Vietnam is seeking US$500 million in assistance from domestic and international sources to help clear war-era bombs and mines and reduce the difficulties for its people and land contaminated by unexploded ordnance, officials said yesterday.
Vietnam already has available US$200 million to demine 500,000 hectares in 14 provinces by 2015, or 7.6 percent of the total affected land, Vietnamese Deputy Minister of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs Bui Hong Linh told an international seminar, adding that only 300,000 hectares, or 5 percent, of the contaminated area has been cleared.
Unexploded ordnance (UXO) has killed more than 42,000 people and injured more than 62,000 nearly four decades after the war ended, Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung told the gathering.
“The task for the coming time is a difficult one,” Dung said. “The Vietnamese government always appreciates and wishes to continue receiving valuable help and support from the international community to overcome the consequences of bombs and mines left from the war.”
Vietnamese officials named no specific amounts sought from the international community.
The US used about 16 million tonnes of weaponry in the war that ended in 1975, Dung said. The country’s impoverished central region was subject to particularly heavy bombing and mining. The US administration sent troops to back up the former South Vietnam government between 1965 and 1973 in a conflict known as the Vietnam War. North Vietnamese forces took over Saigon, the capital of south, in April 1975, ending the war and reunifying the country.
Experts have estimated it would take hundreds of years to clear up unexploded bombs and mines, which have contaminated a fifth of the total area of Vietnam, the world’s second-largest producer of coffee and the second-biggest rice exporter.
The Southeast Asian country launched a UXO action program last year to raise awareness, apply the latest demining technology and reduce accidents that have hit mostly children and workers.
US Ambassador to Vietnam David Shear told the seminar Washington had already provided US$62 million to help survivors of UXO accidents as well as to help Vietnam cope with “this painful legacy.” The US Humanitarian Mine Action Program has provided a further US$37 million since 1989, the US embassy said.
“Our efforts to help Vietnam deal with this difficult problem have helped build the mutual trust and understanding between the US and Vietnam that has allowed our bilateral relationship to flourish,” Shear said.
“The war’s painful legacy, which includes hundreds of thousands of tonnes of bombs and unexploded ordnance, continues to cause painful casualties every day,” Dung said at the UN-sponsored conference on ways to deal with the problem.
Apps and Web sites that use artificial intelligence (AI) to undress women in photos are soaring in popularity, researchers said. In September alone, 24 million people visited undressing Web sites, the social network analysis company Graphika said. Many of these undressing, or “nudify,” services use popular social networks for marketing, Graphika said. For instance, since the beginning of this year, the number of links advertising undressing apps increased more than 2,400 percent on social media, including on X and Reddit, the researchers said. The services use AI to recreate an image so that the person is nude. Many of the services only
IN ABSOLUTE CONTROL: About 80 percent of Russians approve of Putin, a survey shows, but that might be misleading due to his intolerance to criticism Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday moved to prolong his repressive and unyielding grip on Russia for at least another six years, announcing his candidacy in the presidential election in March that he is all but certain to win. Putin still commands wide support after nearly a quarter-century in power, despite starting an immensely costly war in Ukraine that has taken thousands of his people’s lives, provoked repeated attacks inside Russia — including one on the Kremlin itself — and corroded its aura of invincibility. A short-lived rebellion in June by mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin raised widespread speculation that Putin could be
JUMPING BAIL: The democracy advocate said made the decision after ‘considering the situation in Hong Kong, my personal safety, my physical and mental health’ Hong Kong pro-democracy activist Agnes Chow (周庭), who was jailed over her role in massive 2019 protests, on Sunday said she had moved to Canada and would not return to meet her bail conditions. Chow was one of the best-known young faces of the 2012, 2014 and 2019 protest movements against Beijing’s increasingly authoritarian rule in Hong Kong. She spent about seven months behind bars for her role in a protest outside Hong Kong police headquarters in 2019, when huge crowds rallied week after week in the most serious challenge to China’s rule since Hong Kong’s 1997 handover. On Sunday
TAKING STOCK: It was not yet clear how damaging the espionage, dating to 1981, has been, as authorities are still assessing the situation, the State Department said A former US ambassador to Bolivia has been arrested and charged with spying for Cuba over a 40-year span, the US Department of Justice announced on Monday, detailing a shock betrayal by a suspect who called the US “the enemy.” US Attorney General Merrick Garland laid out the allegations against Victor Manuel Rocha, a onetime member of the White House’s National Security Council now accused of using his positions within the government to support Cuba’s “clandestine intelligence-gathering mission” against the US. The charges against Rocha, 73, expose “one of the highest-reaching and longest-lasting infiltrations of the United States government by a foreign
RSS