Zimbabwe to kill dozens of elephants and distribute meat to people
The Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Management Authority, also known as ZimParks, said it has issued permits to Save Valley Conservancy, a large private game reserve in the southeast, "for an elephant management exercise."
"The management quota is meant to address the growing elephant population in the region and will initially target 50 elephants," the agency said in a statement Tuesday. "According to the 2024 aerial survey, there are 2,550 elephants against an ecological carrying capacity of 800 elephants in Save Valley Conservancy."
MORE: Study explores elephant greetings and how they change based on social relationships
The reserve has translocated 200 elephants to other areas in the southern African nation over the past five years "to manage the elephant population and protect the wildlife habitat," according to ZimParks.
"Elephant meat from the management exercise will be distributed to local communities while ivory will be State property that will be handed over to the ZimParks for safekeeping," the agency added.
A global ban on ivory trade bars Zimbabwe from selling its stockpile of elephant tusks.
MORE: 'Double joy': Rare elephant twins born in Kenya's Samburu National Reserve
ZimParks spokesperson Tinashe Farawo told ABC News on Wednesday that the "management exercise" is "not culling," as the latter "involves wiping [out] the whole herd in huge numbers." He did not respond to a question about how many elephants in total will be killed in this instance and over what period of time.
ABC News has reached out to Save Valley Conservancy for comment.
Zimbabwe is home to the second-largest population of elephants in the world, after neighboring Botswana.
ABC News' Liezl Thom contributed to this report.
Zimbabwe to kill dozens of elephants and distribute meat to people originally appeared on abcnews.go.com
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19 minutes ago
Ukraine, left out in Trump-Putin summit, fears setbacks on key peace issues
LONDON -- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has warned that the Friday meeting between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin "will not achieve anything" if peace talks exclude Ukraine. Decisions taken without Kyiv's input will be "stillborn decisions," Zelenskyy continued. "They are unworkable decisions. And we all need real and genuine peace," the president said in an address to the nation last weekend. Ukrainian expectations for the summit in Alaska are low, amid fears in Kyiv that the American and Russian leaders will seek to dictate Ukraine's future without its participation. Zelenskyy's talks with European leaders and Trump on Wednesday, though, did appear to find consensus on key Ukrainian demands according to subsequent statements from Zelenskyy and his European counterparts, including that Kyiv will be the one to decide on any territorial concessions and that no such concessions can occur without binding security guarantees. "We must learn from the experience of Ukraine, [and] our partners, to prevent deception by Russia," Zelenskyy said in a statement posted to social media on Wednesday. "There is no sign now that the Russians are preparing to end the war," he added. "Our coordinated efforts and joint steps -- of Ukraine, the United States, Europe, all countries that want peace -- can definitely force Russia to make peace." Trump said Wednesday after the virtual meeting with Zelenskyy and European leaders that there will be "severe consequences" against Russia if Putin did not agree to stop his war on Ukraine. Oleksandr Merezhko -- a member of the Ukrainian parliament and chair of the body's foreign affairs committee -- likened the coming Alaska summit to the 1938 Munich Agreement -- a pre-World War II accord by which European powers allowed Nazi Germany to annex part of Czechoslovakia without Prague's consent. "Putin secured a one-on-one meeting with Trump, providing an opportunity to influence U.S. policy and push for abandonment of Ukraine and European allies," Merezhko told ABC News. "Putin would like to use the summit to persuade Trump to blame Ukraine for the lack of progress on a ceasefire and give him a pretext to walk away from the negotiations," Merezhko said. "Putin is a very masterful manipulator and he will go into Friday's meeting well prepared," Merezhko added. "He will go in with well-prepared, planned and rehearsed talking points." John E. Herbst, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine now working at the Atlantic Council's Eurasia Center, said Putin "wants a deal with Trump that will be presented to Kyiv and other European capitals as a fait accompli." The Kremlin's goals remain the "elimination of Ukraine as a state and as a culture, elimination of NATO and undermining of the U.S. global positions," Pavel Luzin, a Russian political analyst at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts, told