If someone had mentioned fentanyl to you 5 or 10 years ago, you might have scratched your head. But today, this synthetic opioid has become a household word in the worst sense imaginable. It’s cheap and easy to manufacture, while being 50 times more potent than heroin and 100 times more potent than morphine. And it’s the most commonly identified drug in fatal overdoses in the United States. For this week’s interview on Trend Lines, WPR’s Elliot Waldman is joined by Ben Westhoff, a journalist who spent the past few years chronicling the rise of fentanyl for a new book, [...]
In this week’s editors’ discussion on Trend Lines, WPR’s Judah Grunstein, Frederick Deknatel and Laura Weiss talk about the death of the Islamic State’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and the impact it might have on the group. They also discuss Argentina’s election results and their implications for the country’s deep economic crisis, as well as the new Brexit questions raised by the upcoming U.K. elections. If you like what you hear on Trend Lines and what you’ve read on WPR, you can sign up for our free newsletter to get our uncompromising analysis delivered straight to your inbox. The newsletter [...]
Mass protests are unfolding across the Middle East and North Africa, as demonstrators take to the streets to decry a wide range of social and political ills. From Algiers to Khartoum, Beirut to Baghdad, the list of grievances includes rampant corruption, economic malaise, oppression and sectarian divisions. The protests have already resulted in the ouster of two leaders this year, in Sudan and Algeria. In other countries, demonstrators have clashed with security forces, resulting in hundreds of deaths and injuries, and many more arrests. Given their wide geographic scope, the protests have drawn comparisons to the Arab uprisings that swept [...]
