Explosives are slow to remove by hand, so some farmers are deploying robots and drones to help speed up the process and kick-start their devastated businesses. The treaty was the result of the leadership of the Governments of Canada, Norway, South Africa and Mozambique working with the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, launched in 1992. The campaign and its leader, Jody Williams, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 for its efforts. Placing minefields without marking and recording them for later removal is considered a war crime under Protocol II of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, which is itself an annex to the Geneva Conventions.

Thirty-six countries, including the People’s Republic of China, the Russian Federation and the United States, which together may hold tens of millions of stockpiled antipersonnel mines, are not party to the Convention.[67] Another 34 have yet to sign on. The United States did not sign because the treaty lacks an exception for the Korean Demilitarized Zone. Some minefields are specifically booby-trapped to make clearing them more dangerous. Mixed anti-personnel and anti-tank minefields, minefield game anti-personnel mines under anti-tank mines, and fuses separated from mines have all been used for this purpose. Often, single mines are backed by a secondary device, designed to kill or maim personnel tasked with clearing the mine. Anti-tank minefields can be scattered with anti-personnel mines to make clearing them manually more time-consuming; and anti-personnel minefields are scattered with anti-tank mines to prevent the use of armored vehicles to clear them quickly.

Late last year, Hunter Biden retained Abbe Lowell, an elite and combative defense lawyer whose clients have included Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez, former Democratic Sen. John Edwards and even Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Lowell successfully defended Menendez against corruption charges in 2017, and is now representing him in a new corruption case. He fended off campaign finance charges against Edwards, the Democratic nominee for vice president in 2004. And he helped Kushner navigate special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe.

• Previous activities during the course included a trip to Fort Smith to visit the APAC sand mining operation on the Arkansas River, a trip to local caves and experimenting with lava lamps to investigate the behavior of the Earth’s mantle.
• Two U of A political scientists anticipated they would find a connection between legislative civility and performance, but the strength of this link proved surprising.
• Other White House aides and outside Democratic operatives are concerned about Hunter Biden’s strategy.
• They encourage open dialogue and allow everyone to express their thoughts and feelings.

This information should not be considered complete, up to date, and is not intended to be used in place of a visit, consultation, or advice of a legal, medical, or any other professional. These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word ‘minefield.’ Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Consistent with the president’s vow to honor the Justice Department’s independence, the White House does not comment on Hunter Biden’s criminal case or his other legal issues. And their voluminous attacks have received limited public rebuttal from the left. Meanwhile, the investigation itself was becoming a political story, with IRS whistleblowers telling Congress that Weiss — the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney for Delaware who had been leading the probe since its inception — had been hampered in various ways. Meanwhile, in private talks with the federal prosecutors running the criminal probe, Hunter Biden’s lawyers were using aggressive negotiating tactics, even threatening at one point to put Joe Biden on the witness stand if prosecutors charged Hunter Biden with the gun crime. And when Republicans took control of the House in 2022, they zeroed in on Hunter Biden’s financial dealings, accusing him of a cornucopia of crimes — and accusing the Justice Department of going easy on him.

How difficult is Minefield?

The CCM entered into force in 2010, and has been ratified by over 100 countries. Signatories of the Ottawa Treaty agree that they will not use, produce, stockpile or trade in anti-personnel land mines. In 1997, there were 122 signatories; as of early 2016, 162 countries have joined the Treaty.

Demining

Notably, these autonomous methods utilize unmanned ground systems, or more recently subterranean systems such as the EMC Operations Termite, using either outward pressure differentials along system bodies, or corkscrew mechanisms. The extents of minefields are often marked with warning signs and cloth tape, to prevent friendly troops and non-combatants from entering them. Most forces carefully record the location and disposition of their own minefields, because warning signs can be destroyed or removed, and minefields should eventually be cleared. Minefields may also have marked or unmarked safe routes to allow friendly movement through them.