ABC News. There are several key -- and thorny -- issues for the two leaders to discuss. Territory Territory has been a main source of conflict between the two countries since Russia's annexation of Crimea and fomentation of separatist revolt in eastern Ukraine in 2014. Putin has remained firm in his demands. Any peace settlement, Moscow has said, must include "international legal recognition" of its 2014 annexation of Crimea and four regions it has occupied to varying degrees since launching its full-scale invasion in 2022. Russia demanded that Ukrainian troops withdraw entirely from the Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions -- including areas that Russian troops do not control. The Kremlin claimed to have annexed all four regions in September 2022. Moscow also wants Kyiv to give up on any designs on taking back occupied Crimea. Ahead of Friday's meeting, Trump suggested that a "swapping of territories" could lead to a peace deal. However, Ukrainian officials quickly rejected that idea. Zelenskyy held that the country would not give up any of its land, saying in a Saturday statement, "Ukrainians will not gift their land to the occupiers." The president has since said that any decisions on territorial concessions must be made by Ukraine, and that no such concessions can occur without Ukraine receiving binding security guarantees that include the U.S. NATO ambitions Russian officials are also looking for their own "security guarantees" regarding NATO, by which Ukraine would be permanently excluded from the alliance, which has a mutual defense agreement among members. Putin has regularly expressed concern over NATO's eastward expansion, framing the alliance's growth as an existential security threat to Russia. He has repeatedly warned the alliance against accepting Ukraine as a member, accusing the organization of trying to turn the country into a launch pad for aggression. Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister, Alexander Grushko, said in March that Moscow is seeking "the neutral status of Ukraine, the refusal of NATO countries to accept it into the alliance." Ukrainian officials have continued in their bid to join NATO -- an ambition that has the backing of the vast majority of Ukrainians and is enshrined in the national constitution. During a news conference earlier this year, Zelenskyy offered to step down from the presidency in exchange for admission to NATO. "If to achieve peace you really need me to give up my post -- I'm ready. I can trade it for NATO membership, if there are such conditions." NATO nations, while backing Ukraine in its defensive war, have refused to allow Kyiv's accession to the alliance. The alliance agreed at a 2008 summit that Ukraine "will become a member of NATO," but the leaders of key allied nations -- including the U.S. -- have said Kyiv cannot accede while it is at war. Limits to Ukraine's military Russian officials have demanded limits to the size of Ukraine's military, which Moscow has framed as necessary to ensure its own security -- a claim dismissed by Kyiv as false. During peace negotiations in the opening days of the full-scale invasion, Moscow demanded that Ukraine reduce its military size to 50,000. Zelenskyy, however, has expressed concern that any reductions to Ukraine's military could allow Russia to secure more Ukrainian land, even with Western support. "The best thing is a strong army, a large army, the largest army in Europe. We simply have no right to limit the strength of our army in any case," he said in December. Russia is also demanding limits on Ukraine's weapons arsenals and the sophistication of its military technology. In the days leading up to Friday's meeting between Trump and Putin, Ukraine has increased its long-range drone strikes into Russia. Ukrainian officials have said such attacks are part of its strategy to force the Kremlin into genuine peace talks. Sanctions The lifting of international sanctions on Russia may also be discussed during Friday's meeting. Russia is currently the world's most sanctioned country with "50,000 or so measures," according to The Center for European Policy Analysis. Russian officials have stated that a peace treaty should include lifting sanctions imposed since 2022. The European Union has refused requests to reduce sanctions against Russia before a peace deal is secured, and Zelenskyy has called Putin's suggestion that reductions could lead to lasting peace "manipulative." Trump has threatened to impose further sanctions on Russia and its top trading partners if Putin fails to commit to a ceasefire. Earlier this month, the U.S. announced additional tariffs on India related to its purchases of Russian oil. "Everyone sees that there has been no real step from Russia toward peace, no action on the ground or in the air that could save lives," Zelenskyy said earlier this week. "That is why sanctions are needed, pressure is needed."
