Iqbal AkhtarAssociate Professor of Religious Studies, Florida International University
Disclosure statement
Iqbal Akhtar does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under Creative Commons licence.Republish this article
Share article
Print article
By the time Zohran Mamdani became the next mayor-elect of New York City on Nov. 4, 2025, many Americans were familiar with his progressive platform and legislative record. But understanding the Democratic candidate’s background requires examining the rich cultural tapestry woven into his surname: Mamdani.
He takes the name from his father, Mahmood Mamdani, a prominent academic who was raised in Uganda and whose work focuses on postcolonial Uganda. I studied the history of the Khoja community for my doctoral work and have helped develop Khoja studies as an academic discipline. The Mamdani surname tells a story of migration, resilience and community-building that spans centuries and continents.
The Khoja history
Mamdanis in Uganda belong to the Khoja community, a South Asian Muslim merchant caste, that shaped economic development across the western Indian Ocean for centuries.
The name originates from greater Sindh, a region in South Asia that today includes southeastern Pakistan and Kachchh in western India.
Its etymology is twofold. Mām is an honorific title in Kachchhi and Gujarati languages, meaning kindness, courage and pride.Māmadō is a local version of the name Muhammad that often appeared in surnames in Hindu castes that converted to Islam, such as the Memons.
The Khoja were categorized by the British in the early 19th century as “Hindoo Mussalman” because their traditions spanned both religions.
Our mission is to share knowledge and inform decisions.
About us
Over time, the Khoja came to be identified only as Muslim and then primarily as Shiite Muslim. Today, the majority of Khoja are Ismaili: a branch of Shiite Islam that follows the Aga Khan as their living imam.
The Mamdani family, however, is part of the Twelver community of Khoja, whose Twelfth Imam is believed to be hidden from the world and only emerges in times of crisis. Twelvers believe he will help usher in an age of peace during end times.
Around the late 18th century, the Khoja helped export textiles, manufactured goods, spices and gems from the Indian subcontinent to Arabia and East Africa. Through this Western Indian Ocean trading network, they imported timber, ivory, minerals and cloves, among other goods.
Khoja family firms were built on kinship networks and trust. They built networks of shops, communal housing and warehouses, and extended credit for thousands of miles, from Zanzibar in Tanzania to Bombay – now Mumbai – on the western coast of India.
Cousins and brothers would send money and goods across the ocean with only a letter. The precarious nature of trade in this period meant that families also served as insurance for each other. In times of wealth, it was shared; in times of disaster, help was available.
Khoja contributions in Africa
The Khoja became instrumental in building the commercial infrastructure of eastern, central and southern Africa. But the Khoja contribution to the development of Africa extended far beyond trade.
In the absence of colonial investment in public infrastructure, they helped build institutions that formed the foundation of the modern nation-states that emerged after colonization. The institutions both facilitated trade and established permanent communities.
For example, the first dispensary and public school in Zanzibar were constructed by a Khoja magnate, Tharia Topan, who made his wealth through the ivory and clove trades. Topan eventually became so prominent that he was knighted by Queen Victoria in 1890 for his service to the British Empire in helping to end slavery in East Africa.
The Khoja community continues to invest in East Africa. The most famous example is the Aga Khan Development Network, whose hospitals and schools operate in 30 countries. In places such as Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, they are considered the best.
Khoja in Uganda
Like in other parts of Africa, the Khoja settled in Uganda as a liaison business community to develop a market to serve both African and European needs. The linguistic and cultural knowledge, developed over centuries, helped facilitate business despite the challenges of colonization.
Ugandan President Idi Amin and his wife, Sarah, in Rome on Sept. 10, 1975. AP Photo
However, in 1972, Ugandan dictator Idi Amin expelled all Asians – approximately 80,000 – forcing families like the Mamdanis into exile. These included indentured laborers, who were brought in to help build the railroad and farm during the British colonial period, and free traders, like the Mamdani family.
Amin saw them all as the same and famously said: “Asians came to Uganda to build the railway. The railway is finished. They must leave now.”
The experience was a bitter one. Families lost everything, and many left with only the clothes on their backs.
Mahmood Mamdani, who came from a Khoja merchant family, was 26 when he was exiled. Yet, unlike most Ugandan Asians, he chose to go back. At Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda’s capital, Mamdani set up the Institute for Social Research, which helped to provide rigorous social science training to Ugandan researchers trying to improve their society.
