Shrinking, aging population makes South Korea ‘super-aged society’

GOMA, DR Congo: The Rwanda-backed armed group M23 vowed on Thursday to march on the DR Congo capital, Kinshasa, as its fighters made further advances in the mineral-rich east of the country.
The group’s capture of most of Goma, the capital of North Kivu province, is a dramatic escalation in a region that has seen decades of conflict involving multiple armed groups.
Rwanda says its primary interest is to eradicate fighters linked to the 1994 genocide but it is accused of seeking to profit from the region’s reserves of minerals used in global electronics.
“We will continue the march of liberation all the way to Kinshasa,” Corneille Nangaa, head of a coalition of groups including the M23, told reporters in Goma.
“We are in Goma and we will not leave... for as long as the questions for which we took up arms have not been answered,” he said.
Nangaa said the group would restore electricity and security in the city in the coming days and establish humanitarian corridors to help displaced people return home.
Late on Wednesday, Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi pledged to continue fighting.
In an address to the nation he said a “vigorous and coordinated response against these terrorists and their sponsors is under way.”

The United Nations said on Thursday it was “deeply concerned” by “credible reports” that M23 was advancing south from Goma to Bukavu, capital of the neighboring province of South Kivu.
Local sources told AFP late on Wednesday that Rwandan-backed fighters were advancing on a new front and had seized two districts in South Kivu.
The army of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has yet to comment on the M23 advances.
After days of intense clashes that left more than 100 dead and nearly 1,000 wounded, according to an AFP tally of hospital figures, some Goma residents on Thursday ventured out to take stock.
“We do not want to live under the thumb of these people,” one person, who asked not to be named, told AFP.

Angola, China, the European Union, France, the UN and United States have all urged Rwanda to withdraw its forces.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot arrived in Rwanda on Thursday to meet President Paul Kagame after holding talks with Tshisekedi in Kinshasa earlier in the day.
Kagame directly criticized Tshisekedi at an online meeting of the regional East African Community bloc late on Wednesday.
“Why do we leaders of our own countries accept this to go on forever and just accept that we should be manipulated by Tshisekedi or whoever is supporting him?” he asked.
Kagame said “M23 are not Rwandans — they are Congolese.”
Belgium on Thursday asked the EU to consider sanctions against Rwanda, suggesting the bloc could use as leverage its agreement with Kigali over key mineral resources.
Britain threatened to reexamine its aid to Rwanda, in a statement from its foreign ministry.
The 16-nation Southern African Development Community (SADC) said it will hold a special summit on the crisis on Friday.
Kagame has told South African President Cyril Ramaphosa his country is “in no position to take on the role of a peacemaker or mediator.”
South African soldiers, 13 of whom have been killed in the past week in the DRC, are part of a UN peacekeeping force and southern Africa’s own peacekeeping mission (SAMIDRC).
Kagame said SAMIDRC “is not a peacekeeping force and it has no place in this situation.”

M23 fighters and Rwandan troops entered Goma on Sunday.
After four days of fighting, residents could be seen on the streets again on Thursday.
“There is nothing left to eat. Everything has been looted,” said Bosco, a local who gave only one name.
“We need help urgently.”

The offensive has heightened an already dire humanitarian crisis in the region, causing food and water shortages and forcing half a million people from their homes this month, the UN said.
Africa’s health agency warned that the “unnecessary war” in eastern DRC — a hotspot for infectious diseases — raised the risk of pandemic.
The DRC is rich in gold and other minerals such as cobalt, coltan, tantalum and tin used in batteries and electronics worldwide.
Kinshasa has accused Rwanda of waging the offensive to profit from the region’s mineral wealth — an allegation backed by UN experts who say Kigali has thousands of troops in the DRC and “de facto control” over the M23.
Rwanda has denied the accusations.
 

KYIV: A Russian drone attack on a residential block killed nine people including three elderly couples in the eastern Ukrainian city of Sumy, officials said on Thursday.
Moscow has pummelled Ukrainian cities with dozens of drones or missiles almost daily since it invaded in early 2022.
Images distributed by the emergency services showed a gaping hole in the facade of the long block of flats and rescue workers digging through debris for survivors.
“This is a terrible tragedy, a terrible Russian crime. It is very important that the world does not pause in putting pressure on Russia for this terror,” President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on social media.
National Police later said the search operation had been completed after 19 hours, with rescuers finding nine bodies in the ruins, while 13 people were wounded.
Among the dead were three couples — men and women between the ages of 61 and 74 — Ukrainian prosecutors said.
Those killed also included a 37-year-old woman, while her eight-year-old daughter was wounded, the Sumy prosecutor’s office said.
Sumy lies just over the border from Russia in northeastern Ukraine and has been regularly targeted by Moscow. Around 255,000 people lived there before the war.
“(Russian President Vladimir) Putin claims to be ready for negotiations, but this is what he actually does. Only strength works with liars,” Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiga said on social media.
Ukraine said Russian guided bombs hit the Kyiv-held town of Sudzha in the Kursk region, one of which damaged a boarding school used to house Russian residents trapped by the cross-border offensive.
“As a result of the strike, the windows of the boarding school were smashed again, the doors were broken. The elderly people will have to spend the night in the cold,” Ukraine’s military spokesman for Kursk, Oleksiy Dmytrashkivsky, said in a video statement.
The school was damaged by air strikes earlier this month, according to Ukraine, with one woman dying after being wounded.
Dmytrashkivsky said at the time that all those housed in the school are elderly and many are disabled and ill.
Several thousand Kursk region residents remain missing since Ukraine captured territory there, prompting criticism from relatives over the slow pace of efforts to return them.
Dmytrashkivsky accused Russian officials of seeking to “destroy” Kursk residents.
The Ukrainian air force said Moscow had attacked with 81 drones, including the Iranian-designed Shahed type.
Ukraine’s air defense units downed 37 of the drones in various regions, including in Sumy and near the capital Kyiv.
In the southern Odesa region on the Black Sea, officials said Russian drones targeted the port town of Izmail, one of several important Ukrainian export hubs.
Zelensky’s chief of staff Andriy Yermak on Thursday accused Russia of launching Shahed drones charged with shrapnel “to increase the number of civilian casualties.”
Separate Russian attacks killed one person and wounded 14 more, including two children, in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, which the Kremlin said it annexed in late 2022.
Ukrainian shelling of a Moscow-held village on the Dnipro River’s western bank in the southern Kherson region killed an elderly man and wounded a woman, a spokesman for the Russian authorities told TASS news agency.