While widows in Kabul stand in line for food handouts and policemen beg at intersections, the Taliban extremist group in Afghanistan issued an edict banning foreign journalists from writing commentaries or analyses of the situation in Afghanistan. Photographs of women or animals are also forbidden. Afghanistan currently has no independent newspapers or radio stations.
Afghans receive their news from the international media.
The Taliban has said they cannot deal with the problem of widespread poverty until they have captured all of Afghanistan. Foreign aid agencies give monthly handouts of 10 pounds of oil and 26 pounds of beans to widows, who cannot support themselves because of the ban on women working. Facing a severe decline in Latino and African-American graduate enrollment as a result of prohibitions against affirmative action in the wake of Proposition 209, the University of California is considering dropping the SAT requirement for undergraduate admission, citing racial bias in the test. The number of non-white students plummeted this fall at graduate schools where affirmative action was recently banned, such as Texas and California. The SAT is also biased against women students.