Neil Katz

HARDIN, Mont. (CBS/AP) This is the strange story of how American Police Force, a little known company which claims to specialize in training military and security forces overseas, has seemingly taken control of a $27 million, never-used jail, and a rural Montana town's nonexistent police force.

After arriving in this tiny city with three Mercedes SUVs marked with the logo of a police department that has never existed, representatives of the obscure California security company said preparations were under way to take over Hardin's jail, which has no prisoners.

Significant obstacles remain - including a lack of any contracts to acquire prisoners from other jails or other states.

And on Friday came the revelation the company's operating agreement for the facility has yet to be validated - two weeks after city leaders first unveiled what they said was a signed agreement.

Still, some Hardin leaders said the deal to turn over the 464-bed jail remained on track.

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Fred Reed

All God's Chillun Gottun Gotta Have Structure. Most'em, Leastways

People seem to need an overarching explanation of things—of origins, meaning, purpose, and destiny. Christianity provided these things for a long time but, at the close of the Enlightenment, was losing its luster among the educated. Too much in Christianity just didn’t make sense in light of continuing discoveries. The sciences were more compelling, and a better fit for the changing mood of the times.

When the Origin of Species appeared in 1859, it offered a plausible and rational alternative to God Did It. Evidence in its favor existed. Selective breeding of animals greatly changed them. That this might have occurred by natural selection made sense.

But natural selection did not explain where life came from in the first place. The notion of abiogenesis—that life began by accident in remote primal seas—was tacked on to Darwin. Scientists passed sparks through flasks of chemicals hoped to represent the primal seas, and molecules of compounds usually found in living things were discovered afterward. This was exceedingly thin evidence, but it pointed in the desired direction, and was accepted.

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Ian Williams

[Judge Richard Goldstone (l), head of the U.N. Human Rights Council’s special mission investigating Israel’s “Operation Cast Lead,” and U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay prior to the Council’s Sept. 29, 2009 meeting in Geneva at which Goldstone presented his findings. (AFP photo/Fabrice Coffrini)]

It is a tribute to the legal meticulousness of Richard Goldstone and his colleagues on the U.N. Human Rights Council’s (UNHRC) fact-finding mission that the Israeli government is so obsessed with their report. It can see prosecutions of IDF and Knesset members just over the horizon. Binyamin Netanyahu and his ministers have raucously complained to Britain and France for not voting against the Council resolution that accepted the report, and to Russia and China for supporting it. And, of course, they keep confusing Obama administration criticism of the mandate the Council gave with criticism of the report itself.

In fact, Britain, France and the U.S. united in telling Israel to set up an impartial inquiry. Indeed, to their credit, Gordon Brown and Nicholas Sarkozy apparently tried to trade a “no” vote for Israeli pledges to hold an inquiry, lift the blockade and stop settlement activity and evictions. In the flood of personal attacks on Goldstone and his mission, neither Washington, nor London, nor Paris has seriously challenged the substance of his report or the integrity of his mission, let alone his own personal integrity.

Israel’s Western allies have been reduced to inanities, lamenting the mission’s failure to hear the case the Israelis refused to make. “Because Israel did not cooperate with the Mission, which we regret, the report lacks an authoritative Israeli perspective on the events in question, so crucial to determining the legality of actions,” declared the British envoy in Geneva, who should have been fully aware that it was precisely with that eventual excuse in mind that Israel refused to cooperate.

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