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SAM475 USAF G5 on ground at Peterson AFB, Colorado Springs from JBA
Roman Abramovich P4-MES 767 landed at Moscow-Vnukovo Airport from Basel, Switzerland-EuroAirport Basel Mulhouse Freiburg about 11 hours ago
Campaigning in LDP leadership race to begin
Official campaigning is to kick off in the race to choose the successor to outgoing Prime Minister Abe Shinzo as head of Japan's main governing Liberal Democratic Party. Three lawmakers plan to file their candidacies on Tuesday. They are Chief Cabinet Secretary Suga Yoshihide; LDP policy chief and former foreign minister Kishida Fumio; and former LDP secretary-general Ishiba Shigeru. In the afternoon, the three candidates will deliver speeches and hold a joint news conference. Among key issues in the race are whether and how to continue with the polices of the Abe administration, measures against the coronavirus pandemic, the economy, and regional revitalization. In a bid to prevent the spread of the coronavirus campaign events like debate sessions will be live-streamed, with limits on crowd sizes at venues. Usually candidates travel across the country to give speeches, but that won't happen this time.
Voting takes place at a general meeting of LDP lawmakers in both houses of the Diet on Monday of next week. The candidates will vie for a majority of 535 votes, with 394 LDP lawmakers having one vote each and each of the local chapters representing the country's 47 prefectures having three votes. Many of the 47 chapters say they'll hold a preliminary poll of rank-and-file party members to determine how to cast their allocated ballots.
https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20200908_05/
Mexico to Probe the Diversion of U.S. Chemicals Into Drug Trade
Mexico’s President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said Monday his government will not allow the diversion of chemicals sold by private companies to make the heroin and methamphetamine fueling an American drug epidemic and enriching cartels. The president said his administration would look into the matter after Bloomberg Businessweek found that chemicals legally produced and sold in Mexico by U.S. companies have been easily diverted, on a massive scale, to make two of the main narcotics bound for America’s streets in the last decade. “It doesn’t matter if these are U.S. companies,” Lopez Obrador said during a news conference. “They can be from any part of the world, but we will not permit this.”
Mexican cartels have a veritable monopoly on the supply of heroin and meth to the U.S., where more than 142,000 people died from overdoses of both drugs from 2010 through 2018.
Lopez Obrador pledged he would have his government review the details of the investigative report, which was published in this week’s Mexican edition of Bloomberg Businessweek magazine. He said he would be careful about how he handled any findings, given the U.S. election season, because the “only thing we don’t want is to intervene or insert ourselves into” the American political campaigns. Without the right chemicals, it’s impossible for cartels to make the two drugs plaguing America. The most critical chemical, and the most ubiquitous, is called acetic anhydride, which is required to make heroin and also has been used in Mexico to produce industrial quantities of meth. Through their Mexican subsidiaries, U.S. companies also have largely avoided oversight from international and American narcotics authorities, the investigation shows.
One, Avantor Inc., sold acetic anhydride across Mexico in containers that are big enough to make lucrative quantities of heroin, but small enough to load into the trunk of a car. Bloomberg found evidence its chemicals were used in drug labs in the two top Mexican heroin producing regions across the last decade, and that it remained readily available. Sales come via a network of distributors, online sellers, and stores spread across the country. The company said it followed all applicable laws and regulations and was “committed to preventing diversion or misuse of our products” for illicit drugs.
Another U.S. company, Celanese Corp., lost enough of a different, critical meth-making chemical in repeated Mexican hijackings to make all the meth U.S. border agents seized in 2015 and 2016 combined, Bloomberg found. Celanese said it followed all applicable laws, and that it decided in 2016 to end production of the chemical, called monomethylamine, or MMA, because “it was not consistent with our corporate values to be associated with the situation or to put our employees or reputation in harm’s way.” The company continues to be Mexico’s top industrial producer of acetic anhydride; its main legal use is to make cigarette filters, while smaller quantities are used in chemistry labs.
Under international drug laws, it has been one of the most strictly controlled “precursor and essential chemicals” for the production of illegal narcotics, but not in Mexico; in the roughly 18 years before Lopez Obrador took office in December 2018, the Mexican government left acetic anhydride virtually unregulated. U.S. companies, operating through Mexican subsidiaries, have dominated the local market.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-07/mexico-to-probe-the-diversion-of-u-s-chemicals-into-drug-trade