While the earlier generations of the Khoja tended to choose business or adjacent professions, such as accounting, the subsequent generations – particularly those educated in the West – embraced the knowledge economy as professionals, academics and nonprofit leaders.
Several of Mahmood Mamdani’s generation of Khoja academics conducted path-breaking work on Afro-Asian solidarity – a way of thinking about the world beyond colonial categories, such as the category of religion as a separate domain from the secular. These scholars, such as Tanzania’s Issa Shivji and Abdul Sheriff, worked on creating solidarity among the newly independent states of the Global South.
Mahmood Mamdani is known for his influential post-9/11 academic work, “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim,” which examined how Muslim identities are stereotyped. He argued that these identities are complex and varied, shaped by accumulated history and present experiences.
Interfaith identity
The Khoja community – known globally as the Khoja Shia Ithnasheri Muslim Community – has developed strong transnational connections. Today, they are concentrated in the United Kingdom, Canada, United States and France. However, Khoja can be found in almost any country in the world. In 2013, I met members of the community in Hong Kong.
The Khoja community plays an important role in interfaith dialogue and global development initiatives. A prominent Ismaili Khoja, Eboo Patel, the founder of Interfaith America, has dedicated his life to pluralism and mutual understanding through building up civil society.
Zohran Mamdani’s mother, acclaimed filmmaker Mira Nair, is Hindu by birth. This interfaith marriage exemplifies the flexibility, diversity and tolerance of Khoja Islam, which has historically navigated between Hindu and Islamic traditions.
Whether Mamdani’s policies prove practical remains to be seen, but his background offers something valuable: a deep understanding of how communities build resilience across generations and geographies.
This article was updated on Nov. 6, 2025, after Mamdani won the election for New York City mayor.
This newsletter is coming to you direct from what is now known (somewhat) affectionately in New York as the “commie corridor” – a stretch of Queens that has become the heartland of progressive, Democratic Socialist voters in the city. As such, I have long been aware of the Zohran Mamdani effect. His posters and street volunteers have been omnipresent in recent months and seemingly everyone in my neighborhood knows him personally – he even married a friend of mine (albeit as an officiant rather than a groom).
And while Mamdani’s success in the New York mayoral race was no surprise given his consistent poll lead, it is nonetheless a breakthrough moment:For the first time, New York’s mayor will be a Muslim, and someone of South Asian descent, also African-born.At 34, he is the youngest person to hold the position in more than a century. But what does his win, and that of other Democrats this week, mean for U.S. politics?
First off, it suggests that a focus on cost-of-living issues pays off. The budgets of many American families have been stretched thin of late. So alleviating measures – such as free high-quality child care for all – are particularly attractive to voters, as labor and inequalities expert Simon Black’s article explains.
Meanwhile, U.S. politics scholar Andrew Gawthorpe suggests that while Trump wasn’t on the ballot, he kinda was. And the results on Tuesday night were a clear indication that voters are“fed up with the lack of progress on reducing the cost of living, the brutality of immigration raids, and the corruption and chaos that many perceive to exist under the Trump administration.”Noting the immediate backdrop to this week’s off-year elections, Bruce Wolpe adds that U.S. voters are also blaming Republicans for the current government shutdown.
But he cautions newly buoyant Democrats that what flies in New York may not be to everyone’s tastes: “To take back Congress next year and the White House in 2028, the Democrats will need all kinds of flowers to bloom — not just Mamdani’s bouquet.
The Rundown: A Dutch startup is developing an artificial womb, a fluid‑filled incubator that mimics the uterine environment to keep premature babies born between 22 and 24 weeks alive long enough for their lungs and brains to mature.
The details:
The system uses an artificial placenta roughly the size of a human fist that connects to the baby’s umbilical cord, delivering oxygen and nutrients.A double-layered sac, dubbed AquaWomb, is designed to mimic the uterine environment, complete with resistance against kicks to strengthen muscles. Babies born at 22 weeks have only a 10% survival chance with high risks of lung disease and neurological damage, but two weeks later, that jumps to 60%. Its design prioritizes parental bonding with access ports for touch and a “uterus phone” that transmits parents’ voices and heartbeats through the fluid.
