Copyright © 2022, Los Angeles Times | | | | On a mild September morning, about two dozen girls and women, swathed in brightly colored shawls that revealed only their eyes, picked through a verdant field. With sickles that glinted in the waning summer sun, they reaped the blanket of spiky-leaved stalks stretching to the foot of the nearby hills.The crop was cannabis. And it’s a lifeline, advocates say, that Lebanon urgently needs.The country is scrabbling to escape an existential, multilayered crisis that has to less than a quarter of its previous value, brought the specter of shortages to a...…Copyright © 2022, Los Angeles Times | | | | On a mild September morning, about two dozen girls and women, swathed in brightly colored shawls that revealed only their eyes, picked through a verdant field. With sickles that glinted in the waning summer sun, they reaped the blanket of spiky-leaved stalks stretching to the foot of the nearby hills.The crop was cannabis. And it’s a lifeline, advocates say, that Lebanon urgently needs.The country is scrabbling to escape an existential, multilayered crisis that has to less than a quarter of its previous value, brought the specter of shortages to a...WW…

Copyright © 2022, Los Angeles Times | | | | When Taliban insurgents attacked Sangsar village in late October, they were fighting for lost ground again within their reach.Fighters besieged the mud-walled town, ringed by corn and cannabis fields. They gunned down six police officers who had run out of ammunition after three days of fighting. “It was the first time in many years they were that strong,” said Raqya Aslam, a 30-year-old villager.It was in Sangsar, 25 miles outside the southern city of Kandahar, that the Taliban movement was founded in 1994 by a one-eyed local cleric. A decade...…Copyright © 2022, Los Angeles Times | | | | When Taliban insurgents attacked Sangsar village in late October, they were fighting for lost ground again within their reach.Fighters besieged the mud-walled town, ringed by corn and cannabis fields. They gunned down six police officers who had run out of ammunition after three days of fighting. “It was the first time in many years they were that strong,” said Raqya Aslam, a 30-year-old villager.It was in Sangsar, 25 miles outside the southern city of Kandahar, that the Taliban movement was founded in 1994 by a one-eyed local cleric. A decade...WW…