The Washington Post today describes the failure of regimented programs in Afghanistan to reintegrate Taliban teenagers ("Taliban" (alt.: "Terrorist") means "any Afghan who fights against the presence of foreign military forces in their country" and "reintegrate" means "persuading or compelling them to passively acquiesce to those forces"):

The teenage insurgents spend their days learning to make shoes and bookshelves, listening to religious leaders denounce the radical interpretation of Islam they learned as children.

But when they return to their cells at Kabul's juvenile rehabilitation center, the boys with wispy beards and cracking voices talk only of the holy war from which they were plucked and their plans to resume fighting for the Taliban.

As the Taliban presses its efforts to recruit teenage fighters, Afghan officials and their international backers have crafted a program to reintegrate the country's youngest insurgents into mainstream society. But that ambition is coming up against the intransigence of the teens, who say they would rather be on the battlefield.

"We'll fight against America for a thousand years if we have to," said Ali Ahmad, 17, sitting at a desk that has hearts and Koran verses scratched in the wood . . .

"They bring us here to change us," said Nane Asha, in his late teens. "But this is our way. We cannot be changed." . . .

The Taliban visited Asha's school when he was about 13, preaching the evils of American interlopers and the value of violent jihad. Asha approached the speaker after the sermon ended. "How can I join you?" he asked. . . .

Within a few weeks, Asha was enrolled in a six-month training course, learning how to fire a Kalashnikov and to connect a nest of wires and explosives that could take out a U.S. tank. He studied the material obsessively. . . .

Reintegration is at the heart of U.S. and Afghan government strategies to wind down the war, with schooling and employment being offered to coax fighters away from the insurgency.

The state of California has just passed bill AB499, which will permit minor children as young as 12 years old to be vaccinated with sexually transmitted disease vaccines like Gardasil without parental knowledge or parental consent. This means that if you live in California, school or medical personnel would be allowed to vaccinate your child against an STD without your ever knowing it.


At issue, of course, is whether 12-year-olds are mature enough to fully analyze the benefits versus risks of vaccination (or any medical treatment for that matter), or recognize the alternatives to STD prevention, such as abstinence. Meanwhile, a child could suffer a vaccine reaction and the parent, not knowing the child had been vaccinated, could mistake it for the flu or another condition, delaying getting help until it is too late.

But, perhaps the greatest issue of all is whether this law violates your basic right to be involved in important decisions regarding your child's health.

The Israeli cabinet accepted plans to relocate Bedouin villages to government-approved towns.

Recently the Israeli cabinet approved a major plan for the Negev that seeks to "relocate" an estimated 30,000 Bedouin Palestinian citizens to government-approved townships.

The details that have emerged about the government's 'solution' for Bedouin Palestinians show a continuation of the colonial logic that has shaped Israeli policy in the Negev since 1948. Reports suggest that the state will reject half of the Bedouins' land claims. For the tens of thousands of Bedouin Palestinians in 'unrecognised villages', there is now uncertainty about exactly which communities will be 'legalised' - and which will be demolished, their residents forcibly transferred.

Unsurprisingly, you wouldn't know that from the Israeli Prime Minister's communiqué about the decision, which repeatedly used language like development and absorption. There was only a hint about the forced relocation, in the promise to "strengthen the [state's] enforcement mechanism".

Dick Cheney is back in the news this week, and for once, he kept his warmongering to a minimum. Cheney is, like most politicians, trying to cash in on his lifetime of destroying the country and enriching his friends by publishing a book. His version of the truth, titled In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir, is published by Simon & Schuster. I guess the original title, "How I Escaped From the Death Star" was rejected for copyright reasons. You can buy it at Amazon at 45% off (already?) or wait a few more weeks and pick it up at your average dollar store.

The book itself is a stunning display of psychological twisting, as Cheney tries in vain to defend the indefensible: The Bush Administration in general, and specifically, the War in Iraq. Cheney defends Guantanamo Bay, the massive military buildup, the torture of innocent Muslims, the loss of American freedom at home (in the name of security, of course), and the general fear-baiting, terror-hyping security state he built on the backs of an attack that I believe he knew was coming.

That's right. I think Dick Cheney knew an event LIKE 9/11 was going to happen on American soil, and he was fully prepared to enact his fascist agenda as soon as the crisis emerged. How do I know that? It's in his own words, if you read with a little insight.

Cheney was chatting with The American Enterprise Institute about 9/11, and moderator Stephen Hayes delved into what Cheney's immediate, emotional reaction to the events was. Hayes said that President Bush nearly cried in public, and that Condoleeza Rice wept at home. Cheney's reaction as the events unfolded? Not a single human emotion.

Nope. Cheney's first thoughts were all about war and who we got to kill, and which brown people we'd get to bomb, now that they were dumb enough to attack us. Cheney focused on "what the targets might be and how we might go after him."

