Shahindokht Molaverdi, VP for women and family affairs: "We have a village where every single man has been executed".

Shahindokht Molaverdi, VP for women and family affairs: "We have a village where every single man has been executed". (AlArabia).

An Iranian village has seen every one of its men executed for drug offences, according to a leading Iranian official.

The unnamed village in the east of the country was used as an example of how Tehran is taking a tough line against drug smugglers.

Shahindokht Molaverdi, vice-president for women and family affairs, made the comments to Iranian news agency Mehr.

"We have a village in Sistan and Baluchistan province where every single man has been executed," she said.

"Their children are potential drug traffickers as they would want to seek revenge and provide money for their families. There is no support for these people."

Molaverdi did not name the village, but said that welfare support programmes are providing financial assistance to those who might be otherwise induced into the drugs trade.

Iran is one of the world's leading executioners and capital offences include drug smuggling, homosexuality and adultery.

Tehran put to death more than 289 people in 2014 according to Amnesty International. The condemned are usually hung by cranes in public, although stoning to death remains on the stature books.

Iran is also grappling with a problem of widespread drug addiction. Read the full story here. More here.

'Breaking Bad?' - Engineered yeast paves way for home-brew heroin

'Breaking Bad?' - Engineered yeast paves way for home-brew heroin. (Nature).

Biotechnology is about to make morphine production as simple as brewing beer. A paper published on 18 May in Nature Chemical Biology1 reports the creation of a yeast strain containing the first half of a biochemical pathway that turns simple sugars into morphine — mimicking the process by which poppies make opiates. Combined with other advances, researchers predict that it will be only a few years — or even months — before a single engineered yeast strain can complete the entire process.

Besides giving biologists the power to tinker with the morphine-production process, the advance could lead to more-effective, less addictive and cheaper painkillers that could be brewed under tight controls in fermentation vats. At the same time, it could enable widespread, localized production of illegal opiates such as heroin, increasing people’s access to such drugs. Recognizing that danger, the synthetic biologists behind the work have already opened a discussion of how to prevent the technology’s misuse without hampering further research.

“It’s easy to point to heroin; that’s a concrete problem,” says bioengineer John Dueber of the University of California, Berkeley, who led the latest research. “The benefits are less visible. They are going to greatly outweigh the negative, but it’s hard to describe them.”

Over the past decade, several research teams have tried to coax microbes, including the baker’s yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae and the lab-workhorse bacterium Escherichia coli, into making plant-derived drugs. The anti­malarial drug artemisinin, originally derived from sweet wormwood (Artemisia annua), is now produced commercially in yeast.

The opium poppy (Papaver somniferum), as the only commercial source of morphine and opioid painkillers such as oxycodone and hydrocodone, is an obvious target for bioengineering.

The crop must be grown in highly regulated conditions, in only a few countries. Outside those boundaries, in places such as Afghanistan, it is grown to supply the illegal heroin trade.

Producing opiates in industrial facilities from yeast could eliminate the need for the tightly controlled legal plant-production chain. Read the full story here.

NATO chief doesn't see Karzai signing security pact.

NATO chief doesn't see Karzai signing security pact.(Taz).

President Hamid Karzai is unlikely to sign a pact for U.S. and NATO forces to stay in Afghanistan after 2014 and will probably leave the choice for his successor, NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen said on Saturday, Reuters reported.

Kabul and Washington spent months negotiating a legal framework for some U.S. troops to stay on after the end of 2014, when NATO-led forces are due to end combat operations, leaving behind a much smaller training and advisory mission.

But Karzai has said he will not sign the agreement unless certain conditions are met.

The delay has frustrated the United States and its allies, who want to plan the post-2014 training and advisory mission.
Both the United States and NATO have said they may be forced to pull their forces out of Afghanistan entirely at the end of this year unless the agreement is signed soon.
Rasmussen acknowledged for the first time on Saturday that he did not expect Karzai to sign the U.S. pact and a similar pact that must be negotiated with other NATO forces.
Instead, he believed Karzai would leave the issue for the president elected in April 5 election.
Karzai has served two terms and cannot run again.
"I think, realistically speaking, a new president will be the one to sign," Rasmussen told reporters during the annual Munich Security Conference.
He said however he was confident that Afghanistan would sign the agreement "at the end of the day" and NATO would still have time to plan its post-2014 mission, even if it was not signed until Karzai's successor was in office.
"Most probably, it will be for a new president to sign a security agreement and in that case we are prepared to stay after 2014," Rasmussen said.

