A US delegation is headed for Kabul to persuade President Hamid Karzai to approve a program of glyphosate spraying over the opium-producing lands of southeast Afghanistan. The private contractor Dyncorp is to carry out the spraying in cooperation with a specially-trained Afghan force. The US is willing to negotiate, but makes clear it will not take glyphosate off the table. "There has to be a stick that goes with the carrot," said Thomas Schweich, State Department co-ordinator for counter-narcotics in Afghanistan. Eradication had to be a component of US policy, he emphasized.

Jakob Kellenberger, head of the International Committee of the Red Cross, said May 24 he was not optimistic about a breakthrough in talks with Iraqi officials to gain access to up to 20,000 held in the country's prisons. "We are still in negotiation about an agreement with them," Kellenberger told a news conference. Asked about the impasse, he replied: "I don't think that I am expressing extreme optimism."

Exiled Somali leaders in Eritrea issued a call to boycott a Mogadishu peace conference scheduled for next month, warning of further violence if it goes ahead. Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, leader of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), and Sheikh Sharif Hassan Aden, a former Somali parliament speaker, released the joint statement in Asmara.

Interesting. A Pew survey finds that 87% of Muslim Americans polled (just some 1,000 out of the total 2 million-plus) condemn the practice of suicide bombings. But for those under 30, the 13% finding them sometimes justified doubles to 26%. So the lefty InterPress Service headline states: "Major Poll Finds U.S. Muslims Mostly Mainstream." The reactionary New York Post editorializes May 23 (all caps in original, of course): "TIME BOMBS IN OUR MIDST"

"Agriculture likes immigration bill," reads the May 21 headline in the Columbus Dispatch and other McClatchy newspapers. The new bill would expand and streamline the guest worker program which has been in place since the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. Some 30,000 workers annually come in through the current H-2A program. The streamlined program, dubbed AgJOBS (for Agricultural Job Opportunity, Benefits and Security Act of 2007) could be passed as a stand-alone bill or part of the larger immigration legislation. Some of the same politicians who shaped the 1986 act are instrumental in the guest worker provisions of the currrent bill, such as Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA). California's Tri-Valley Herald notes that the state's agbiz interests are lobbying heavily for it. But a timely May 24 story in the New York Times notes how an attempt by farm labor organizers to eliminate the system of graft which greases the H-2A program recently resulted in a grisly assassination in northern Mexico. Further details on the case are provided by the advocacy website LabourStart:

Veteran journalist Jim Lobe reports on his LobeLog blog that the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a neo-conservative group created two days after 9-11, is holding what it calls "a policy workshop" during Congress' Memorial Day recess, at a luxury resort on Grand Bahama Island. Entitled "Confronting the Iranian Threat: the Way Forward," the confab is to include "30 or so leading experts who will analyze the implications of Iran’s activities, the diplomatic challenges, military and intelligence capabilities, the spread of its ideology within and beyond its borders, and other issues, including the prospects for democratization in the Islamic world, energy security and other related issues that face policymakers in the United States, Europe and the Middle East," according to the invitation letter from FDD's president, Clifford May. The purpose will be "exploring policy options...and [to] consider solutions to one of the most significant policy issues of our day." Writes Lobe:

Every president since FDR has drawn up such plans. The most notorious were Nixon's "Operation Garden Plot" and Reagan's "REX 84 Alpha"—a legacy we recalled when the Homeland Security Act passed in 2002. This latest incarnation has gone unnoticed by the New York Times and other major media. Leave it to the editorial page of Tennessee's Chattanoogan, May 24:

The 9-11 death toll in New York City has just been officially raised from 2,749 to 2,750. From CBS, May 24:

A woman who died of lung disease five months after Sept. 11 was added on Wednesday to the medical examiner's list of attack victims, marking the first time the city has officially linked a death to the toxic dust caused by the World Trade Center's collapse.