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Police Investigating Killings of 12,000 Ukrainians in War

A heavily damaged house following Russian night shelling is seen through a broken window, in the town of Bakhmut, Donetsk region, Ukraine, Monday, June 13, 2022. (AP)
A heavily damaged house following Russian night shelling is seen through a broken window, in the town of Bakhmut, Donetsk region, Ukraine, Monday, June 13, 2022. (AP)
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Police Investigating Killings of 12,000 Ukrainians in War

A heavily damaged house following Russian night shelling is seen through a broken window, in the town of Bakhmut, Donetsk region, Ukraine, Monday, June 13, 2022. (AP)
A heavily damaged house following Russian night shelling is seen through a broken window, in the town of Bakhmut, Donetsk region, Ukraine, Monday, June 13, 2022. (AP)

Police have opened criminal investigations into the killings of more than 12,000 Ukrainians nationwide during Russia's war, and authorities in the Kyiv region near Bucha on Monday reported discovering the bodies of several victims whose hands were tied behind their backs.

"Shots to the knees tell us that people were tortured," said Andriy Nebytov, head of the Kyiv regional police. "The hands tied behind the back with tape say that people had been held (hostage) for a long time and (enemy forces) tried to get any information from them."

Since the withdrawal of Russian troops from the region at the end of March, the authorities say they have uncovered the bodies of 1,316 people. One site reporters saw Monday was a mass grave in a forest near Bucha, where the horrors of war shocked the world after a regional Russian withdrawal earlier in the war. Reporters on Monday saw a mass grave just behind a trench dug out for a military vehicle.

The bodies of seven civilians were retrieved from the mass grave. Two of the bodies were found with their hands tied and gunshot wounds to the knees and the head, Nebytov.

Nationwide, police chief Igor Klimenko told the Interfax-Ukraine news agency on Monday that criminal investigations into the deaths of more than 12,000 Ukrainians included some found in mass graves. He said the mass killings of people resulted from snipers firing from tanks and armored personnel carriers. Bodies were found lying on streets and in their homes, as well as in mass graves. He didn't specify how many of the more than 12,000 were civilian and military.

Complete information about the number of bodies in mass graves or elsewhere isn’t known, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told the American Jewish Committee on Sunday. He cited the killings of two children who died with their parents in the basement of an apartment building in Mariupol in a Russian bombing.

Zelenskyy, who is Jewish and lost relatives in the Holocaust, asked: "Why is this happening in 2022? This is not the 1940s. How could mass killings, torture, burned cities, and filtration camps set up by the Russian military in the occupied territories resembling Nazi concentration camps come true?"

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World

UN Urges Slowing AI Development

An employee replaces a component from the Alps supercomputer at the Swiss National Supercomputing Center (CSCS) in Lugano, southern Switzerland, on August 27, 2026. (Photo by Til BUERGY / AFP)
An employee replaces a component from the Alps supercomputer at the Swiss National Supercomputing Center (CSCS) in Lugano, southern Switzerland, on August 27, 2026. (Photo by Til BUERGY / AFP)
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UN Urges Slowing AI Development

An employee replaces a component from the Alps supercomputer at the Swiss National Supercomputing Center (CSCS) in Lugano, southern Switzerland, on August 27, 2026. (Photo by Til BUERGY / AFP)
An employee replaces a component from the Alps supercomputer at the Swiss National Supercomputing Center (CSCS) in Lugano, southern Switzerland, on August 27, 2026. (Photo by Til BUERGY / AFP)

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has warned world leaders that rapidly advancing artificial intelligence poses risks that cannot be ignored, affirming that global coordination is essential to “slow down AI.”

“We cannot afford to ignore concerns that have been raised, especially by those on the front lines of the development ⁠of AI,” said Guterres. “It’s the first responsibility of any government to protect its citizens – including from the threats of artificial intelligence.”

Speaking on Wednesday ahead of next week's UN General Assembly gathering in New York, Guterres underscored that AI will be “a major topic” in his discussions with world leaders coming to the city.

This comes amid rising calls for stricter control on the technology that is growing at lightning speed and not without dangerous precedents.

