What You Should Know About Shape-Shifter Omarosa | Farms Swap Narcotics for Coffee

Othman El Hammouchi, 18, challenges the traditional molds of the European right.

He often wears suits, has thick glasses and when he talks, he starts out in an informal, teenager-like tone but then quickly recovers into academic language. Othman El Hammouchi is on his way to becoming one of Belgium’s most prominent philosophers, but he’s still an 18-year-old college student. “My choice to study mathematics had nothing to do with politics,” El Hammouchi laughs when asked about his choice of study. He's amid his first-year exams at the Free University of Brussels. “I’m just interested in certain questions and how they relate to things like the relativity theory and Kantian philosophy.”

When he was 17, El Hammouchi won an essay contest for high school students and in his own words entered the “circuit” of writing opinion pieces, doing interviews and giving talks. Since then he has been featured in most of Belgium’s newspapers, and one of the country’s most important philosophers, Etienne Vermeersch, called him “brilliant.”

Farms in Laos and Myanmar are trading in opium cultivation for high-value coffee.

On a misty, cold day in Laos’ highlands, former opium farmer Bounsee Lorleuxai sips a three-in-one instant coffee. For years, that was the best he could do if he wanted the drink. Now he’s planning to switch to growing coffee himself, and the days of the three-in-one are numbered. “One day I hope to test coffee that I’ve grown myself,” he says.

Coffee has long served as a benign crutch to help fight darker addictions — think endless pots of caffeine at 12-step meetings. Now, farmers in Southeast Asia’s opium-growing Golden Triangle region are trying to kick their drug habit and looking to coffee for help. In the 1980s, Thailand led the region’s fight against opium by helping farmers change crops and investing in schools, hospitals and roads to ensure that the fruits of the country’s development reached poor farmers dependent on poppy cultivation. Laos and Myanmar, the two other countries whose borders with Thailand constitute the Golden Triangle, are finally joining in.

Omarosa Manigault Newman’s shape-shifting road has led from Al Gore staffer to White House aide to media sensation.

If one person could be the embodiment of the transient outrage of modern American culture, the crony amateurism of the Trump White House and the frenetic indifference engendered by our current news cycle, it would almost certainly be Omarosa Manigault Newman. While the rest of us have been biding our time, awaiting the Mueller report and the next season of Game of Thrones, the 44-year-old reality TV star turned White House official turned anti-Trump crusader has managed to drive a truck right through our dulled senses, and right to the bank. Over and over again, and on national television.