Fox News
4 hours ago
- Fox News
MORNING GLORY: President Trump should go far and fast in reforming the DC police
The first thing President Trump should do with the District of Columbia police force, which he took over on Tuesday, is fire or retire much, if not most, of its upper tier of leadership, and replace them with the most successful law enforcement professionals he can recruit to the nation's capitol. And, yes, President Trump can do just that, though D.C. may have to pay out some settlements if contracts are broken. (Union agreements and individual contracts do not trump Trump in this situation.) The president will be blamed by the left for everything that happens while he is in control of the District's "thin blue line." An example of this style of "reporting" comes from ABC News, which posted at 6:03 PM Tuesday evening: "Roughly nine hours after President Donald Trump declared a public safety emergency in Washington, D.C., and took control of the city's police force, a 33-year-old man was shot and killed in Logan Circle, less than a mile from the White House, officials said." "The killing marked the 100th homicide in Washington, D.C., this year," the ABC story continued, "and the first since the Trump administration took over control of the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD), according to statistics." The legacy media and its left-wing journo-activists will be eager for the president to fail in his attempt to restore the sense of safety that has disappeared from much of the nation's capitol. "Failure" is going to be the "narrative" from the legacy media regardless of the facts because so much of legacy media loathes everything the president does. So, as the president will be blamed for every crime while he's in control of the Metropolitan Police Department ("MPD"), the president should use his statutory authority over the D.C. cops to its fullest extent. Doubt the authority of the president to remake the D.C. police from top to bottom? Then read up on the underlying law governing the District. Law professors in the United States are among the most politically vociferous and ideologically committed of all academics, and the vast majority of them are men and women of the left and often the far left. Some of them are objective, even if from the left, though, and that includes Professor Steve Vladeck of Georgetown University Law Center, who earlier this week provided a great summary of the history of the District of Columbia and the links to the statutory authority the president invoked Monday. In his "One First" newsletter this week, Professor Vladeck concedes that "the Home Rule Act gives the President the power to take control of the D.C. Police 'whenever [he] determines that special conditions of an emergency nature exist which require the use of the Metropolitan Police force for federal purposes.'" "The authority is limited to no more than 30 days (it's limited to 48 hours unless the President sends a special notification to the Chair and Ranking Members of the relevant congressional committees explaining why he needs the authority for longer)," the professor adds. "And even within those 30 days, the authority is simply to use the MPD 'for federal purposes.'" "In other words," Vladeck concludes, "the President can borrow the MPD for his own priorities; but he can't control how they discharge their other duties." In other words, about Professor Vladeck's "in other words" phrase, the president's control of the D.C. police is complete for at least 30 days. He's in complete charge of the department. That means President Trump's authority is "plenary," in other words: "full," "entire," "absolute," or "comprehensive," and that includes all aspects of a topic or situation, which means hiring, firing, retiring or reorganizing. It is arguable from the face of the statute that the president can renew the authority for many 30-day periods, if Congress does not provide him a resolution making his control of the D.C. police explicit and limited to a certain time. Perhaps he ought to make them non-consecutive to err on the side of complying with the law, but repetitive 30-day periods separated by a day or two could work. What isn't in doubt is President Trump's control of the MPD for another 28 days. How to make a lasting change in 25 days if the president would prefer to both reform policing and yet not have to litigate his way through successive 30-day declarations? Personnel is policy, of course, so switch up the leadership. The president should thank the existing hierarchy of the department for their service and then dismiss them and bring in his own people to run the department while simultaneously expanding its budget for officers on the street significantly. The president need only ask GOP governors for suggestions on a new chief and other senior leaders, and then select a new #1 from the suggestions offered by the governors (or from his FBI Director Kash Patel). The president and the new chief should appoint a new senior level of leadership. There is no doubt that there are many fine, courageous and superbly trained professionals already within the department, and some, if not many, will want to stay on the job, and the president and the new leadership will want them to stay on. But for a clean break to occur with the culture that has allowed chaos to spread in the city over the past decade and beyond, a sharp separation from the past will be needed. Some retirement or farewell receptions will be teary-eyed, but not as sad as the funerals taking place because of brazen and increasingly shocking crime. (The murder of the two employees