In her State of the Union address to the European Parliament on Wednesday, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called for pacing the development of frontier AI models due to their disruptive potential, pledging closer safety cooperation with Canada, the UK and other like-minded countries.

She hailed AI's potential to benefit humanity, provided its risks and opportunities are properly balanced.

Last Saturday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei also called for a slowdown in the industry's development, with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, xAI's Elon Musk and Hassabis all supporting the sentiment.

The calls have gone unanswered by the administration of US President Donald Trump.

Comparing AI development to the Cold War-era arms race between the US and Soviet Union, the UN Secretary-General called for cooperation between countries at the forefront of AI – including the US and China – to slow down AI development while risks continue to be assessed.

“The countries that have the highest capacity in the frontiers of AI – I think they should establish mechanisms of contact, have an exchange of information and (create) some common guardrails in order to avoid a race to the bottom that could one day lead to a gigantic disaster at the global level,” Guterres said.

With the scientific and diplomatic mechanisms now in place, the UN will continue to work to turn that cooperation into concrete action as AI becomes increasingly powerful.

World

World's Water Cycle Becoming More Unpredictable, UN Warns

FILE PHOTO: People walk on the dry riverbed of the Indus River in Hyderabad, Pakistan April 24, 2025. REUTERS/Yasir Rajput/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: People walk on the dry riverbed of the Indus River in Hyderabad, Pakistan April 24, 2025. REUTERS/Yasir Rajput/File Photo
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World's Water Cycle Becoming More Unpredictable, UN Warns

FILE PHOTO: People walk on the dry riverbed of the Indus River in Hyderabad, Pakistan April 24, 2025. REUTERS/Yasir Rajput/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: People walk on the dry riverbed of the Indus River in Hyderabad, Pakistan April 24, 2025. REUTERS/Yasir Rajput/File Photo

The planet's water cycle is becoming increasingly erratic, swinging between too little and too much, the United Nations warned Thursday, with an unprecedented El Nino expected to exacerbate the long-term trend.

Last year was among the driest for the world's rivers in over three decades, the UN's World Meteorological Organization said in a report.

In 2025 -- one of the warmest years on record -- glaciers also shrank across all regions, even as groundwater levels in many parts of the world are in multi-year decline, it found.

Overall, the WMO's annual State of Global Water Resources report showed that the Earth's freshwater storage -- the total amount of water stored in groundwater, lakes and rivers, soil moisture, vegetation and ice and snow -- continued a decade-long decline.

Some elements of the water cycle change rapidly -- like precipitation, river flow and soil moisture, responding to weather within days or weeks.

WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo voiced particular concern about the decline in "slow reserves", like groundwater and glaciers, which she said had traditionally served as the planet's "savings account".

They have served as "a buffer that absorbs bad years so that a single drought or a single dry season does not translate directly into a water crisis", she told reporters.

Now, "we are depleting that savings account", she warned, according to AFP. "We are spending our reserves."

Glaciers have also been shrinking at a precipitous rate, with 2025 marking the fourth consecutive year where they shed significant ice mass across all regions.

Between 2023 and 2025, the report estimated that glaciers lost a cumulative global glacier mass of 1,400 gigatons of water -- roughly equal to the water required to fill 560 million Olympic-sized swimming pools, or about a third of the world's annual freshwater withdrawals.

"Groundwater tells a similar story: nearly two-thirds of monitored wells worldwide showed conditions outside the historical norm in 2025," Saulo said.

She highlighted that this was happening in parallel with "more water-related disasters".

In particular, she pointed to the current El Nino pattern, which is expected to be the strongest since comparable records began four decades ago.

El Nino is the warm phase of a natural climate cycle that occurs every two to seven years and is characterized by above average ocean temperatures across the Pacific, and brings worldwide changes in winds and rainfall patterns and erratic weather.

"The strengthening El Nino will increase the risk of drought in some areas, and flooding in others," Saulo cautioned.

Already before El Nino hit, rivers worldwide were showing "abnormal" flows, WMO said, with 2025 among the three driest years for rivers in 35 years.

For a seventh year in a row, the number of river basins globally experiencing "normal" conditions were in a clear minority in 2025.

Only around 36 percent saw normal flows, while an equal percentage saw below-normal discharge conditions and 21 percent were above normal, the report found.

