Afghanistan: ISIS Gets Revenues From Mines And The Heroin Crop

AFGHANISTAN

Harvest of Woes

An Afghan bomb squad recently tried but failed to defuse an explosive device in a car parked in an auto repair garage in Kandahar. Sixteen people, including four security officers, perished when the device detonated. Another 38 were wounded, including children.

Interestingly, the car was also filled with suicide vests, suggesting jihadists were planning to use the car in an attack during Ramadan, which ends in mid-June, the New York Times reported.

The incident is one reason why Afghans have grown so frustrated with their leaders in Kabul.

On a recent visit of US officials to the country, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani celebrated his soldiers’ recent progress against the Taliban in cities like Farah. But local Afghans gave the American visitors an earful on the “corruption, cowardice and perhaps worst of all, indifference” of the local military, the Wall Street Journal wrote.

A Congress-mandated report came to a similar conclusion, Newsweek said, citing reports that found that Taliban or Islamic State militants controlled almost 15 percent of the country as of January, more than double the area they controlled three years ago. The Afghan government controlled less than 60 percent of the country.

The Journal also reported that the Pentagon probably also believed things needed to change. President Donald Trump has appointed a new commander in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Scott Miller, to carry out a new strategy. He will be the ninth US general in a conflict that has raged since shortly after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the US.

Meanwhile, the carnage continues. In Farah, the militants remain active despite US-led airstrikes. “The Taliban are moving very fast. If the government does not take serious and speedy action, the province is going to collapse,” Hamidullah, a resident of the city, told Reuters.

A series of blasts killed eight at a cricket match in Jalalabad recently: They occurred after evening prayers on May 18 at a football stadium that was hosting the match to mark the start of Ramadan.

Unfortunately, things could get worse. The Islamic State controls mineral mines in Afghanistan that give the group revenue streams from unlikely goods like baby powder, according to the Intercept.

Imagine the resources that the terrorists might gain if the heroin yield from last year’s bumper crop of opium poppies is as huge as the United Nations has warned it might be. Opium is now the single largest sector in the Afghan economy, eclipsing even the mountains of international aid that have gone to the country, the Telegraph wrote.

It’s a race to see whose state will survive.

W

Adolf Hitler Definitely Died In 1945

Believe It or Not Seven decades after Adolf Hitler’s death, conspiracy theorists still posit that he survived the World War II by escaping to Argentina – or perhaps to the dark side of the moon. Those theories, however, can now be put to rest on account of French pathologists’ analysis of the Führer’s teeth, NPR reported. Russia’s state intelligence service has held Hitler’s dental remains since the end of World War II, and it was only last year that a team of foreign researchers was allowed to study them. Researchers confirmed that the teeth indeed belonged to the notorious Nazi leader by cross-referencing the sample with descriptions of Hitler’s dental hygiene from those who knew it best – his dentists. Hitler had such bad teeth that by the time he died only a few of them were original. According to Deutsche Welle, Hitler’s personal dentist, Hugo Blaschke, and his assistant, Kathe Heusermann, described “conspicuous and unusual prostheses and bridgework” that were done to fill the gaps. The researchers said the teeth matched those descriptions. Moreover, traces of meat were absent from the examined teeth – consistent with reports that Hitler was a vegetarian toward the end of his life. “The teeth are authentic — there is no possible doubt,” lead pathologist Philippe Charlier was quoted by Agence France-Presse as saying. “Our study proves that Hitler died in 1945.”

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A Most Noble And Generous Man

The ‘Golden Arm’ Rests

He’s made over 1,100 blood donations across six decades, saving the lives of 2.4 million babies in the process.

But a few weeks ago, at the age of 81, Australian James Harrison, known as “the man with the golden arm,” officially made his last donation, Newsweek reported.

Nicknamed for his charitable contributions to the medical field, Harrison unwillingly retired when doctors advised him to stop donating for his own health.

But it’s not just his selflessness that makes Harrison special: Harrison’s plasma contains a rare antibody combination that can be harnessed to create a powerful treatment against rhesus D hemolytic disease of the newborn.

It’s a disorder in which a mother’s body perceives her fetus’s blood cells as an invading threat due to differing blood types and produces antibodies to kill off the invader. The disease can result in stillbirths and miscarriages, or deformities such as deafness, blindness or brain damage.

“Every ampule of anti-D ever made in Australia has James in it” since 1967, Robyn Barlow, the treatment program coordinator who recruited Harrison, told the Sydney Morning Herald.

Given all he’s accomplished and his altruism, Harrison said his last donation was bittersweet.

“It’s a sad day for me,” he told the Sydney newspaper. “The end of a long run.”

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Indonesia: Motion Sickness

INDONESIA

Motion Sickness

Indonesia, the world’s third-largest democracy, is developing at breakneck speeds.

Since the ouster of longtime dictator General Muhammad Suharto in 1998 and the nation’s first democratic elections in 2004, Indonesia’s extremely diverse 261 million citizens have enjoyed more political freedoms than ever before.

After his election in 2014, President Joko Widodo – the nation’s first leader not belonging to the political or military elite – set about implementing reforms to bring Indonesia into the 21st century.

To attract direct investment and diversify the economy, Indonesia passed laws to streamline bureaucracy and set its sights on sectors like textiles, entertainment and packaged foods, Bloomberg reported. The ease of doing business has vastly improved in Indonesia since Widodo took office, and the economy is growing at a healthy pace.

Widodo also created a universal healthcare scheme that ­­offers all Indonesians a slew of services for free. It’s a huge improvement on the previous system, where the poor either remained sick or entered into lending schemes to get treatment, the South China Morning Post wrote.

But the pace of Widodo’s reforms may be much too fast for Indonesian society.

Indonesia, the country with the single largest Muslim population in the world, has preached equality and secularism by having six official religions. But last year, conservative Islamic factions became increasingly mobilized in local elections.

Some pious provinces have been particularly resistant to change and still practice public punishments in accordance with Sharia law, the Associated Press reported.

Now there are whispers that Widodo’s likely primary challenger for 2019’s presidential race is aligning himself with radicals to win votes, writes the Lowy Institute’s the Interpreter.

Widodo’s election may have been a symbolic end to elite rule, but Indonesia’s political system runs on a rulebook of pay-to-play, writes the Diplomat. The reality of that political situation isn’t likely to change anytime soon, either.

Meanwhile, even the country’s most promising achievements – its healthcare system and its economy – are experiencing motion sickness.

Much of Indonesia’s population lives in rural outposts spread across the archipelago and have little to no access to medical care. Those people aren’t reaping the benefits of the new system, wrote the South China Morning Post.

And economic growth has meant more consumption, which has meant more waste. In a country where tradition dictated packaging food in banana leaves, not plastic, pollution has become so bad that the government has had to mobilize the army to help clean up the mess, the BBC reported.

This year and the next will be pivotal years in Indonesia as local and presidential election campaigns come into full swing, and despite shifting societal and economic conflicts around the nation, the government has promised stability, Reuters reported.

But being stable and being quick to catch up don’t always go hand-in-hand.