Common Dreams: On April 4th, at a large demonstration in Strasbourg, France, U.S. Sergeant Matthis Chiroux planned to publicly apologize to Afghan peace activist Malalai Joya for participating in the occupation of her country; however, before he could do so, the demonstration was disrupted by attacks of the French police. He made his apology instead on April 5, 2009, at the NATO Congress in Strasbourg.      Full news...

Associated Press: A group of some 1,000 Afghans swarmed a demonstration of 300 women protesting against a new conservative marriage law on Wednesday. The women were pelted with small stones as police struggled to keep the two groups apart. The law, passed last month, says a husband can demand sex with his wife every four days unless she is ill or would be harmed by intercourse — a clause that critics say legalizes marital rape. It also regulates when and for what reasons a wife may leave her home alone.      Full news...

The Age: FOR the women of Afghanistan, it is yet another brutal message — that death awaits those who choose a public life... Malalai Joya understands better than most the oppression of Afghan women — and the danger of speaking out. The women's rights activist and member of Afghanistan's national parliament has lived in hiding for five years and never spends more than 24 hours at the same house.      Full news...

Global Pundit: Sgt. Chiroux, an Individual Ready Reservist, publicly refused activation and deployment orders to Iraq, citing the war as “an illegal and immoral occupation”. He has also chosen to stay on U.S. soil to ” to defend himself from any charges brought against him by the military”. Chiroux declared in a recent press release “My resistance as a noncommissioned officer to this abhorrent occupation is just as legitimate now as it was last year”.      Full news...

PAN: Angry with reported innocent killing of five persons of a family by the US forces in a raid in central Logar province last night, protestors besieged the building of Charkh district headquarters on Saturday. More than three hundreds protesting people, chanting anti-American slogans, called for an immediate trial of the killers.      Full news...

The Independent: My brother is an innocent man. He has already spent more than a year in jail, and he's been sentenced to 20 more years in prison. But the warlords and the murderers who are in power, they are free. It's a joke. People are angry. They are fundamentalists. Some of them are criminals. Some of them are powerful. Some of them are in the government, and they are playing political games with the fate of an innocent man. We must struggle for justice. We must struggle for free speech. Our society cannot live without these values.      Full news...

PAN: Residents of Lashkargah, capital city of southern Helmand province, on Wednesday staged a protest demonstration against the US-led coalition forces and Afghan government. They alleged that a civilian was killed and another wounded when a shell hit them in Spini Kotta area of the city during an operation by the foreign forces last night.      Full news...

Ennahar Online: The UN diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi, who had participated in the reconstruction of Afghanistan after the Taliban, said that the country is in the process of ruin, in an interview published Tuesday by the U.S. weekly The Nation. The next conference on Afghanistan, scheduled for March 31 in The Hague and organized at the initiative of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, “comes after six very long years of waste,” he says. “We, the international community, have not helped much,” he says.      Full news...

IRIN: Less than 30 percent of the 166,000 tonnes of wheat the Afghan government promised to distribute to tens of thousands of people during the winter months (October-March) has been delivered so far, according to the Afghanistan National Disasters Management Authority (ANDMA). Severe drought which reduced domestic agricultural production by 35 percent in 2008, sudden hikes in food prices, and problems resulting from armed conflict have pushed about eight million people into high risk food insecurity, aid organisations say.      Full news...

USA Today: Afghan demonstrators blocked the path of a U.S. military convoy in eastern Afghanistan on Saturday after an overnight U.S. raid killed four Afghans and wounded two, an official and protesters said. Protesters in the eastern city of Khost threw rocks at the convoy, shouted "Death to America" and burned tires in the road, sending up dark plumes of smoke. Several hundred men gathered in the street, preventing the vehicles from passing.      Full news...

RIA Novosti: Hundreds of Afghans in the southern city of Kandahar protested the deaths of two boys, believed to have been killed by a Canadian rocket. Some media sources reported the children were killed when a missile hit a house in the Panjwai village. Five other people were injured. However Canadian media reported that the children may have died when an unexploded bomb detonated as they searched for scrap metal in the Panjwai valley. A local police chief said the deaths may have been caused by a Taliban attack.      Full news...

Wakht News Agency (Translated by RAWA): Authorities of the Human Rights Organization and Gul Afroz’s family, a girl who was raped, demanded severe punishment for the people accused of being involved in the crime; saying the order of the preliminary court of the Sar-e-Pul province is not enough. 13-year old Gul Afroz was gang-raped by two armed men three months back in the Kohistanat District of Sar-e-Pul Province. The accusers are not contented with the sentence of the court.      Full news...

Times Online: On the streets of Kabul any mention of Mr Karzai – who will stand for reelection on August 20 after the poll was put back from May – is now likely to produce a scowl. The President is blamed for a quartet of woes that blight the lives of ordinary people in one of the world’s poorest countries: insecurity, chronic unemployment, crippling food prices and endemic corruption. While two years ago public criticism in Kabul was more broadly aimed, and often included the perceived failure of the international community to deliver money and change, it now appears to be focused sharply on Mr Karzai.      Full news...

The New York Times: The outrage over civilian deaths swelled again over the weekend. Hundreds of angry villagers demonstrated here in Mehtarlam, the capital of Laghman Province, on Sunday after an American raid on a village in the province on Friday night. The raid killed at least 16 villagers, including 2 women and 3 children, according to a statement from President Hamid Karzai. They agreed that 13 civilians had been killed and 9 wounded when American commandos broke down doors and unleashed dogs without warning on Jan. 7 in the hunt for a known insurgent in Masamut, in Laghman Province in eastern Afghanistan. The residents were so enraged that they threatened to march on the American military base here.      Full news...

