Afghanistan’s once-booming opium industry has shrunk dramatically with cultivation falling by 20 percent in 2025, according to a United Nations report warning of a sharp rise in synthetic drug production.
The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) said on Thursday that the area devoted to the cultivation of opium poppies dropped from 12,800 to 10,200 hectares (31,630 to 25,200 acres) this year, barely a fraction of the 232,000 hectares (573,000 acres) cultivated before the Taliban’s narcotics ban took effect in 2022.
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The Taliban, which returned to power in 2021, outlawed poppy cultivation across the country a year later, ending decades of reliance on the illicit crop, which once made Afghanistan the world’s largest producer. In 2013, it supplied about 74 percent of the opium worldwide.
“After the ban, many farmers turned to growing cereals and other crops. However, deteriorating weather conditions due to drought and low rainfall have led to more than 40 percent of agricultural land being left fallow,” the UNODC said.
The agency estimated Afghanistan’s total opium output at 296 tonnes in 2024, placing it behind Myanmar for the first time in decades. Revenues for farmers have plunged by nearly half, falling 48 percent to about $134m this year.
While production has dropped, prices remain high, nearly five times the pre-ban average, as limited supply continues to meet persistent demand.
Before the ban, Afghan farmers harvested more than 4,600 tonnes of opium each year despite facing detention, injury or death at the hands of security forces. Since the ban, most of the processing equipment has been destroyed, and the geography of cultivation has shifted.
Rise of synthetic drugs
The UN report noted that poppy fields have moved to northeastern Afghanistan, particularly Badakhshan province, where some farmers have resisted the crackdown. In May 2024, clashes between farmers and Taliban forces enforcing the ban killed several people.
The UN has urged the international community to help Afghan farmers develop alternative livelihoods, a call echoed by the Taliban government, which has nevertheless struggled to provide economic substitutes for those who once depended on the opium trade.
At the same time, the UNODC warned that organised criminal networks are increasingly turning to synthetic drugs, particularly methamphetamine, which are easier to produce and harder to detect. Seizures in Afghanistan and neighbouring countries rose by 50 percent in late 2024 compared with the previous year.
“Synthetic drugs appear to have become a new economic model for organised criminal groups due to their relatively easy production, greater difficulty in detection, and relative resilience to climate change,” the report said.
The United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act was meant to keep children safe. Instead, it is keeping the public uninformed. Within days of the law taking effect in late July 2025, X (formerly Twitter) started hiding videos of Israel’s atrocities in Gaza from UK timelines behind content warnings and age barriers. A law sold as safeguarding has become one of the most effective censorship tools Britain has ever built. What is unfolding is no accident. It is the result of legislation that weaponises child-protection rhetoric to normalise censorship, identity verification and online surveillance.
The roots of Britain’s online censorship crisis go back almost a decade, to MindGeek, now rebranded as Aylo, the scandal-ridden company behind Pornhub. This tax-dodging, exploitative porn empire worked closely with the UK government to develop an age-verification system called AgeID, a plan that would have effectively handed Aylo a monopoly over legal adult content by making smaller competitors pay or perish. Public backlash killed AgeID in 2019, but the idea survived. Once one democracy entertained the notion that access to online content should be gated by identity checks, the precedent was set. The Digital Economy Act 2017 laid the groundwork, and the Online Safety Act 2023 made it law. Today, several European Union states, including France and Germany, are exploring similar legislation, each cloaked in the same rhetoric of “protecting children”. This is not conspiracy; it is the natural convergence of corporate capture and state control, wrapped in the moral language of child safety.
The Online Safety Act empowers Ofcom to police almost every corner of the internet, from social media and search engines to adult content platforms, under threat of fines of up to 18 million pounds ($24m) or 10 percent of global revenue. Platforms can be designated as “Category 1” services, triggering the harshest rules, including mandatory age verification, identity checks for contributors and the removal of vaguely defined “harmful” material. Wikipedia now faces this exact threat. In August 2025, the High Court dismissed the Wikimedia Foundation’s challenge to the categorisation rules, clearing the way for Ofcom to treat it as a high-risk platform. The foundation has warned that compliance would force it to censor vital information and endanger volunteer editors by linking their real identities to their writing. If it refuses, the UK could, in theory, be legally empowered to block access altogether, a breathtaking example of how “child protection” becomes a tool for information control. Already, Ofcom has opened multiple investigations into major porn sites and social networks over alleged non-compliance. The law’s chilling effect is no longer hypothetical; it is operational.
