80 Afghan schoolgirls fall ill; poison feared - From FOXNews

" Dozens of Afghan schoolgirls have fallen ill in recent days after reporting a strange odor in their classrooms in northern Afghanistan, prompting an investigation into whether they were targeted by militants who oppose education for girls or victims of mass hysteria. In the capital of Kabul, President Hamid Karzai's spokesman, Waheed Omar, said any attempt to keep girls out of school is a "terrorist act."

The Taliban said they didn't do it. The whole thing probably has a simple explanation or is else an attempt by the Karzai government to garner the West's support. He has been in the doghouse lately for his suggestion that negotiations with the Taliban may be better than continuing NATO civilian deaths.

And included in this story:
"Elsewhere in Afghanistan on Sunday, hundreds of people blocked a main road in Logar province, west of Kabul, and burned several trucks to protest what they said were civilian deaths in NATO operations. They gathered hours after NATO said coalition troops killed several insurgents and captured a Taliban sub-commander.
"The man they killed was a schoolteacher and a mullah," said businessman Jan Mohammed. "They killed him inside his house and because of that the people came and burned my gas station, my car and my house."
He complained that if NATO thought the mullah was with the Taliban, "they should have arrested him at his school not gone to his house at midnight."
"The people are very angry. They are saying these people killed are innocent civilians," provincial spokesman Din Mohammad Darwesh said.

The villages in Afghanistan are very tribal in nature. You hear this in the news often, but do you know what it means? Even though they may be only 20 or so kms from a big city (ie, Khandahar or Kabul) 99% of them have never been outside their local area. They live in houses made of rocks and mud and manure and have no running water or electricity. Their whole universe is within the village and surrounding pasture area for their sheep and goats and if lucky cows. They have little care for what is going on in Kabul or Khandahar. They raise their children and their sheep and goats and their crops. And they practise a hashish society or even an opium one. So their decision to grow opium poppies instead of wheat or even grapes is very logical to them.
They have no concept of far away lands such as Europe and North America; they mean nothing to them.
They are a friendly people for the most part, but being so poor they always have an alternate goal in mind.
For them a central government means nothing. There is always an armed warlord to deal with, to sell their drugs to. When the government in far away Kabul vowes to cut back drug production it means nothing to the small village economy. This is the best way that they have to support for their family and themselves.

I'm searching my little brain for another example of this,, maybe when the southern states were producing cotton and other crops with slaves may be similiar. Who cares if Washington bans slaves? The farmers are producing a valuable crop at great profit to the farmers because they only have to feed and house the workers. Did they only sell cotton to fellow southerners? Or to notherners (yankees) also? And even to Canada?
When does a Nation's profit overwhelm it's ethics? And is that so simple a question at all? Our ethics can't be compared to those of other countries.

Also in this story Fox reports on a homicide bomber attack that targeted the guards at a bazaar in Sahjoy district of Zabul province. This is the first time I have heard the phrase "homicide bomber" instead of Suicide bomber, although they refer to him as a suicide bomber in the text of the story.