from starvation.      Full news...

BBC: Sayed Parwez Kambakhsh was convicted in January of insulting Islam. But at the appeals court in Kabul the 24-year-old insisted he was innocent of all the charges. He said he was tortured into confessing that he had disrupted university classes by asking questions about women's rights under Islam.      Full news...

The Guardian: In an article I wrote in 2003, when I was still working in the country, I argued that "good governance, respect for human rights and the rule of law are not optional when it comes to rebuilding a country, but an intrinsic part of reconstruction." This week a UN expert made almost exactly the same point when he warned of "staggeringly high" complacency about civilians being killed by international troops and that foreign intelligence units may be carrying out death-squad type killings with impunity.      Full news...

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...

Intermediadialogue.org: Although, the international media organizations have published detailed reports on the condition of freedom of speech and press in Afghanistan, but the real situation is something different from these reports. Because some of these organizations are either very conservative or are linked to the fundamentalist figures inside the government in order to keep their jobs safe. Therefore, we cannot trust the honesty in their works and reports.      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...

AFP: "I stand before you today with the strength and clarity and resolve to declare to the military, my government and the world that this soldier will not be deploying to Iraq," Chiroux said in the sun-filled rotunda of a congressional building in Washington. "My decision is based on my desire to no longer continue violating my core values to support an illegal and unconstitutional occupation... I refuse to participate in the Iraq occupation," he said, as a dozen veterans of the five-year-old Iraq war looked on.      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...

Xinhua: The United Nations Special Rapporteuron extra judicial executions Philip Alston on Thursday expressed concern over civilians' killing in Afghanistan and urged all warring sides in the country to respect human rights. "In the past four months, hundreds of civilians have been killed. They have died from bombs, missiles, explosive devices, police fire, beheadings and domestic violence," Alston said in a statement handed out at a news briefing here.      Full news...

Times Online: It is an unremarkable scene by Afghan standards – at first sight, just another sad monument to three decades of war. Yet this desolate, seemingly hopeless, place is the source of Afghanistan’s most recent chapter of violence – and possibly now of a brighter economic future.      Full news...

PAN: Attorney general Abdul Jabar Sabit said on Wednesday 22 members of the parliament accused of various crimes have been avoiding facing the law. The attorney general said the MPs, whom he did not name, were summoned officially many times to attend his office for explanations of the accusations and for investigations.      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...

International Herald Tribune: Thieves raided the city flour market in broad daylight a few weeks ago, shooting and wounding two people before escaping with their loot. "We are not feeling safe," Haji Hayatullah, one of the flour merchants, said sitting on the floor of his shop with sacks of flour stacked around him. "We don't have security and we don't trust the government to provide it." The merchants got together and hired eight private security guards.      Full news...

IRIN News: The killing and abduction of dozens of health workers in the past two years has prompted officials to shut down at least 36 health facilities in Afghanistan’s volatile southern and eastern provinces, depriving hundreds of thousands of people of basic health services, according to the Ministry of Public Health (MoPH).      Full news...

Daily Times: Pakistani society was ‘militarised’ with ‘active support’ from the United States as part of the ‘critical evolution’ of the ‘big powers’’ policy for the region, the Awami National Party (ANP)’s Afrasiab Khattak said on Wednesday.      Full news...

Mail Online: A teacher was shot to death in northern Afghanistan after he gave a speech condemning suicide bombings, it was revealed today. e spoke at a gathering of about 700 people, including the Kunduz governor, and was on his way home when he was killed, Khair Mohammad Subat said.      Full news...

Pajhwok Afghan News (Translated by RAWA): A family handed over two of its children to another family because they were unable to feed them. The father named Bashir Ahmad lives in Ashaba village in Jabl Saraj District of Parwan province. He said, “I announced my poverty in the Jamay Qal-e-Naw Mosque in Bagram District and some time later a man called Abdul Raziq came and agreed to take away my children and look after them.”      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...

The Earth Times: At least two people were killed and six others wounded when police opened fire on protesters blocking a highway linking eastern Afghanistan to Pakistan, witnesses said Saturday. Hundreds of protesters blocked the highway in Shinwar district of eastern Nangarhar province protesting against the alleged killing of civilians by US-led coalition forces on Friday night.      Full news...