South Asia News: US-led forces claimed Saturday they killed 15 rebels, including a female fighter, in eastern Afghanistan. However, a provincial lawmaker and local villagers said that 21 Afghan civilians were killed in the operation. Eleven militants were killed in the firefight, while four others were killed in an airstrike, it said, adding that a female fighter was killed 'while maneuvering on coalition forces and was carrying a rocket-propelled grenade.' However, Abdul Rahimzai, head of Laghman's provincial council, said that Friday night's attack killed 21 civilians and wounded several others.      Full news...

The Journal: After NATO's invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, most people thought the world had finally remembered and rescued a country drowned in pain and sorrow. But despite the attention paid by the international community, today Afghanistan is one of the poorest, most under-developed countries in the world. RAWA believes that no other nation can liberate Afghan women, and it is their own responsibility to raise and fight for their rights. In this hard fight we need the support and solidarity of peace-loving and democratic-minded people of the world.      Full news...

Human Rights Watch: On October 1, 2008, the Department of Defense published a summary of a report by Brig. Gen. Michael Callan of its investigations into USairstrikes on the village of Azizabad in Herat province on August 21-22, 2008. Since that time, Human Rights Watch has conducted additional research into theevents surrounding the Azizabad airstrikes, reviewed the facts presented in the summary, and analyzed the Callan investigation’s methodology. “The weaknesses in the Callan investigation call into question the Defense Department’s commitment to avoid civiliancasualties,” said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch.      Full news...

Tolo T.V. (Translated by RAWA): The relatives of patients admitted in the Jamhooriat Hospital complain about the lack of hygienic equipments, necessary medicines and carelessness of the people in charge in the Ministry of Public Health. They say they even have to buy the important equipments of surgery from the bazaar. The head of the surgery department of the Jamhooriat Hospital confirmed the statements and said they have many problems and no steps have been taken by the Ministry of Public Health to solve the matters. A hospital worker said, “We buy all items, from the thread with which we sew the cuts to the substance with which the cut is washed.”      Full news...

The Earth Times: Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Thursday condemned the reported killing of 17 civilians, including women and children, in a US-led coalition operation in eastern Afghanistan, the presidential palace said in a statement. Several demonstration have been staged in Afghan cities and rural areas to condemn the killing of civilians by foreign forces. Unable to seek revenge independently, many Afghan men in southern and eastern Afghanistan have joined the Taliban ranks after losing members of their families in international military operations, according to Afghan officials.      Full news...

The Nation: President-elect Barack Obama not only had the good judgment to oppose the war in Iraq, he argued for the need "to end the mindset that took us into" that war. So it's troubling that he ramped up his rhetoric during the campaign about exiting Iraq in order to focus on what he calls the "central front in the war on terror"--Afghanistan. His plan now calls for an escalation of 20,000 to 30,000 additional American troops over the next year--nearly doubling the current 32,000. New York Times columnist Tom Friedman criticized the Dems' position on Afghanistan as ill-conceived "bumper sticker politics."      Full news...

Midland Free Press: What will it take to convince the Harper government that Canada's military invasion of Afghanistan was an ill-conceived, monumental blunder and failure? As of Dec. 28, 2008 the lives of 106 Canadian soldiers in the flourishing stage of their youthful development have been killed in a war started by George W. Bush and his hawkish Republican Administration. The loss of one Canadian in Bush's war, or what could become Obama's war, is one too many. Further in this regard, Barack Obama's ostentatious saber rattling during his election campaign and his more recent pronouncements on the subject, is not an auspicious or favourable beginning for a newly-elected president of the USA.      Full news...

Vancouver Free Press: The 101 Canadians who have been killed in Afghanistan believed that they were serving our country, and for that they deserve our respect and gratitude. We must not forget or trivialize their ultimate sacrifice. But there is an awful truth that we tend to avoid, a truth that must be proclaimed if we are to end the killing on all sides of that bloody conflict. The truth is that those 101 brave Canadians died for nothing. Their lives were taken away from them, and from their loving families and friends, for a lie. More accurately, they died for a series of lies.      Full news...

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...

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...

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...

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...

CNN News: The U.S. military is investigating two airstrikes this week that Afghan officials say killed as many as 60 civilians. Many Afghans accuse the United States of not taking caution when carrying out airstrikes in civilian areas and Karzai has been under enormous political pressure to stop the strikes.      Full news...

RAWA News: To condemn the presence of Afghan criminals in the Mini-Peace Jirga in Islamabad, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) held a sit-in protest on October 28, 2008. RAWA denounced the participation of corrupt people and criminals like Abdullah (head of the delegation), Kabir Ranjbar, Arif Noorzai and Farooq Wardak. RAWA emphasized that such murderers and traitors can’t solve the problem of terrorism in both the countries and in no way can represent the Afghan people. The hands of above-mentioned people are stained with the blood of our innocent people.      Full news...

Canada.com: Thousands of people took to the streets of eastern Afghanistan Friday to protest against the killing of 27 civilians by Taliban insurgents. Witnesses said the victims, some as young as 15, were ordered off a bus by armed gunmen in the troubled Kandahar province on October 14 as they travelled to Iran in search of work. Organizers said more than 10,000 people attended the rally to protest against what they called an "un-Islamic" act.      Full news...

CISDA: The ridiculous sentence against Parwiz Kambakhsh shows that the justice programme designed and run by the Italian government has completely failed. This failure looks even worse if we consider the huge amount of money spent. In addition, this is also a defeat for Karzai and for Western governments that have dressed some well-known criminals with jacket and tie, named them "democratic" and put them in power.      Full news...