Fentanyl Kills Mexico's Opium Trade

I went to the mountains of Guerrero to see how farmers of poppy - the raw ingredient for heroin- have adapted to the shift to synthetics. They're now lucky to get 4,000 pesos ($250) for a kilo of gum and many have left.
crashoutmedia.com/p/fentanyl-kil…

Ahoy! And welcome to me voyage of the damned.

Ecuador is no stranger to giving fugitives refuge in its embassies - Assange holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci is 526 years old, and it's had a rough history.

Monks used to eat breakfast next to it, Napoleon's soldiers turned the room into a stable, and it was bombed during WWII.

And somebody once added a new door that destroyed the feet of Jesus...

Lovely review of Josephine Quinn's brilliant book How the World Made the West by the great Tristram Hunt

How the World Made the West — a scuttling of civilisational myths - on.ft.com/3ThBBYC via Financial Times

This morning an electronic billboard on my way to work is displaying this Putin quote: “Russia’s borders do not end anywhere.”

Russia obtained at least one-third of its foreign-sourced critical battlefield components, valued at $7.3bn, from companies based in the US and its allies last year ft.com/content/96c4f3…

Allied propaganda map depicting what would happen to North America if the Central Powers won World War I, 1916.

NEW COMMENTARY | Crisis Group’s 10 Conflicts to Watch in 2024

1️⃣ Gaza

2️⃣ Wider Middle East War

3️⃣ Sudan

4️⃣ Ukraine

5️⃣ Myanmar

6️⃣ Ethiopia

7️⃣ The Sahel

8️⃣ Haiti

9️⃣ Armenia-Azerbaijan

🔟 U.S.-China

In collaboration w/ Foreign Policy

📌 Read more: crisisgroup.org/global/10-conf…

“War and peace side by side.” I gauge the mood in a small town sixty miles from Moscow. #2024 BBC News (UK)

newly declassified us intelligence assessment: 315k russian personnel killed/injured since start of the war in ukraine

which is 87% (!!!) of moscow’s prewar force

Cait O'Riordan singing 'I'm A Man You Don't Meet Every Day', the piper's solo, and Maurice MacGowan's reaction was just one of so many beautiful moments from Shane MacGowan's funeral. #ShaneMacGowan

When Marina Abramovic placed herself at the mercy of a crowd of strangers in an art studio in Naples in 1974, she had no idea what to expect.

She stood before them with a sign that read:

“There are 72 objects on the table that one can use on me as desired. Performance.

I

Russia's grain production is high - suspiciously high. Millions of tonnes of this 'Russian' grain may be coming from occupied Ukraine. Where the authorities are using brutal means of control. My dispatch from the front. With Pjotr Sauer theguardian.com/world/2023/dec…

This is bigger than it seems. A terrific move on the part of DoD.

Scientists Have Reported a Breakthrough In Understanding Whale Language vice.com/en/article/4a3…

Italy has exited China's Belt and Road Initiative. aljazeera.com/news/2023/12/6…

Fentanyl is a game changer in the narco trade both because of how lethal it is and also how low volume it is. While cocaine comes in wraps of a gram, a fentanyl pill can be 1 milligram, or a thousandth of the weight.

A kilo of fentanyl can be worth millions of dollars in pills.

My long essay on the state of the South Caucasus published for @engelsbergIdeas The aftermath of Azerbaijan’s violent takeover of Karabakh, the precarious state of Armenia and the lessons Georgia takes from it. The new focus on Zangezur and Nakhchivan... engelsbergideas.com/essays/armenia…