The war in Afghanistan has looked a lot like the war on drugs in Latin America and previous colonial campaigns in Asia, with a rapid militarization of the area and the empowerment of pliant local elites.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a death knell to so many industries in Afghanistan. Charities and aid agencies have even warned that the economic dislocation could spark widespread famine. But one sector is still booming: the illicit opium trade. Last year saw Afghan opium poppy cultivation grow by over a third while counter-narcotics operations dropped off a cliff. The country is said to be the source of over 90% of all the world's illicit opium, from which heroin and other opioids are made. More land is under cultivation for opium in Afghanistan than is used for coca production across all of Latin America, with the creation of the drug said to directly employ around half a million people.

This is a far cry from the 1970s, when poppy production was minimal, and largely for domestic consumption. But this changed in 1979 when the CIA launched Operation Cyclone, the widespread funding of Afghan Mujahideen militias in an attempt to bleed dry the then-recent Soviet invasion. Over the next decade, the CIA worked closely with its Pakistani counterpart, the ISI, to funnel $2 billion worth of arms and assistance to these groups, including the now infamous Osama Bin Laden and other warlords known for such atrocities as throwing acid in the faces of unveiled women.

"From statements by U.S. Ambassador [to Iran] Richard Helms, there was little heroin production in Central Asia by the mid 1970s," Professor Alfred McCoy, author of "The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade," told MintPress. But with the start of the CIA secret war, opium production along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border surged and refineries soon dotted the landscape. Trucks loaded with U.S. taxpayer-funded weapons would travel from Pakistan into its neighbor to the west, returning filled to the brim with opium for the new refineries, their deadly product ending up on streets worldwide. With the influx of Afghan opium in the 1980s — Jeffrey St. Clair, co-author of "Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press," alleges — heroin addiction more than doubled in the United States.

Ivory Hecker, a reporter with the Houston affiliate of Fox News, fired a surprising broadside at the network, accusing it of suppressing reporting that didn't fit the desired narrative, and promising to expose it.

During a live report on Monday, Hecker alleged that "Fox Corp. has been muzzling" her and possibly other reporters "to keep certain information from you, the viewers."

"I am going to be releasing some recordings about what goes on behind the scenes at Fox," she said, pointing to the controversial conservative outfit Project Veritas. The material is supposed to be published by the outlet on Tuesday.

Vandana Shiva is a brilliant mind calling for inhabitants of the Earth to unite against forces that are threatening to destroy the planet, in part via a new wave of colonization in the name of sustainability.

Tech billionaire Bill Gates, now the largest owner of farmland in the U.S.,¹ is at the root of the problem, pushing technology as the only mechanism to save the world, and in so doing denying real solutions. This path is not accidental but carefully orchestrated to amass wealth, power and control, while making all but the elite subservient.

In my interview with Vandana Shiva, Ph.D., she spoke about Gates Ag One,² which is headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri, where Monsanto is also headquartered.

"Gates Ag One is one [type of] agriculture for the whole world, organized top down. He's written about it. We have a whole section on it in our new report,³ 'Gates to a Global Empire,'" she said. This includes digital farming, in which farmers are surveilled and mined for their agricultural data, which is then repackaged and sold back to them.

According to a senior US official, Washington is not happy with the absence of a "major change in behavior" of President Assad. This is in fact not surprising, since the primary goal of the United States's (illegal) presence in the country was to overthrow Assad and install a government in favor of Washington.

Acting Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs Joey Hood warned US allies in the Middle East against normalizing ties with Syria, asking them to consider "very carefully the atrocities committed by the regime on the Syrian people over the last decade", Al Arabiya reported.

Hood gracefully hinted that if the Arab countries chose the path of normalization, they will risk being hit by economic pressure from the United States.

The United States is planning to evacuate a group of vulnerable Afghan interpreters before the U.S. military completes its withdrawal from Afghanistan so they can wrap up their visa applications from safety, U.S. officials said on Thursday.

The evacuation of the at-risk Afghans will include their family members for a total of as many as 50,000 people, a senior Republican lawmaker told Reuters.

The decision by President Joe Biden's administration risks inflaming a sense of crisis in Afghanistan, just a day before Biden meets Afghan President Ashraf Ghani for talks in Washington aimed at projecting a sense of partnership despite the U.S. military exit.

