AMSTERDAM – The monumental chestnut tree that cheered Anne Frank while she was in hiding from the Nazis was toppled by wind and heavy rain on Monday, August 23, 2010.

The once mighty tree, that was diseased and rotted through the trunk, snapped about 3 feet (1 metre) above ground and crashed across several gardens. It damaged a brick wall and several sheds, but nearby buildings including the Anne Frank House museum escaped unscathed. No one was injured. A global campaign to save the chestnut, widely known as The Anne Frank Tree, was launched in 2007 after city officials deemed it a safety hazard and ordered it felled. The tree was granted a last-minute reprieve after a battle in court.

The 150-year-old tree suffered from fungus and moths that had caused more than half its trunk to rot. Two years ago city workmen encased the trunk in a steel support system to prevent it from falling, but that failed under windy weather Monday. The Netherlands’ Trees Institute, one of the most prominent supporters of the preservation project, stated it was “unpleasantly surprised” by the news of the tree’s fall early Monday afternoon. On the advice of experts in tree care, it had been calculated that the tree could live several more decades” with the support structure.

Many clones of the tree have been taken, including 11 planted at sites around the United States and 150 at a park in Amsterdam. It is not clear whether a new tree will replace the original one on the same spot, since it rests on property belonging to a neighbour.

The Jewish teenager made several references to the tree in the diary that she kept during the 25 months she remained indoors until her family was arrested in August 1944. “Nearly every morning I go to the attic to blow the stuffy air out of my lungs,” she wrote on Feb. 23, 1944. “From my favourite spot on the floor I look up at the blue sky and the bare chestnut tree, on whose branches little raindrops shine, appearing like silver, and at the seagulls and other birds as they glide on the wind.”

She also wrote: “As long as this exists, … and I may live to see it, this sunshine, the cloudless skies — while this lasts I cannot be unhappy.” Anne Frank died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in March 1945. Her diary was recovered and published after her death. It has become the most widely read document to emerge from the Holocaust.

Archaeologists working in Tel Kedesh in Ramot Naftali in northern Israel have uncovered an extremely rare 2,200-year-old gold coin, minted in Alexandria by King Ptolemy V.

The head of the Coin Department of the Israel Antiquities Association, long-time American immigrant Dr. Donald T. Ariel, stated, “This is the heaviest and most valuable ancient gold coin ever found in an excavation in Israel.”

The coin depicts a queen, believed to be Arsinoe II Philadelphus, who was married to her half-brother Ptolemy II. It is possible, however, that it may actually be Ptolemy V’s wife Cleopatra I, daughter of Antiochus III.” “This is an amazing numismatic find,” The excavations at Tel Kedesh, near Israel’s border with Lebanon, are being carried out by the University of Michigan and University of Minnesota.

The coin is beautiful and in excellent preservation. It is the heaviest gold coin with the highest contemporary value of any coin ever found in an excavation in Israel, weighing almost an ounce,” or 27.7 grams, compared with 4.5 grams for most ancient gold coins.

In Ariel’s words, “This extraordinary coin was apparently not in popular or commercial use, but had a symbolic function, possibly related to a festival in honor of Queen Arsinoe, who was deified in her lifetime.” The coin’s denomination is called a mnaieion, meaning a one-mina coin, and is equivalent to 100 silver drachms, or a mina of silver.

The reverse side of the coin depicts two overlapping cornucopias (horns-of-plenty) decorated with fillets. “It is rare to find Ptolemaic coins in Israel dating after the country came under Seleucid rule in 200 BCE,” Ariel explained. “The only other gold Ptolemaic coin from an excavation in Israel (from Akko) dates from the period of Ptolemaic hegemony, in the third century BCE, and weighs less than two grams.”

The coin was minted in Alexandria by King Talmai V in 191 BCE. The coin bears the name of the wife of King Talmai II, and features the face of the queen. The average gold coin, archaeologists stated, includes 4.5 grams of gold – hence this coin was probably used for ceremonies and not for business.
The excavations at Tel Kedesh, conducted since 1997, have uncovered a large Persian/Hellenistic administrative building, complete with reception halls, dining facilities, store rooms and an archive. While the documents in the archive were not preserved, the excavations yielded 2043 seal impressions, from which the flourishing of the Hellenistic phase of the building can be dated to the first half of the second century BCE.

About three years ago, an Alexandrine hoard of Ptolemaic gold coins appeared on the world antiquities market. No coins of Ptolemy V were included in that hoard, however, so the extreme rarity of the mnaieion from Tel Kedesh remains unimpaired.

Afghan heroin kills more people from NATO countries every year than Afghan insurgents have killed in the eight years since the fall of the Taliban regime, the United Nations has found. About 15 million people around the world use heroin, opium or morphine, fueling a $65 billion market, warned Antonio Maria Costa, head of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime.

The trade is fueling terrorism and insurgencies: The Taliban raised between $450 million and $600 million in the past four years by “taxing” opium farmers and traffickers, he says in a new report. Not all the money is going into the pockets of rebels or full-time drug dealers but some Afghan officials are making money off the trade as well.

Costa stated,”The Afghan drug economy generates several hundred million dollars per year into evil hands, some with black turbans, some with white collars,” And the problem is spreading. Drug money is now funding insurgencies in Central Asia, which has huge energy reserves. “The Silk Route, turned into a heroin route, is carving out a path of death and violence through one of the world’s most strategic, yet volatile regions.”

Route of heroin movement, from source to Europe.

Authorities are seizing too little heroin by intercepting only about 20 percent of opiate traffic around the world, according to the U.N. report, titled “Addiction, Crime and Insurgency.” It follows a U.N. warning that two years’ worth of opium is effectively “missing,” probably stockpiled by the Taliban and criminal gangs.

More than 12,000 tons of opium, which can be consumed as a narcotic itself or turned into heroin is unaccounted for, the United Nations estimated in September 2009. It is not clear who has it or why, but the United Nations speculates criminals could be holding it as a hedge against falling prices, or that insurgents or terrorists could be stockpiling it to fund future attacks.

The latest report claims to be the first systematic attempt to track where Afghan opium ends up. Europe and Russia together consume just under half of the heroin coming out of Afghanistan, the United Nations concludes, while Iran is by far the single largest consumer of Afghan opium.

Afghanistan is probably supplying an increasing share of the heroin in China that is perhaps as much as a quarter, the report says.

Afghanistan is by far the world’s largest producer of opium, although Laos, Myanmar (also known as Burma) and Latin America produce small quantities of the narcotic, according ot the report. The United Nations found that Afghanistan may be supplying more heroin to the United States and Canada than had previously been suspected.

The two North American countries consume more than twice as much heroin as Latin America produces. That means either that more Afghan heroin is making its way to North America than had been known, or that Mexico and Colombia are producing more than was realized, the United Nations says.