A New Study Says the World is Safer

I am happy to report some good news. THE WORLD IS GETTING (HAS GOTTEN) SAFER.

HEADLINERS
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-The authoritative Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, in a 2004 Yearbook report obtained by The Associated Press in advance of publication, says 19 major armed conflicts were under way worldwide in 2003, a sharp drop from 33 wars counted in 1991.

-The Canadian organization Project Ploughshares, using broader criteria to define armed conflict, says in its new annual report that the number of conflicts declined to 36 in 2003, from a peak of 44 in 1995.

-The Stockholm report, to be released in September, notes three wars ended as of 2003 — in Angola, Rwanda and Somalia and a fourth, the separatist war in India's Assam state, was dropped from the "major" category after casualties were recalculated.

- A collaboration with Sweden's Uppsala University, that report will conservatively estimate battle-related deaths worldwide at 15,000 in 2002 and, because of the Iraq war, rising to 20,000 in 2003. Those estimates are sharply down from annual tolls ranging from 40,000 to 100,000 in the 1990s, a time of major costly conflicts in such places as the former Zaire and southern Sudan, and from a post-World War II peak of 700,000 in 1951.
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