Age-verification systems are fundamentally incompatible with privacy and security, in fact, any id-verification system should immediately raise suspicion. The July 25 breach of the Tea dating app, with thousands of photos and over 13,000 sensitive ID documents leaked and circulated on 4chan, or the even more recent Discord data breach exposing over 70 thousand government ID documents after a third-part service was hacked, proved the point.
When systems store verification data that link real identities to online activity, they create a treasure trove for hackers, blackmailers and states. History already offers warnings, from the 2013 Brazzers leak of nearly 800,000 accounts to the FBI’s finding that pornography-related exposure scams remain one of the leading categories of online extortion. Now imagine this infrastructure applied not just to adult content, but to political speech, journalism and activism. The same tools being built for “child safety” enable unprecedented blackmail and political manipulation. A single breach could expose journalists, whistleblowers or public officials. And in a world where data often cross borders, there is no guarantee that verification databases in democracies will stay out of the hands of authoritarians. The more we digitise “trust”, the more we endanger it.
The most insidious feature of this legislative trend is how it absolves parents while empowering the state. Existing parental control tools are sophisticated: parents can already monitor and restrict children’s internet use through devices, routers and apps. The push for government-mandated age verification is not about those tools failing; it is about some parents choosing not to use them and governments seizing that negligence as a pretext for surveillance. Rather than investing in education and digital literacy, authorities are expanding their power to decide what everyone can see. The state should not be parenting the public. Yet under the Online Safety Act, every citizen becomes a suspect who must prove innocence before speaking or viewing online. What is framed as “protecting children” is, in practice, the construction of a population-wide compliance system.
Britain’s disastrous experiment is already spreading. France and Germany have advanced parallel drafts of age verification and online safety legislation, while the European Union’s age-verification blueprint would link adult content access and “high-risk” platforms to interoperable digital IDs. The EU insists the system will be privacy-preserving, but its architecture is identical to the UK model, comprehensive identity verification disguised as safeguarding. The logic repeats itself everywhere. Laws begin with the narrow goal of shielding minors from pornography, but their powers quickly expand, first to protests, then to politics. Today, it is Gaza videos and sexual content; tomorrow, it is journalism or dissent. The UK is not an outlier but a template for digital authoritarianism, exported under the banner of safety.
Supporters of these laws insist we face a binary: either adopt universal age verification or abandon children to the internet’s dangers. But this framing is dishonest. No technical system can replace engaged parenting or digital-literacy education. Determined teenagers will still find ways to access adult content, they will just be driven towards the darker corners of the web. Meanwhile, the laws do little to stop the real threat: child sexual abuse material that circulates on encrypted or hidden networks that will never comply with regulation. In reality, the only sites that follow the rules are those already capable of policing themselves, and those are precisely the ones the state is now undermining. By pushing young people towards VPNs and unregulated platforms, lawmakers risk exposing them to far greater harm. The result is not safety, but greater exposure to danger.
Strip away the child-protection rhetoric, and the Online Safety Act’s true function becomes clear: it builds the infrastructure for mass content control and population surveillance. Once these systems exist, expanding them is easy. We have seen this logic before. Anti-terror laws morphed into instruments for policing dissent; now “child safety” provides cover for the same authoritarian creep. The EU is already entertaining proposals that would mandate chat-scanning and weaken encryption, promising such measures will be used only against abusers, until, inevitably, they are not. The immediate consequences in the UK – restricted Gaza footage, threatened access to Wikipedia, censored protest videos- are not glitches. They are previews of a digital order built on control. What is at stake is not just privacy but democracy itself, the right to speak, to know and to dissent without being verified first.
Protecting children online does not require building a surveillance state. It requires education, accountability and support for parents, teachers and platforms alike. Governments should invest in digital literacy, prosecute genuine online exploitation and give parents better tools to manage access. Platforms should be held to clear standards of transparency and algorithmic responsibility, not forced into policing adults. Where self-regulation fails, targeted oversight can work, but universal verification cannot.
