land mines

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Man's New Best Friend: Rats Ferret Out Land Mines, TB

(Newser) - Move over, Rover: Man has a new best friend that is helping to combat two scourges plaguing the developing world. Rats, normally reviled as filthy vermin, are sniffing out land mines and detecting tuberculosis bacteria. "Rats are usually considered pests or enemies of humanity,” said one Mozambican handler,...

Scars of War Remain for Laotian Farmers

Land littered with bombs makes subsistence farming a more dire proposition

(Newser) - As if surviving as a farmer in the developing world wasn't hard enough, for those in Laos there is an extra—often deadly—complication. The US littered the Southeast Asian nation with 2 million tons of explosives during the Vietnam War, one-third of which remain precariously unexploded, and responsible for...

Cindy McCain's Soft Talk Masks Deep Resolve

GOP candidate's wife is quiet on trail, crusader off it

(Newser) - Cindy McCain is reserved on the campaign trail—a marked contrast to the sometimes-pugilistic style of husband John—but outside the public eye she has been a “one-woman philanthropic operation,” reports the Chicago Tribune in a profile. The would-be first lady has brought medical relief missions to Rwanda...

WWII Mines Block Egypt's Access to Oil

4.8B barrels of crude lie under 22M mines, shells in desert

(Newser) - Millions of land mines and unexploded artillery shells left over from World War II are hampering Egypt's efforts to get at a treasure trove of oil and gas beneath the desert, der Spiegel reports. The ordnance is an unwelcome reminder of the North African conflict between Brits and Erwin Rommel’...

Afghan Refugees Flooding Home, Some Forced From Camps

Mass repatriation may be new disaster

(Newser) - Afghan refugees are returning to their post-Taliban nation by the hundreds of thousands, and there are few resources to support them. Much of the repatriation is voluntary, the BBC reports, with newfound stability attracting Afghanis who fled as long as 25 years ago; others have been forced out of Pakistani...

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