The WMO stressed the importance of good data to map the developments in the water cycle, warning that significants gaps remained in hard-hit areas.

"Weather respects no borders, and this is especially true for water," Saulo said, arguing for the importance of "shared data, shared standards and shared early warnings".

"A river basin is fed by water upstream, often in another country," she pointed out.

And "a glacier disaster in one country can lead to devastation in another as we saw with the recent tragedy of China and Nepal".

World

North Korea Says US-led Arms Buildup Justifies Expanding Nuclear Force

North Korea's Vice Defense Minister Kim Kang Il looks on before a plenary session at the Beijing Xiangshan Forum in Beijing, China September 17, 2026. REUTERS/Florence Lo
North Korea's Vice Defense Minister Kim Kang Il looks on before a plenary session at the Beijing Xiangshan Forum in Beijing, China September 17, 2026. REUTERS/Florence Lo
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North Korea Says US-led Arms Buildup Justifies Expanding Nuclear Force

North Korea's Vice Defense Minister Kim Kang Il looks on before a plenary session at the Beijing Xiangshan Forum in Beijing, China September 17, 2026. REUTERS/Florence Lo
North Korea's Vice Defense Minister Kim Kang Il looks on before a plenary session at the Beijing Xiangshan Forum in Beijing, China September 17, 2026. REUTERS/Florence Lo

North Korea's vice defense minister said on Thursday that a growing US-led military buildup and what he called an expanding nuclear alliance among Washington, Seoul and Tokyo justified Pyongyang's efforts to strengthen and expand its nuclear forces.

Speaking at the Beijing Xiangshan Forum, China's flagship international security conference, Vice Defense Minister Kim Kang Il said North Korea's status as a nuclear weapons state was irreversible and pledged to continue expanding its nuclear arsenal.

"The ceaseless nuclear arms buildup of the enemy states fully justifies the building of a solid nuclear shield of the DPRK," Kim said, using the acronym for North Korea's formal name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

"As ⁠the enemy states' ⁠nuclear threat reaches the extreme level ... the DPRK will firmly defend the peace and stability in the Korean Peninsula and the region by ceaselessly expanding and strengthening its self-defensive nuclear deterrent."

According to Reuters, Kim blamed tensions on the Korean Peninsula on what he called Washington's "invariable" hostile policy toward North Korea and accused the United States of turning trilateral cooperation with South Korea and Japan into a nuclear alliance.

He said North Korea's constitutional status as a nuclear weapons state was "the line of no retreat" and urged ⁠other countries to abandon what he called the "daydream" of denuclearization.

Kim's appearance at the Xiangshan Forum marked a rare high-profile showing by North Korea at an international security gathering in recent years and came as Pyongyang seeks closer ties with Beijing amid tensions with Washington and its allies.

Asked about the possibility of a meeting between US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, Kim said he was not in a position to discuss whether such a summit could take place.

His remarks followed a statement on Thursday morning from Kim Yo Jong, the powerful sister of leader Kim Jong Un, rejecting renewed international calls for North Korea's denuclearization following discussions at the annual meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

In a statement carried by state media KCNA, ⁠she said North Korea's ⁠status as a nuclear weapons state was "absolute" and could not be reversed, dismissing repeated denuclearization demands as annual "noise" and insisting Pyongyang's nuclear position had been permanently established "physically and legally.”

Her comments echoed a separate statement issued on Wednesday by a North Korean defense ministry spokesman, who accused the United States and South Korea of escalating military confrontation through joint weapons-of-mass-destruction response planning and exercises.

The spokesman said recent US-South Korean WMD response discussions amounted to an "open declaration of confrontation" and warned such actions could require Pyongyang to invoke provisions of its nuclear force policy law.

The statements appeared to form part of a broader messaging campaign by Pyongyang on its nuclear policy, according to Lim Eul-chul, a professor at Kyungnam University's Institute for Far Eastern Studies in Seoul.

The comments were aimed at cementing North Korea's claim that its nuclear status had reached an "irreversible stage,” while creating justification for future military and nuclear activities in response to what it portrays as growing US and South Korean pressure, Lim said.