The UK’s Online Safety Act and similar legislation worldwide represent a fundamental choice about the kind of digital future we want. We can accept the false promise of safety through surveillance and control, or we can insist on solutions that protect children without sacrificing the privacy, freedom, and democratic values that make protection worthwhile in the first place. The early results from the UK should serve as a warning, not a model. Before this authoritarian creep becomes irreversible, citizens and lawmakers must recognise that when governments claim they’re protecting children by controlling information, they’re usually protecting something else entirely: their own power to determine what we can see, say, and know.
Sudanese Prime Minister Kamil Idris has called for the international community to designate the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) as a “terrorist” organisation and warned that violence could spill over to the wider region as evidence of atrocities committed by the paramilitary group in the western region of Darfur piles up.
In an exclusive interview with Al Jazeera on Wednesday, Idris slammed the RSF as “mercenaries and rebel militias” whose crimes are “unprecedented in the history of mankind”.
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“They have been condemned worldwide, but these condemnations are not enough,” Idris said. “What is needed now more than ever is to designate this group as a terrorist militia because the danger now is not only threatening Sudan, but there is a danger that it will come and threaten the security stability of Africa and the whole world.”
Idris’s government is aligned with the Sudanese armed forces (SAF) in the civil war against the RSF.
His remarks come after the RSF last week seized control of el-Fasher, the last stronghold of the Sudanese army in Darfur. The city’s fall put an end to 18 months of an RSF siege that caused a humanitarian crisis in the capital of North Darfur State.
But according to survivors, it also unleashed mass killings, summary executions, rape and other abuses by the RSF against civilians. The Sudan Doctors Network put the death toll at 1,500 in the first few days of the takeover with analysts estimating the death toll to be higher.
Satellite images analysed on Wednesday appeared to show mass graves being dug in the city. According to the International Organization for Migration’s displacement tracker, more than 80,000 people have fled the city and surrounding areas. And the United Nations estimated that hundreds of thousands of civilians were still trapped in the city as of last week.
‘They took my husband and tortured him’
Civilians recounted escaping the fighting in terror, fearing for their lives, navigating armed checkpoints, and being confronted with extortion and abduction as they tried to reach safety in the town of Tawila, about 50km (31 miles) west of el-Fasher.
“We were leaving el-Fasher and it was tragic,” Najwa, a displaced woman in el-Dabbah refugee camp in Sudan’s Northern State, told Al Jazeera. “They took my husband and tortured him. They beat his face and his body. … We begged them to let us go. They took him covered in blood, unconscious. I don’t know if he is alive or dead.”
On Monday, the International Criminal Court (ICC) said it was taking “immediate steps … to preserve and collect relevant evidence for its use in future prosecutions”.
While acknowledging that some crimes have been committed by its forces, the RSF has largely denied some of the worst accusations against it and insists that it is “liberating” territory. The widespread circulation of videos documenting crimes against civilians prompted RSF authorities to jail one of its top commanders, known as Abu Lulu. On Wednesday, he was freed.
The RSF and SAF have been at war since April 2023 when a rivalry between Sudan’s army chief, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the RSF’s commander, Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo, exploded into open conflict.
The fighting quickly spread from the capital, Khartoum, and in the cities of the conflict-weary Darfur region, the violence quickly took on an intercommunal dimension, pitting armed Arab men against fighters from the Masalit ethnic group in confrontations that witnesses and survivors described as ferocious.
In the more than two years of conflict, the paramilitary group gradually seized control of Darfur’s main cities with the SAF remaining only in el-Fasher before last week. Idris described the army’s retreat from the state capital as a “tactical withdrawal”, rejecting the notion that it constituted a military defeat and expressed optimism over the army’s ability to retake the city.
He also rebuked claims that there is famine in Sudan. On Tuesday, three UN agencies said famine had spread in two areas of the country, including el-Fasher, where families are surviving on leaves, animal feed and grass.
The IMF says global public debt could exceed 100% of GDP by the end of the decade.
Governments around the world now owe nearly $100 trillion in public debt. That’s almost double what they owed just a decade ago.
The International Monetary Fund warns that by 2029, global debt will surpass 100 percent of the world’s gross domestic product, meaning the world’s borrowing could soon exceed the size of the entire global economy.
But there is a stark contrast: Richer nations can – for now – still borrow at lower costs and keep spending while many poorer nations are running out of room to take on more debt.
