A Nato air strike has killed 14 people, all said to be civilians, in Helmand province, south-west Afghanistan, Afghan officials say.

The strike took place in Nawzad district after a US Marines base came under attack on Saturday.

The air strike, which was targeted at insurgents, instead struck two civilian homes, killing two women and 12 children, reports say.

Nato and Afghan troops are looking into the incident.

A group from the Serakala village travelled to Helmand's capital, Lashkagar, bringing with them the bodies of eight dead children, some as young as two-years-old, says the BBC's Quentin Sommerville in Kabul.

Earlier, a coalition soldier was killed in a gun battle with insurgents in the area and an air strike was called in, said a spokesman for the international mission.

While insurgents are responsible for most civilian deaths in Afghanistan, the killings of Afghans by foreign soldiers is a source of deepening anger, our correspondent adds.

Separately, 20 Afghan police and 18 civilians were killed on Wednesday in a Nato air strike in north-eastern Afghanistan, in which some 30 Taliban fighters were also killed, the governor of the province of Nuristan has told the AFP news agency.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-13587968

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From Richard Branson

New York today - joined with former Presidents from Latin America calling for an end to the war on drugs. In the last 50 years we have seen increased drug usage, filled our jails, cost millions of tax payer dollars and fuelled organised crime. It is definitely time for an alternative approach. The criminal drugs trade has a turnover of over US $300billion each year and it's a trade that kills millions through murder, disease and corruption.

Time to end the criminalisation and stigmatising of drug users. People with drug problems need health care, not prison! The facts speak for themselves - where countries treat drug-use as a public health issue not a crime, disease, ill-health and costs have fallen.

http://www.virgin.com/richard-branson/blog/end-the-war-on-drugs

from Chris Floyd

War Against Humanity, Part 1
A new drive has been launched to end the so-called "War on Drugs." A whole raft of Establishment worthies -- conveniently out of power now, alas -- have signed their names to a new call to end what is probably the most pernicious, corrupting, and corrosively evil movement of our time. The "War on Drugs" has doubtless done more to degrade human society -- and civil liberties -- than anything else in the past 30 years. It has given jet fuel to the expansion of the underworld, corrupted the "overworld" beyond all reckoning, aided and exacerbated the rise of authoritarian regimes in what were once considered democracies across the world, and generally added immeasurably to the burden of human suffering, in every corner of the globe, for decade after decade.

Yet, because it serves the interests of the powerful few so superbly, there is almost no hope that this "war" will ever end -- even though some, or many, of those who once served and feasted in the gilded circles of the elite now publicly acknowledge that this relentless onslaught on liberty and reason will, in the end, devour the goose that gave them so many golden eggs.

Two recent articles address this issue. First, Peter Wilby in the Guardian; and this news piece in The Independent.

War Against Humanity, Part 2
Of course, the "Drug Wars" are only part of a much larger campaign to enclose the human community in a super-techno, ultra-modern feudal regime of servitude and dependence on the high and mighty. For some searing explications of how this pernicious dynamic operates, see this piece by Johan Hari in the Independent; and the always excellent (and harrowing) Michael Hudson in CounterPunch.

Atlanta

IN an extraordinary new initiative announced earlier this month, the Global Commission on Drug Policy has made some courageous and profoundly important recommendations in a report on how to bring more effective control over the illicit drug trade. The commission includes the former presidents or prime ministers of five countries, a former secretary general of the United Nations, human rights leaders, and business and government leaders, including Richard Branson, George P. Shultz and Paul A. Volcker.

The report describes the total failure of the present global antidrug effort, and in particular America’s “war on drugs,” which was declared 40 years ago today. It notes that the global consumption of opiates has increased 34.5 percent, cocaine 27 percent and cannabis 8.5 percent from 1998 to 2008. Its primary recommendations are to substitute treatment for imprisonment for people who use drugs but do no harm to others, and to concentrate more coordinated international effort on combating violent criminal organizations rather than nonviolent, low-level offenders.

These recommendations are compatible with United States drug policy from three decades ago. In a message to Congress I also cautioned against filling our prisons with young people who were no threat to society, and summarized by saying: “Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself.” in 1977, I said the country should decriminalize the possession of less than an ounce of marijuana, with a full program of treatment for addicts.

These ideas were widely accepted at the time. But in the 1980s President Ronald Reagan and Congress began to shift from balanced drug policies, including the treatment and rehabilitation of addicts, toward futile efforts to control drug imports from foreign countries.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/17/opinion/17carter.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print

see toon at top...

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has pledged more foreign aid to fight drug cartels in Central America.

Mrs Clinton told a regional security conference in Guatemala that the US would increase its aid by more than 10% to nearly $300m (£187m).

Analysts say the figure is still small, given that more than two-thirds of cocaine sent from South America to the US now passes through Central America.

In total, some $1.8bn was promised to support the region's security.

