COPENHAGEN (Xinhua) – North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) countries were sternly reprimanded on Saturday for “supplying cluster munitions or failing to condemn their supply and use.” “Circumstances under which the use of cluster munitions is acceptable simply don’t exist,” said Charlotte Slente, secretary-general of the Danish Refugee Council (DRC), an NGO refugee relief organization clearing mines in eight countries.
Invited to speak with the Parliamentary Assembly during the 69th annual session of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly in Copenhagen, Slente criticized the lack of condemnation on cluster munitions from other countries. “The United States providing cluster bombs to Ukraine is reprehensible and cannot be defended in any way,” she said. “Using it on either side of the war is absolutely unjustifiable, no matter the circumstances, and so is supplying it to the fighting parties. There is no excuse or exception,” she added.

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KOLKATA (AFP) – At least 56 people are confirmed dead in floods that hit India’s northeast as of Saturday, with the army warning munitions washed away by the deluge posed a public safety risk. Violent torrents struck Sikkim state on Wednesday after the sudden bursting of a high-altitude glacial lake. Climate scientists warn that similar disasters will become an increasing danger across the Himalayas as global temperatures rise and ice melts. “So far 26 bodies have been found in Sikkim,” state relief commissioner Anilraj Rai told AFP by phone. Thirty more bodies had been recovered from the Teesta river basin by search and rescue teams downstream in neighbouring West Bengal state, Jalpaiguri district police superintendent K. Umesh Ganpat told AFP. “The river stretches up to 86 kilometres,” he added. “The search operation is continuing.” Among the dead are seven Indian army soldiers posted in Sikkim, which sits on India’s remote frontiers with Nepal and China and boasts a sizeable military presence.

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BOGOTA (Dispatches) – Six Colombian inmates killed in a prison in Ecuador were all suspects in the murder of the country’s anticorruption presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio earlier this year, Ecuadorian authorities have confirmed.
The killings took place on Friday in Litoral Penitentiary in Guayaquil, Ecuador’s largest city, the attorney general’s office said. The SNAI prisons agency said in a statement that the six men who were killed were Colombian nationals. They “are of Colombian nationality and were accused of the murder of the former presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio”, the prison authority said. Ecuador’s government condemned the prison killings and President Guillermo Lasso pledged in a message on social media that there would be “neither complicity nor cover-up” in getting to the bottom of who killed the suspects in the Villavicencio case.

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LOS ANGELES (Xinhua) – A funeral home in the U.S. state of Colorado is under investigation after more than 100 rotting bodies were found at the facility, local authorities said Friday. The deceased bodies were discovered on Wednesday in the Return to Nature Funeral Home in Penrose, a town in Fremont County. Police took a closer look at the “green” funeral operator’s storage facility and found at least 115 decomposing bodies inside. Fremont County Sheriff Allen Cooper told a news conference that “during the last 48 hours, my office made a very disturbing discovery.” “The area of the funeral home where the bodies were improperly stored was horrific,” he said. “There have been a lot of questions and concerns expressed by the community, especially those families who entrusted their loved ones to this funeral home. Our priority and our focus are on the families,” said Cooper, adding that officials are committed to finding answers for the families as quickly as possible. Fremont County Coroner Randy Keller also said at the conference that “after making entry into the facility, we found over 100 decedents, who were improperly stored and has created a hazardous scene.”

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MEXICO CITY (AP) – At least 16 migrants from Venezuela and Haiti died early Friday in a bus crash in southern Mexico, authorities said. Mexico’s National Immigration Institute originally reported 18 dead, but later lowered that figure. Prosecutors in the southern state of Oaxaca later said there had been an overcount due to some of the bodies being dismembered, and that the real death toll was 16, AP reported. Both sources said the dead include two women and three children, and that 29 people were injured. There was no immediate information on their condition. Photos from the scene showed the bus rolled over onto its side on a curvy section of highway in the southern state of Oaxaca. The cause of the crash in the town of Tepelmeme, near the border with the neighboring state of Puebla, is under investigation. The institute said a total of 55 migrants, mostly from Venezuela, were aboard the vehicle.

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MUMBAI (AFP) – India has sent notices to social media platforms X, formerly known as Twitter, YouTube and Telegram, asking them to ensure there is no child sexual abuse material on their platforms, the government said. The companies could be stripped of their protection from legal liability if they don’t comply, the government said in a statement. The notices, sent by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY), emphasized the importance of prompt and permanent removal of any child sexual abuse material on the platforms. “If they do not act swiftly, their safe harbor under section 79 of the IT Act would be withdrawn and consequences under the Indian law will follow,” the junior minister for information technology, Rajeev Chandrashekhar, was quoted as saying in the statement. Chandrasekhar has been a vocal advocate for removing such content from the internet in India and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government was determined “to build a safe and trusted internet under the IT rules”, the government said.