Destruction and Death, as Pope Francis offered this homily in St. Peter's Square, had just left the scene in the central African nation of Chad, where in a single night in mid-March 89 elephants were slaughtered for their tusks.
Reports described the ivory poachers as 50 or so men on camel and horseback, speaking Arabic, armed with AK-47s, and presumed to be the same band that came over from Sudan last year to execute more than 450 elephants in Cameroon -- on that foray, dispatching their victims with rocket-propelled grenades.
In Chad, near the Cameroon border to the south, they left their mark by sparing not even the 33 pregnant females and 15 elephant calves, and by hacking off the tusks while some of the creatures were still alive. There were four park rangers on duty that night, short a fifth guard who was murdered by poachers last year.
But they were far away at the time, and, in any case, would have been helpless against overwhelming force. Among other problems, the elephant preserve is about 850 square miles, a big stretch of creation for just four guys to protect.
Yuri Ushakov, an aide to Vladimir Putin, asserted on May 10 that any settlement regarding the...
The Hungarian Parliament held its inaugural session on Saturday, May 9, ushering in a new political...
The 1974 Carnation Revolution in Portugal that overthrew the country's dictatorship and led to independence for...
President Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukraine and Russia have agreed to carry out a large‑scale prisoner exchange...
