Garlic butter. Peanut butter. Or just butter. All may be household names. Now farmers in the Baltic state of Latvia want to introduce a hitherto unknown butter, cannabis butter, to the world.
"I love it, especially like my grandma used to make," Latvian farmer Dainis Lagzdins said as he invited AFP to taste the dark green butter, a local specialty made of cannabis seed, which he calls a "miracle of taste and flavor."
"Mmm, the taste is heavenly," he said.
Latvian farmers use centuries-old recipes to make the butter or spread at home, sometimes using only soaked, roasted and milled cannabis seed, sometimes mixing it together with oil or butter.
Latvians love it. And unlike the soft drug cannabis, it's legal.
Latvians usually buy it from farmers or at farmers' markets. The speciality also appears on the shelves of big supermarkets, but not so regularly.
Now Lagzdins, the director of the Iecavnieks company, has ambitious plans from the tiny Latvian village of Iecava, 44km south of the capital Riga, to introduce this hitherto unknown product to the world.
"Russian and Finnish salesmen have already shown an interest in our cannabis spread," Lagzdins said, saying he was slightly concerned about whether he would be able to supply the specialty in large quantities.
He is currently finetuning his recipe, but swears by its health qualities -- it does not contain milk proteins, or cholesterol, while cannabis seeds are a natural antioxidant. Once prepared it can be stored for half a year.
Preparing good cannabis butter is not easy. It is mainly done by hand in 18 different steps.
Although cannabis butter and the cannabis seeds used to make it are legal, Latvia's cannabis fields are under strict controls, and farmers have to get permission to grow cannabis and can only grow it in the open air.
Lagzdins started to grow cannabis in large quantities last year, mixing the seeds with seeds brought from England.
The nation’s fastest supercomputer, Nano 4 (晶創26), is scheduled to be launched in the third quarter, and would be used to train large language models in finance and national defense sectors, the National Center for High-Performance Computing (NCHC) said. The supercomputer, which would operate at about 86.05 petaflops, is being tested at a new cloud computing center in the Southern Taiwan Science Park in Tainan. The exterior of the server cabinet features chip circuitry patterns overlaid with a map of Taiwan, highlighting the nation’s central position in the semiconductor industry. The center also houses Taiwania 2, Taiwania 3, Forerunner 1 and
FIRST TRIAL: Ko’s lawyers sought reduced bail and other concessions, as did other defendants, but the bail judge denied their requests, citing the severity of the sentences Former Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) was yesterday sentenced to 17 years in prison and had his civil rights suspended for six years over corruption, embezzlement and other charges. Taipei prosecutors in December last year asked the Taipei District Court for a combined 28-year, six-month sentence for the four cases against Ko, who founded the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP). The cases were linked to the Core Pacific City (京華城購物中心) redevelopment project and the mismanagement of political donations. Other defendants convicted on separate charges included Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Taipei City Councilor Angela Ying (應曉薇), who was handed a 15-year, six-month sentence; Core Pacific
J-6 REMODEL: The converted drones are part of Beijing’s expanding mix of airpower weapons, including bombers with stand-off missiles and UAV swarms, the report said China has stationed obsolete supersonic fighters converted to attack drones at six air bases close to the Taiwan Strait, a report published this month by the Arlington, Virginia-based Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies said. Satellite imagery of the airfields from the institute’s “China Airpower Tracker” shows what appear to be lines of stubby, swept-winged aircraft matching the shape of J-6 fighters that first flew with the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Air Force in the 1960s. Since their conversion to drones, the aircraft have been identified at five bases in China’s Fujian Province and one in Guangdong Province, the report said. J.
China used fake LinkedIn profiles to harvest sensitive data from NATO and EU institutions by soliciting information from staff, a European security source said on Friday. The operation, allegedly orchestrated by the Chinese Ministry of State Security, targeted dozens of employees at the military alliance or EU organizations through fictitious accounts, the source said, confirming reports in French and Belgian media. Posing as recruiters on the online professional networking platform, Chinese spies would initially request paid reports before later soliciting non-public or even classified information. One particularly active fake profile used the name “Kevin Zhang,” claiming to be the head
RSS