Why it matters: The FDA is reportedly reviewing data to consider human trials, while U.S. firm Vitara Biomedical has raised over $125M for similar “biobag” tech. If the approach succeeds, it could rescue more fragile newborns and slash the risk of lasting complications.
22 Gen Zers are currently graduating from Palantir’s Meritocracy Fellowship, as CEO Alex Karp calls his company “the best credential in tech.”
While many college students across the U.S. are still knee-deep in their studies, one small cohort of pupils is about to turn their tassels. But instead of graduating from an elite university, they’re wrapping up a niche program at $452 billion tech giant Palantir.
Recommended Video
CEOs on How AI Is Already Changing Everything
The company’s Meritocracy Fellowship launched this April: a four-month, paid internship for recent high school graduates not enrolled in college. The program required Ivy League-level test scores to quality, and attracted over 500 applicants, with only 22 teenagers making the cut—a mix of those who felt attending college wasn’t compelling, or didn’t get into their dream schools, according to WSJ reporting. During their stint, the pupils learned about U.S. history and foundations of the West, working alongside Palantir’s full-time employees in solving technical problems and improving products. Palantir is known controversially for its defense technology, particularly providing software for ICE and running data analytics for the U.S. Army, which has entered a resurgence under the Trump administration.
This month, fellows will wrap the program after deciding to forgo their undergraduate degrees—and those who “excelled” will be given the chance to interview for a salaried job at the business.
The fellowship may sound unorthodox, as major tech companies like Meta have historically snatched young talent right after they received their college diplomas.
But Palantir’s program reflects CEO Alex Karp’s disdain for higher education; the gig was advertised as a way to “get the Palantir degree” and “Skip the debt. Skip the indoctrination.”
“Everything you learned at your school and college about how the world works is intellectually incorrect,” Karp told CNBC in an interview earlier this year.
Fortune reached out to Palantir for comment.
CEO Alex Karp’s disdain for “indoctrinating” colleges
Karp is one of several CEOs, like Ford’s Jim Farley and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, questioning if college degrees are still worth it. The Palantir leader goes as far as completely disregarding elite diplomas when considering who to hire at the company.In his eyes, work experience at Palantir is a better teacher.
“If you did not go to school, or you went to a school that’s not that great, or you went to Harvard or Princeton or Yale, once you come to Palantir, you’re a Palantirian—no one cares about the other stuff,” Karp said during its Q2 2025 earnings call. “This is by far the best credential in tech. If you come to Palantir, your career is set.”
Despite being a graduate of several colleges—including Stanford University—Karp has slammed higher education institutions for lowering their current admissions criteria, the “woke” culture on campuses and failing to prepare students for the working world.
“People with less than a college education are creating a lot of value—and sometimes more value than people with a college education—using our product,” Karp continued during the earnings call.
“Opaque admissions standards at many American universities have displaced meritocracy and excellence,” the Palantir posting echoed.
“As a result, qualified students are being denied an education based on subjective and shallow criteria. Absent meritocracy, campuses have become breeding grounds for extremism and chaos.”
More teenagers are already turning away from college
The company’s graduating Palanteens is just one small example of a broader shift happening among Gen Z high schoolers: they’re wondering if going to college is even worth it anymore.
Seven in 10 Americans say the U.S. higher education system is heading in the wrong direction, according to recent data from the Pew Research Center. And 55% of Americans gave colleges and universities poor ratings when it comes to prepping students for well-paying jobs in the current labor market. It’s signaling growing discontent as entry-level job opportunities run dry, tuition costs are on the rise, and once-lucrative career paths learned in school—like computer science—are being overtaken by AI.
Why Are Some European Drug Gangs Burying Cocaine Instead of Selling It?
Feature
Wholesale prices are in the gutter across much of Europe, forcing drug smugglers to try to manipulate the market. OCCRP explains the factors affecting Europe’s cocaine supply in 2025.
Underpinning the “Bad Practice” investigation were months of digital detective work: Dozens of scrapers, 17 freedom-of-information requests, and countless spreadsheets — all to trace how doctors stripped of their licenses could quietly move across borders.
A city clerk is on trial for allegedly selling personal information from Amsterdam’s municipal systems to criminals via data brokers — which prosecutors say has helped fuel a terrifying wave of shootings and bombings across the Netherlands.
What is the investigation and how was it put together? What are the main findings? And why is it so hard to find data on doctors?
