Day: September 4, 2023

Official claims Israeli concessions to Palestinians not a central concern for Saudis and that Netanyahu’s hardline government will ultimately fall in line to approve a deal

NYPD: 2 stabbed, woman falls from window in Mount Hope …  News 12 Bronx

NYC cop shot during vicious road-rage brawl gets rousing support from about 100 other NYPD officers following hospital release  New York Post

Give us 5 minutes, and we’ll give you the world. Around the clock, Voice of America keeps you in touch with the latest news. We bring you reports from our correspondents and interviews with newsmakers from across the world.

Russia has likely proposed that North Korea participate in three-way naval exercises with China, according to a lawmaker who attended a closed-door briefing with the director of South Korea’s top spy agency Monday.

The briefing came days after Russia’s ambassador to North Korea, Alexander Matsegora, told Russian media that including North Korea in joint military drills between Russia and China “seems appropriate.” Matsegora added it was his own point of view and that he wasn’t aware of any preparations, according to Russia’s Tass news agency.

According to lawmaker Yoo Sang-bum, when South Korean National Intelligence Service Director Kim Kyou-hyun was asked about the possibility of such drills, he said Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu likely proposed holding trilateral naval exercises with North Korea and China while meeting North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in July.

Kim invited Shoigu to a major military parade in Pyongyang in July while vowing to expand military cooperation with Moscow, which U.S. officials say could involve North Korean supplies of artillery and other ammunition as Russian President Vladimir Putin reaches out to other countries for support in his war against Ukraine. Last week, the White House said Kim and Putin exchanged letters as Moscow looked to Pyongyang for more munitions.

Amid deepening nuclear tensions with Washington, Seoul and Tokyo, Kim has been trying to boost the visibility of his partnerships with Moscow and Beijing as he seeks to break out of diplomatic isolation and have Pyongyang be a part of a united front against the United States.

Diplomacy between Pyongyang and Washington has stalled since 2019 over disagreements over the crippling U.S.-led sanctions against North Korea and the North’s faltered steps to wind down its nuclear weapons and missiles program.

In the briefing, Kim Kyou-hyun also said that North Korea’s recent testing activities suggest its warplanes were highly reliant on its tactical nuclear systems as its aims to achieve swift victory over the South if war breaks out, as its otherwise ill-equipped military would struggle to handle a prolonged war, according to lawmaker Yoo.

Kim has used the international focus on Russia’s war on Ukraine to dial up his weapons demonstrations, which have included more than 100 missile launches since the start of 2022. Kim’s testing spree has been punctuated by verbal threats of preemptive nuclear attacks against South Korea and other rivals if the North perceives its leadership as under threat.

The small band of soldiers gathers outside to share cigarettes and war stories, sometimes casually and sometimes with a degree of testiness over recollections made unreliable by their last day fighting, the day the war took away their limbs.

Some clearly remember the moment they were hit by anti-tank mines, aerial bombs, a missile, a shell. For others, the gaps in their memories loom large.

Vitaliy Bilyak’s skinny body is a web of scars that end with an amputation above the knee. During six weeks in a coma, Bilyak underwent more than 10 surgeries, including his jaw, hand, and heel, to recover from injuries he received April 22 driving over a pair of anti-tank mines.

“When I woke up, I felt like I was born again and returned from the afterlife,” said Bilyak, who is just beginning his path to rehabilitation. He does not yet know when he’ll receive a prosthesis, which must be fitted individually to each patient.

Ukraine is facing a future with upward of 20,000 amputees, many of them soldiers who are also suffering psychological trauma from their time at the front. Europe has experienced nothing like it since World War I, and the United States not since the Civil War.

Mykhailo Yurchuk, a paratrooper, was wounded in the first weeks of the war near the city of Izium. His comrades loaded him onto a ladder and walked for an hour to safety. All he could think about at the time, he said, was ending it all with a grenade. A medic refused to leave his side and held his hand the entire time as he fell unconscious.

When he awoke in an intensive care unit the medic was still there.

“Thank you for holding my hand,” Yurchuk told him.

“Well, I was afraid you’d pull the pin,” the medic replied. Yurchuk’s left arm was gone below the elbow and his right leg above the knee.

In the 18 months since, Yurchuk has regained his equilibrium, both mentally and physically. He met the woman who would become his wife at the rehabilitation hospital, where she was a volunteer. And he now cradles their infant daughter and takes her for walks without the slightest hesitation. His new hand and leg are in stark black.

Yurchuk has himself become the chief motivator for new arrivals from the front, pushing them as they heal from their wounds and teaching them as they learn to live and move with their new disabilities. That kind of connection will need to be replicated across Ukraine, formally and informally, for thousands of amputees.

“Their whole locomotive system has to be reoriented. They have a whole redistribution of weight. That’s a really complicated adjustment to make and it needs to be made with another human being,” said Dr. Emily Mayhew, a medical historian at Imperial College who specializes in blast injuries.

There are not nearly enough prosthetic specialists in Ukraine to handle the growing need, said Olha Rudneva, the head of the Superhumans center for rehabilitating Ukrainian military amputees. Before the war, she said, only five people in all of Ukraine had formal rehabilitation training for people with arm or hand amputations, which in normal circumstances are less common than legs and feet as those sometimes are amputated due to complications with diabetes or other illnesses.

Rudneva estimated that 20,000 Ukrainians have endured at least one amputation since the war began. The government does not say how many of those are soldiers, but blast injuries are among the most common in a war with a long front line.

