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.      Full news...

UNICEF: With 504 recorded cases, Afghanistan has a relatively low number of confirmed HIV cases, but experts on the disease are raising alarm bells for an expected rise in reported numbers, especially among street children. “Children are at high risk to contract HIV in Afghanistan,” said Dr. Malalai Ahmadzai, UNICEF Maternal Health and HIV Specialist. “Those children who have lost their parents due to war, those children who are doing street work and labour, and also those children who may be at risk because of transmission from mother to child.”      Full news...

Quqnoos: Friday’s riots in Kabul, caused by the death of an Afghan civilian at the hands of foreign troops, were just the latest sign of the anger felt by many Afghans at continuing civilian casualties. Figures show that at least 540 Afghans civilians were killed in the first nine months of 2008. Of these, 367 were killed by the Taliban and other militants, many in suicide attacks. Two suicide bombers have struck Kabul in the last week. Seven people have been killed and 27 were wounded. All of them were civilians. The children of Nasir Ali - a road sweeper killed in a suicide bomb on Sunday.      Full news...

Quqnoos: DRUG smugglers are using the cars of high-ranking Afghan officials to traffic drugs through the country, the Ministry of Anti-Narcotics has said. Officials are trying to break the smugglers network, a ministry spokesman said.      Full news...

Herald Tribune: Breaking with a military tradition of keeping silent about policy, a top German general has branded his country's efforts in Afghanistan a failure, singling out its poor record in training the Afghan police and allocating development aid. The comments came from General Hans-Christoph Ammon, head of the army's elite special commando unit, or KSK, whose officers are in Afghanistan fighting alongside U.S. forces against Al Qaeda and the Taliban.      Full news...

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.      Full news...

The Associated Press: The Taliban and other warlords could clear almost half a billion dollars from Afghanistan's opium trade this year — money that will help finance insurgent attacks, the U.N.'s drug czar said. Antonio Maria Costa, head of the U.N.'s Office on Drugs and Crime, said the Taliban also appears to be stockpiling the drug to manipulate its price, after several years in which production surpassed world demand. Afghanistan produces over 90 percent of the world's opium, the raw ingredient for making heroin.      Full news...

The Independent: The collapse of Afghanistan is closer than the world believes. Kandahar is in Taliban hands – all but a square mile at the centre of the city – and the first Taliban checkpoints are scarcely 15 miles from Kabul. Hamid Karzai's deeply corrupted government is almost as powerless as the Iraqi cabinet in Baghdad's "Green Zone"; lorry drivers in the country now carry business permits issued by the Taliban which operate their own courts in remote areas of the country.      Full news...

This deliberate fostering of culture of impunity was based on political compromises as the President did not want to offend warlords and criminals by punishing the members of their syndicates. This approach of the government offered the most conducive medium for corrupt officials and culprits to get protected in the criminal networks and safe havens. Criminal warlords, human rights violators, kidnappers, and notorious commanders who are currently in the state institutions or have their members of their networks actively working in key government positions further deepened this problem.      Full news...

IRIN: More than 1.6 million under-five children and hundreds of thousands of vulnerable women are exposed to acute malnutrition and some could die this winter due to food insecurity and lack of medical care, the government has warned. hese figures are significantly higher than the 550,000 under-five children and pregnant and lactating women considered "most vulnerable" in a joint emergency appeal by the government and aid agencies in July.      Full news...

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.      Full news...

Chicago Tribune: Ramzan Bashardost drives a beat-up black 1991 Suzuki with a cracked windshield and often sleeps in a tent—habits hardly befitting a respected member of parliament. "In the Afghan administration now, money is the law," said Bashardost, the former planning minister. "When you have money here, you can do anything. Afghanistan is the only country in the world where corruption is legal." Not exactly legal, but definitely rampant. Increasingly, corruption is driving a wedge between the government and the Afghan people, who are growing more and more resentful of their leaders, experts say.      Full news...

AmericanFreePress.net: The U.S. has been in Afghanistan for over seven years, has spent $177 billion in that country alone, and has the most powerful and technologically advanced military on Earth. GPS tracking devices can locate any spot imaginable by simply pushing a few buttons. Common sense suggests that such prolific trade over an extended period of time is no accident, especially when the history of what has transpired in that region is considered. While the CIA ran its operations during the Vietnam War, the Golden Triangle supplied the world with most of its heroin. After that war ended in 1975, an intriguing event took place in 1979 when Zbigniew Brzezinski covertly manipulated the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan.      Full news...

AFP: Afghan children are being recruited as suicide bombers, drawn into the military and used for sex by armed groups, a senior official with the UN children's agency said on Sunday. But the conflict means that children in more than 60% of the country cannot not be reached by Unicef workers, the agency's deputy executive director Hilde F Johnson said on a visit to Kabul.      Full news...

BBC: Although millions of Afghan children have gone back to school since the fall of the Taliban, full time education remains a distant dream for many. Continuing poverty means many children, including some as young as six, are forced to work to help their families. Twelve-year-old Izatullah was pushing a cart containing heavy sacks of flour. "I take this load to another shopkeeper. They will give me 10 or 20 Afghanis (21 pence or 42pence). I am poor, I don't have bread. My father is an old man. I earn our living," he said.      Full news...

