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Parents and children. Spouses and partners. Siblings and friends. United in service and sacrifice for something greater.Heroes Remembered We honor the brave men and women by sharing tributes to help ensure their memory lives on. See or read some of their stories. If you'd like to share a tribute, send your story and any images or videos to poppyinmemory@usaa.com. The USAA Poppy Wall of Honor is a tribute to these fallen heroes and each of the more than 645,000 service members lost in the line of duty since World War I. Visit the Poppy Wall of Honor in D.C. For...

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said Monday the government is studying what to do about growers of opium poppies who have been hit by competition from synthetic opioids, suggesting that some sort of legalization scheme might be possible. Asked about legalizing marijuana production — a bill for which is now before Congress — López Obrador said the question also involves opium poppies grown illegally in some parts of Mexico to make heroin. “As far as commercializing marijuana and opium poppies, the decision has been made to undertake a thorough study of these crops,” López Obrador said.

A Chinese Restaurant Operator is in big trouble after he laced his noodles with Opium drugs in an attempt to keep customers coming back. Chinese Guangxi Province-based restaurant intended to get patrons addicted and increase the chances of them coming back for more. The restaurateur’s dirty trick was uncovered by mistake, after someone who ate at his local in Sanjiang Dong Autonomous County tested positive for morphine, the active component in opium, during a police inspection. The shocked man insisted that he had not willingly taken drugs, and told investigators that the only thing he had ingested that he couldn’t...

Today the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy released the results of the annual U.S. Government estimate measuring poppy cultivation and potential opium production in Afghanistan.The U.S. Government estimate of “Afghanistan Poppy Cultivation and Potential Opium Production” found poppy cultivation decreased in 2019 compared to 2018, but potential pure opium production increased.  Poppy cultivation in Afghanistan declined 28 percent, from 221,000 hectares in 2018 to 160,000 hectares in 2019.  Conversely, potential pure opium production increased by 21 percent, from 5,550* metric tons in 2018 to 6,700 metric tons in 2019.  Low opium prices at planting time drove the...

**SNIP** In a statement on Monday, the Monterey County Sheriff’s Office reported a shocking find: a small poppy field on a private plot near a road in Moss Landing, about 15 miles northeast of Monterey, that could produce some four pounds of heroin annually. “Over the weekend the Sheriff’s Office Investigations Division eradicated one acre of opium poppies, which contained approximately 27,000 plants of opium poppies and another 16,500 harvested plants,” the statement said. Those plants could have produced a pound and a half of heroin. The plot could have been harvested three times a year. “The street value of...

Thirty-five restaurants across China, including a popular Beijing hot pot chain, have been found illegally using opium poppies as seasoning, one of the more unusual practices bedeviling the country's food regulators. Five restaurants are being prosecuted while 30 others, ranging from Shanghai dumpling joints to noodle shops in southwestern Chongqing, are under investigation, said the China Food and Drug Administration. Cases of cooks sprinkling ground poppy powder, which contains low amounts of opiates like morphine and codeine, in soup and seafood are not new in China, though it is unclear whether they can effectively hook a customer or deliver a...

Downing Street has been ridiculed for digitally adding a remembrance poppy to a photograph of David Cameron that it was using on its Facebook page.

The death of a Danish backpacker who drank a brew of tea made from poppies has prompted a warning from a Tasmanian coroner about the dangers. Jonas Havskov Pedersen died on his 26th birthday in February 2014 as a result of morphine intoxication after drinking poppy tea. He was on a working holiday at the time he climbed a poppy field fence somewhere between Jericho and Oatlands and took some poppy heads. Mr Pedersen began to vomit several hours after drinking the tea and his travelling companion said he looked "scared" and did not "look right". Both men eventually went...

KIEV, April 22 (Reuters) - Ukraine, in a break with tradition that is certain to rile Moscow, is ditching the Soviet name for World War Two and aims to adopt the poppy, a mainly British wartime symbol, to mark the 70th anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany. [....] In another break with the Soviet past, Kiev will align its calendar with that of its European allies by adding for the first time May 8 - known in the West as Victory in Europe Day - as a national holiday. A decree signed by President Petro Poroshenko fixed May 8...

Little was recognisable of 22-year-old Lieutenant Alexis Helmer after he took a direct hit from a German shell at Ypres on the Western Front one May morning in 1915. His pals gathered what they could find of his remains into sandbags and then arranged them in the shape of a human inside an army blanket. At sunset he was buried — just another of the hundreds of thousands of men of the British Empire to die in World War I. The officer who spoke over his grave as the battle raged around them was his close friend Lt-Col John McCrae,...

'Mosques will take the unprecedented step of urging British Muslims to 'wear the poppy, rather than burn it' this week in a bid to counter claims of being unpatriotic. Poppy stalls will be set up at around the country leading up to Remembrance Sunday in a move backed by government ministers and the Royal British Legion. It follows high-profile protests in the past by Muslim extremists, including those linked to the hate preacher Anjem Choudary, and the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby outside Woolwich barracks in south-east London.'