House Republicans have also put Hunter Biden at the center of their impeachment inquiry, arguing that the president may have corruptly benefited from his son’s business activities. So far, they have failed to produce evidence of wrongdoing by the president. The Justice Department investigation broadened to include not just financial issues but also Hunter Biden’s purchase of a handgun in 2018, a time when he has said he was frequently using crack cocaine. Some White House staff are “irritated that he’s being more aggressive, because he is not clearing the tactics and the strategy,” said one former 2020 campaign aide. The counteroffensive will play out in courtrooms and in public just as his father ramps up his reelection campaign. For years, as Hunter Biden faced a protracted criminal probe, he was told to cooperate with prosecutors and wait quietly for exoneration. That strategy, favored by veteran Democrats who came of age in a less pugilistic political era, failed.

Rio Tinto has lusted after Oak Flat for years, but it took a stealth act of congressional chicanery for Resolution to get it. In 2014, Senators John McCain and Jeff Flake slipped a “midnight rider” (a ploy that has proved quite effective in depriving Native Americans of their lands and rights) into a must-pass defense bill. This permitted a land swap whereby Resolution would give up five thousand acres it owned in small parcels here and there in Arizona for two thousand four hundred acres around Oak Flat. The preferred, but most labour-intensive, way is to have engineers bury the mines, since this will make the mines practically invisible and reduce the number of mines needed to deny the enemy an area.

The system that includes the drone, the person operating the machine and the communication system is called an unmanned aerial (or aircraft) system (UAS). The FAA also uses the term small unmanned aircraft systems (sUAS) for small UAS.[120][121] In the past decade, the use of such systems for demining has grown rapidly. Instead, two Capitol Hill Democrats have told POLITICO that they view the politics on the issue as fixed, so the prospect of going on offense is all risk and no reward. In general, they are comfortable defending the president, but not his son.

Conventional detection methods

Some aides worry, too, that Hunter Biden’s courtroom counterpunching only brightens the spotlight on his legal entanglements, foreign business activities, and personal struggle with drug addiction. For these aides, too much engagement with opponents, including Rudy Giuliani and the conservative media, risks legitimizing their most extreme attacks on the president’s family. The president’s son is now under one indictment, is bracing for another and has become the face of the Republican impeachment probe of his father. Over the past three months, Hunter Biden has filed a barrage of lawsuits and has challenged his indictment on gun charges by attacking the prosecution as tainted by Republican pressure. The president’s son has a new legal plan, and it will play out in parallel with his father’s reelection campaign. Multiple anti-tank mines have been buried in stacks of two or three with the bottom mine fuzed, to multiply the penetrating power. Since the mines are buried, the ground directs the energy of the blast in a single direction—through the bottom of the target vehicle or on the track.

More from Merriam-Webster on minefield

Mine-scattering shells may be fired by artillery from a distance of several tens of kilometers. Since combat engineers with mine-clearing equipment can clear a path through a minefield relatively quickly, mines are usually considered effective only if covered by fire. Hunter Biden and his team viewed the move as a sign Weiss had turned draconian. They have long argued that it’s the first time anyone has been charged in Delaware with owning a gun as a drug user without any other aggravating circumstances — such as using the gun to commit a crime. But among the small cadre of advisers close to the president’s son, the newly aggressive approach was long overdue.

The intention is to hinder deminers by discouraging any attempts to clear minefields. There is a degree of overlap between the function of a boobytrap and an anti-handling device insofar as some mines have optional fuze pockets into which standard pull or pressure-release boobytrap firing devices can be screwed. Alternatively, some mines may mimic a standard design, but actually be specifically intended to kill deminers, such as the MC-3 and PMN-3 variants of the PMN mine.

Other White House aides and outside Democratic operatives are concerned about Hunter Biden’s strategy. His team rolled out the lawsuits independent from the president’s political operation. Some of the president’s allies argue the politics surrounding Hunter Biden are already baked in.

The moves themselves are entirely up to Hunter Biden and his lawyers — and that’s as it should be, aides emphasize, because the president has vowed to stay out of his son’s legal affairs. Responding to the Ofcom proposals, the Open Rights Group (ORG), which campaigns for privacy and free speech online, said age-checking technologies risked personal data being “breached, collected, shared or sold”. Globe, Arizona, is an old mining town in a breathtaking landscape scarred by that brutal industry, which literally scours out the hearts of mountains, leaving behind toxic craters, lifeless terraced hills of slag, and poisonous ponds of chemical-laced tailings. A mine is a horrible thing to behold—a brazen monument to environmental ruin. An enormous one presses against 177, a side route out of the town of Winkelman, named for somebody.