Reported by
OCCRP
November 4, 2025
On a cool cloudless morning at the break of dawn last December, authorities spotted two speed boats carrying a number of large packages at the mouth of the Guadalquivir River in southwest Spain.
Civil guard officials followed the boat’s cargo as it was whizzed some 60 km upriver to a farm protected by armed guards in the town of Coria del Río, on the fringes of Seville.
During a search of the farm, the civil guard said it uncovered two shipping containers buried underground.Opening a hatch at the top, they discovered seven metric tons of cocaine, with an estimated street value of some 420 million euros.
One of the cocaine bricks fished out by the civil guard showed a devil emoji playing the guitar.
Although the cocaine bust was far from Spain’s biggest, it reveals how traffickers are adapting to a crackdown at Europe’s major ports by using alternative landing sites, and caching their wares in a market awash in cocaine.
Ballooning coca cultivation, shifting criminal networks, and the increasing use of “narco-subs” and “chemical camouflage” are among a confluence of factors that have created a massive cocaine glut in Europe.
Combined with fierce competition between traffickers, oversupply has caused the wholesale price of cocaine to collapse to all-time lows in many countries — reaching a point where some traffickers find selling is no longer profitable.
“There is greater competitiveness and more maneuverability for criminal enterprises,” said Cesar Alvarez Velasquez, a fellow at the Innovation for Development Foundation, a Colombian think tank.
“Those at the top of the pyramid have become very efficient, with a high capacity to mitigate risks, have very rapid scalability, and the ability to offer very competitive prices.”
But while users have enjoyed an incremental bump in purity, the street price of cocaine remains largely unchanged. Instead of passing on the savings to customers, trafficking networks have started hoarding vast quantities of cocaine, aiming to throttle supply and allow wholesale prices to bounce back.
Through interviews with more than a dozen top law enforcement officers and drug experts across Europe and Latin America, OCCRP has pieced together the evolving narcotics landscape to explain why some drug gangs are literally burying their “Florida snow.”
“There are huge stockpiles. You have examples in Spain where the cocaine is buried in the bunkers under the ground,” said Robert Fay, head of the drugs unit at Europol. “Everybody is asking: ‘What the hell has happened?’”
Why has cocaine production exploded?
The first part of the puzzle lies across the Atlantic Ocean in the jungles of Colombia, which is the world’s largest grower of coca, the bush from which cocaine is manufactured.
The amount of land where coca is grown in the South American nation expanded by almost two-thirds between 2018 and 2023 to 253,000 hectares, roughly the size of Luxembourg, according to the latest available data from the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC).
Over the same period, potential production more than doubled to 3,708 metric tons, equal to the weight of around 300 double decker buses, UNODC data shows.
Accordingly, coca leaf prices fell sharply to around $5 per arroba (a Colombian imperial weight equivalent to around 12.5 kg) in 2024, down from around $18 two years earlier, Colombia’s Rural Development Agency said in a report.
The production boom boils down to three main things: failed policies, agricultural innovation in concentrated areas, and a constellation of smaller armed groups taking over, who are focused on profits over politics.
Ahead of the landmark 2016 peace deal with the country’s biggest rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the government suspended aerial spraying of coca crops with a toxic herbicide.
“With less pressure, farmers no longer have to spend time and resources on replanting, but can instead invest in improving their crops, in agrochemicals, in selecting plants, and in consolidating what they already have,” said Ana María Rueda, drug policy analysis coordinator at the Colombian Ideas for Peace Foundation.
At the same time, a government crop substitution scheme proved counterproductive.Farmers who had never grown coca started to plant it so they could qualify for a subsidy that would pay them to grow an alternative crop.
Farmers also began cultivating new, high-yield strains of coca that can be harvested several times a year, significantly boosting potential output.
“[Around] 90 percent of the crops have been concentrated in the same places for a decade. This has made it possible to consolidate networks, exchange seeds, experiences, knowledge, techniques, and this impacts productivity,” Rueda said.
Candice Welsch, UNODC representative for the Andean region, told a news conference last year that twice as much coca can be produced from the same plot of land compared to a decade ago, according to reporting by Bloomberg.
Furthermore, the void left by FARC militants who once regulated the market and imposed price controls allowed other armed groups to sweep in, introducing more efficient processing techniques and a competitive market that lowered farmgate prices.
