In London, Kentucky, Ryan VanNorstran huddled with his brother’s large dogs in a first-floor closet as the storm hit his brother’s home Friday in a neighborhood along Keavy Road where much of the destruction in the community of nearly 8,000 people was centered. VanNorstran was house-sitting.
The ark stretches one and a half football fields long — “the biggest freestanding timber-frame structure in the world,” Ham says. It holds three massive decks with wooden cages, food-storage urns, life-size animal models and other exhibits.It’s all designed to argue that the biblical story was literally true — that an ancient Noah really could have built such a sophisticated ship. That Noah and a handful of family members really could have sustained thousands of animals for months, floating above a global flood that drowned everyone else in the wicked world.
“That’s what we wanted to do through many of the exhibits, to show the feasibility of the ark,” says Ham, the organizer behind the Ark Encounter theme park and related attractions.Ken Ham, founder of Answers in Genesis, poses for a portrait at the Ark Encounter in Williamstown, Ky., Friday, March 21, 2025. (AP Photo/Madeleine Hordinski)Ken Ham, founder of Answers in Genesis, poses for a portrait at the Ark Encounter in Williamstown, Ky., Friday, March 21, 2025. (AP Photo/Madeleine Hordinski)
And with that, he furthers his goal to assert the entire biblical Book of Genesis should be interpreted as written — that humans were created by God’s fiat on the sixth day of creation on an Earth that is only 6,000 years old.of modern scientists — that the Earth developed over billions of years in “deep time” and that humans and other living things evolved over millions of years from earlier species.
But Ham wants to succeed where he believes William Jennings Bryan failed.
Bryan, a populist politician and fundamentalist champion, helped the prosecution in the famous“Very importantly, we are discussing how to build new regional economic value chains that link our countries, including with American private sector investment,” he said.
Trump’s senior adviser for Africa, Massad Boulos, the father-in-law of Trump’s daughter Tiffany, helped broker the U.S. role in promoting security in east Congo, part of an opening that Boulos has said could involve multibillion-dollar investments.The response from Congolese civil society Friday mixed hope with skepticism.
Rights advocate Christophe Muisa in Goma, a city in east Congo that the powerful, Rwandan-backed M23 armed group seized earlier this year, said the U.S. is the main beneficiary of the deal. He urged his government not to “subcontract its security.”Georges Kapiamba, the president of the Congolese Association for the Access to Justice, a nongovernmental organization focusing on rights, justice and addressing corruption, said he supported a mineral-and-security deal with the U.S., but worried his own government could blow it by siphoning off the proceeds.