Rampaging South Sudan troops raped foreigners, killed local
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — The soldier pointed his AK-47 at the female aid worker and gave her a choice.
“Either you have sex with me, or we make every man here rape you and then we shoot you in the head,” she remembers him saying.
She didn’t really have a choice: By the end of the evening, she had been raped by 15 South Sudanese soldiers.
On July 11, South Sudanese troops, fresh from winning a battle in the capital, Juba, over opposition forces, went on a nearly four-hour rampage through a residential compound popular with foreigners, in one of the worst targeted attacks on aid workers in South Sudan’s three-year civil war. They shot dead a local journalist while forcing the foreigners to watch, raped several foreign women, singled out Americans, beat and robbed people and carried out mock executions, several witnesses told The Associated Press.
For hours throughout the assault, the U.N. peacekeeping force stationed less than a mile away refused to respond to desperate calls for help. Neither did embassies, including the U.S. Embassy.
———
Trump calls for ‘extreme vetting’ of immigration applicants
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio (AP) — Donald Trump called Monday for “extreme” ideological vetting of immigrants seeking admission to the United States, vowing to significantly overhaul the country’s screening process and block those who sympathize with extremist groups or don’t embrace American values.
“Those who do not believe in our Constitution, or who support bigotry and hatred, will not be admitted for immigration into our country,” Trump said in a foreign policy address in Youngstown, Ohio. “Only those who we expect to flourish in our country — and to embrace a tolerant American society — should be issued visas.”
Trump’s proposals were the latest version of a policy that began with his unprecedented call to temporarily bar foreign Muslims from entering the country — a religious test that was criticized across party lines as un-American.
The Republican nominee has made stricter immigration measures a central part of his proposals for defeating the Islamic State, a battle he said Monday is akin to the Cold War struggle against communism. He called for parents, teachers and others to promote “American culture” and encouraged “assimilation.”
Trump’s address comes during a trying stretch for his presidential campaign. He’s struggled to stay on message and build a consistent case against Democrat Hillary Clinton, repeatedly roiling the White House race with provocative comments that have deeply frustrated many in his own party.
———
Biden: Trump is ‘thoroughly unqualified’ for presidency
SCRANTON, Pa. (AP) — Vice President Joe Biden assailed Donald Trump’s ability to lead America at home and abroad on Monday, branding him as indifferent to the needs of Americans in his first campaign appearance with Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
Biden, who decided not to make a third presidential bid last year, said in his native city of Scranton that Trump was “totally, thoroughly unqualified” to be president, calling him a dangerous voice on national security and foreign policy.
On the economy, he said, Trump’s reveling in his TV reality show tag-line, “You’re fired,” showed his true colors.
“He’s trying to tell us he cares about the middle class? Give me a break. It’s such a bunch of malarkey,” Biden told a crowd of about 3,000 at Riverfront Sports, adding: “He doesn’t have a clue.”
Pennsylvania has not supported a Republican in a presidential election since 1988, but is among the most-contested battleground states between Clinton and Trump, who are both vying for white working-class voters here.
———
‘Act of God’: Ruinous flooding catches Louisiana off guard
BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — An act of God is how some are describing it, a catastrophic 48-hour torrent of rain that sent thousands of people in Louisiana scrambling for safety and left many wondering how a region accustomed to hurricanes could get caught off guard so badly.
At least six people have been killed and more than 20,000 have had to be rescued since Friday in some of the worst flooding the state has ever seen.
As of Monday, the rain had mostly stopped, but rivers and creeks in many areas were still dangerously bloated and new places were getting hit by flooding. In areas south of Baton Rouge, people were filling sandbags, protecting their houses and bracing for the worst as the water worked its way south. In Ascension Parish officials said some small towns have already been swamped by floods.
More than 11,000 people were staying in shelters, with a movie studio and a civic center that usually hosts concerts and ballets pressed into service.
“It was an absolute act of God. We’re talking about places that have literally never flooded before,” said Anthony “Ace” Cox, who started a Facebook group to help collect information about where people were stranded. He was in Baton Rouge to help his parents and grandparents, who got flooded out.
———
‘Islam for Dummies’: IS recruits have poor grasp of faith
PARIS (AP) — The jihadi employment form asked the recruits, on a scale of 1 to 3, to rate their knowledge of Islam. And the Islamic State applicants, herded into a hangar somewhere at the Syria-Turkey border, turned out to be overwhelmingly ignorant.
The extremist group could hardly have hoped for better.
At the height of Islamic State’s drive for foot soldiers in 2013 and 2014, typical recruits included the group of Frenchmen who went bar-hopping with their recruiter back home, the recent European convert who now hesitantly describes himself as gay, and two Britons who ordered “The Koran for Dummies” and “Islam for Dummies” from Amazon to prepare for jihad abroad. Their intake process complete, they were grouped in safe houses as a stream of Islamic State imams came in to indoctrinate them, according to court testimony and interviews by The Associated Press.
“I realized that I was in the wrong place when they began to ask me questions on these forms like ‘when you die, who should we call?’” said the 32-year-old European recruit, speaking to the AP on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals. He said he thought he was joining a group to fight President Bashar Assad and help Syrians, not the Islamic State.
The European, whose boyish demeanor makes him appear far younger than his age, went to Syria in 2014. He said new recruits were shown IS propaganda videos on Islam, and the visiting imams repeatedly praised martyrdom. Far from home, unschooled in religion, having severed family ties and turned over electronic devices, most were in little position to judge.
———
Police chief was surprised by violence after fatal shooting
MILWAUKEE (AP) — Following a night of violence that left half a dozen businesses in flames, the Milwaukee police chief expressed surprise at the level of unrest that erupted after the fatal shooting of a black man by a black officer.
“This was, quite frankly, unanticipated,” Chief Edward Flynn said Monday, two days after the worst of the rioting hit the Sherman Park neighborhood on the city’s economically depressed and largely black north side.
The chief’s statement raised questions about whether authorities could have taken steps to curb the violence, perhaps by sharing details of the shooting earlier, including the officer’s race or footage from his body camera.
Randolph McLaughlin, a Pace University law professor and a civil rights attorney, questioned how Milwaukee leaders could have expected the streets to stay quiet on Saturday night given the national debate about law enforcement and race.
“For a mayor to say everything’s fine (and) we just killed somebody, that’s turning a blind eye to his town,” McLaughlin said.