Lastly, vast stockpiles of the drug that built up during the COVID pandemic, when trafficking slowed but production continued, are fueling “a virtually inexhaustible supply” across South America, said Juliana Grotz, a spokesperson for Munich prosecutors.
Producers have lowered prices to shift merchandise in any way they can, said Alberto Morales, head of the anti-drug brigade in the Spanish police.
“If they keep the merchandise stored, only two things can happen: It gets stolen or the police seize it.”
Are authorities trying to seize all this cocaine?
Yes, and they’re succeeding. For the seventh consecutive year, EU member states seized a record amount of cocaine in 2023.
Belgium, Spain, and the Netherlands remained at the top of the seizure leaderboard in 2023, reflecting their importance as entry points for cocaine trafficked to Europe, while Spain reported its largest ever cocaine bust last year, 13 tons hidden in a shipment of bananas from Ecuador.
But it hasn’t been enough to hold back the flood.
“[Cocaine], it’s like water. It finds its way,” said Martin Van Nes, the national prosecutor for cocaine trafficking in the Netherlands.
Despite record-breaking efforts by authorities in recent years, only a fraction of the smuggled cocaine is ever captured.
“In Spain, 80 percent of cocaine is seized in containers. And 10 percent of containers are inspected. So do the math,” said a senior anti-drug officer in Catalonia.
The bulk of cocaine arriving on Europe’s shores comes directly by sea, concealed in the millions of shipping containers that pass through the continent’s major ports every year, but that’s starting to change.
Aided by the cracking of two encrypted messaging platforms, Sky ECC and Encrochat, stricter border controls and inspections at major ports, European officials seized a record 419 metric tons of cocaine in 2023, according to EUDA, roughly the weight of a fully loaded Boeing 747.
What do criminals say to each other when they think nobody can hear? The fall of Sky Global — an encrypted communications company that once promised limitless privacy — may have been our best-ever chance to find out.Read More
But the success was short-lived. The following year, seizures at the ports in Antwerp and Rotterdam cratered, even as cocaine usage continued to climb, as revealed by increased cocaine residue in waste water across major European cities.
“Hacking of these communication platforms created a disruption in the traffic. So the network had to adapt,” said Fay from Europol.
What new routes are being used by cocaine smugglers?
Improved interdiction at large ports has forced traffickers to find innovative ways of evading detection, such as using different transit points, smaller ports, semi-submerged vessels known as “narco-subs,” transfers of cargo at sea, planes, and chemical concealment.
West Africa has grown from a transit point into a logistics hub as corruption and lackluster policing in countries like Sierra Leone, Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, and Cabo Verde allow the origins of a shipment to be obscured, making cocaine harder to track and seize when it makes landfall in the EU.
Law enforcement told the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime that they believe almost one third of Europe’s cocaine is now routed through West Africa’s Gulf of Guinea, and they expect that to rise to half by 2030.
“There are structural factors that keep West Africa attractive in the long term,” said Kars de Bruijne, head of the Sahel program at Clingendael Institute, a Dutch think tank.
These are “significantly improving infrastructure and connections to global markets, and political structures that make it easier for global organized crime to be protected,” de Bruijne said.
Shipments are then being diverted to landing sites in Europe that are less well monitored, European officials say.
“Organizations aren’t stupid. If you’re hitting a port all day, they’ll move to another one,” said Morales from the Spanish police.
“Colombians call it the balloon effect, you know. You press one side and then it goes to another.”
A significant cut of the traffic is now going through the old hashish smuggling routes from Morocco, or being collected from fishing boats and narco-subs far from land in the Atlantic Ocean, Morales said.
“Narcos drop the cocaine in the sea, and it is recovered there by speedboats that then go up the Guadalquivir River, and drop the cocaine on the banks,” Morales said.
One of the most significant changes to the way cocaine trafficking networks operate in recent years has been fragmentation and decentralization of the supply chain, which has streamlined processes and reduced costs.
“It is no longer the cartel that controls the chain from A to Z, but several groups specializing in a specific stage of supply,” said Yasmine Salhi, an economist at the French Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction. “So they are really professionalized for one task.”
They tend to work in small cells that form alliances with each other, rather than in classic hierarchical criminal organizations, said Fatjona Mejdini, a Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime researcher.
“As a result, cells operating, for example, in Latin America, that nobody had heard of before have turned out to be quite powerful,” Mejdini said.
