GENEVA (AFP) -- New use of landmines, including extensive deployment by Russia in Ukraine, drove a global rise of new casualties from the weapons last year, a monitor said Tuesday.  According to the Landmine Monitor, 4,710 people were injured or killed by landmines and explosive remnants of war (ERW) across 49 states and two other areas in 2022.  Civilians -- half of them children -- accounted for 85 percent of those casualties, it said. That number of overall casualties was actually a bit lower than a year earlier, when 5,544 such casualties were recorded. But Loren Persi, a co-author of the annual report, noted a dramatic increase in the number of casualties linked exclusively to landmines, explosive devices intentionally placed above or underground that kill and wound people during and long after conflicts. 

 

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SEOUL (AFP) -- North Korea on Tuesday slammed a joint statement by G7 foreign ministers that criticized the country’s nuclear program, arguing the grouping of rich democracies should be “dismantled immediately”.  Jo Chol Su, a high-ranking official at Pyongyang’s foreign ministry, said he “resolutely” rejects and “most strongly” condemns the recent G7 statement, calling it “groundless”. He said members of the G7, especially the United States, have “disgraceful records by doing considerable harm to international peace and security”, and that the group “has lost the justification for its existence”. The “G7, the remnant of the Cold War, should be dismantled immediately,” Jo said, according to Pyongyang’s state-run Korean Central News Agency. He accused the group of being a “peace strangler, confrontation maniac and nuclear war merchant”. In a statement issued last week, the top diplomats of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Britain, the United States and the European Union reiterated their longstanding call for the “complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula”.

 

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MOSCOW (Reuters) -- Russia has signed a contract to supply its Igla hand-held anti-aircraft missile to India and allow production of the Igla there under license, Russian state news agency TASS quoted a top arms export official as saying on Tuesday. India is the world’s largest arms importer and Russia remains its largest supplier. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), Russia accounted for 45% of India’s arms imports between 2018 and 2022, with France providing 29% and the United States 11%. Another Russian state news agency, RIA, quoted Mikheyev earlier as saying that “Rosoboronexport is working with Indian private and public enterprises to organize joint production of aviation weapons and integrate them into the existing aviation fleet in India”. At the beginning of the year, India and Russia also started joint production of AK-203 Kalashnikov assault rifles.

 

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BURLINGTON (AP) -- Two men were shot and killed Sunday night and a third was seriously injured early Monday in two separate, suspected drug-related shootings in Vermont’s largest city of Burlington, officials said. The shootings happened on a busy night for police that first included a report of gunfire downtown and later an early morning arson fire in the vestibule of the police station, the chief and mayor said at a press briefing on Monday. At the same time, Vermont State Police are investigating a spate of homicides around Vermont in recent months, many of which they suspect are drug-related. In September, the Burlington City Council passed a resolution declaring the drug crisis its top public health and safety priority.

 

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DEHRADUN, India (AFP) -- More than a hundred rescuers in northern India struggled for a third day on Tuesday to save workers trapped underground after the road tunnel they were building collapsed. Excavators have been removing debris since Sunday morning from the site in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand to create an escape tunnel for the 40 workers, who are all alive. “Our biggest breakthrough is that we have established contact and there is a supply of oxygen and food,” Uttarkashi district’s top civil servant Abhishek Ruhela told AFP on Tuesday. “Whatever is necessary for their survival is being done.”  Oxygen was being pumped into the tunnel and small food data-x-items such as dry fruit were being provided to the workers, he added. The State Disaster Response Force (SDRF) said Tuesday rescuers had spoken to the trapped workers via radio. Ranjit Kumar Sinha, a senior disaster management official, told reporters at the site he was hopeful workers could be freed by Wednesday, adding that there was enough oxygen where they were trapped “for about five to six days”. 

  

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BANGKOK, Thailand (AFP) -- Fighters from an ethnic minority group pressed their assault on security forces in Myanmar’s Rakhine state for a second day Tuesday, a spokesman said, as an offensive against the military widens across the country. Arakan Army (AA) fighters seized an outpost of the border police at Chinkhali in Rakhine state on Tuesday morning, spokesman Khaing Thu Kha told AFP. The AA also attacked military outposts on two hills in Paletwa township in neighbouring Chin state at dawn on Tuesday, he said. In Paletwa the military had responded with airstrikes and heavy artillery fire and the fighting was ongoing and “intense,” Khaing Thu Kha said. Local media also reported the clashes in Paletwa township and said two women had been killed in artillery firing. The AA has for years fought a war for the autonomy of the state’s ethnic Rakhine population, and has a presence in neighboring Chin state.