Activists promised a huge lobbying effort for identical bills in the US House of Representatives and the Senate that call for the elimination of a Ugandan warlord and his Lord’s Resistance Army fighters in eastern Africa.
At a gathering in Washington on Monday, an estimated 3,000 activists discussed plans to win over members of Congress during meetings yesterday in offices of the Capitol complex.
In its statement of policy, the legislation specifies that the US will provide “political, economic, military and intelligence support for a comprehensive multilateral effort to protect civilians in affected areas, to apprehend or otherwise remove Joseph Kony and his top commanders from the battlefield, and to disarm and demobilize Lord’s Resistance Army fighters.”
It would authorize US$10 million in aid for the budget year beginning Oct. 1 to meet humanitarian needs of people in southern Sudan, Uganda and Congo affected by Kony’s fighters.
Many thousands have been killed by Kony’s rogue army, which largely comprises abducted children, and by Ugandan military efforts to capture him since 1986.
In 2005, Kony and his top lieutenants were named in the first arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC).
The warrants have not been served, however, because Kony has escaped arrest since he began his private war 23 years ago in Uganda and southern Sudan. His forces are now based in eastern Congo.
The ICC prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, who took out the warrants against Kony and his aides, spoke on Monday to the activists who are pressing for passage of the two bills, both filed on May 19.
“Joseph Kony’s army is an army of children,” Moreno-Ocampo said. “They don’t want to fight. He forces them to fight, and when he kills them, he just abducts more. It’s an army of defectors, and that’s why if Kony is arrested, most of the Lord’s Resistance Army will collapse.”
He told the activists: “You are changing the world, but it will take more than one day.”
KINGPIN: Marset allegedly laundered the proceeds of his drug enterprise by purchasing and sponsoring professional soccer teams and even put himself in the starting lineups Notorious Latin American narco trafficker Sebastian Marset, who eluded police for years, was handed over to US authorities after his arrest on Friday in Bolivia. Marset, a Uruguayan national who was on the US most-wanted list, was passed to agents of the US Drug Enforcement Administration at Santa Cruz airport in Bolivia, then put on a US airplane, Bolivian state television showed. “The arrest and deportation were carried out pursuant to a court order issued by the US justice system,” Bolivian Minister of Government Marco Antonio Oviedo told reporters. The alleged kingpin was arrested in an upscale neighborhood of Santa
ACTIONABLE ADVICE: The majority of chatbots tested provided guidance on weapons, tactics and target selections, with Perplexity and Meta AI deemed to be the least safe From school shootings to synagogue bombings, leading artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots helped researchers plot violent attacks, according to a study published on Wednesday that highlighted the technology’s potential for real-world harm. Researchers from the nonprofit watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate and CNN posed as 13-year-old boys in the US and Ireland to test 10 chatbots, including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Deepseek and Meta AI. Eight of the chatbots assisted the make-believe attackers in more than half the responses, providing advice on “locations to target” and “weapons to use” in an attack, the study said. The chatbots had become a “powerful accelerant for
SCANDAL: Other images discovered earlier show Andrew bent over a female and lying across the laps of a number of women, while Mandelson is pictured in his underpants A photograph of former British prince Andrew and veteran politician Peter Mandelson sitting in bathrobes alongside late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was unearthed on Friday in previously published documents. The image is believed to be the first known photograph of the two men with Epstein. They are currently engulfed in scandal in the UK over their ties to their mutual friend. The undated photograph, first reported by ITV News, shows King Charles III’s disgraced brother and former British ambassador to the US sitting barefoot outside on a wooden deck. They appear to have mugs with a US flag on them
Since the war in the Middle East began nearly two weeks ago, the telephone at Ron Hubbard’s bomb shelter company in Texas has not stopped ringing. Foreign and US clients are rushing to buy his bunkers, seeking refuge in case of air raids, nuclear fallout or apocalypse. With the US and Israel pounding Iran, and Tehran retaliating with strikes across the region, Hubbard has seen demand for his product soar, mostly from Gulf nation customers in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. “You can imagine how many people are thinking: ‘I wish I had a bomb shelter,’” Hubbard, 63, said in
RSS