The cocaine trade has become increasingly fragmented and less “cartelized” in recent years, as improvements in camouflaging the drug and new supply-chain innovations are transforming the industry.Read More
Several of the groups with an increased foothold across the trade are Albanian and Slavic-speaking gangs from the Western Balkans.
They not only buy directly from groups in South America, particularly Ecuador, but have expanded multi-tonne transhipments via Brazil and West Africa, according to the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.
Brazil doesn’t grow coca, but an arrangement between its biggest organized crime syndicate, Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC), and mafia organizations like Italy’s ’Ndrangheta and Western Balkan groups such as the Kavač and Škaljari clans from Montenegro, now underpins a significant proportion of Europe-bound cocaine flows, according to a Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime report.
PCC trafficks the drug through Brazil and offers its logistics and network of contacts to others, like a trusted broker between growers and traffickers, ensuring neither side gets ripped off, said Gabriel Feltran, a professor at the Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po).
“The PCC functions as a platform, in the same sense as Uber or Airbnb… in a business structure that allows many independent entrepreneurs to connect,” Feltran said.
How is cocaine being concealed?
Authorities suspect that more sophisticated concealment could also explain the decline in busts at major ports.
“They are looking for why, and they don’t know,” said Laurent Laniel, an analyst at EUDA. “There are hypotheses; one of them is chemical camouflage.”
While the predominant mode of trafficking still involves transporting finished cocaine in kilogram-sized bricks, traffickers also use a variety of concealment techniques to avoid detection, according to a 2024 United States Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) report.
Physical camouflage involves washing the cocaine base, a partially processed extract, into clothes or cardboard, or mixing it with substances like coffee, fertilizer, or coal, the DEA said.
One indicator supporting this hypothesis is the discovery of more cocaine laboratories across Europe in the last few years, said Janneke Hulshof, a narcotics specialist at the Netherlands Forensic Institute.
In these laboratories, the concealed drug is extracted from its carrier material using chemicals such as caustic soda, hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, and different solvents.
Chemical camouflage, where the cocaine has been altered at the molecular level, is even harder to detect, because it can be hidden in plastics or metals. Normal tests, which turn blue if cocaine is present, won’t register it.
“That blue color simply doesn’t come out,” Hulshof said. “It’s no longer recognized as cocaine.”
The Iberian Peninsula, but also other countries like Belgium, Netherlands, and Germany, show a slight increase in busts of laboratories extracting or reprocessing cocaine, or both, said Fay from Europol.
Colombian drug experts have told Europol they believe around 20 percent of cocaine shipped to Europe from Colombia is now being smuggled by chemical camouflage, Fay said.
“Never before has organized crime had so much venture capital available to invest in corruption… [and] better concealment methods,” said Daniel Brombacher, who leads the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime’s work in Europe.
What effect is all this having on cocaine prices?
Prices vary widely across Europe, but authorities in several countries said the wholesale price of cocaine had roughly halved in the last year, while retail prices have remained relatively unchanged.
The economics of illicit drug markets don’t always function like those of legal goods. Experts say falling wholesale prices have nudged up the purity of cocaine sold on the street, but not affected prices.
Drug prices are regulated to a degree by cutting, saidRamon Chacón, head of criminal investigation in the Catalonian police, referring to the purity of a drug.
With cocaine, the street price is overwhelmingly determined by the dealers’ perceived risk of arrest or violence rather than the wholesale cost, UNODC research shows.
A little over a year ago, a 1-kg block of cocaine cost close to 30,000 euros in the Netherlands, said Dutch prosecutor Van Nes. According to his sources, it’s now closer to 15,000 euros, Van Nes said. Officials in Spain and Germany, and at Europol, report similar prices.
“One of our informants told us that traffickers are saying: ‘I won’t traffic for less than 12,000 euros per kg because the numbers don’t add up for me,’” Spanish anti-drug police chief Morales said.
In response, traffickers are hoarding the merchandise to force the price back up, Morales said.
In Coria del Río, the local administration’s website invites potential visitors to discover “our unique history, welcoming people, and rich cuisine, and to join us in enjoying the beautiful landscapes on the banks of the Guadalquivir.”
It doesn’t mention that its riverside location also makes it a convenient spot to unload and stash bundles of cocaine while you wait for wholesale prices to bounce back.