For the first-ever time, Russia has deployed two MiG-31K interceptor aircraft to Syria. The fighter is capable of carrying the much-hyped hypersonic Kinzhal air-launched ballistic missile, which has a range of around 2,000km.

The Mikoyan MiG-31, first built during the Soviet Union, is a supersonic aircraft currently in operation with the armed forces in Russia and Kazakhstan. The MiG-31K planes, the variant sent to Middle Eastern countries, were upgraded in 2018 to enable them to carry the state-of-the-art Kinzhal missile.

The Kinzhal - which means 'dagger' in Russian - can fly at Mach 10 speed and is said to have the ability to perform evasive maneuvers in-flight. It can carry both conventional and nuclear warheads.

Labour has accused Boris Johnson of being "spineless" after Downing Street said the prime minister accepts Matt Hancock's apology for breaking social distancing rules and "considers the matter closed".


The health secretary has been backed by Number 10 after he released a statement saying he had "let people down" and was "very sorry" after pictures emerged of him kissing an aide.

But a Labour spokeswoman said: "This matter is definitely not closed, despite the government's attempts to cover it up."

In a stunning admission about the critical chain of custody documents for absentee ballots deposited into drop boxes in the November 3, 2020 election, a Fulton County election official told The Georgia Star News on Wednesday that "a few forms are missing" and that "some procedural paperwork may have been misplaced."

A Star News analysis of drop box ballot transfer forms for absentee ballots deposited in drop boxes provided by Fulton County in response to an Open Records Request showed that 385 transfer forms out of an estimated 1,565 transfer forms Fulton County said should have been provided are missing - a number that is significantly greater than "a few" by any objective standard.

On Sunday, The Star News published a story which included the files containing digital images of the 1,180 transfer forms that Fulton County did provide. Those digital images can be viewed here.

This is the first time that any election official at either the state or county level from a key battleground state has made an admission of significant error in election procedures for the November 3, 2020 election.

The admission of missing chain of custody documents by a Fulton County official is important for several reasons that cut to the very core of public confidence in the outcome of the 2020 presidential election:

How fast did the West forget about the crisis in Gaza last month? Anyway, now it is out of the way, the unending narrative concerning Xinjiang has come back to the fore, but the US is already making blunders.

Earlier this week the US and Canada worked to assemble a coalition of countries to call out China at the United Nations on the matter of human rights, demanding a probe over the autonomous region. Amongst the 40 or so countries who signed up included, of all countries, Israel, reportedly at the request of Washington. This has seen Tel Aviv take a new position on international human rights that it had not previously considered, after adopting a new Prime Minister in Naftali Bennett.

Coming just weeks after the sustained bombing of Gaza and condemnation around the world, Israel's incorporation into such a "coalition" is an astonishing act of hypocrisy, projection and double standards. It makes a mockery out of international human rights, not least regarding Muslims, and is a huge strategic blunder on Washington's part which will backfire in the Islamic world, and even amongst some in the West. As this saga takes place in Geneva, the biggest irony was that not a single Muslim country, be it in the Middle East, Africa or Southeast Asia, joined the statement regarding Xinjiang. In fact, most major Islamic nations actually joined a counter-coalition of at least 65 countries supporting China's position.

Prime Minister Naftali Bennett appeared to hint at Israel's role in a recent attack on an Iranian nuclear site during a speech at a graduation ceremony for Israeli Air Force pilots on Thursday. Bennett, in his speech at the IAF's Hatzerim Air Base, outside Beersheba said:

"Our enemies know — not from statements, but from actions — that we are much more determined and much more clever, and that we do not hesitate to act when it is needed."

His remarks came a day after an alleged drone attack on an Iranian centrifuge production facility outside Tehran, which reportedly damaged the site.

In his speech, one of his first since taking over as premier earlier this month, Bennett referred to Israel's strike on Iraq's nuclear reactor nearly 40 years ago. The attack — dubbed Operation Opera — was the first implementation of what has become known as the Begin Doctrine, named for then-prime minister Menachem Begin, which favors taking military action — unilaterally, if necessary — in order to prevent enemy countries in the Middle East from obtaining nuclear weapons.

Bennett said Israel's prime ministers have always had a "sacred responsibility not to allow an existential threat to the State of Israel. Then it was Iraq, today it is Iran."