"If we don't get a signature even from a new president, then we will also be prepared to withdraw everything by the end of 2014, because in that case we don't have a legal basis for a continued presence," he said.

The NATO-led force currently has around 57,000 soldiers in Afghanistan, two-thirds of them from the United States. Troop numbers are expected to fall to 8,000-12,000 after 2014.
Rasmussen has said a complete foreign military withdrawal from Afghanistan could also jeopardize foreign military aid needed to finance the 350,000-strong Afghan security forces as well as development aid.
The foreign aid totals about $8 billion a year.Hmmm.....Obama: "If we work hard....Afghanistan can be another success like Iraq, Yup.....Another 'Obamamination'

Afghan air force 'Flying high' - ‘$37 Million Aviation Facility May Have Been Used to Store Opium.’

Afghan air force 'Flying high' - ‘$37 Million Aviation Facility May Have Been Used to Store Opium.’(Reuters).

"This is a hard deal. We're far from 100-percent guaranteed on delivery," said Air Force Brigadier General John Michel, who leads NATO Air Training Command Afghanistan, which is due to complete its training of the Afghan air force by December 31, 2017 - three years after most U.S. forces leave Afghanistan.

The one-star general cited progress in training and planning for Afghanistan to assume control over the air force but said many factors were outside his control.
Michel spoke to Reuters this week during the annual Air Force Association conference here.

He said the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force was re-examining all infrastructure projects after a report that one $37 million aviation facility may have been used to store opium and other concerns raised by Congress.Read the full story here.

Obama 'admin' led U.S. Kicks Drug-War Habit, Makes Peace With Afghan Poppies.

Obama 'admin' led U.S. Kicks Drug-War Habit, Makes Peace With Afghan Poppies.HT:Wired.By David Axe.

ZARI, Afghanistan — Because of the poppies, the raw material for most of the world’s heroin, the list of things 1st Lt. Christopher Gackstatter and his 2nd Platoon can’t do in Sartok is far longer than the list of things they can.

Marching into the mud-walled village in t­­his sun-baked district of southern Afghanistan on an April 24 intelligence-gathering mission, the boyish 25-year-old lieutenant and his roughly dozen riflemen and machine gunners are mindful of the many poppy-related prohibitions, developed over 12 painful years of war, that have been passed down to their Bravo Company by the higher unit, 3-41 Infantry, part of the Texas-based 1st Brigade of the 1st Armored Division.

They’re not allowed to actually step foot in Sartok’s many acres of poppy fields or damage the fields in any way.They can’t even threaten to destroy the fields or send in Afghan troops to burn, plow under or poison the delicate, pastel-colored flowers.

Nor can they discourage poppy farmers, however gently, from growing their illicit crop, which is hardier and commands a higher price than alternatives such as wheat. Poppy cultivation has been illegal in Afghanistan since 2001 but still represents a full quarter of the country’s gross domestic product and a major source of revenue for the Taliban, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Many of the middlemen who buy up raw poppy paste for onward sale to heroin-producers hail from the insurgent group.

The rules are fairly new and reflect a subtle but profound shift in the way the U.S. Army thinks about Afghanistan, its people and culture and conflict. Having furtively experimented with every possible approach to Afghan poppies since 2001 — from blissfully ignoring them to actively destroying them and everything in between — today the ground-combat branch has made peace with poppies, viewing them as a potential good thing for Afghanistan and the Army.

There is also a significant overlap between the corrupt political establishment and the illegal drug trade, up to and including the president's late brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai. So, another unintentional consequence may be that some of this unaccountable ghost money is propping up the drug trade.

Afghanistan is the world's leading producer of heroin, and the UN reports that poppy growth has increased dramatically. Indeed, the UN estimates that acreage under poppy growth in Afghanistan has tripled over the last 7 years.  The value of the drug trade to the Afghan warlords is now estimated to be in the region of $700 million per year.  You can buy a lot of Kalashnikovs with that.Read the full story here.