KABUL (AFP) – As the pink poppy fields of southern Afghanistan yield their sticky harvest, opium production in the country that supplies the world with heroin is set to fall, farmers and officials say. That's good news for the fight against the multi-billion-dollar drugs trade but it could be bad news for Afghan farmers struggling to feed their families as the war against Taliban insurgents and drugs gangs escalates. "This year we had less poppy cultivation, which I think was because of our public awareness campaign which we launched before cultivation started," said Gul Mohammad, head of the counter-narcotics department...

LASHKAR GAH -- Aziz Ahmad is a deeply worried man. With two wives and seven children at home, the 30-year-old farmer depends entirely on his opium-poppy crop to make a living. This year, it's proving to be an increasingly difficult task. First, falling water tables stunted his crop. Then a mysterious blight emerged to destroy most of what remained. In a normal growing season, Ahmad's 4-hectare plot in the Washer district of Afghanistan's southern Helmand Province yields 100 kilograms of opium -- enough to cover his debts and ensure his family's survival over the winter. This year he managed to...

WASHINGTON, D.C. (Aug. 9, 2009) — In October 2007, the Missouri National Guard personnel, with agricultural and business development expertise, as well as other essential skills, formed the Afghanistan Agribusiness Development Team to develop agribusiness in Afghanistan. Agriculture accounts for 45 percent of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product and employs over 70 percent of the Afghan population. However, decades of war and neglect have devastated the country’s agricultural sector. As a result, one of the great needs in the country is to develop its agriculture potential, and I am so proud of the efforts of the Missouri National Guard, who assumed...

The Pentagon has put 50 of Afghanistan’s powerful opium barons on a “kill or capture” list, signalling a radical shift in tactics against the Taleban. The announcement came as the commander of US forces in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, admitted that the insurgency, nurtured by tens of millions of dollars from the country’s vast poppy fields, now held the upper hand. The existence of the “joint integrated prioritised target list” — a rogues’ gallery of drug lords who are earmarked for arrest or assassination — is revealed in an unpublished Senate report obtained yesterday by The Times. It was confirmed...

Obama’s First Military Order by Paul L. Williams, Ph.D. thelastcrusade.org Don’t shoot back! Don’t pick the poppies! And don’t bother the women and men in burqas! These are the new rules of engagement for leathernecks in Afghanistan. Sound incredible? They’re true. Welcome to the modern Marine Corps under Commander-in-Chief Barack Hussein Obama Taliban for ObamaOn July 1, the U.S. military initiated Operation Khanjar or “Strike of the Sword,” an invasion of the Helmand Province by 4,000 Marines and 650 Afghan soldiers. “Strike of the Sword” represents the first military operation to be ordered by President Obama. The purpose of the...

At the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, I am sure the thoughts of all Telegraph readers will be with those British and Commonwealth Service men and women who fell in the defence of our liberty. But spare a thought, too, for the men and women of the White Poppy appeal. And don't make it a kind thought. This wretched outfit "believes that there are better ways of solving conflicts than killing strangers". That is how they describe the sacrifice of British and Allied lives in the inescapable war against Nazi Germany and the Axis powers....

The have-a-go-hero, aged around 80, left the robber so stunned at being unmasked that he and his accomplice dropped their weapons and fled empty-handed. He was the only person to intervene as the raid unfolded in front of a crowd of over 50 shoppers and office workers on a busy London high street. Eye-witnesses said that the man showed "amazing guts" risking his life as he tackled the raider. The pensioner stepped in as the two attackers pounded the reinforced glass windows of the branch of jewellers Ernest Jones in Richmond, south-west London, in broad daylight. Eyewitness Nick Thompson, a...

WASHINGTON, Sept. 26, 2008 – Things are looking up in Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province, a region that has been declared poppy-free and experiences little insurgent-generated violence, senior U.S. officials posted in Afghanistan told Pentagon reporters today. The report was in contrast to a Pentagon briefing earlier in the day in which Navy Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, discussed increased tensions along Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan. Nangahar borders Pakistan, just east of Afghanistan’s capital city, Kabul. Shawn Waddoups and Army Lt. Col. Gregory Allison, the U.S. State Department and military leaders, respectively, of Provincial Reconstruction Team Jalalabad...

WASHINGTON, May 19, 2008 – The NATO International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan has made significant progress in the country despite the command being “under-resourced,” the alliance’s top officer in the country said today. In a conference call with defense experts from his headquarters in the Afghan capital of Kabul, U.S. Army Gen. Dan K. McNeill also said opium poppy cultivation continues to be a major threat to Afghanistan. “In some portions of the country right now, mostly in the south, the cultivation of poppy is a far greater threat to the Afghan government -- to the security and stability...