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...

The Associated Press: A NATO operation killed six civilians Monday, including a woman and a young girl, in a mountainous region of eastern Afghanistan, villagers and officials said. But the military alliance said its force killed four to eight "militants." The governor of Kunar province, Sayed Fazelullah Wahidi, said four men also died in the NATO air strikes. Five houses were damaged, and one was demolished, Wahidi and villagers said.      Full news...

Reuters: Taliban militants publicly executed a man and girl on Monday for eloping when she was already engaged to marry someone else, an official said, in a sign of the grip the Islamists have over parts of Afghanistan. Hashim Noorzai, head of Khash Rud district in southwestern Nimruz province, said the two were executed by gun shots in front of a crowd of villagers.      Full news...

Toronto Star: A female provincial official known for fighting for women's rights was gunned down in southern Afghanistan yesterday... Gunmen killed Sitara Achakzai outside her home in Kandahar city and then drove off, said Matiullah Khan Qateh, police chief of Kandahar province. He said the four men drove up on two motorcycles and shot Achakzai as she was getting out of her car.      Full news...

RAWA News: While much continuity with Bush policies exists, some opportunistic changes in the execution of the Afghan war have been made. Most are inspired by the aim to better market “the good war” to the American public. For example, under Obama U.S/NATO forces are relying less upon deadly air strikes which are 4-10 times more deadly for Afghan civilians than are ground attacks. As a consequence, the monthly total of Afghan civilians killed by US/NATO action has declined moderately at the same time as the monthly death toll of occupation forces has risen.      Full news...

The New York Times: The Obama administration is basking in praise for its welcome commitment to shut down the American detention center at Guant?namo Bay. But it is acting far less nobly when it comes to prisoners held at a larger, more secretive military detention facility at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. In February, the new administration disappointingly followed the example of the Bush White House in opposing judicial review for prisoners who have been indefinitely detained at Bagram without any charges or access to lawyers.      Full news...

A Pakistan News: Baitullah Mehsud, the chief of Pakistani Taliban, who claimed credit for the recent deadly attack on a police academy near Lahore, has links with the country’s Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI), a media report said.Based in lawless border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, Mehsud was tipped off by ISI, to enable him escape attempts to capture or kill him in the last two years.      Full news...

Reuters: The father of a seven-day-old boy said on Thursday his infant son died in an overnight raid by Afghan and U.S. forces, with the U.S. saying it was investigating the claim. A female school teacher was also killed and the child's mother wounded, the father said, during the raid in Ali Daya village in Khost province, where Taliban fighters are active      Full news...

DPA: A provincial governor in south-eastern Afghanistan said Thursday that US-led international troops killed five civilians including two women and a 7-day-old child and wounded two other women in an operation against suspected militants. The coalition troops conducted an operation in a village near Khost city, the capital of the province of the same name Wednesday night "after they claimed that they were attacked by small arms fire," Hamidullah Qalandarzai, the provincial governor, told the German Press Agency DPA.      Full news...

IRIN: Over 600,000 Afghans lack basic healthcare services due to attacks on healthcare facilities and health workers - a figure that has doubled since 2007, Abdullah Fahim, a spokesman for the Ministry of Public Health (MoPH), has said. About 32 health centres were torched, destroyed and/or closed down due to insecurity in 2007, and 28 health facilities were shut down or attacked in 2008, MoPH said.      Full news...

Common Dreams: The proposed new Afghan law requiring (among other things), women to have sex with their husbands on demand and not leave home unescorted, has shocked the West. But for women in Afghanistan whose rights have always been bargaining chips to be given or taken away for political gain, it comes as no surprise. Despite the rhetoric from the Bush Administration in 2001 that “to fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women (Laura Bush),” Bush’s own military strategy set the stage for the new Taliban-like law today. In hiring the fundamentalist warlords of the Northern Alliance to defeat the Taliban, the US knowingly sacrificed women’s rights for political gain.      Full news...

PAN: A mass grave of civil war era was found in Karta-i-Chahar locality of capital Kabul when a private construction company's workers started digging the base for a new building near the education department's compound, officials said on Sunday.      Full news...

AP: At least 62 people suffocated to death in the back of a truck packed with illegal migrants, and dozens were rescued unconscious after Pakistani police acting on a tip opened the vehicle Saturday near the Afghan border. More than 100 people were packed inside the 40-foot-long (12-meter-long) metal container, Bakhsh said. He said survivors were rushed to the hospital, many of them unconscious.      Full news...

IRIN: Much of the international aid to Afghanistan over the past seven years has been spent to achieve military and political objectives, and the current approach to aid lacks “clarity, coherence and resolve”, a group of international NGOs has said. “We feel a pull on our sleeves pulling us to the military tent,” said Dave Hampson, a representative of Save the Children UK, adding that funds for aid agencies were being tied to military and political conditionality more than ever before.      Full news...