During the Wall Street Journal‘s Tech Live conference on Wednesday, OpenAI chief financial officer Sarah Friar hinted at the possibility that the government could “backstop the guarantee that allows the financing to happen” as the AI industry continues to take on even more debt.
Friar regretted her comment almost immediately, clarifying in a subsequent post on LinkedIn that “OpenAI is not seeking a government backstop for our infrastructure commitments.”
The suggestion clearly caused immense chagrin to OpenAI’s leadership; even CEO Sam Altman emerged to put out the fire, tweeting that “we do not have or want government guarantees for OpenAI data centers.”
Yet the damage was already done, exacerbating an already testy stock market. Ongoing fears over an AI bubble triggered a major tech selloff earlier this week — and reassurances by president Donald Trump’s “AI czar” David Sacks that there will be “no federal bailout for AI” haven’t helped.
Shares of AI chipmaker Nvidia are continuing their tumble, sliding nearly four percent in early trading on Friday. The company’s shares are down over 13 percent so far this week; AI software giant Palantir was hit even harder, currently down over 16 percent so far this week.
And if the AI bubble really does burst — a calamity that some experts worry could take the entire US economy with it — the Trump administration is saying that the government wouldn’t intervene. That’s despite the White House being extremely amenable to the industry’s needs, with the president going as far announcing a $500 billion AI infrastructure initiative, dubbed Stargate, earlier this year.
In a tweet, Sacks clarified that competition would sort out any such eventuality, arguing that the US “has at least five major frontier model companies. If one fails, others will take its place.”
At the same time, Sacks said that “we do want to make permitting and power generation easier” in a followup. “The goal is rapid infrastructure buildout without increasing residential rates for electricity.”
Altman, Friar, and Sacks’ coordinated efforts to extinguish the fire that the CFO’s “backstop” comments ignited highlight an AI industry in a precarious state.
Even before Friar’s comments on Wednesday, investors had become concerned that AI industry stalwarts, like Nvidia and Palantir, may be grossly overvalued, with analysts predicting a correction following months of soaring valuations.
What the situation looks like for OpenAI, which, according to Friar, isn’t looking to go public any time soon, remains far more murky.
In his latest tweet, Altman argued that “we expect to end this year above $20 billion in annualized revenue run rate and grow to hundreds of billion by 2030.” That’s despite “looking at commitments of about $1.4 trillion over the next 8 years.”
In other words, OpenAI would have to massively grow its current revenue — just to afford soaring debt payments in the coming years without any government assistance.
I’m a senior editor at Futurism, where I edit and write about NASA and the private space sector, as well as topics ranging from SETI and artificial intelligence to tech and medical policy.
He added that China will defeat the US due to lower energy costs and looser regulations, while the West is paralyzed by “cynicism” — an astonishing admission about the technological capabilities of a country which multiple presidential administrations have taken pains to hinder.
The comment comes a week after Trump’s trade meeting with PRC President Xi Jinping, where Nvidia’s AI chips were supposed to take center stage. Nvidia’s chips were seen as a key asset in the economic competition with China, but the PRC recently stopped importing them in favor of its own home-baked competitors.
Huang and his fellow tech CEOs had previously hoped the US government could arrange to get the People’s Republic hooked on US tech.
“President Trump understands that having the world build AI on American tech stack helps America win the AI race,” Huang told Fox News in August. “And he wants American technology all over the world so that the whole world is built on the American standard, like the US Dollar is the global standard.”
Instead, Trump’s meeting with Xi has largely been seen as a failure, with the famously hawkish FT admitting China now looks like a “peer rival” to the US.
This stems partly from the trade meeting itself — Trump gave up more than Xi, backing down months of tariff threats. But Huang’s comments also highlight China’s rapidly expanding electrical grid, which stands in stark contrast to the sorry state of energy infrastructure in the US.
With that said, the Nvidia CEO’s comments also read like an effort to give Trump a sharp kick in the pants — though the chronically acrimonious Trump is probably just as likely to turn on Huang.
I’m a tech and transit correspondent for Futurism, where my beat includes transportation, infrastructure, and the role of emerging technologies in governance, surveillance, and labor.
Matt WilliamsSenior International Editor – Queens, New York
Image source: TU/e, Bart van Overbeeke
By 
.jpg/85aa5bb032b714eba0dfccec98c38e1a/borderless-doctors-data-(4).jpg)
canisgallicus 