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A father was dragged from his home and handcuffed in front of his children by a SWAT team looking for his estranged wife - to collect her unpaid student loans. A stunned Kenneth Wright had his front door kicked in by the raiding party at 6 am yesterday before being dragged onto his front porch, handcuffed and led to a police car with his three children. He says he was then detained for six hours while officers looked for his wife - who no longer lives at the house. Scroll down for video

On July 25th, for instance, while John Boehner raced around the Capitol desperately pressing Republican House members for votes on a debt-ceiling bill that Harry Reid was calling dead-on-arrival in the Senate, America's new ambassador to Afghanistan, Ryan Crocker, took his oath of office in distant Kabul.  According to the New York Times, he then gave a short speech "warning" that "Western powers needed to 'proceed carefully'" and emphasized that when it came to the war, there would "be no rush for the exits." If, in Washington, people were rushing for those exits, no chance of that in Kabul almost a decade into America's second Afghan War.  There, the air strikes, night raids, assassinations, roadside bombs, and soldier and civilian deaths, we are assured, will continue to 2014 and beyond.  In a war in which every gallon of gas used by a fuel-guzzling US military costs $400 to $800 to import, time is no object and -- despite the panic in Washington over debt payments -- neither evidently is cost.

No one on the ground or in Pakistan's air defence spotted Area 51's latest toy as it kept watch on Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, on the night of the US raid that killed the Taliban leader. Rather than one of the UFOs that the wilder fringes of the internet believe the military has stashed away at America's top-secret military site in Nevada, this "toy" was actually the latest Star Wars-type drone, or unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), developed at the base whose existence Uncle Sam only barely admits. Named the "Beast of Kandahar" after it was snapped at Kandahar air base in Afghanistan back in 2009, this stealthy grey batwing-shaped long-distance reconnaissance drone, officially known as the RQ-170 Sentinel, was a throwback to Area 51's golden age before the advent of the spy satellite put the spy plane out of business.