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“AIG’s ability to restructure its business and repay the government is unclear at this time,” the Government Accountability Office said in a new report released Monday.

As of the start of September, the company’s outstanding balance of taxpayer aid was $120 billion.

It was a year ago this month that AIG received the first chunk of a government bailout that has since grown to $182 billion. The federal money, noted the GAO, has since helped stabilize the insurance giant, which this year posted a $1.8 billion second-quarter profit, its first profit since 2007.

Frankly, I wouldn’t bet on Us either. In eight years, American troops have worn out their welcome. Their very presence now incites opposition, but that’s another story. It’s Them — the Afghans — I want to talk about.

Afghans are Afghans. They have their own history, their own culture, their own habitual ways of thinking and behaving, all complicated by a modern experience of decades of war, displacement, abject poverty and incessant meddling by foreign governments near and far — of which the United States has been the most powerful and persistent. Afghans do not think or act like Americans. Yet Americans in power refuse to grasp that inconvenient point.

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American military planners and policymakers already proceed as if, with sufficient training, Afghans can be transformed into scale-model, wind-up American Marines. That is not going to happen. Not now. Not ever. No matter how many of our leaders concur that it must happen — and ever faster.

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In a country where 40 percent of men are unemployed, joining the ANA for 10 weeks is the best game in town. It relieves the poverty of many families every time the man of the family goes back to basic training, but it’s a needlessly complicated way to unintentionally deliver such minimal humanitarian aid. Some of these circulating soldiers are aging former mujahidin — the Islamist fundamentalists the U.S. once paid to fight the Soviets — and many are undoubtedly Taliban.

The Chicago Department of Public Health says there’s no sign anyone else was exposed to the bacteria.

The tragic irony is that Professor Casadaban had been trying to develop a vaccine so that thousands of people around the world wouldn’t die a painful, ugly death from a bacterial infection related to the plague. But it was that bacterium that appears to have killed him.

“We really thought he was so strong, we didn’t see this coming at all,” said Leigh Casadaban, daughter.

Not only did they not see it coming, but sisters Leigh and Brooke Casadaban say their father never knew what killed him.

“It was just so much of a shock, even the time he was in the ER, from the moment he got accepted to the time he passed away. We had no idea, we didn’t even get to say goodbye to him,” said Brooke Casadaban.

Malcom Casadaban was a professor of molecular genetics at the University of Chicago for 30 years.

For the past eight years, his daughters say, he’d been working with a strain of bacteria called yersinia pestis, trying to develop a stronger vaccine for the plague, once the world’s worst health scourge.

The weakened strain he was using, however, isn’t supposed to make healthy people sick.

And that is the big mystery now for investigators with the Centers for Disease Control and the state and city public health departments who’ve been looking for clues at the U. of C. labs.

“Was it a change in the organism, something about the person infected that made him uniquely susceptible? We don’t really know the answers yet,” said John Easton, University of Chicago Medical Center.

“It was hurtful because we remember our father as very healthy. He rode his bike to work, never smoked, never drank,” said Brooke Casadaban.

Brooke and Leigh Casadaban say they’re not satisfied with the answers they’ve been given so far.

How did their father, who had flu-like symptoms, enter the hospital a week ago Sunday morning and die 12 hours later with no one suspecting that it could be related to the plague?

Leigh, who is following in her father’s footsteps, now attends her father’s alma mater Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says it may be up to her to solve this.

“I plan to go to the lab to read his papers and notes and go and really understand what he was trying to do,” said Leigh Casadaban.

It’s also been wreaking havoc, disrupting transport and placing health authorities on alert for widespread respiratory illness.

“The Perimeter system is very, very nice,” he says. “We remove unique responsibility from high politicians and the military.” He looks around again.

Yarynich is talking about Russia’s doomsday machine. That’s right, an actual doomsday device—a real, functioning version of the ultimate weapon, always presumed to exist only as a fantasy of apocalypse-obsessed science fiction writers and paranoid über-hawks. The thing that historian Lewis Mumford called “the central symbol of this scientifically organized nightmare of mass extermination.” Turns out Yarynich, a 30-year veteran of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces and Soviet General Staff, helped build one.

The point of the system, he explains, was to guarantee an automatic Soviet response to an American nuclear strike. Even if the US crippled the USSR with a surprise attack, the Soviets could still hit back. It wouldn’t matter if the US blew up the Kremlin, took out the defense ministry, severed the communications network, and killed everyone with stars on their shoulders. Ground-based sensors would detect that a devastating blow had been struck and a counterattack would be launched.

The loans would go to the fund maintained by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. that insure depositors when banks fail, said one industry and one government official familiar with the FDIC board’s thinking, who requested anonymity because the plans are still evolving.

Regulators also are considering levying a special emergency fee on all banks, charging regular fees early or tapping a $100 billion credit line with the U.S. Treasury, the officials said.

The fund, which insures deposit accounts up to $250,000, is at its lowest point since 1992, at the height of the savings-and-loan crisis. Ongoing losses on commercial real estate and other loans continue to cause multiple bank failures each week.

FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair wants to avoid tapping the Treasury credit line, and Treasury officials insist that the strongest big banks have enough extra capital to operate, the officials said. Comptroller of the Currency John Dugan, who is a voting member of the FDIC board, has said he doesn’t want to levy another fee on banks while the industry is still recovering.

The loans would give big, healthy banks a safe harbor for their money and would limit their risk-taking, said Daniel Alpert, managing director of the investment bank Westwood Capital LLC in New York.

It also would allow the industry’s strongest players — which still rely on FDIC loan guarantees and other emergency subsidies — to help weaker banks avoid paying another fee, he said.

“Lots of banks are going to require more capital, and (Bair is) trying to rob from the rich and give to the poor,” said Alpert, who supports the plan as a creative way to avoid another bailout.

“If you see another quarter, then I think owners have to do something,” Jensen said by phone today. “We are subsidizing oil companies.”

The USAF does not know how or why operators lost control of the MQ-9 Reaper Unmanned Aircraft System. “We do not speculate on the cause of an aircraft mishap,” Captain Frank Hartnett, a spokesman for the Air Force, told Security Management. An investigation, however, will be conducted to find an answer, he said.

The Reaper was flying a combat mission when operators lost “positive control” of the UAV, or the ability to establish connections and send control inputs to the remote-controlled aircraft. When operators noticed the UAV was bound to exit Afghani airspace and all efforts to reestablish communication with the machine failed, the Air Force deployed an F-15E Strike Eagle to destroy it.

The fighter jet fired one Sidewinder missile at the Reaper, causing the UAV to crash into a mountain side. There was no report of civilian casualties or damage to civilian property, according to a USAF statement.

Harnett said the USAF has no knowledge of any similar incidents happening before. “This is the first MQ-9 Reaper crash that was due to loss of control,” he said.