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.
A bill "aimed at combating renewed forms of antisemitism", which is due to be debated on...
President Volodymyr Zelensky announced that Ukraine and Saudi Arabia have reached an important agreement on defense...
A group of anti-war, US military veterans have slammed what they say are Israeli interests guiding...
Law enforcement officers foiled a plot to assassinate New York-based Palestinian American activist Nerdeen Kiswani and...
