These days, Casal Ventoso is an ordinary blue-collar community – mothers push baby strollers, men smoke outside cafes, buses chug up and down the cobbled main street.

Ten years ago, the Lisbon neighborhood was a hellhole, a ‘drug supermarket’ where some 5,000 users lined up every day to buy heroin and sneaked into a hillside honeycomb of derelict housing to shoot up. In dark, stinking corners, addicts – some with maggots squirming under track marks – staggered between the occasional corpse, scavenging used, bloody needles.

At that time, Portugal, like the junkies of Casal Ventoso, had hit rock bottom: An estimated 100,000 people – an astonishing 1 percent of the population – were addicted to illegal drugs. So, like anyone with little to lose, the Portuguese took a risky leap: They decriminalized the use of all drugs in a groundbreaking law in 2000.

Now, the United States, which has waged a 40-year, $1 trillion war on drugs, is looking for answers in tiny Portugal, which is reaping the benefits of what once looked like a dangerous gamble. White House drug czar Gil Kerlikowske visited Portugal in September to learn about its drug reforms, and other countries – including Norway, Denmark, Australia and Peru […]

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If your social life is a blur of friends and family, you might want to thank an almond-shaped clump of nerves at the base of your brain.

Researchers have found that part of the brain called the amygdala, a word derived from the Greek for almond, is larger in more sociable people than in those who lead less gregarious lives.

The finding, which held for men and women of all ages, is the first to show a link between the size of a specific brain region and the number and complexity of a person’s relationships.

The amygdala is small in comparison with many other brain regions but is thought to play a central role in coordinating our ability to size people up, remember names and faces, and handle a range of social acquaintances.

Researchers at Massachusetts general hospital in Boston used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans to measure the amygdalas of 58 people aged 19 to 83 and found the structure ranged in size from about 2.5 cubic millimetres to more than twice that.

As part of the study, each of the volunteers completed a questionnaire giving the number of people they met on a regular basis. They also commented on the complexity of each […]

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KABUL - Confidential UN maps show a clear deterioration in security in parts of Afghanistan this year, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday, as its mission there acknowledged security in some parts had worsened.

Two United Nations maps, one showing the situation at the start of this year’s fighting season in March and the other towards its end in October, highlight a particular decline in parts of the north and east, the paper said.

Kieran Dwyer, communications director of the UN mission in Afghanistan, acknowledged security had got worse in some parts, hampering its mission, although he said he had not seen the maps.

‘There are parts of the country that have become increasingly difficult to operate in during 2010 due to insecurity.

‘This includes the targeting of humanitarian workers and government officials whose jobs it is to deliver services to the people,’ he told AFP.

‘As the conflict intensifies in certain parts of the country, we’re seeing insurgents bobbing up in districts which have previously not been a target.’

While the situation in the south — the fiercest battleground between US-led troops and the Taliban — remained virtually unchanged between the two maps at ‘very high risk’, it worsened in 16 districts in the north […]

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Numerous times this year, members of Congress have held fundraisers and collected big checks while they are taking critical steps to write new laws, despite warnings that such actions could create ethics problems. The campaign donations often came from contributors with major stakes riding on the lawmakers’ actions.

For three weeks in June, for instance, the members of a joint House and Senate committee worked to draft final rules for regulating the financial industry in the wake of its 2008 meltdown. During that time, the 35 members of the drafting committee collected $440,000 in donations from that same industry, which was then lobbying heavily for looser rules.

Earlier this month, the chairman of the Senate committee overseeing tax policy, Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), gave himself a birthday-party fundraiser – on the same day that the chamber took its first vote on an $858 billion tax package that would provide breaks to wealthy citizens and business interests.

Members of Congress contacted for this article declined to answer questions about ethics rules and the possible appearance of impropriety. Instead, they stressed that their votes can’t be bought.

‘Money has no influence on how Senator Baucus makes his decisions,’ Baucus spokeswoman Kate Downen said. ‘The only factor […]

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WASHINGTON — The Drug Enforcement Administration has been transformed into a global intelligence organization with a reach that extends far beyond narcotics, and an eavesdropping operation so expansive it has to fend off foreign politicians who want to use it against their political enemies, according to secret diplomatic cables.

In far greater detail than previously seen, the cables, from the cache obtained by WikiLeaks and made available to some news organizations, offer glimpses of drug agents balancing diplomacy and law enforcement in places where it can be hard to tell the politicians from the traffickers, and where drug rings are themselves mini-states whose wealth and violence permit them to run roughshod over struggling governments.

Diplomats recorded unforgettable vignettes from the largely unseen war on drugs:

¶In Panama, an urgent BlackBerry message from the president to the American ambassador demanded that the D.E.A. go after his political enemies: ‘I need help with tapping phones.

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