As an economist I have never had much patience with Paul Krugman's economics, stuck as he is in 1940s-era Keynesian demand-side economics. I have sometimes concluded that Krugman had rather denounce Ronald Reagan that to acknowledge that supply-side economists have established that fiscal policy has supply-side, not just demand-side, effects.

However, Krugman does display at times a moral conscience. He did so on September 11 in his New York Times column, "The Years of Shame." Krugman wrote that 9/11 was hijacked by "fake heros" who used the event "to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight" and that "our professional pundits" lent their support to the misuse of the event.

The stuck pigs, of course, squealed loudly. The war criminal, Donald Rumsfeld, publicly cancelled his New York Times subscription, and the complicit presstitutes in Washington's wars of aggression jumped on Krugman with spikes and hatchets.

On Wednesday, a coalition of Israeli peace organizations published a list of 50 reasons for Israel to support a Palestinian state. Assuming that you only accept five of them, isn't that enough? What exactly is the alternative, now that the heavens are closing in around us?

What will we tell the world next week, at the UN? What could we say? Whether in the General Assembly or the Security Council, we will be exposed in all our nakedness: Israel does not want a Palestinian state. Period. And it doesn't have a single persuasive argument against the establishment and the international recognition of such a state.

Where now for European banks? Sir Howard Davies, former chairman of Britain's Financial Services Authority, said on BBC Radio's Today programme on Tuesday morning that he thought the French government was only days away from having to recapitalise the country's banking system for a second time. It's hard to disagree.

The panic seems to have been temporarily stemmed by a statement from BNP Paribas to the effect that it wasn't having the problems widely reported of finding dollar funding. There was also an emphatic denial of discussions over state intervention. But no-one is kidding themselves. Italy had to pay the highest spread since joining the euro to sell its bonds on Tuesday. There are growing fears over whether Europe's largest borrower can stay the course.

The eurozone sovereign debt crisis is meanwhile exacting a devastating toll on the European banking system as a whole, the UK included. With their high exposure to eurozone debt, the problem is particularly acute for the French banking goliaths, BNP Paribas and Societe Generale.

A single food seed can be as tiny as a grain of sand. Yet many say the fate of the entire organic industry rests upon our efforts to protect the integrity of these small, but vital agricultural inputs.

"Seed is the first resource in our food production chain, so its integrity is vital to the success of organic farmers. Yet little has been done to address the issue of genetic contamination," says Kristina Hubbard, director of advocacy for the Organic Seed Alliance. "I don't think seed is getting enough attention."

As the natural foods industry gears up for an unprecedented assault on genetically modified organisms (GMOs), much emphasis has been placed on convincing government to label foods containing GMOs and on swaying grocers and manufacturers to rid them from the retail shelf. But Hubbard and others say those actions will mean little if farmers can't find clean, GMO-free seed to plant in the first place.

I don't expect that Monsanto takes much notice when articles about superweeds - plants that have developed resistance to its flagship RoundUp herbicide and its active ingredient glyphosate - appear in Grist, Scientific American, Mother Jones or even The New York Times. That's nothing but typical "fearmongering" from the "liberal media" and the biotech behemoth can laugh it off all the way to the bank.

But when the mainstream business press writes lead paragraphs like this:

Justin Cariker grabs a 7-foot-tall Palmer pigweed at his farm, bending the wrist-thick stem to reveal how it has overwhelmed the cotton plant beneath it. This is no ordinary weed: Over time it has developed resistance to Monsanto's best-selling herbicide, Roundup. Hundreds of such "superweeds" are rising defiantly across this corner of the Mississippi Delta. "We're not winning the battle," Cariker, owner of Maud Farms in Dundee, Miss., says as he looks at weeds that tower over his infested cotton field like spindly green scarecrows.

...as Bloomberg BusinessWeek did under the headline "Attack of the Superweeds," I have to believe that Monsanto's top brass starts to worry.

The four-star Air Force general who oversees Air Force Space Command walked into a highly secured room on Capitol Hill a week ago to give a classified briefing to lawmakers and staff, and dropped a surprise. Pressed by members, Gen. William Shelton said the White House tried to pressure him to change his testimony to make it more favorable to a company tied to a large Democratic donor.

The episode - confirmed by The Daily Beast in interviews with administration officials and the chairman of a congressional oversight committee - is the latest in a string of incidents that have given Republicans sudden fodder for questions about whether the Obama administration is politically interfering in routine government matters that affect donors or fundraisers. Already, the FBI and a House committee are investigating a federal loan guarantee to a now failed solar firm called Solyndra that is tied to a large Obama fundraiser.

Now the Pentagon has been raising concerns about a new wireless project by a satellite broadband company in Virginia called LightSquared, whose majority owner is an investment fund run by Democratic donor Philip Falcone.