The World Bank is to provide $1bn in the coming years, said Pamela Cox, the bank's vice preident for Latin America and the Caribbean.

The Inter-American Devleopment Bank (IADB) will also offer $500m over two years.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-13883721

Crystal meth is notorious for being highly addictive and ravaging countless communities. But few know that the drug can be traced back to Nazi Germany, where it first became popular as a way to keep pilots and soldiers alert in battle during World War II....
The young soldier, though, needed more of the drug, much more. He was exhausted by the war, becoming "cold and apathetic, completely without interests," as he himself observed. In letters sent home by the army postal service, he asked his family to send more. On May 20, 1940, for example, he wrote: "Perhaps you could obtain some more Pervitin for my supplies?" He found just one pill was as effective for staying alert as liters of strong coffee. And -- even better -- when he took the drug, all his worries seemed to disappear. For a couple of hours, he felt happy.
This 22-year-old, who wrote numerous letters home begging for more Pervitin, was not just any soldier -- he was Heinrich Böll, who would go on to become one of Germany's leading postwar writers and win a Nobel Prize for literature in 1972. And the drug he asked for is now illegal, notoriously so. We now know it as crystal meth.
Many TV fans are familiar with the drug primarily from the hit American series "Breaking Bad," in which a chemistry teacher with financial troubles teams up with a former student to produce meth by the pound, while drug enforcement agents chase drug rings in the oppressive New Mexico heat.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/crystal-meth-origins-link-back-to-nazi-germany-and-world-war-ii-a-901755.html
See story and toon at top...

The US supreme court is poised on Friday to decide whether to take on the case of a 76-year-old disabled army veteran handed a sentence of life in prison without parole for growing marijuana in his back yard to alleviate his own health problems.

If the court does not review the case, Lee Carroll Brooker is destined to die behind bars even though judges in his native Alabama have declared this was not an appropriate punishment.

Brooker is arguing that such a hefty sanction for marijuana possession violates the eighth amendment to the US constitution because it amounts to cruel and unusual punishment.

He has been subjected to strict sentencing mandatory minimum laws in Alabama because the cannabis offense involves a certain weight of the drug and comes on top of convictions for armed robbery more than 30 years ago in Florida when Brooker held up a series of liquor stores, his trial lawyer John Steensland said on Wednesday.

Brooker was arrested in 2011 when police visited his address in Cottonwood, southern Alabama, on an unrelated matter and found that he was growing marijuana behind the house.

The police seized 34 plants. They were sent for forensic analysis and weighed in their entirety, including the stalks, which are not used in cannabis consumption.

The plants weighed a total of 2.85lb, which placed the haul above the threshold of possessing 2.2lb of the drug that, in conjunction with certain prior felony convictions, triggers the use of life without parole as the mandatory sentence under Alabama law.

“The actual usable amount of marijuana from the contraband was a fraction of the 2.85 lbs and clearly under the threshold of 2.2 lbs,” according to court documents filed in Brooker’s case.

“The evidence clearly indicated that Brooker was simply growing said marijuana plans for his own personal use in an effort to self-medicate,” the document added.

But in announcing the state supreme court’s decision, Alabama’s chief justice, Roy Moore, issued a lengthy explanation pointing out that the original trial judge, Larry Anderson, had said: “If the court could sentence you to a term that is less than life without parole, I would. However, the law is very specific … there is no discretion.”

And Moore himself added that Brooker’s sentence was “excessive and unjustified” and urged the Alabama legislature to “revisit the statutory sentencing scheme” for the state.

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/apr/15/lee-carroll-brooker-alabama-marijuana-sentence

Here we have a sad case of someone trying to enjoy a bit of life, when so far events have dished the shittiest possible cards at him... The headline which I used is from Le Monde newspaper. It is designed to deride drug laws. "La fumette" is the action of smoking a bit of pot from time to time. "Perpète" is a short version of "perpetuity" (as in prison forever...). "Mène à" means "leads to..."

The rhyme is quite satirical. See toon at top. 

Sir Richard Branson, the billionaire founder of the Virgin Group, had no desire to evacuate his home in the British Virgin Islands, which was directly in the path of Hurricane Irma.

Instead, Branson declared that he would hunker down with his team on his private, 74-acre Caribbean island — “as I have been on the three times we have had hurricanes over the past 30 years.”

“On Necker Island we have constructed really strong buildings (with hurricane blinds) that should be able to handle extreme weather pretty well, though with a Category 5 hurricane almost nothing can withstand it,” Branson wrote in a blog post, which also implied there would be no guests at his island's private resort when the hurricane hit. “We had some lovely guests staying on Necker Island who have cut their trip short for safety reasons, and another group of guests have also postponed.”

Branson is the 324th wealthiest person in the world, with a net worth of about $5 billion, according to Forbes, which notes that he bought Necker Island for $180,000 nearly four decades ago.

Read more:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/09/06/sir-richard...

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