The Taliban were founded in Kandahar in 1994, their founder and many of the experienced fighters who joined them had previously been Afghan mujahideen though. There were a lot of factions that were fighting each other in the aftermath of the Soviet-supported government’s collapse since the broad group of Afghan mujahideen agreed on fighting the Soviets but not on all the other things.

Anything that triggers the reward pathways in your brain has at least some addictive potential and eating is no exception. Not all foods are created equal, either - adding ex. sugar boosts the reward and makes the food more addictive. Now many foods have huge amounts of added sugars for the sake of preserving shelf life and getting recurrent customers, that sort of thing increases the power of the reward. Over time you become habituated to it though so you can’t get quite the same good feeling with the same amount you ate before - you have to eat even more to get there.

It’s certainly a weaker effect than in drugs, but unlike them EVERYONE has to eat food to survive and over their entire life. There’s a lot of money to be made by enhancing the addictive potential of food so many efforts have been made towards that over time, plus as the obesity rate has risen and people eat more cultural expectations around food on portion size and the like have also been increasing. When I cut weight some years ago after getting overweight and almost at the edge of obesity some of my coworkers were wondering why I was bothering to do so because in their eyes I was a relatively skinny guy, even though I was 197 lbs.

Irish Examiner has a few more details.

Written statements to the coroner’s court from Mr Warnick’s friend Gareth Kirwan said he had last seen him on the afternoon before and that he was “drunk and loud but not out of control”.

Another man, Andrew Haire who lived in a tent with Mr Scanlon, said there was “a lot of drink and drugs involved”.

He said both he and Mr Scanlon were chronic alcoholics, and all three men had consumed a lot of alcohol and drugs around the city centre the day before their bodies were found in the water.

Autopsy results showed Alex Warnick had evidence of five times the legal driving limit for alcohol in his system and “toxic” benzodiazepine levels, as well as evidence of cocaine and methadone use.

Coroner Clare Keane said those levels were not fatal on their own but would make an individual unsteady on their feet.

While Mr Scanlon had consumed alcohol just above the drink driving limit and a benzodiazepine above a therapeutic level, there was also evidence of cocaine use.

Alcohol and benzodiazepines together is a really nasty combination that amplifies the effects of both, making you act much more drunkenly and can cause respiratory depression which can have you stop breathing. Not the best condition to combine with going for a swim.

I had a relative who died in shallow water in a lake, he was an fisherman for decades but slipped and bumped his head. Unconsciousness and water don’t go well together.

Huge order sizes for military industries keeps the costs of production low in addition to exports bringing in cash from outside. So generally if a country wants a strong military but getting the money for it from taxes is problematic due to the political situation or state of the economy, they’ll try to export as widely as they can. Downside is that if someone you exported to does something nasty with those weapons then everyone who didn’t care for that will give you the side-eye

Store klemmar til dere i Noreg! 🇳🇴

All these reports beg the question… have they found a country that ISN’T carrying out covert schemes in Canada?

Is this supposed to signal against Azerbaijan and other countries that have arrested Russians vaguely recently or is this just a show to prop up the domestic situstion? Either way I don’t think they’re in a situation to do another “special military operation” any time soon…

Beating prisoners with plastic pipes, forcing women to undress, ripping their hair out by hand and slicing off random patches with scissors while laughing, beating people in a tire, calling the women whores and interrupting praying Sunnis to tell them they deserve to burn, demanding prisoners to shout Assadist slogans, blasting A/C in the cold and cutting it in the heat, rescinding food if they took >3 min to eat, tossing water on prisoners are leaving them soaking wet for hours, not allowing use of the bathroom so women had to relieve themselves in their cells… how could you do all that and think, hm, our regime fell, this is a good time to move to the capital. Her buddies at the beauty salon even said a dude told them all he recognized her from the prison well in advance of her being detained, so she had a flashing red button indicating her past could catch up with her.

Can’t help but agree with her victim Hiba when she said, “How dare she not flee Damascus?” The stupidity really boggles the mind.

I am not sure how reliable this other site is but they claim that mixed results came from the emergency meeting becuase the UAE rejected strong language directly mentioning Ethiopia or referring to external support. The meeting apparently did get language of condemnation of attacks against Sudan generically and that Sudan has a right to defend its sovereignty.

https://sudanhorizon.com/the-arab-leagues-decision-on-sudan-behind-the-scenes-the-significance-of-the-positions/

What are these alternative factions primed to be cycled through? The SDF got bodied despite Lindsey Graham’s shrieking and are just trying to maintain their toehold in largely Kurdish areas. Hijri is landlocked and cordoned off in the southeast by neighbors who hate him.

This AI slop churning nets $18k/yr and puts him into the top ten percent of earners in Pakistan, he can probably afford private security there since that’s crazy cheap what with the massive poverty. Even if he were to have something terrible happen to him the money at stake would likely see someone else step right up to replace him in that sort of scheme.

Idk for other ships but their aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov became a meme for always being down for maintenance and/or on fire

The west has maintained more of the larger, predators certainly. Not as much here in the east. Coyotes are invading and sort of acting in the now unoccupied larger land predator niche but given their small size they still don’t really take out deer in any serious quantity.

Unsurprising, they are quite tightly aligned.

They are extremely overpopulated in much of the US, in part because most of the natural predators capable of keeping their numbers down have been killed off and there has been a huge artificial increase in field/forest interfaces where they thrive. Huge amounts of starving deer abound and descend on diminishing native vegetation with a voracious appetite while generally ignoring weird invasive foreign plants. Many native plant gardeners are vexed by their tendency to gnaw native plants, trees and shrubs to death unless those are caged in and some got a taste for venison out of revenge haha.

Would be cool if we could re-introduce red wolves and the like to keep a lid on the deer without like half of the predators ending up shot or run over

Is there a big push in the EU to expand deportations or something? Since this article seems to indicate that’s a focus of the talks on the EU side. I read something similar as an aside on the news that the suspended cooperation agreement the EU has with Syria is being revived, that said they were looking to send 80% of Syrians back or something like that.

Mozambique has you covered

The “Good Taliban, Bad Taliban” theory really did not age well at all for Pakistan

Why do you expect it to fall? Amish and Haredi Jews intentionally stay at arms length from wider society. They maintain strict social pressures that encourage their members to focus on children and discourage the dizzying alternative uses for time socially available to Catholics and the wider US population. Certainly in Israel the Haredi growth rate is remaining stable and has taken them from a marginal groups of a few tens of thousands up to one and a half million, 14% of the population.

Anyway say they do defy their customs and assimilate and follow suit, then other currently marginal groups that do find some way to keep birth rates propped up over time or raise them will eventually inherit the world. Not in our lifetime to be sure.