IWPR: Residents of Mazar-e-Sharif suffer ill effects of polluted environment caused by urban expansion on land seized by warlords. A decades-old land grab has left Mazar-e-Sharif and much of the rest of Balkh province with little or no open areas or green spaces. While the government tries to cope with the nearly impossible task of reclaiming the land, residents are suffering the ill effects of living in a polluted environment devoid of trees and other vegetation. Mazar-e-Sharif has been losing its open spaces for decades, ever since the 1990s free-for-all that is known as the “era of the warlords”.      Full news...

Quqnoos: Child abuse has tripled in Afghanistan’s northern provinces, the head of the human rights commission in the north, Said Muhammad Sami, said. He said the sexual abuse of, and violence against, children had increased threefold in four of the north’s provinces.      Full news...

Independent.co.uk: There is a little girl in the Meir Wais hospital with livid scars and dead skin across her face, an obscene map of brown and pink tissue. Then there is another girl, a beautiful child, Khorea Horay, grimacing in pain, her leg amputated, her life destroyed after her foot was torn to pieces. In another ward, two girls lie on their backs, a tent above their limbs. One has lost an arm, another – a 16-year-old – a leg. The black turbans are everywhere. So are the blue burkhas which we Westerners confidently – stupidly – believed would vanish from Afghan society.      Full news...

PAN (Translated by RAWA): In the common border of Torkham between Pakistan and Afghanistan about 4000 children engage in harsh work everyday. Besides being beaten by the border patrols of Pakistan they are also imprisoned. Rana, a 12-year old girl belonging to the Sarkhrud District of Ningarhar province, told PAN on 20 November that her father has Hepatitis and she is forced to work in Torkham. She added that everyday she has to bring a small bag of flour from the other side of the border to earn 10 rupees.      Full news...

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.      Full news...

AFP: Waheeda's arms were blown off in a suicide attack in the Afghan capital a few years ago. Flesh was also torn from one of her legs and she lost much of her vision. Her mashed face is split by an uneven scar. Now about 35, she has six children but not much else. "I cannot even drink water by myself," she weeps silently, dabbing at a tear with one of her stumped arms.      Full news...

PAN: Unknown armed men kidnapped three students of two high schools students in Baraki Barak district of Logar province, on Wednesday. Deputy Director of Logar province, Mohammad Yasin Ahmadi told Pajhwok Afghan News that the students of two different high schools in the district were residents of Chalozai village.      Full news...

AP: Khan and his children are among nearly 4,000 Afghan families living in a makeshift settlement because their homes were destroyed or overtaken in the decades they spent abroad waiting out wars. First, with the former Soviet Union in the 80s, then the strife of civil war and most recently the U.S. offensive against the Taliban. At the height of their exodus, Afghans made up the world's largest refugee population with 8 million people in more than 70 countries. More than 5 million of these people have returned home since 2002, according to the U.N.      Full news...

PAN: Convoy of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) run over a ten-years-old girl in northern Afghanistan. The minor girl received injuries in the mishap but succumbed to her injuries later in the hospital, he worried. The dead body of the girl was handed over to her family, he added.      Full news...

Spiegel Online: It's all too often that the US military accepts civilian casualties as a necessary evil. An internal Air Force report describes its excessively violent methods as well as how officials have been trying to placate surviving family members with money. There have been times when artillary shells have killed innocent civilians after landing several kilometers off-target. That is what happened in Paktika Province in the country's southeast on July 19. In other instances, such as that of last Monday -- as well as on July 6 and other previous occasions -- wedding parties have been misidentified as groups of insurgents -- with deadly consequences.      Full news...

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty: Afghan education authorities say they are facing a difficult task of convincing parents to send their daughters to school as attacks on female students have increased in recent months. Three girls sustained severe burns in the southern town of Kandahar earlier in the week when unknown men sprayed acid on up to 15 girls. One of the girls might permanently lose her sight.      Full news...

CNN: Little Banafsha wakes up in her small mud home, has a cup of tea and braces herself for the day ahead. She is just 11 years old, but she is the breadwinner for her family. Literally. Without the bread that she begs from strangers, she, her sisters, her baby brothers and her mom would all go hungry.      Full news...

IRIN: UXOs and explosive remnants of war have also been reported in other returnees' settlements in the eastern provinces of Nangarhar and Kunar. Hundreds of thousands have returned there in the past few years. "About 200 metres from our settlement the area is full of landmines and explosive devices which often kill animals," said Mohammad Afzal, a resident of a settlement in Nangahar Province. Provincial officials said mine-clearing agencies had been asked to re-examine areas in Baghlan and Nangarhar provinces for any hazardous explosives.      Full news...

BBC News: Attackers in Afghanistan have sprayed acid in the faces of at least 15 girls near a school in Kandahar, police say. They say the attack happened shortly before at least six people were killed in a bomb blast near a government building in the city.      Full news...

Quqnoos: Jobless refugees turfed out of Iran turn to lives of crime, officials say. Rising unemployment has forced many people living in the south-western province of Nimroz to turn to crime, militancy or drugs for money, officials say. About 30,000 illegal Afghan immigrants have been ordered out of Iran since the start of October for not having work permits. The returnees say they are willing to work in Nirmoz for $2 a day, but they complain that there are no jobs available for them.      Full news...