In western Sudan, the number of people fleeing el-Fasher and its surrounding villages in North Darfur in search of safety is rising.
As of Tuesday, the International Organization for Migration estimated that 81,817 people have been displaced in the area – most on foot – since the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) seized the city on October 26, ending an 18-month siege and driving out the Sudanese army.
Many of the displaced have sought refuge in different parts of el-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur State, and in the nearby town of Tawila.
Thousands of people inside the city are feared to have been killed since the RSF took control.
The United Nations and international aid agencies have confirmed numerous accounts from survivors reporting that RSF fighters have carried out mass executions, torture, rape and sexual abuse and have held people for ransom. Famine is spreading while outbreaks of cholera and other deadly diseases continue to rise.
More than 9.5 million people displaced
According to the UN, Sudan is facing the world’s largest humanitarian and displacement crisis with more than 9.5 million people internally displaced across 10,929 locations in 185 localities, spanning all 18 states of Sudan.
Most of the displaced have sought refuge in South Darfur (1.84 million), North Darfur (1.75 million) and Central Darfur (978,000). More than half, or 51 percent, of those displaced are children under the age of 18.
Sudan’s civil war between Sudan’s military and the RSF began on April 15, 2023, and both sides have been accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The RSF has also been implicated in atrocities in Darfur that the UN said may amount to genocide.
Even before the current war began, the International Organization for Migration estimated that more than 2.32 million people had already been displaced in Sudan, mostly in Darfur, due to years of conflict and climate-driven crises.
Since April 2023, an additional 7.25 million people have been displaced within Sudan, including around 2.7 million from Khartoum State, 2 million from South Darfur and a similar number from North Darfur.
More than 4.3 million refugees
In addition to 9.58 million internally displaced people, an estimated 4.34 million have fled to neighbouring countries as refugees, bringing the total number of displaced across Sudan to 14 million – more than a quarter of the country’s 51 million population.
Most have sought refuge in Egypt (1.5 million), South Sudan (1.25 million) and Chad (1.2 million). Of those who fled, about 70 percent are Sudanese nationals while 30 percent are non-Sudanese.
Russian forces have spread rapidly through Pokrovsk, the city in Ukraine’s east where the warring sides have concentrated their manpower and tactical ingenuity during the past week, in what may be a final culmination of a 21-month battle.
Geolocated footage placed Russian troops in central, northern and northeastern Pokrovsk, said the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a Washington-based think tank.
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Russia sees control of Pokrovsk and neighbouring Myrnohrad as essential to capturing the remaining unoccupied parts of the Donetsk region.
It set its sights on the city almost two years ago, after capturing Avdiivka, 39km (24 miles) to the east.
Ukraine sees the defence of the city as a means of eroding Russian manpower and buying time for the “fortress belt” of Kostiantynivka, Druzhkivka, Kramatorsk, and Sloviansk, the largest remaining and most heavily defended cities of Donetsk.
Members of the White Angel unit of Ukrainian police officers, who evacuate people from front-line towns and villages, check an area for residents, in Pokrovsk [File: Anatolii Stepanov/Reuters]
Russian President Vladimir Putin has demanded their surrender as part of a land swap and ceasefire he discussed with United States President Donald Trump last August. Ukraine has refused.
A recent US intelligence assessment said Putin was more determined than ever to prevail on the battlefield in Ukraine, NBC reported.
Russia seems to have outmanoeuvred Ukraine by striking its drone operators before they had time to deploy, and cutting off resupply routes at critical points.
“Operational and tactical aircraft, backed by drones, significantly disrupted the Ukrainian army’s logistics in Pokrovsk,” said Russia’s Ministry of Defence on Friday. It said it had destroyed two out of three bridges across the Vovcha River, used by Ukrainian logistics to reach the city.
“Unfortunately, everything is sad in the Pokrovsk direction,” wrote a Ukrainian drone unit calling itself Peaky Blinders on the messaging app Telegram. “The intensity of movements is so great that drone operators simply do not have time to lift the [drone] overboard.”
Ukrainian servicemen walk along a road covered with anti-drone nets in the front-line town of Kostiantynivka in Donetsk region, Ukraine, on November 3, 2025 [Anatolii Stepanov/Reuters]
On October 29, Ukrainian commanders reported only 200 Russian soldiers in Pokrovsk.
