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- 1 Billion meth pills: East, SE Asia drug industry hits ominous peak
- 3 US women dead in early heat wave
- Plane wreckage in Nepal found; 14 confirmed dead
| 1 Billion meth pills: East, SE Asia drug industry hits ominous peak Posted: 30 May 2022 04:53 AM PDT BANGKOK — The number of methamphetamine tablets seized in East and Southeast Asia exceeded a billion last year for the first time, highlighting the scale of illegal drug production and trafficking in the region and the challenges of fighting it, the UN said Monday.The 1.008 billion tablets was part of a regionwide haul of almost 172 tons of methamphetamine in all forms and was seven times higher than the amount seized 10 years earlier, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime said in a report.The drugs are largely consumed in Southeast Asia but also exported to New Zealand and Australia, Hong Kong, Korea and Japan in East Asia, and increasingly to South Asia."Production and trafficking of methamphetamine jumped yet again as supply became super concentrated in the Mekong (River region) and in particular Thailand, Laos and Myanmar," Jeremy Douglas, Southeast Asia regional representative for the UN agency, told The Associated Press in an email interview.The increased production makes the drug cheaper and more accessible, creating greater risk to people and their communities, the report said.Methamphetamine is easy to make and has supplanted opium and its derivative heroin to become the dominant illegal drug in Southeast Asia for both use and export.The Golden Triangle area, where the borders of Myanmar, Laos and Thailand meet, was historically a major production area for opium and hosted many of the labs that converted it to heroin. Decades of political instability have made Myanmar's frontier regions largely lawless, to be exploited by drug producers and traffickers.The report also called Laos one of the countries most impacted by methamphetamine trafficked out of Myanmar. One of Asia's biggest-ever drug busts was made in Laos last October, with police there seizing more than 55.6 million methamphetamine pills in a single raid. They also seized 65 bags of crystal methamphetamine, also known as ice, state media reported.The UN agency said it was concerned that criminal enterprises were targeting Cambodia as a drug production site. One clandestine laboratory dismantled there last year was an industrial-scale facility set up to produce ketamine and potentially other drugs, the report said.Ketamine is used legitimately as an anesthetic, but its non-medical use and clandestine manufacture was concerning to the UN agency.Many nations tried to halt meth production by choking supplies of precursors, usually ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, best known for being used in decongestant medicines. But the UN agency said some methamphetamine producers have clearly learned to make these precursors from non-controlled substances that can be freely and legally traded. (AP) |
| 3 US women dead in early heat wave Posted: 30 May 2022 04:52 AM PDT CHICAGO — Temperatures barely climbed into the 90s and only for a couple of days. But the discovery of the bodies of three women inside a Chicago senior housing facility this month left the city looking for answers to questions that were supposed to be addressed after a longer and hotter heat wave killed more than 700 people nearly three decades ago.Now, the city — and the country — is facing the reality that because of climate change, deadly heat waves can strike just about anywhere, don't only fall in the height of summer and need not last long.The Cook County Medical Examiner's office has yet to determine the causes of death for the three women whose bodies were found in the James Sneider Apartments on May 14. But the victims' families have already filed or plan to file wrongful death lawsuits against the companies that own and manage the buildings.City Council member Maria Hadden whose ward includes the neighborhood where the building is located said she experienced stifling temperatures in the complex when she visited, including in one unit where heat sensors hit 102 degrees.Part of the problem, experts say, is that communities nationwide are still learning how deadly heat can be. It took the sight of refrigerated trucks being filled with dead bodies after Chicago's 1995 heat wave to drive home the message that the city was woefully unprepared for a silent and invisible disaster that took more than twice as many lives as the Great Chicago Fire of 1871."We recognize people need heating in cold weather and set up programs, financial assistance, to enable that, but we don't do that for cooling," said Gregory Wellenius, a Boston University professor of environmental health who has studied heat-related deaths. "But subsidies for cooling are really controversial (because) for many people cooling is seen as a luxury item."In Chicago, Hadden said the building's management company believed it was not allowed to turn off the heat and turn on the air conditioning until June 1, because of the city's heat ordinance. But while she said the ordinance has no such requirement, the explanation may at least be a signal that the ordinance should be amended to better protect vulnerable people from heat. (AP) |
| Plane wreckage in Nepal found; 14 confirmed dead Posted: 30 May 2022 04:37 AM PDT KATHMANDU, Nepal — The wreckage of a plane lost in Nepal's mountains was found Monday scattered on a mountainside and 14 of the 22 people on board were confirmed dead, the army said.Rescuers recovered 14 bodies from the crash site, said Teknath Sitaula of Tribhuwan International Airport in Kathmandu. There was no word on survivors, and the search of the crash site was continuing.Aerial photos of the crash site showed aircraft parts scattered on rocks and moss on the side of a mountain gorge.The Tara Air turboprop Twin Otter lost contact with the airport tower Sunday while flying in an area of deep river gorges and mountaintops on a 20-minute flight.The army said the plane crashed in Sanosware in Mustang district close to the mountain town of Jomsom where it was heading after taking off from the resort town of Pokhara, 200 kilometers (125 miles) west of Kathmandu.According to tracking data from flightradar24.com, the 43-year-old aircraft took off from Pokhara at 9:55 a.m. (04:10 GMT) and transmitted its last signal at 10:07 a.m. (04:22 GMT) at an altitude of 12,825 feet (3,900 meters).Four Indians and two Germans were on the plane. The three crew members and other passengers were Nepali nationals.The plane's destination is popular with foreign hikers who trek the mountain trails and also with Indian and Nepalese pilgrims who visit the revered Muktinath temple.The Twin Otter, a rugged plane originally built by Canadian aircraft manufacturer De Havilland, has been in service in Nepal for about 50 years, during which it has been involved in about 21 accidents, according to aviationnepal.com. (AP) |
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