Rehabilitation centers Unbroken and Superhumans provide prostheses for Ukrainian soldiers with funds provided by donor countries, charity organizations and private Ukrainian companies.

“Some donors are not willing to provide military aid to Ukraine but are willing to fund humanitarian projects,” said Rudneva.

Some of the men undergoing rehabilitation regret they’re now out of the war, including Yurchuk and Valentyn Lytvynchuk.

Lytvynchuk, a former battalion commander, draws strength from his family, especially his 4-year-old daughter who etched a unicorn on his prosthetic leg.

He headed recently to a military training ground to see what he could still do.

“I realized it’s unrealistic. I can jump into a trench, but I need four-wheel drive to get out of it. And when I move ‘fast’ a child could catch me,” he said.

Then, after a moment, he added: “Plus, the prosthesis falls off.”

The hardest part for many amputees is learning to live with the pain — pain from the prosthesis, pain from the injury itself, pain from the lingering effects of the blast shockwave, said Mayhew, who has spoken with several hundred military amputees over the course of her career. Many are dealing with disfigurement and the ensuing cosmetic surgeries.

“That comorbidity of PTSD and blast injury and pain — those are very difficult to unpick,” she said. “When people have a physical injury and they have a psychological injury that goes with it, those things can never be separated. ”

For the severely injured, rehabilitation could take longer than the war ultimately lasts.

The cosmetic surgeries are crucial to allowing the soldiers to feel comfortable in society. Many are so disfigured that it’s all they believe anyone sees in them.

“We don’t have a year, two,” said Dr. Natalia Komashko, a facial surgeon. “We need to do this as if it was due yesterday.”

Bilyak, the soldier who drove over anti-tank mines, still sometimes finds himself dreaming of battle.

“I’m lying alone in the ward on the bed, and people I don’t know come to me. I realize they’re Russians and they start shooting me point-blank in the head with pistols, rifles,” he recounted. “They start getting nervous because they’re running out of bullets, and I’m alive, I show them the middle finger and laugh at them.”

Nobel Prize-winning Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov will mount a legal challenge to try to overturn his designation as a “foreign agent” by the authorities in Russia, Novaya Gazeta, the newspaper he edits, said on Monday.

Russia’s Justice Ministry on Friday added Muratov, a veteran editor and co-laureate of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, to the growing list of people it has formally labeled “foreign agents” — a designation used to stigmatize and complicate the life of people it deems to be working against Russian state interests.

It said Muratov, who sold his Nobel medal at auction to help Ukrainian child refugees, had “created and disseminated material [produced by] foreign agents and used it to spread negative opinions of Russia’s foreign and domestic policies on international platforms.”

Novaya Gazeta, which is famous for its investigations that have sometimes taken aim at the Kremlin, government policy and top officials, said on Monday that Muratov would temporarily step aside from his role as editor-in-chief in order to challenge his designation through the courts.

“Muratov categorically disagrees with the decision of the Ministry of Justice and is filing a lawsuit,” Novaya Gazeta said in a statement.

“At his own request, the editorial board is suspending Dmitry Muratov as editor-in-chief for the duration of the legal proceedings. Sergei Sokolov has been appointed acting editor-in-chief.”

It said Muratov had been targeted by the authorities for his opinions and beliefs, something it said ran counter to constitutional guarantees about freedom of thought and speech.

The Justice Ministry has significantly expanded its “foreign agent” list since Russia launched what Moscow calls its “special military operation” in Ukraine in February 2022, using it to tar people and organizations who publicly criticize or question the war.

Journalists designated “foreign agents” must include a disclaimer about their status on every piece of work, are subject to greater official scrutiny and financial checks, and media given the same label have seen Russia-based funders and sponsors withdraw their support.

Novaya Gazeta suspended publication in 2022 in response to legislation imposing harsh penalties for discrediting the Russian military’s actions in Ukraine. Many of its journalists have since regrouped with a new publication in Latvia.

A bomb attack on a government compound in the Myanmar border hub of Myawady killed five government and security officials and wounded 11 policemen, sources told AFP Monday.  

The town on the border with Thailand has seen sporadic clashes between the military and anti-junta fighters since a coup in 2021 plunged the country into turmoil.

Early Sunday evening two “drop bombs” fell into a compound containing the district police office and general administration office, a military source told AFP.

As officials took “security measures” after the blasts, another two bombs were dropped, killing five and wounding 11, they said, requesting anonymity as they were not authorized to talk to the media.

The dead included a military officer, two police officers and two officials from the administration department, they said.

Eleven “junior and senior” police officers were wounded, five critically, they added.

A local police source who also requested anonymity confirmed the incident and casualty figures.

Neither source said who was responsible for the attack.

The junta said “some security members and government staff” were wounded in the attack, without giving a figure.

It blamed anti-coup “People’s Defense Forces” and the Karen National Liberation Army, an established ethnic rebel group that has fought the military for decades.  

Anti-junta fighters battling to overturn the coup that deposed Aung San Suu Kyi’s government have used commercial drones for surveillance and as crude bomb-dropping devices.

A Myawady resident who did not want to be named told AFP they heard two blasts Sunday evening in the town, which abuts the Thai province of Tak.  

Since the coup, the KNLA and PDF groups have clashed sporadically with the military in Myawady town and its surroundings in Karen state, sending tens of thousands fleeing into Thailand.