Peaky Blinders said Russia was sending as many as 300 into the city a day, “in groups of three people with the expectation that two will be destroyed”.
By neutralising Ukraine’s drone operators and using fibre optic drones immune to jamming, Russia reportedly acquired a numerical drone advantage in the city’s vicinity.
Ukrainian commanders said Russia also took advantage of wet weather, which disadvantaged the use of light, first-person-view drones.
Ukrainian military observer Konstantyn Mashovets said the Russian command had developed these new infiltration tactics to exploit Ukrainian vulnerabilities – a lack of manpower and gaps among their units.
“The Russian command ‘tried different options’ for some time,” said Mashovets.
“Russian technical innovations, such as first-person-view drones with increased ranges, thermobaric warheads, and ‘sleeper’ or ‘waiter’ drones along [ground lines of communication], allowed Russian forces to … restrict Ukrainian troop movements, evacuations, and logistics,” the ISW said.
Residents sit in an armoured vehicle as members of the White Angel unit of Ukrainian police officers evacuate them, in the front-line town of Kostiantynivka in Donetsk region, Ukraine, on November 3, 2025 [Anatolii Stepanov/Reuters]
As recently as Saturday, Ukrainian commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskii framed the battle as one of counterattack rather than defence.
“A comprehensive operation to destroy and push out enemy forces from Pokrovsk is ongoing,” he wrote on his Telegram channel. “There is no encirclement or blockade of the cities.”
Yet there was clearly alarm. Ukraine sent its intelligence chief, Kyrylo Budanov, to the Pokrovsk area with military intelligence (GUR) forces to keep supply lines open.
Two Ukrainian military sources told the Reuters news agency that the GUR had successfully landed at least 10 operators in a Blackhawk helicopter near Pokrovsk on Friday.
On Saturday, Russia’s Defence Ministry claimed “an operation to deploy a GUR special operations group by a helicopter in 1km (0.6 miles) northwest of [Pokrovsk] was thwarted. All 11 militants who disembarked from the helicopter have been neutralised.”
It was unclear whether the two reports referred to the same group.
Deep air strikes
Russia kept up a separate campaign to destroy Ukraine’s electricity and gas infrastructure, launching 1,448 drones and 74 missiles into the rear of the country from October 30 to November 5.
Ukraine said it intercepted 86 percent of the drones but just less than half the missiles, such that 208 drones and 41 missiles found their targets.
With US help, Ukraine has responded with strikes on Russian refineries and oil export terminals.
Ukraine appeared on Sunday to strike both a Russian oil terminal and, for the first time, two foreign civilian tankers taking on oil there.
Video appeared to show the tankers at Tuapse terminal on the Black Sea on fire, and the governor of Russia’s Krasnodar region confirmed the hit.
“As a result of the drone attack on the port of Tuapse on the night of November 2, two foreign civilian ships were damaged,” he said.
Russia’s Defence Ministry said it intercepted another 238 Ukrainian long-range drones overnight.
On Tuesday, Ukraine’s Ministry of Defence said it struck the Lukoil refinery in Kstovo in Russia’s Nizhny Novgorod region, east of Moscow.
Russian regional authorities also said Ukraine attempted to damage a petrochemical plant in Bashkortostan, 1,500km (930 miles) east of Ukraine.
Russia’s Defence Ministry said it shot down 204 Ukrainian long-range drones overnight.
According to the head of Ukraine’s State Security Service, SBU, Kyiv’s forces have struck 160 oil and energy facilities in Russia this year.
Vasyl Maliuk said a special SBU operation had destroyed a hypersonic ballistic Oreshnik missile on Russian soil.
“One of the three Oreshniks was successfully destroyed on their (Russian) territory at Kapustin Yar,” Maliuk briefed President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Friday.
Russia unveiled the Oreshnik with a strike on the city of Dnipro a year ago. It says it will deploy the missile in Belarus by December.
Ukraine has been lobbying the US government for Tomahawk cruise missiles, which have a range of 2,500km (1,550 miles). So far, Trump has refused, on the basis that “we need them too.”
The Pentagon cleared Ukraine to receive Tomahawk missiles, after determining this would not deprive the US military of the stockpile it needs, CNN reported last week, quoting unnamed US and European officials.
The political decision now rests with Trump on whether to send those missiles or not. The report did not specify how many Ukraine could have.