Times Online: Tom Coghlan, reporting for The Times in Kabul, has been leaked the full text of new laws in Afghanistan, under which a woman from the minority Shia community will not be able to leave the house without her husband's permission and cannot refuse him his marital rights. 'The wife is bound to preen for her husband, as and when he desires,' the law says. According to the United Nations Development Fund for Women, the new law legalises the rape of a woman by her husband.      Full news...

UNOHCHR: The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay on Thursday urged the Afghan Government to rescind a new law, reportedly signed by President Karzai earlier this month, saying it would seriously undermine women's rights in Afghanistan and contravene the Afghanistan constitution as well as universal human rights standards.      Full news...

Times online: This grainy footage appears to show a 17-year-old girl being beaten by Islamic radicals in Pakistan’s northwestern region of Swat, where Sharia law was introduced after the government reached a truce with the Taleban in February.A local Taleban commander in the militant stronghold of Matta, 25 miles from the regional capital, Mingora, ordered the girl to be flogged a week ago after accusing her of adultery, according to local reporters.      Full news...

IRIN: Despite a July 2008 joint emergency appeal for US$404 million to help the most vulnerable 550,000 pregnant and lactating women and under-five children in Afghanistan, nutritious food aid - specially fortified food -is yet to reach those in need. Some 24 percent of lactating women are malnourished, over 19 percent of pregnant women have a poor nutritional status (low on minerals, vitamins, food insecure and weak) and about 54 percent of under-five children are stunted, according to a joint survey by UN agencies and the government.      Full news...

The Independent: Afghanistan's President, Hamid Karzai, has signed a law which "legalises" rape, women's groups and the United Nations warn. Critics claim the president helped rush the bill through parliament in a bid to appease Islamic fundamentalists ahead of elections in August.      Full news...

The Guardian: Hamid Karzai has been accused of trying to win votes in Afghanistan's presidential election by backing a law the UN says legalises rape within marriage and bans wives from stepping outside their homes without their husbands' permission. The Afghan president signed the law earlier this month, despite condemnation by human rights activists and some MPs that it flouts the constitution's equal rights provisions.      Full news...

PAN: A Husband decapitated his wife and a police officer was detained in a case of embezzling 1.4 million afghanis in northern Jozjan province.Colonel Syed Abbas Sadat, crime branch chief of Jozjan police told Pajhwok Afghan News that Abdul Razaq, 22, killed his 18 years old wife with knife in Khawja Do Koh district on Sunday night.      Full news...

The Washington Post: A former U.N. official who oversaw reconstruction funds in Afghanistan diverted half a million dollars from roads, schools and clinics to fund his luxury lifestyle, according to a confidential internal U.N. investigation. The U.N. Procurement Task Force accused Gary K. Helseth, an American who headed the U.N. Office for Project Services (UNOPS) in Afghanistan from 2002 to 2006.      Full news...

Quqnoos: An Afghan emergency hospital records 600 suicide attempts within a year. This is an enormous number of Afghans, mainly women, trying to commit suicide to flee violence in life. Based on the figures given by the Ibn-e Sina Emergency Hospital in Kabul more than 600 incidents of suicide attempts have been referred to this hospital during the past 12 months.      Full news...

New York Times: The Taliban’s widening campaign in southern Afghanistan is made possible in part by direct support from operatives in Pakistan’s military intelligence agency, despite Pakistani government promises to sever ties to militant groups fighting in Afghanistan, according to American government officials.      Full news...

AP: The Afghan government had arrested two TV presenters, one for a programme apparently offensive to Muslim clerics and another for interviewing a Taliban spokesman, a media watchdog said Tuesday.Reporters Without Borders said it was "disturbed" by Monday's arrests of Fahim Kohdamani of Emroz television, who is still being held, and Ajmal Alamzai of Ariana TV, who was released just before midnight Monday.      Full news...

AP: A roadside bomb ripped through a van carrying civilians on a road used by foreign troops in eastern Afghanistan on Wednesday, killing 10 and wounding six, officials said.In the south, three Australian soldiers were wounded in another blast.The attacks are a reminder of the dangers facing Afghan and foreign forces as thousands of new U.S. troops roll into the country to try to reverse the Taliban gains of the last three years.      Full news...

PAN: Residents of Garoch village in eastern Laghman province, who fled their homes as a result of several US forces air raids, are in dire need of shelters, fuel and drinking water in their makeshiftarrangements near the capital city of Mehtarlam.Garoch village northwest to Mehtarlam is surrounded by mountains range connecting to Sarobi district of Kabul province came under US air-strikes thrice, forcing the residents to flee and take refuge in Mehtarlam city.      Full news...