of the Israeli Embassy, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, on May 21 is only the most shocking of the many awful crimes of this spring and summer. For a rundown of the climate of lawlessness in D.C., listen to Tuesday's episode of "The Ruthless Podcast.") Among many disturbing allegations about the District is the one that reported stories of the purposeful mischaracterization of crimes that are being committed in order to minimize the shock of the bleak statistics. Very few people who have lived in or near D.C. doubt the allegation because the happy talk about falling crime rates does not match the experience of downtown, even in its relatively peaceful Northwest quadrant. Near-by residents of Maryland and Virginia are of the same mind as the non-criminal class within the District: The feeling of safety that was common in D.C. even a decade ago has faded away, slowly at first but accelerating rapidly in the years of President Biden's tenure when Democratic Party political posturing was more focused on getting the District statehood and two United States senators rather than the equal of any police force in the city. (This DNC talking point is unconstitutional gambit absent an actual amendment to the Constitution replacing the 23rd Amendment) President Trump asserted lawful authority on Tuesday. Now he must use it —lawfully of course— to effect the reforms of MPD that almost everyone inside the Beltway longs for, even if only inside their thoughts. It's a "deep blue" District, but parents in deep blue cities want their children as safe as parents in deep red jurisdictions. Hugh Hewitt is a Fox News contributor, and host of "The Hugh Hewitt Show," heard weekdays from 3 pm to 6 pm ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh drives America home on the East Coast and to lunch on the West Coast on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel's news roundtable hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University's Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcast, and this column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.
Business Insider
5 hours ago
- Business Insider
Africa's youngest state dismisses deal to host Palestinians from war-torn Gaza
South Sudan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs has firmly denied claims that it is engaged in talks with Israel to resettle Palestinians from the war-ravaged Gaza Strip. South Sudan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs denied allegations of involvement in discussions to resettle Palestinians from Gaza. South Sudan emphasized its priorities are addressing internal challenges, stating these claims were unfounded. Other African nations, such as Somalia, have also previously rejected similar proposals concerning displaced Palestinians. The statement comes in response to an Associated Press report on citing six unnamed sources who alleged that discussions were underway between Juba and Tel Aviv to relocate some Palestinians to the East African nation. South Sudanese officials dismissed the claims as unfounded, stressing that no such negotiations had taken place and reaffirming the country's current priorities lie in addressing its own internal humanitarian and development challenges. In a statement sighted by Reuters, South Sudan's foreign affairs ministry described the claims as baseless and ' do not reflect the official position or policy of the Government of the Republic of South Sudan," The ministry's clarification seeks to put to rest mounting speculation over the reported arrangement, which had quickly drawn international attention due to the highly sensitive nature of the Israel–Palestine conflict and South Sudan's delicate diplomatic posture. African nations take a firm stance on hosting Palestinian refugees This marks the second time an African nation has rejected proposals to host displaced Palestinians from Gaza. In March, both Somalia and its breakaway region of Somaliland denied receiving any such proposal from the United States or Israel, with Mogadishu stating it categorically opposed the idea. The refusal by African states such as South Sudan, Somalia, and Somaliland to host displaced Palestinians from Gaza is rooted in a mix of political, security, and geopolitical considerations, all of which intersect with historical sensitivities about sovereignty and foreign influence. Gaza has become almost uninhabitable due to a combination of prolonged conflict, blockade, and the current war's unprecedented destruction. Years of restrictions on movement and goods imposed primarily by Israel and Egypt, have crippled Gaza's economy, infrastructure, and health systems. Water and electricity are scarce, and large parts of the territory lie in ruins after sustained Israeli military operations. These conditions have fueled occasional proposals to relocate some displaced Palestinians abroad. The AP report published in March disclosed that the United States and Israel engaged officials from several East African governments to discuss the possibility of using their territories as destinations for Palestinians displaced from the Gaza Strip under President Donald Trump's proposed postwar plan. The outreach to Sudan, Somalia, and the breakaway region of Somaliland highlighted Washington and Tel Aviv's determination to advance a proposal that has drawn widespread condemnation and raised serious legal and moral concerns. Given that all three locations face poverty and, in some cases, ongoing violence, the plan also casts doubt on Trump's stated aim of resettling Gaza's Palestinians in what he described as a 'beautiful area.'
