Vietnam and the US on Wednesday said they have finished the cleanup of dioxin contamination at Da Nang International Airport caused by the transport and storage of the herbicide Agent Orange during the Vietnam War.
The 30 hectares of land cleansed of the toxic chemical were handed over to Vietnam at a ceremony.
Vietnamese Vice Minister of Defense Nguyen Chi Vinh praised the US government’s involvement in the cleanup.
“It is proof that we are opening a future of good cooperation between the governments of Vietnam and the United States,” he said. “Today marks the day that Da Nang airport is no longer known as a dioxin hot spot, the day that Da Nang people can be assured that their health will not be destroyed by chemicals left over from the war.”
Large amounts of Agent Orange, which contains dioxin, were stored at the airport during the war and sprayed by US forces to defoliate the countryside and deny communist fighters jungle cover. Vietnamese still suffer from the effects of the spraying.
US Ambassador to Vietnam Daniel Kritenbrink called the cleanup a significant milestone in the expanding partnership between the two nations.
“This project truly is a hallmark of our countries’ shared vision to be honest about the past, deal responsibly with remaining legacy issues and turn a point of contention into one of collaboration,” he said.
Working together on the issues of the past “builds strategic trust and enables us to further strengthen our forward-looking partnership that advances shared interests and strong people-to-people ties,” Kritenbrink added.
Between 1962 and 1971, the US military sprayed about 41.64 million liters of Agent Orange across large swaths of southern Vietnam. Dioxin stays in the soil and in the sediment at the bottom of lakes and rivers for generations. It can enter the food supply through the fat of fish and other animals.
Vietnam says as many as 4 million of its citizens were exposed to the herbicide and as many as 3 million have contracted illnesses caused by it — including the children of people who were exposed during the war.
The US government says the actual number of people affected is much lower and that Vietnamese are too quick to blame Agent Orange for birth defects that can be caused by malnutrition or other factors.
Last month, US Secretary of Defense James Mattis visited Bien Hoa Air Base north of Ho Chi Minh City, another dioxin hot spot.
The US Agency for International Development is to soon begin a soil restoration project at the base that is estimated to take several years and cost US$390 million.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
RSS